Defining your impact isn’t always easy, but you should do it anyway

Impact is everything, but defining it can be hard.

Impact is the reason we do the work we do. It’s the change we seek to create in the world, the conditions we try to create for ourselves and others. It’s a difference — hopefully positive — between the way things are and the way we’d like things to be.

Paying attention to impact can drive change and make organizations more effective, more accountable. It’s super important.

At the same time, talking about impact can sometimes feel like an egg-heady, abstract exercise in productivity-theatre.

That’s why it’s good, every now and then, to question what impact and impact measurement means for your organization by asking these questions:

• What is impact?
• What happens if you don’t define your organization’s impact?
• Why do so many of us refuse to define our impact, even when we know it’s good for us?

Can you and your organization define your impact?

Here’s a mini-test for your organization, suggested by self-professed nonprofit governance nerd Nicole Gagliardi. Can your organization do these three things?

1. Define the specific change you exist to create
2. Articulate how your work contributes to that change
3. Track how effective your programs are at creating change

Many organizations struggle with the “specific” part of #1. You might know you exist to “help” or to “save” or to “serve” or to “solve”, but you struggle to define the details. Ironically, the better people understand the complexity of the issues they address, the more difficult they may find it to define their impact specifically.

What’s great about #2 is the double-meaning of the words “your work”. This could mean both your organization’s work and your personal work.

How does your organization’s work contribute to the change it exists to create? How does your personal work contribute to your organization’s impact? Knowing the answers to those questions helps people carry out winning strategies, stay motivated, and ward off burnout.

Tracking (#3) is the rich, super nerdy part of impact measurement. Tracking is the way you define, collect, and analyze data to see what effect you are truly having on the world around you. It’s how you learn and adapt and grow and mature. It’s how you become and remain accountable to your community.

Tracking is a craft that is essential to successful nonprofit management.

The gap between who we are and who we want to be

Most of us believe it is important to define and measure impact, but few of us actually do it day-to-day. Gagliardi puts forward a few different reasons people struggle to define their impact, including:

• Uncertainty. Explaining change work often generates a lot of ambiguity, something that makes our brains, bosses, and donors uncomfortable.
  
• Cognitive biases. People are deeply invested in the way they do things. Deep impact assessment might lead to the conclusion that you or your strategy need to change, and that can be emotionally and financially painful.
  
• Ego. We like to think we already know what we’re doing.
  
• Urgency. There. Are. So. Many. Urgent. Things. To. Do. Right. Now. Looking backward, looking forward, and updating documentation never seem as urgent.
  
• Lag time. Often the information we need doesn’t appear until long after our work finishes. Education, habitat restoration, preventative health efforts are just a few examples of really important work with impact that might not manifest until a generation later.
  
• Expertise. Defining impact and measuring it take skill and experience. Most organizations don’t have that expertise when they start out, and because the work isn’t prioritized the skills aren’t being nurtured.

Easier isn’t always better

There are a lot of reasonable excuses not to define and measure impact; day-to-day responsibilities usually seem more urgent, and impact measurement is an easy task to defer.

But the long-term costs of skipping impact measurement are high. When organizations don’t define their impact, they tend to embrace bad habits. They focus on action and doing, often scattering their attention and resources across too many different task. Effort gets wasted, which is tiring and frustrating. They also tend not to be good at self-reflection or improvement, which wastes more resources and sometimes causes real harm to communities.

These habits are the recipe for burnout and disenchantment. They are the kinds of habits that make good work feel hard all of the time.

Make time to define impact

You do the work you do because you want to see change in the world. In this sector, impact is the motivation for showing up. It’s everything. So yeah, it’s worth defining.