What if we’ve been asking the wrong question about impact?
Last Friday evening, I joined Common Ground and Green Nudge for a conversation titled Good impact work needs a good impact story.
I expected a discussion about storytelling.
Instead, I left thinking about something much more fundamental.
Perhaps our challenge isn’t that we don’t know how to tell better stories.
Perhaps we haven’t spent enough time understanding what has actually changed.
We measure what is easy.
As practitioners, we’re usually good at reporting outputs.
- How many people attended.
- How many workshops were delivered.
- How many volunteer hours were contributed.
- How many dollars were raised.
These things matter.
They tell us something.
But they don’t tell us everything.
During the evening, Heng Li Seng at Green Nudge shared examples of the kinds of changes that often remain invisible:
- Relationships that form.
- Confidence that grows.
- Agency that develops.
- New ways of working together.
- Communities that continue long after a funded programme ends.
Those are often the very reasons we started the work in the first place.
The challenge is that they’re harder to notice.
And even harder to measure.
Perhaps the first question isn’t:
How do we measure impact?
Perhaps it’s:
What change actually matters?
Beyond outputs
One framework shared during the discussion stayed with me.
Rather than stopping at outputs, we might think about four increasingly deeper questions.
Outputs
What did we do?
Outcomes
What changed?
Contribution
What difference did this contribute to?
Learning
What are we learning about how change actually happens?
That final question feels especially important.
Because community work rarely follows a straight line.
- One conversation leads to a new friendship.
- A volunteer becomes a facilitator.
- A participant starts a new initiative two years later.
- An organisation quietly changes how it works.
None of these changes belong to a single intervention.
They’re part of an ecosystem.
Funding and giving are not quite the same thing.
One conversation during dinner kept returning to trust.
Funding often carries an understandable expectation of accountability.
- What happened?
- What changed?
- Was this investment worthwhile?
Giving feels slightly different.
- Giving begins with trust.
- Not blind trust.
- But trust that someone will steward what has been entrusted to them with care.
Neither is better.
Communities need both.
- Without accountability, trust becomes fragile.
- Without trust, everything risks becoming transactional.
It made me wonder whether we’ve accidentally reduced community building to a funding problem.
Perhaps the real work is stewardship.
As I sketched throughout the evening, a different question began to emerge.
Instead of asking:
How do we fund communities?
Perhaps we should be asking:
How do we steward communities?
Money is certainly one resource.
But it isn’t the only one.
Communities are sustained through many forms of contribution:
- Time.
- Attention.
- Facilitation.
- Hospitality.
- Introductions.
- Knowledge.
- Care.
- Leadership.
- Financial support.
Every healthy community is continually navigating how these different forms of contribution are invited, valued and cared for.
That feels much bigger than fundraising.
A question I’m carrying forward
Over the past year, while developing the Range Compass, I’ve become increasingly interested in the tensions we hold rather than the answers we seek.
This conversation left me wondering if communities have their own tensions too.
Not simply between raising money and spending it.
But between contribution and stewardship.
Between freedom and structure.
Between emergence and sustainability.
I’m still sketching.
Still learning.
Still noticing.
But perhaps good impact stories don’t begin with communication.
Perhaps they begin with communities paying closer attention to the quiet changes that are already unfolding around them.
Many thanks to Common Ground, Green Nudge and everyone who contributed to an evening that was generous, thought-provoking and left me with more questions than answers.
The Collab Folks 