Impact Reports Need to be Standardized

Impact Reports Need to be Standardized

Impact measurement in philanthropy has a holy grail: comparable data across funders.
Every foundation wants it. Almost none can produce it.

Today, foundations measure impact using three general approaches:

1. Most funders ask grantees to self-report.

2. Some build in-house frameworks with quarterly reviews, custom rubrics, and internal tracking systems.

3. A smaller number hire external partners who evaluate each grantee individually and in depth.

I went through all three of these with my own nonprofit, and each approach has the same structural flaw: none of them produce comparable data.

Which means two funders can support the same organization, and walk away with completely different conclusions.

Imagine if there were even a baseline set of shared category-level indicators.

Impact reports would take less time to produce.
Less time to interpret.
And over time, the data would actually compound across funders.

The future of philanthropy reporting is standardized, comparable data. Nobody's there yet, but that’s what we're working toward.