Proactively tell people/organisations when they have changed your actions/impact
Measuring and communicating impact is hard, particularly when focusing on community building over the long term.
You have a much better idea of what led to you starting a new role, changing your donations, etc, than anyone else could. It will take you 2-10 minutes to directly tell someone how they’ve impacted your trajectory[1] where they might take hours-to-forever to try to reach you and ask.
It seems likely that many community builders, orgs, and funders would get significant-value from additional impact stories[2].
It also seem very unlikely to be high-cost for any org to receive your impact story. At worst this is an unwanted email that needs to be processed.
So: think about how you got to where you are on your impact journey, and whether it would be beneficial to tell someone now.
And: when you make meaningful changes in the future, tell the people who helped make that happen.
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This includes confirming things i.e. “[I actually did the thing we talked about and here’s what happened next]”
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During a recent funding application I got really positive feedback about a document I’d put together to support the application. That document was a barely-edited bullet-point-list with a handful of one or two sentence impact stories. The fact that this was so well received says something about the benchmark for receiving/sharing impact stories and was my motivation to write this post.
Attributing your impact to any particular organisation or program can be quite difficult. A lot of people make changes after two EAGx attendances, a handful of local group interactions, building in-depth connections with certain people, etc.
But as a community builder trying to evaluate the impact of our programs, it would be really useful if someone reached out and said: “Hey, I think the 30-minute chat we had last year was maybe 5% influential in getting me to my current position, alongside X, Y, and Z other programs and influences.” 5% influence for a 30-minute chat is a useful signal for us when evaluating a 1:1 program! But people are unlikely to share that, because there’s usually a more substantial mentor or program that felt much more influential.
So beyond proactively telling people when they’ve changed your actions, it seems good to me if there was a norm of proactively sharing when something influenced you even a bit.
Strong agree! My working title for this was “Tell people/orgs when they influence your impact” but that didn’t scan as well.
So true! It’s also just very nice to receive these messages
Agreed, Tom. Here is a related post from Kevin Xia.