Outcomes versus impact: Where to focus and why

So much of the literature in non-profits related to fundraising, stewardship, and evaluation is focused on measuring impact—to the degree that it’s concerned with measuring anything at all! Sometimes, it appears as the phrase “social impact,” and both this and the unmodified “impact” can be a bit slippery to define.

But it matters! Indeed, so much of what we do involves taking small steps toward ambitious goals to make differences that go beyond the individuals we work with or the time frames in which we work with them. We aim to help individuals in ways that last a lifetime and to scale up those influences to include whole communities.

In other words, we work to achieve outcomes that then lead to broader impact.

Jared BlackstoneJanuary 9, 2019outcomes, impact, social impact, measurement, research

Azimuth: Our origin story

It’s an odd word--it’s not one that feels English, for instance, and it’s not likely to make sense to laypeople. It’s a navigational term--also used in engineering, surveying, and astronomy--and one disconcertingly complex definition has it as, “the direction of a celestial object from the observer, expressed as the angular distance from the north or south point of the horizon to the point at which a vertical circle passing through the object intersects the horizon.”

Thanks, Google. A much simpler definition might be, “the distance between North or another reference point and a celestial object, clockwise along the observer’s horizon.”

Jared BlackstoneJanuary 7, 2019personal

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