I’m Christopher Hall, an Assistant Professor of Human Services Delivery & Administration at the University of North Georgia. I am proud to guide students to learn foundational applications of evaluation within human services settings.

There’s a moment in learning about evaluation where students begin to understand that all human beings evaluate things constantly, and then recognize how complicated it can be to get professional, mindfully-designed evaluations.

The various career pathways in human services are vast, but the need to continually use evaluation for growth, learning, and improvement are critical for quality improvement.

Hot Tips:

While my professional training in evaluation was through the lens of educational research methodologies, I have heavily leaned on a method of training used for physicians in medical residency programs learned from my emergency medicine physician partner. The premise is that to become an expert, you need to:

• SEE ONE: Witnessing someone who is an expert completing a task may involve a direct practice, an educational lesson, a discussion, or a combination of experiential observation, explanation, or hands-on training. I tend to do this by demonstrating a skill like a logic model using step-by-step examples in a human services program context.
• DO ONE: Gaining the ability to directly practice that skill with supervision involves a learning curve the first time you try it, so learning through feedback, support, and making mistakes are all important parts of this process. Students have the chance to choose a local human services agency and learn how they operate, then in turn come up with a logic model that outlines this process. This often leads to mistakes, misunderstandings, and vague details that present opportunities to provide feedback and guidance.
• TEACH ONE: An individual has to practice something enough to where they can have confidence and ability to teach someone else that skill. This is also the point of greatest potential for learning, as when you teach others you discover more nuances through the questions asked, the mistakes made, and the corrections and feedback offered. Usually, a final presentation of a logic model that has incorporated feedback from me (as an expert) leads to the opportunity to teach other students what they learned, and how a logic model functions to outline a human services agency – an important skill to learn as a human services worker!

In evaluation, ungrading strategies in teaching, where the purpose is not to find fault but rather to offer guidance and support toward greater achievement of quality in use of a skill is more effective in students gaining competency. This tends to lead to a process of “grading” that is more akin to a work-based practice. When students practice a skill, they are given a percentage score that rates the completion of the task, not a judgment on an A-F scale. This means that I offer feedback to improve work, add specificity and detail, improve mistakes, add clarity, and generally learn how to elevate quality.

Being a new evaluator is challenging, as evaluation can be a seemingly infinite array of methods, skills, organizational strategies, approaches, and theories. If experienced evaluators work to train newcomers with care, guidance, and support, the future of evaluation has the opportunity to improve in quality and mindful care.

Rad Resources:

• Ayub (2022) describes the “See One, Do One, Teach One” guidance used within medical contexts.
• Intellectual humility, as a component of providing guidance and the importance of learning through mistakes, is well discussed by Battistone, et al. (2026).
• My favorite resource for teaching Logic Models in a structured and logical fashion is through the work of Shakman & Rodriguez (2015).

AEA is hosting GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

Hello AEA365 community! I’m Eunice Oduro, a PhD student in the Educational Research Methodology Program at the University of North Carolina, Greensboro.

“What really counts as mentorship?” As an emerging evaluator, I have been reflecting on this question. Although mentorship is often encouraged in professional spaces, its meaning is not always clear in practice. Mentorship may include guidance during graduate training, support through collaborative projects, sponsorship in professional spaces such as conferences, and other kinds of encouragement that shape professional growth.

Across the literature and professional resources I reviewed, one idea stood out: mentorship is more than occasional advice. It is a developmental relationship that can shape how mentors and mentees learn, grow, and navigate the evaluation field.

Mentorship is developmental. Mentorship is not simply about giving advice or helping someone complete a task. At its best, it is a mutually supportive relationship that helps mentors and mentees to learn, reflect, and grow over time. Through dialogue, guidance, and reflection, mentorship can strengthen skills, build confidence, and support professional identity development. In evaluation, this may involve working together on real evaluation tasks, discussing professional decisions, connecting academic training to practice, and reflecting on strengths, areas for growth, and future aspirations.

Culturally responsive mentorship matters. Effective mentorship should also be culturally responsive. Identity and context shape academic and career development, and mentors should move beyond “colorblind” approaches toward practices that acknowledge the lived experience, belonging and opportunity. Montgomery and Page’s work on multi-mentor systems reminds us that culturally relevant mentoring should attend not only to the individual relationships but also to the broader institutional and social contexts that shape access and inclusion. This matters because mentorship is notexperienced the same way by everyone. Culturally responsive mentorship calls for greater awareness of how identity, context, and inequity shape trust, growth, and professional opportunity.

Mentorship can take many forms. Mentorship is multifaceted rather than monolithic. Mentors may serve as teachers, sponsors, counselors, guides, and exemplars. This broader understanding shows that mentorship extends beyond providing advice. At times, mentorship may involve encouragement and affirmation; at other times, it may require constructive challenge, honest feedback, critical questioning, advocacy, or opening doors to new opportunities.

Mentorship supports career growth. Mentorship matters not only for encouragement but also for long-term career development. There are several ways mentors can support mentees, including skill development, problem-solving, decision-making, goal-setting, strategy, and networking. For mentees, this support can make career pathways more visible and easier to navigate. For mentors, it is a reminder that their influence may extend beyond immediate advice and shape how someone prepares for their future in the field.

Mentorship is part of evaluator professional development. The American Evaluation Association’s Guiding Principles, particularly Principle  B4 under Competence, emphasize that evaluators should engage in ongoing personal and professional learning through formal and informal education, training, and practice. This suggests that evaluator growth occurs not only through coursework or structured training, but also through relationships, dialogue, feedback, and shared experience. Mentorship offers a meaningful pathway for evaluators to strengthen competence, reflect on practice, and develop their professional identity.

Trust and intentionality matter. Meaningful mentorship depends on trust and should not be left to chance. Strong mentorship requires clarity, openness, commitment, and mutual investment from both mentors and mentees.

Rad Resources:

• Better Evaluation – Mentoring
• Better Evaluation – Leveraging Mentorship
• American Evaluation Association – Guiding Principles for Evaluators
• National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine – Developing a Culture of Mentorship Montgomery and Page – Multi-Mentor Systems and Models

AEA is hosting GSNE Week with our colleagues in the Graduate Student and New Evaluators AEA Topical Interest Group. The contributions all this week to AEA365 come from our GSNE TIG members. Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators. The views and opinions expressed on the AEA365 blog are solely those of the original authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the American Evaluation Association, and/or any/all contributors to this site.

Today we spotlight how this mindset informs how we function as a firm.

Like many evaluators, we spend a lot of time asking our clients a version of this question: How do your values drive your strategy, decisions, implementation, and outcomes of your work?

It’s also one we have to answer ourselves.

Building an equity-centered, feminist firm is itself an act of disrupting capitalist norms. But disruption doesn’t happen by declaration, it happens through design and consistent follow through. The rubber meets the road via the unglamorous, ongoing work of building systems that reflect our values, measuring whether they actually do, and being willing to be uncomfortable when they don’t.

If impact is a verb, then ours shows up in how we run this firm, not just in the work we deliver, but in the decisions, systems, and practices we build when no one’s watching.

Hot Tip: Start where you have power.

If we’re interested in shifting power and dismantling systems as evaluators, we have to begin where we actually have agency. For us, that’s inside I2I itself. How we hire. How we price our work. How we care for the people doing this work. How we measure our own progress.

Operations aren’t sexy but we love them anyway. Designing systems for people to thrive is the work, but it’s the layer the field rarely sees.

4 Lessons Learned:

1. Hiring processes are cultural signals not HR functions. That means publishing salary ranges, sending interview prompts in advance,  and closing the loop with every single applicant (especially when the answer is no). In a contracted market full of brilliant evaluators navigating transitions they didn’t plan for, clarity is a gift. Care is a choice.
2. Being values-driven costs money, plan for it. We had to reckon with something uncomfortable early on: you cannot use capitalism to break a system while pretending capitalism doesn’t apply to you. Being values-driven costs money. So we built a pricing model that accounts for the true effort of our work. It’s about more than billable hours, it accounts for uncertainty, complexity, and mission alignment. We call it our LoE formula. Rad Resource: Developing More Intentional Budgets By Redefining LoE
3. Adaptation as an act of care. In 2025, we realized our AI adoption was happening in the shadows, some team members experimenting quietly, others opting out entirely, and all of us assuming we were more aligned than we were. So we hired an outside consultant (s/o to Valerie at Mission Bloom) and did the slow, messy work: listening sessions, shared values mapping, bounded experiments. When our practices feel out of whack with our intended values, we invest the time and resources to slow down and build.
4. Measurement is 360. Every year, we compile metrics across five pillars of our business: finance, business development, products and services, marketing, and people and culture. Every team member completes a self-review and a 360. We share progress openly, reset goals together biannually. This is our version of what we ask of our clients: use data to learn, not just to report.

Good intentions are nouns. Closing the gap between what you say and how you operate, that’s the verb. And that’s the work we’ll always be in.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

This week our team is taking over AEA365,exploring what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today: the hardest impact to measure is the kind that cannot trace back to you — and sometimes that’s exactly the point.

Our field loves a counterfactual. What wouldn’t have happened without this organization, strategy, or report? It’s the cleanest evidence of impact we have, and when you can measure it, you should. But there’s a whole category of change the counterfactual is not designed to see: narrative change. The slow, diffuse work of shifting how an entire field thinks and talks about something.

Take FreeFrom, an organization working to end gender-based violence (GBV) by building survivors’ long-term safety and economic security. For years, the field treated it as merely a crisis to respond to, with shelters, hotlines, and the justice system, and it spoke for survivors more than it trusted them to lead. FreeFrom insisted on a different frame: that GBV is an economic issue; everyone from banks and employers to policymakers has a role to play in ending it. Survivors are the experts on their own lives, and leaders of the movement.

FreeFrom refused to bet on a single lever. They made the case through research and survivor-centered data, carried it into storytelling, policy, and partnerships. They pushed the once-fringe idea that direct unrestricted cash to survivors is, on its own, a legitimate response. The bet was never one signature tactic. It was the reframe itself. And when that reframe becomes the norm, it stops belonging to FreeFrom. Others adopt it, build on it, and carry it into rooms FreeFrom will never enter and impact compounds across the field.

Which raises a measurement problem: when an idea becomes that widely accepted, who gets to claim it?

But that is a smaller question. The bigger one is whether that should matter at all. Attribution isn’t the problem. When you can build a clean counterfactual, it’s powerful and worth doing. For narrative change though, the question is whether the narrative is shifting, not how much we can pin to one source, not how much of that shift we can pin to which source. Getting too hung up on the latter does a disservice to the work. The more successful narrative change is, the less attributable it becomes.

The goal was never for everyone to credit FreeFrom; it was for the reframe to become so ingrained no one remembers it was ever contested. If we only measure what we can attribute, we lose sight of the change we actually need.

So we measured for contribution, not attribution. Instead of asking “did FreeFrom cause this,” we asked: where is this language showing up, who’s using it, and what are they doing differently because of it? We looked for echoes, adoption, and ripple effects — the fingerprints of an idea on the move, not a clean causal line back to one organization.

Rad Resource:

The Waters of Systems Change framework maps the conditions that hold a problem in place, from the visible (policies & practices) to the hardest to see: mental models. Narrative change works at that deepest layer. It’s the least visible, the least attributable, and often the most powerful.

Attribution is a noun; it asks who owns the impact. Influence is a verb; it asks how an idea moves.

Impact is a verb — even when no one can trace it back to you.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

This week, our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun — an active practice, not a static goal.

Today, we’re sharing an example from a nonprofit powering the transition to safe and sustainable production, Open Supply Hub (OS Hub).

OS Hub is the world’s most complete, open, and accessible global supply chain database. It is used by advocates to hold brands accountable, by brands to find peers to collaborate with and achieve compliance, by researchers publishing investigative reports, and by ecosystem actors coordinating toward more sustainable trade. Same platform. Completely different pathways to impact depending on who’s using it, why, and what they do with the data next.

When OS Hub came to us, they weren’t short on impact stories. They had plenty. The challenge was that those stories weren’t talking to each other… a worker reinstatement here, a legislative citation there, a brand integrating a facility ID into their compliance system somewhere else. Each one is compelling, but none of them add up to a picture of what the platform is actually producing — or where it was in the long arc toward genuine systems change.

We needed a framework that could hold all levels of impact in the process of working toward systems change.

Today, the OS Hub impact measurement framework has five stages of impact: Awareness (an actor discovered OS Hub), Use (they engaged meaningfully with the platform), Action (they used OS Hub data to do something in the world), Outcome (a concrete result followed), and Systems Signal (the case contributed to a shift in norms, precedent, or standard practice). Each stage is treated with equal weight — not as a hierarchy of “better” impacts, but as a map of how impact moves and accumulates.

The framework does two things at once: (1) it holds the full diversity of users (advocates, brands, researchers, suppliers, ecosystem actors) and their different pathways to impact (accountability, interoperability, collective action); and (2) it tracks impact on a continuum (from awareness to systems change).

This matters for OS Hub because they are not yet claiming that the global supply chain system has changed. They are in the process of building toward that future. The framework honors incremental progress, while not flattening the story into a single metric.

3 Lessons Learned

1. Resist the pull toward a single story. When impact flows through many different users and mechanisms – as true systems change does – the easiest narrative is rarely the most honest one.
2. Give equal weight to early-stage and late-stage impact. A framework that forces increased awareness to compete with systems changes misrepresents how change happens.
3. Fund the pathway, not just the destination. In systems change work, headline outcomes are downstream of strategies and interim results. When funders prioritize the destination, organizations face pressure to claim late-stage impact too early.

Impact is a verb, even when it’s still becoming.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

This week, our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun: an active practice, not a static goal. Today: what it takes to embed evaluation into a pooled fund designed to shift power to young leaders in the responsible tech movement.

Outside of I2I, I’m involved in young leadership spaces. As a young leader myself, I know from experience that giving young people a seat at the table is not the same as shifting power. A “seat at the table” can often mean being consulted, showcased, or at worst, simply tolerated or tokenized. Power-shifting looks different: our expertise is taken seriously, our input shapes decisions, our time is compensated because it has value. That distinction shaped how we approached The Responsible Tech Youth Power Fund (RTYPF) evaluation.

The Context

RTYPF is a first-of-its-kind philanthropic initiative supporting youth and intergenerationally-led organizations across the responsible tech movement. In its third year, the fund has raised $7 million, with 18 co-funders making a coordinated bet on a shared model that replaces individual grantmaking preferences with a collective strategy and shared governance.

What the Model Was Designed To Do

Over time, the RTYPF model has intentionally evolved. In its current state, one of the design elements that makes RTYPF unique is that it positions young leaders alongside funders on the steering committee, not just as grantees, but as interest-holders and advisors with concrete authority and decision-making power. The grantees don’t share a common program model. They share a belief about who should have power to shape the responsible technology ecosystem, and they bring a diversity of approaches to doing so. That’s a harder thing to measure, and the more important one.

To understand what the model was making possible, we looked at three things: grantee outcomes, model performance, and early ecosystem signals.

What we built

We designed a learning system to track change at multiple levels: young leaders, their organizations, the funders, and the broader ecosystem. The outcomes that matter most are actions, not just accomplishments. That’s measuring impact as a verb, and grantee outcomes only tell part of the story.

Lessons Learned

1. The model is part of what you’re evaluating. In a collective funding model, the architecture of how funders pool resources, share power, and structure relationships is the thing. If your evaluation is only measuring what happens downstream of that architecture, you’re measuring the shadow, not the object.
2. Follow the power. In a model designed to shift power, the most significant outcomes will show up where power lives. That means looking at funder behavior, governance decisions, and resource flows, not just in grantee reports.
3. Build for multiple levels. Grantee outcomes are how you know the model is working. Model outcomes are how you know the broader ecosystem is shifting. Build measurement to capture shifts in multiple levels, and be deliberate up front about which level your framework is designed to illuminate.

To Close…a HOT TIP:

True power-shifting is when the people at the table actually shape what gets decided, not just whether they have a chair. The RTYPF’s design continues to evolve with that in mind, and so does our evaluation. In your next evaluation, ask whether power is actually moving, and build your measurement system to see it when it does.

A seat is a noun. Moving power is the verb. Measure the verb.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

ICYMI, this week our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today: how to build a measurement system that tracks towards a BIG quantitative metric, while being expansive enough to hold nuance.

Decolonizing Wealth Project (DWP)’s Moonshot goal is to unlock $1 trillion in reparative giving over 10 years. Reparative philanthropy is the intentional redistribution of resources that directly acknowledges the extractive origins of institutional or family wealth. It treats wealth as “medicine” designed to heal past harms and foster collective wellbeing rather than protecting, growing, and hoarding it.

Our job as their MEL partners was to build a measurement system that meaningfully tracks towards $1 trillion, and helps DWP understand how its different strategies (i.e., grantmaking, sector transformation, and storytelling & culture) contribute towards it.

We have to admit… as systems-thinking, mixed-methods evaluators, tracking dollars first made us pause. We worried that an impact measurement system that boils everything down to a quantitative number might oversimplify the work.

But the thing about the Moonshot is it is not just a number, it is a movement. When DWP announced their goal, they knew $1T could not be achieved by a single organization, strategy, or sector. An audacious goal like that requires all-hands-on-deck, systems transformation.

So the measurement system needed to do two things at once:

• Systematically track dollars moved from DWP, individuals, and institutions
• AND capture how systems change (e.g., narrative and culture change, policies, practices) also contribute towards the Moonshot in a measurable way.

We had to get clear on what is direct: a grant to a community-led fund or a donor who redirects a portfolio after moving through DWP’s Reparative Philanthropy Framework. And what is indirect: a foundation that shifts its practices after witnessing reparative giving in action or a wealth advisor whose relationship to money starts to change. This requires a clear Theory of Change that allows us to estimate how indirect changes contribute to direct outcomes. It isn’t easy (we’re still in the messy middle), but we realized that publicly tracking towards $1T is part of the strategy to mobilize people to join the movement.

In a world where there are actual trillionaires… we need money as medicine more than ever. And when impact measurement is treated like a verb instead of a noun, it can be an active part of a strategy.

Rad Resource:

Edgar Villanueva’s Decolonizing Wealth — the 2018 book behind DWP’s vision and introduction to the 7 Steps to Healing, which shape DWP’s Reparative Philanthropy Framework and their bespoke offerings for organizations and individuals. It’s essential reading for anyone who wants to understand why reparative giving demands a fundamentally different relationship to money, healing, and power. You may remember him from AEA’s keynote in 2022!

Hot Tip: Let the theory set the terms before the tracker does.

When a goal is this ambitious, the pull is toward what’s easiest to count. Resist it! The framework won’t be perfect, but it needs to be expansive enough to see the change you’re actually trying to make, not just the change that already fits neatly into a column. Build for the whole theory, not just the measurable tip of it.

At the end of the day, $1T is not ‘impact’ — the real impact is in the sector transformation it took to get there and will sustain it beyond.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

ICYMI, this week,our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today, we’re exploring why one great case study isn’t enough to tell the story of a whole portfolio.

Hopelab Ventures (HLV), an impact investor focused on companies delivering youth mental health solutions for Black, Brown, and Queer young people, came to us with a challenge: their companies were clearly having an impact, but measuring it at the portfolio level felt like comparing apples to oranges. How do you build a shared picture of impact when one company is running FDA clinical trials measuring reductions in suicide attempts, another is embedding SEL curriculum in 1.5 million classrooms, and a third is leveraging the power of AI to train crisis counselors who then serve thousands of people in distress? Each is doing meaningful work. None of them is measuring the same thing.

For years, the HLV team had been telling their impact story through individual case studies, each compelling on its own, but collectively amounting to a laundry list of outputs that couldn’t answer the question that actually mattered: what impact is this portfolio producing as a whole?

So, we got to work on developing a Monitoring, Evaluation, Research, and Learning (MERL) framework to communicate the impact of the whole portfolio. We co-created different levels of outcomes, starting with short-term company growth. While companies had varied business models, entry points, and products, there were similarities in how they used HLV investment for organizational development and financial stability. Second, we co-created outcome “archetypes” that described mid-term outcomes among young people across areas like access and affordability, equity and cultural competence, and crisis intervention. Lastly, we identified long-term ecosystem outcomes using the Waters of Systems Change framework to provide common language for companies to describe changing market conditions.

We’re now in our second year of implementation. Version one showed us what was possible. For the first time, we could see beyond the numbers. Across the portfolio, companies were contributing to reduced suicide risk, more culturally competent care, school-based care innovations, and early shifts in policy and resource flows. None of that was visible when outputs were the only thing being tracked.

Version two was even sharper. It included better annual report questions; we layered in financial data that better spoke to the relationship between ROI and outcomes, and we took a scaffolded approach to interviews where annual report responses fed directly into our interview prompts.

We’re already folding in what we learned in the first two years to improve implementation in year three because a meaningful and useful framework evolves with the portfolio.

Lesson Learned:

You don’t need a perfect framework. You need a starting point and the willingness to iterate.

If you find yourself doing a portfolio-level evaluation and the outcomes feel impossible to pin down across companies, you aren’t doing it wrong. You’re taking an honest approach. It’s intentionality about what you’re trying to learn, co-creating with the people who best understand the work, and the willingness to iterate and lean into the messy. Start with what the portfolio is already measuring. Build shared outcome categories from there. Don’t be afraid to go back and revise. The framework that serves your portfolio in year one may not be the one that serves it in year two.

Impact is a verb, even when it’s hard to measure.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

This week our team is taking over AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun — an active practice, not a static goal.

Somewhere along the way, the social sector turned “impact” into a trophy. Something you earn, prove, and put on a shelf. A metric in a report. A stat on a website. A story told to a funder at the end of a grant cycle so the money keeps coming. We achieved impact. Check. Move on.

We think that’s backward. And it’s costing us — in resources misallocated, in communities underserved, and in a field that keeps measuring in the rearview mirror while trying to drive forward.

So here’s our provocation: Impact is a verb.

Not a destination. Not a deliverable. An active practice of measuring, learning, communicating, and doing. It’s resourcing what’s been historically underfunded. Dismantling the systems standing in the way of liberation. Amplifying community voices and solutions. Sustaining change beyond a grant cycle.

Now, that’s what we call impact (cue favorite NOW! CD).

Not just the big, splashy number headlining a report — but the strategy, the decisions, the implementation, and the active, ongoing work behind that number.

When you treat it that way, everything changes. How you measure. How you communicate. How you actually use data to make better decisions. The question stops being did we achieve impact? and starts being: What are we doing? Why? And how are we learning, adapting, and communicating so we can do better?

Rad Resource:

Start with this two-minute explainer video. It’s the fastest way to get the full argument — and the easiest thing to send a colleague who needs to hear it.

Why this, why now?

At I2I, we’ve been sitting with this idea for a long time… in our client work, in our internal team meetings, in conversations with evaluators and funders and nonprofit leaders who are all, in different ways, bumping up against the limits of impact-as-noun. The compliance orientation. The backward-looking reports. The frameworks that exist to satisfy funders instead of inform action.

We kept asking: what would it look like if we built everything (i.e., measurement, learning, communication, strategy) around actually co-creating change instead of proving it happened? This is our answer to that question.

What’s coming this week and beyond:

Over the next week, I2I team members will each take one dimension of Impact Is a Verb and bring it to life through real work:

Day 2 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Case Study (lessons from Hopelab Ventures)

Day 3 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Number (lessons from Decolonizing Wealth Project)

Day 4 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Seat at the Table (lessons from Responsible Tech Youth Power Fund)

Day 5 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Single Pathway (lessons from Open Supply Hub)

Day 6 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Counterfactual (lessons from FreeFrom)

Day 7 — Impact Is a Verb, Not a Good Intention (lessons from Intention 2 Impact)

In the coming months, we’ll be publishing think pieces, sharing case studies, and hosting conversations with funders, nonprofit leaders, and investors — bringing this idea into every context where impact is still being treated like something you report rather than something you do.

Come back tomorrow. Bring a colleague. And if something here resonates, or if you want to push back, we genuinely want to hear from you.

Impact Is a Verb.

Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.

Hello! We’re Emily and Russ with Deloitte’s Evaluation and Research for Action Center of Excellence. We know that in healthcare, quality improvement efforts demand ambition, but what is sometimes lacking is the right information, at the right time, in front of the right people. Bridging the gap between measuring and improving quality is where critically important work resides.

The Measurement Paradox

For decades, healthcare organizations have invested in quality measurement. The result has been a multitude of metrics and scorecards leaving frontline teams overwhelmed with data but lacking useful insight.

The challenges are familiar: Fragmented data sources (e.g., siloed Electronic Health Records (EHR), disparate claims feeds, incompatible registries) obscure views of performance. Overlapping, misaligned measures can make a clinical team meet one program’s standard while failing another simply because definitions differ. And because most quality indicators lag, by the time an anomaly or adverse outcome appears in a formal report, the opportunity for meaningful clinical intervention has passed.

Tensions between industry-standard measures (e.g., Healthcare Effectiveness Data and Information Set, Center for Medicaid and Medicare Services [CMS] quality measures, Joint Commission requirements) and internal metrics worsen the problem.  When measures conflict, quality teams must reconcile competing scorecards and explain inconsistent results to skeptical clinical teams, instead of collaborating to improve care. This shifts focus away from meaningful improvement toward a check-the-box compliance mindset.

From Measurement to Meaningful Action

Hot Tip: Quality data creates value when it becomes actionable insight!

Timely, relevant analysis based on trusted data helps quality and clinical teams understand not only how they are performing, but why, what drives results, and what to do next. By clarifying root causes, these insights help organizations target and refine improvement efforts to have the greatest impact with the least disruption. They also strengthen support for continuous monitoring and the infrastructure needed to sustain it, allowing sustained improvements across quality domains.

Different quality domains require different improvement strategies. Safe care depends on real-time surveillance and automated alerts for adverse events (e.g., infections, complications, falls). Effective care for chronic conditions requires longitudinal, population-level tracking. Timely care relies on scheduling analytics. Patient-centered care depends on combining Consumer Assessment Healthcare Providers Systems experience data with clinical outcomes. Meeting these needs requires modern quality analytics and improvement science, including predictive modeling, AI-enabled clinical decision support, Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring, and automated natural language processing (NLP). The key question is whether organizations are ready to use these tools to deliver insights to the leaders best positioned to act.

Deloitte brings a distinctive mix of capabilities to this challenge: quality measurement, large-scale data analytics, GAGAS-compliant auditing, reporting optimization, and continuous improvement. Our Life Sciences and Health Care practice and Evaluation and Research for Action Center of Excellence turn data findings into targeted improvements and action plans for health systems, federal agencies, and payers.

We currently support the Veterans Health Administration’s (VHA) quality audit, under the Elizabeth Dole Act of 2025. The audit covers 32 measures across four domains of VA’s direct and community care networks. Our team is assessing accuracy and reliability of VA’s measurement methods, validating data sources including VHA’s Corporate Data Warehouse and EHR, and evaluating alignment with industry measure stewards (e.g., CMS, National Committee for Quality Assurance (NCQA)). We are assessing whether quality information is accessible and understandable so it can inform not only oversight bodies, but also frontline clinical teams and Veterans.

Quality data has little value if it does not reach the people who can interpret and then act on it. When measurement is accurate, timely, and trusted, it becomes the foundation for better healthcare decisions and meaningful improvement.

This posting contains general information only, does not constitute professional advice or services, and should not be used as a basis for any decision or action that may affect your business. Deloitte shall not be responsible for any loss sustained by any person who relies on this posting.

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