Proactively tell people/organisations when they have changed your actions/impact

By TJPHutton🔸 @ 2026-03-30T23:33 (+40)

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.

1. ^{^}

   This includes confirming things i.e. "[I actually did the thing we talked about and here's what happened next]"

2. ^{^}

   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.