Ripples of Impact
What did this actually set in motion — and how much of that can we honestly claim to know?
A shared way of describing what a contribution sets in motion, and how much to trust each part of the description. It is being built as an open standard, and it is early.
Most impact reporting produces numbers nobody can check
Someone gives, and rarely learns what changed. Someone does the work, and rarely gets to prove it. Between those two silences sits a great deal of good that never gets funded a second time — not because it failed, but because no one could show that it worked.
We think the missing piece is not more measurement. It is honesty about measurement. A figure drawn from a receipt and a figure drawn from a reasonable assumption are both useful, and they are not the same kind of thing. Presented side by side with no distinction, the weaker one quietly discredits the stronger.
So Ripples grades the evidence rather than generating a score. Every claim is placed at one of three depths of effect and carries an honest confidence class — so a reader can see which figures are auditable, which are reasoned, and which are declared estimates.
Three depths, three different evidence problems
Not three steps of one process. Three genuinely different questions, each answerable to a different standard of proof.
Direct
What the contribution did on contact. Receipts, records, and the accounts of the people directly affected.
Enabled
What that change set in motion nearby. Contribution rather than attribution, mapped within a stated horizon.
Systemic
What becomes normal afterwards. Interpretive — reasoned from evidence rather than observed directly.
Reach grows as you move outward. Certainty falls. Saying so on every figure is what makes the first of them worth believing.
The kinds of solutions we would like to see exist
Less a roadmap than a set of convictions. These are the problems we find ourselves drawn to, and the shape of the answers we think are worth building.
Measurement you are allowed to check
Published methods, stated assumptions, visible arithmetic. If a claim cannot be interrogated, it is a marketing figure wearing a lab coat.
Giving that keeps working
Most gifts are spent once. We are interested in structures where capital can return, be given again, and compound — so that one act of generosity does its work more than once.
The intangible, on the record
What a room feels, what a piece of art moves, what a community recovers. We want these counted in their own units — never converted into a dollar figure to make them look rigorous.
Tools the recipient can actually use
Impact platforms tend to die the same way: a beautiful dashboard for funders, and the people doing the work left in spreadsheets. The reporting side is the hard half, and it comes first.
Open standards over private platforms
A shared language for impact is only worth having if everyone can use it. The standard should be free, adoptable without permission, and applicable by hand.
Comparability across a field
Two organisations describing the same outcome should describe it the same way. Without that, every impact report is an island.
Early, and we would rather say so
The standard is being written now. It is being drafted on paper first, deliberately — if a rule cannot be applied by a person with a spreadsheet and no software, it is not a standard, it is a description of somebody's product.
Nothing is launched. Several of the questions that matter most are genuinely unresolved, including how the work behind an open standard ought to be funded. We would rather publish that plainly than publish a model we have not tested.
We will share the standard openly when it is ready, and we will say what changed and why.
Nothing left out. Nothing overclaimed. Including about ourselves.
We would like to build this with other people
This is not a finished thing being announced. It is an effort at an early stage, and it will be better for being argued with. If any of the above is close to work you already do, or to a problem you have been living with, we would like to hear from you.
Evaluators, environmental scientists, assurance practitioners. You know where this gets hard, and we would rather learn it from you than discover it late.
If impact reporting has frustrated you, tell us how. The failure modes you have lived through are the most useful thing we could be given.
Those making tools in this space, and those doing the work who are tired of reporting it five different ways.
office@thebergens.co — or
kaylarose@thebergens.co
directly.
Tell us what you would change.