Why Start With Why

Measurement that doesn’t start with purpose usually ends up serving no one.

You’re ready to measure impact. Maybe there’s funder interest. Maybe there’s someone with the skills to do it. You may even have a budget.

The natural instinct is to jump straight into logic models, frameworks, and indicators. To build the system. To get the data flowing.

Yet, we’ve watched this play out dozens of times, and it almost always leads to the same place: a measurement exercise that produces something but doesn’t provide much value.

The issue generally is that no one paused to ask a simple question: why do we want to measure impact in the first place?

Different purposes, different approaches

Why matters because different motivations for measurement require fundamentally different approaches.

Reporting to stakeholders is one motivation. Your board and your funders want to know how you’re performing. This is primarily about accountability and communication.

Then there are reporting requirements driven by regulation. This is about compliance. It allows you to meet your legal obligations and your license to operate.

Assessing contribution to impact is a different motivation altogether. This is about legitimacy. It’s also about morale: staff value evidence that their hard work is genuinely changing lives. This demands a more precise approach, one that’s technically rigorous and likely more costly.

Understanding mechanism (i.e. why something happened) is different again. You know something is working – or isn’t – but you want to know why. This is about learning. It calls for deep – often qualitative – work to get inside the black box between inputs and outcomes.

Raising funds is yet another motivation. Grantmakers and impact investors want to know how supporting your organisation will help them achieve their outcome goals. This is about survival, and it requires measuring against funder frameworks.

The insight that matters here is that each of these purposes drives different design choices. A system built for funder reporting might use simple metrics that communicate progress but miss the complexity of how change actually happens. A system built for understanding mechanism might be rich with qualitative insight but be too granular to communicate to a board. A compliance-focused system ticks important boxes but won’t necessarily support your core learning needs.

What changes when you start with purpose

When you begin with a clear answer to ‘why’, the subsequent decisions become easier and clearer. You can right-size your approach and potentially eliminate wasted effort, e.g. collecting information nobody uses.

It also changes the internal conversation. When staff understand why they’re collecting data – how it serves the organisation’s learning or accountability goals – they’re more likely to engage thoughtfully rather than resist what might be seen as, at best, a waste of time and, at worst, an intrusive check on their work.

Perhaps most importantly, starting with purpose creates space for evolution. You’re building from a strategic foundation rather than a methodological one, which means you can adjust your approach for different purposes without the sunk-cost pressure of “but that’s how we’ve always measured it.”

The practical first step

Before you build your measurement system, we find it’s useful to ask this simple question: who needs what information, and how will they use it?

Map it out. Which stakeholders are important? What questions are they curious about? What keeps leadership up at night? What do funders actually want to know? What would help your team do their work better? Where is there genuine uncertainty that data could resolve?

You’ll likely discover that different stakeholders have conflicting goals and different purposes have different data needs. Then you need to make some choices about priorities and sequencing, rather than trying to satisfy everyone immediately.

This article illustrates that impact measurement is not only a technical activity, it’s also a strategic one. Even the most sophisticated theory of change and most rigorous indicator framework won’t help if you haven’t first answered: why are we doing this?