Most nonprofits are not short on impact. They are short on the evidence that makes that impact legible to the people who fund, regulate, and champion their work. The challenge is rarely the mission itself, but the distance between what an organization does every day and what it can credibly demonstrate to an outsider. That divide is wider than most leaders realize. In one survey of 355 nonprofit decision-makers, 76% called measuring impact a top priority, yet only 29% considered themselves very effective at demonstrating outcomes.¹ The intent is nearly universal; the capacity is not.
That is where strong organizations quietly lose ground. A funder reads a moving story but cannot find the number that justifies a larger grant; a legislator nods at the testimony, then funds the program that arrived with economic evidence attached. Three obstacles tend to keep organizations stuck here: scattered data, the perceived cost of rigorous analysis, and reports that emphasize activity over outcomes. None is a failure of effort.
The data exists, but it lives everywhere and nowhere
Program data is rarely missing; it is scattered across spreadsheets, case management systems, and the notebooks staff keep at their desks. Each source is accurate on its own, but none was built to be aggregated, so the work of assembling it into something fit for external reporting falls to people who already have full-time jobs. The result is an organization that knows its impact anecdotally but cannot state it in a single, auditable figure.
A recent mySidewalk survey of nonprofit and public-sector leaders shows how common this strain has become. Many respondents reported spending between 10 and 40 hours a week on manual data tasks, more than 60% said they struggled with data capacity, and nearly half lacked a formal process for managing or sharing data.²
Yet the gap is closable. In a recent engagement, Laisar worked with a long-established human-services nonprofit to consolidate fragmented program and financial data into a coherent, auditable model calibrated to independently audited financial statements. That work created a source-backed foundation for analysis, so every headline number could be traced back to a documented source rather than a best guess.
The economic impact study feels like a luxury for large organizations
Many leaders assume a rigorous economic impact study is something only the largest institutions can afford, requiring an in-house economist or a six-figure consulting budget. So the question never gets asked, and the organization keeps describing its value in qualitative terms while peers quantify theirs. That assumption is worth challenging.
Laisar’s recent engagement used established economic modeling built on federal datasets and calibrated specifically to the state economy. The point is the rigor, not the machinery: a mid-sized nonprofit obtained a study built to the same methodological standard large institutions use. Credible economic analysis is a matter of the right partner, not organizational size. What that rigor produces is concrete: a full economic footprint measured across direct, indirect, and induced effects, capturing the ripple that occurs as wages and vendor spending circulate through the local economy.
The annual report undersells the work, and advocacy pays the price
Many leadership teams sense it privately: the annual report is narrative-heavy and data-light, and it quietly undersells what the organization actually accomplishes. Part of the problem is what gets counted. Many reports still stop at activity: who participated, what was delivered, and how much was distributed. Those figures matter, but they are not the same as outcomes: the measurable change in people’s lives. That distinction is important because funders increasingly treat credible outcome data as a condition of serious consideration.³
The cost shows up most sharply in advocacy, where legislators and government funders respond to quantified economic evidence: jobs supported, dollars circulated, tax revenue generated. Testimony without those figures struggles to compete against organizations that arrive with a balance sheet of community value. Laisar’s completed report gave the client exactly that, showing hundreds of millions of dollars in statewide economic activity, thousands of jobs supported, and tens of millions in tax revenue, with results organized geographically so leaders could speak to the value created in specific communities.
Three symptoms, one gap
It is tempting to treat these as three separate problems: a data problem, a budget problem, and a reporting problem. But they are three expressions of a single underlying gap: the absence of infrastructure to turn everyday program activity into externally credible, decision-grade evidence. Close that gap, and all three begin to ease. The same consolidated dataset that fixes fragmented reporting also feeds the economic model, and the model’s outputs are what give the annual report and the advocacy campaign their missing weight.
What credible evidence makes possible
Rigor is not the same as spin, and the strongest impact work says so plainly. The report Laisar produced was explicit about its own limits, noting that economic modeling captures one dimension of value rather than the full human story, and that its findings reflect association rather than causation. That honesty is not a weakness; it is what makes the numbers trustworthy to a skeptical funder or legislator.
Done well, an impact report becomes more than a document. It becomes the asset an organization reaches for in a grant application, a board meeting, a legislative hearing, and a brand campaign: one source of truth that lets the work speak at full volume.
Tell the whole story
Your organization’s impact is already real; the task is to make it legible, to pair the human stories you tell well with the quantified evidence that funders and policymakers need to act. That is the work we do: building impact reports that turn fragmented data into a credible, compelling case for the difference you make. If your story deserves a fuller telling, talk to us about your next impact report.
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Sources
¹ Candid, “Impact measurement: How to measure your nonprofit’s impact,” citing a survey of 355 nonprofit decision-makers in which 76% ranked measuring impact a top priority while only 29% considered themselves very effective at demonstrating outcomes.
² mySidewalk, “How Can Public and Nonprofit Teams Overcome the Data Capacity Crisis?” (2025–26), on public-serving organizations rethinking data capacity, reducing manual data work, and building stronger systems for using data in 2026.
³ Nonprofit Leadership Center, “Why Nonprofits Must Think Differently About Measuring and Reporting Impact,” noting that many nonprofits report activity metrics (events held, people served, dollars raised) rather than showing why those activities matter.
