You can’t measure what you won’t define

The biggest threat to social impact budgets is invisibility, not backlash.

Benevity's 2024 research found that the top planned budget increase within CSR was impact data and measurement, and that 90% of leaders say more impact data will increase their investment in social impact. That number tells you something important: the teams sitting on unspent potential are being limited by the absence of evidence, not by executives who are having to ruthlessly prioritize.

Social impact teams have a measurement problem. Most of them know it. Few have been setup to solve it. Part of the problem is structural. Social impact often sits organizationally between communications, HR, and community affairs, none of which own the metrics that drive budget conversations. Revenue, market share, employee retention, customer loyalty. Those numbers live in other departments. Social impact teams are rarely set up to connect their work to those outputs.

The other part is definitional. A cause partnership that drives 169,000 blood donation signups is measurable. But most campaigns don't have a number that clean. They have awareness metrics, sentiment scores, and earned media estimates, which matter, but don't translate easily during a CFO's budget review.

The teams that solve this define success before the campaign launches, not after. What specifically will we track? How will we attribute it? Who else owns a piece of this metric?

For cause partnerships, this means the conversation has to start with outcomes, not activities. Not "we'll host a gaming event for Special Olympics athletes," but "we will place 20 athletes in front of a streamed audience and measure fan engagement, press mentions, Special Olympics engagement with gaming programs in the coming year." Those are different conversations with a finance team.

Causes have a parallel problem. They're often asked to report on outputs: number of people served, events held, donations received, rather than outcomes. Outcomes are harder to measure and harder to attribute, but they're what funders increasingly want.

The 2025 Engage for Good data showed 92 cause campaigns collectively pulling in over $275 million in 2024, with about a quarter of the brands running those campaigns seeing a measurable bump in sales while the campaigns ran. That's the data that earns budget. Specific outcomes, named numbers, clear attribution.

The measurement conversation is uncomfortable because it requires committing to numbers before you know if you can hit them. Define success before you launch. Build the tracking before you run the campaign. Then use the numbers you earn.

Image credit: Undead Labs / Xbox Game Studios. All company and product names are trademarks of their respective owners. Descriptions are based on publicly available information and my role in this project.