Beyond the Numbers Game
As someone who runs a nonprofit and submits applications for grants often enough, frustrating can be an understatement. Organizations giving out funding usually want to know exactly how many people we’ll serve and what measurable outcomes we’ll produce, which is not necessarily unreasonable. But in many cases the real impact isn’t countable. It’s the teenager who finally feels seen, the elder who shares their story for the first time and feels connected once more to the larger fabric of the community that has begun to count them out.
This tension between what’s measurable and what’s meaningful shows up everywhere. In creative work, we get caught up in follower counts, sales figures, gallery shows, awards. For organizations, it’s attendance numbers, demographic breakdowns, survey scores. All of these metrics have their place, but they tell an incomplete story.
Those unquantifiable moments don’t fit neatly into grant reports or impact assessments, but they’re the real reason we do this work. They’re also the foundation for everything that comes after: The relationships that lead to future projects, the trust that makes deeper collaboration possible, the sense of ownership that ensures a project actually serves the community it’s meant to serve.
The challenge isn’t to abandon measurement entirely. Accountability matters, especially when you’re working with public funds or community resources. But the best metrics are the ones that actually reflect what you’re trying to achieve, not just what’s easy to count.
Instead of focusing solely on how many people attended your workshop, ask who came back multiple times and why. Instead of just tracking social media engagement, pay attention to the quality of conversations your work generates. Instead of measuring square footage of murals completed, document the stories and connections that emerge from the process.
The most sustainable creative work, the kind that builds lasting impact, often happens in the spaces between the metrics. It’s in the follow-up conversations, the unexpected collaborations, the way a project shifts something in the community’s sense of itself.
This doesn’t mean being careless with resources or avoiding accountability. It means being intentional about what you’re really trying to accomplish and honest about what success actually looks like. Sometimes the most important outcomes take years to fully understand.