Date: Friday, July 24, 2026
Hi, I’m Sahiti Bhaskara, a Senior Consultant at Intention 2 Impact (I2I), a social impact consultancy known for measuring and communicating impact for foundations, nonprofits, and impact investors.
This week our team is taking over AEA365,exploring what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun. Today: the hardest impact to measure is the kind that cannot trace back to you — and sometimes that’s exactly the point.
Our field loves a counterfactual. What wouldn’t have happened without this organization, strategy, or report? It’s the cleanest evidence of impact we have, and when you can measure it, you should. But there’s a whole category of change the counterfactual is not designed to see: narrative change. The slow, diffuse work of shifting how an entire field thinks and talks about something.
Take FreeFrom, an organization working to end gender-based violence (GBV) by building survivors’ long-term safety and economic security. For years, the field treated it as merely a crisis to respond to, with shelters, hotlines, and the justice system, and it spoke for survivors more than it trusted them to lead. FreeFrom insisted on a different frame: that GBV is an economic issue; everyone from banks and employers to policymakers has a role to play in ending it. Survivors are the experts on their own lives, and leaders of the movement.
FreeFrom refused to bet on a single lever. They made the case through research and survivor-centered data, carried it into storytelling, policy, and partnerships. They pushed the once-fringe idea that direct unrestricted cash to survivors is, on its own, a legitimate response. The bet was never one signature tactic. It was the reframe itself. And when that reframe becomes the norm, it stops belonging to FreeFrom. Others adopt it, build on it, and carry it into rooms FreeFrom will never enter and impact compounds across the field.
Which raises a measurement problem: when an idea becomes that widely accepted, who gets to claim it?
But that is a smaller question. The bigger one is whether that should matter at all. Attribution isn’t the problem. When you can build a clean counterfactual, it’s powerful and worth doing. For narrative change though, the question is whether the narrative is shifting, not how much we can pin to one source, not how much of that shift we can pin to which source. Getting too hung up on the latter does a disservice to the work. The more successful narrative change is, the less attributable it becomes.
The goal was never for everyone to credit FreeFrom; it was for the reframe to become so ingrained no one remembers it was ever contested. If we only measure what we can attribute, we lose sight of the change we actually need.
So we measured for contribution, not attribution. Instead of asking “did FreeFrom cause this,” we asked: where is this language showing up, who’s using it, and what are they doing differently because of it? We looked for echoes, adoption, and ripple effects — the fingerprints of an idea on the move, not a clean causal line back to one organization.
The Waters of Systems Change framework maps the conditions that hold a problem in place, from the visible (policies & practices) to the hardest to see: mental models. Narrative change works at that deepest layer. It’s the least visible, the least attributable, and often the most powerful.
Attribution is a noun; it asks who owns the impact. Influence is a verb; it asks how an idea moves.
Impact is a verb — even when no one can trace it back to you.
Do you have questions, concerns, kudos, or content to extend this AEA365 contribution? Please add them in the comments section for this post on the AEA365 webpage so that we may enrich our community of practice. Would you like to submit an AEA365 Tip? Please send a note of interest to AEA365@eval.org. AEA365 is sponsored by the American Evaluation Association and provides a Tip-a-Day by and for evaluators.