Date: Thursday, July 23, 2026
Hi, I’m Victoria Worthen Lang, 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 AEA 365 to explore what it means to treat impact as a verb instead of a noun — an active practice, not a static goal.
Today, we’re sharing an example from a nonprofit powering the transition to safe and sustainable production, Open Supply Hub (OS Hub).
OS Hub is the world’s most complete, open, and accessible global supply chain database. It is used by advocates to hold brands accountable, by brands to find peers to collaborate with and achieve compliance, by researchers publishing investigative reports, and by ecosystem actors coordinating toward more sustainable trade. Same platform. Completely different pathways to impact depending on who’s using it, why, and what they do with the data next.
When OS Hub came to us, they weren’t short on impact stories. They had plenty. The challenge was that those stories weren’t talking to each other… a worker reinstatement here, a legislative citation there, a brand integrating a facility ID into their compliance system somewhere else. Each one is compelling, but none of them add up to a picture of what the platform is actually producing — or where it was in the long arc toward genuine systems change.
We needed a framework that could hold all levels of impact in the process of working toward systems change.
Today, the OS Hub impact measurement framework has five stages of impact: Awareness (an actor discovered OS Hub), Use (they engaged meaningfully with the platform), Action (they used OS Hub data to do something in the world), Outcome (a concrete result followed), and Systems Signal (the case contributed to a shift in norms, precedent, or standard practice). Each stage is treated with equal weight — not as a hierarchy of “better” impacts, but as a map of how impact moves and accumulates.
The framework does two things at once: (1) it holds the full diversity of users (advocates, brands, researchers, suppliers, ecosystem actors) and their different pathways to impact (accountability, interoperability, collective action); and (2) it tracks impact on a continuum (from awareness to systems change).
This matters for OS Hub because they are not yet claiming that the global supply chain system has changed. They are in the process of building toward that future. The framework honors incremental progress, while not flattening the story into a single metric.
Impact is a verb, even when it’s still becoming.
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.