How can funders capture an honest picture of impact? Start by reframing how you approach research and learning.
Traditionally, philanthropic dollars have come with all sorts of strings. Funders distribute grants and, in return, ask grantees to share what they did with the dollars, using prescoped metrics to demonstrate that it was a solid investment.
On the surface, the ask seems simple and reasonable—we fund your work, you show us your impact. But what’s ultimately left out of this equation is nuance. This type of compliance-based approach places an unnecessary burden on grantees and fails to account for what’s actually happening in communities. It’s the equivalent of asking someone to justify why a meal should be prepared rather than just cooking it.
This funder preference for compliance has another unintended consequence: it reinforces existing power dynamics between nonprofits and funders, often resulting in performative feedback that doesn’t reflect the full spectrum of grantee impact.
In recent years, there’s been some pushback from progressive funders who have offered an alternative approach: distribute funding without asking questions. The thinking goes that reporting is burdensome at best and implies a lack of trust in grantees. Funders who trust their grantees should give them autonomy to do their work and ask nothing in return.
At Magic Cabinet, we’re exploring a third way, one that weaves together collaborative and community-centered practices that are simple, accessible, and foster mutual trust with our grantee partners.
This approach includes:
- Offering multi-year, flexible funding that allows our grantees to be creative
- Asking grantees to tell us about their work in ways that feel meaningful
Sophia Sobko, our Qualitative / Mixed Methods Researcher, led a study with our grantee partners in November and December 2025 to better understand how they define impact and their preferences for sharing work with funders. In these conversations, grantees repeatedly affirmed the importance of capturing stories, relationships, and lived experiences as valuable sources of learning.
The feedback shared during these conversations led us to develop a simple, four-question framework to help guide how we approach research and learning:
| Why are you asking for this information? | Know who the information is for, how it will be used, and what you will do with it. |
| What counts as knowledge? | Stories, relationships, lived experience, and feelings—all of these play a role in understanding both progress and challenges. |
| How are you asking grantees to share? | Reports are one way, but conversations, videos, and site visits can also be useful. |
| Who can access this information? | Data sovereignty matters. Make the information you collect accessible to those who supplied it. |
With this as a starting point, funders can begin to shift from prescriptive, top-down asks toward measuring what truly matters.
SHIFTING HOW WE MEASURE IMPACT
Research and learning are at the core of what we do. Our feedback methods have shifted over time because we’re committed to learning from our partners and adjusting our approach to be responsive to their unique contexts.
Here’s what we’ve learned:
Open-ended questions provide more valuable insights than prescriptive reporting metrics.
We ask our grantees open-ended, descriptive questions that honor their own definitions and understanding of their work. This approach creates space for nuance and complexity that provides more value than quantitative metrics alone.
For example, we ask grantees questions like:
- What happened between the start and completion of the project?
- How has this funding impacted your organization?
- Were there any changes in your methods to better meet your goals?
With this approach, grantees decide what’s meaningful to share – whether that’s a metric, a story, or something else entirely.
Instead of funding based on proof of impact, invest in solutions that make impact possible.
We don’t evaluate our grantees. Instead, we ask them to share what grant funding made possible for their organization. The outcomes of the individual grants aren’t as important as building trusting relationships where our partners can share what’s really happening, in all of its joy and messiness. Funding terms are set at the start of the cohort and are not dependent on grant outcomes, reflecting trust that makes it more possible for grantees to share openly, be innovative, and take risks.
Rather than evaluating grantees, learn from them and act on what they share.
Since our start, we’ve worked with Public Profit to survey our grantees at years 1, 3, and 5 of their cohort journey in order to evaluate and evolve our grantmaking. Grantees tell us about their cohort experience, and we take action on the anonymized, aggregated insights we receive. One piece of feedback we’ve received from our grantees was a request to provide support beyond the check. As a result, we now offer Catchafire, a platform that connects nonprofits with highly skilled volunteers for support on capacity-building projects, including fundraising, organizational strategy, translation services, and website development.
Learning-oriented reporting creates space for collaboration and nuance.
Nonprofits are still operating within a system that requires them to compete for funding. Amidst this ongoing reality, we’ve made a few changes to prioritize more accessible and authentic ways for grantees to share what’s happening in their organizations and communities. We’ve simplified our grant reporting questions, eliminated interim reports, and instead are opting for a single final report per grant.
The throughline for us is that progress isn’t always linear. This four-question framework has enabled us to learn so much more than standard reporting templates or prescriptive metrics could ever tell us. It’s the type of approach that not only fosters the creativity and self-determination of our partners but also helps funders understand the true impact of their partnership, making it mutually beneficial for everyone.
Are you a funder seeking to build trust with your grantees and gain meaningful insights in the process? Download our Meaningful Measurements framework below.
