Welcome to the latest installment of Intention 2 Impact’s Heart-2-Heart — our monthly newsletter where we share what’s on our mind, in our hearts, and up our sleeves.
This month, we’re unpacking why rigorous evaluation isn’t influential (and inviting you to a webinar to address it), sharing what we’re carrying from summer into the fall, and introducing our newest client partner, Elevate Cities!
ON OUR MINDS
The Evaluation Influence Gap
Here’s a sentence that should not be true in 2026: The evaluation field is more methodologically sophisticated than it has ever been, and evaluators have rarely felt less powerful.
And yet. Here we are.
The political and economic environment has reshaped the learning & evaluation function from the inside out. Boards are swinging toward accountability and away from learning, budgets are tighter, timelines are shorter, and certain findings can no longer be said publicly without consequences. So much rigor. So little reach.
And here’s what makes it worse: new research from the Let’s Keep Learning initiative (from ORS Impact, Engage R+D, and the Barr Foundation) suggests the problem isn’t that funders don’t understand the value. They do. Foundation CEOs described learning and evaluation as essential to understanding impact, improving strategy, and maintaining accountability in a sector with very few formal accountability levers. The challenge is structural: learning that isn’t close enough to real decisions, and evaluation work that flows upward into foundations without creating value for grantees and communities. As the Let’s Keep Learning follow-up piece argues, the field needs learning that functions as “a strategic practice, not a compliance function.”
Grappling with how to make our work more useful and influential is not new to this field. There are whole textbooks on it and there is a Use and Influence Topical Interest Group (TIG) within AEA. ICYMI, they took over AEA365 just last week with seven blog posts about the topic.
So, if evaluators already know what it takes for our work to be useful and influential, and we can’t blame the funders (which honestly, can be too easy to do)… what is the real issue here?
Our hot take: evaluation has spent decades theorizing about use and influence and very little time learning from a field that actually operationalizes it.
Communications has decades of theory and practice around how audiences process information before they evaluate it on its merits. How framing shapes reception. How narrative architecture makes a finding memorable. How messenger credibility mediates trust. How timing determines whether evidence lands when a door is open (or after it’s already closed). Evaluation has been building products without investing in the distribution system.
On September 24th, Intention 2 Impact is hosting a webinar to name that gap and do something about it. We’ll be walking through four principles from communications that function as a diagnostic for evaluators:
- Design for a decision, not just a question
- Build for an audience, not just a report
- Find the right voice, not just the right finding
- Time the release, not just publish when done
Each principle names something communications does as a discipline that evaluation does by accident, if at all.
If this paradox is one you know intimately… reply to this email and let us know what you’re grappling with. We’d love to continue the conversation.
IN OUR HEARTS
Souvenirs from Summer
If you grew up associating August with the smell of new fresh crayons and the low-grade dread of turning in that summer reading logs, you’re not alone. In the spirit of “back-to-school” season we asked the team “What’s one thing from this summer you’re ‘bringing back to school’ with you and into the fall season (e.g., a habit, a mindset, a snack)?”
SAHITI: A newfound love and respect for pretend play!
ASHLEY: A mindset: I used to treat the workweek like a tax and the weekend like the ‘refund’, but the math aint mathing. I don’t just want to ‘live for the weekends’!
EMMA: My TOMATOES! my garden has been absolutely abundant this summer, and i’m very excited to bring my sweet summer veggies into fall 🍅
VICTORIA: A mindset: thriving, not just surviving! I’m seeking out goals that are inspiring to me and will focus on finding/doing things for myself that make me happy, not just other people.
NISHAT: I am bringing my newly diagnosed Sciatica along with the thinking that life is just so unpredictable- roll with it
ALYSSA: A habit: Zombie hour. I wake up an hour earlier and do all of my least favorite daily chores before my brain is even fully awake.
NINA: Agency in how I’m investing my time and energy.
KATHLEEN: A cracked big toenail. But I’m not even mad about it. It’s an unconventional souvenir from the many miles of trails I hiked this summer, making memories with old friends on new terrain.
What are you carrying into fall with you? Hit reply and tell us — we read every single one.
UP OUR SLEEVES
New Client, Who Dis?
Team I2I is jazzed to introduce our newest partner: Elevate Cities, an organization on a mission to spark joy, belonging, and civic pride in cities around the world. Think poetry contests, music competitions, storytelling campaigns, citywide celebrations; activations designed to make local good more visible, more participatory, and honestly, a little contagious.
We’re helping Elevate Cities turn its foundational strategy into a working measurement system and produce a public version of the Elevate Cities Playbook, made to travel with them as they scale from Miami to Boston and beyond.
Elevate Cities is exactly the kind organization that makes us remember why we love this work.
