I2I’s Heart-2-Heart on 2023’s Receipts, Words of the Year, and Hot Topics for 2024

Hey there,

Welcome to Intention 2 Impact (I2I’s) Heart 2 Heart (H2H) newsletter - where we share what’s on our minds, in our hearts, and up-our-sleeves. This is an archived newsletter from September 2023. Want to read the newsletter in real time? Click here to subscribe!

Season’s greetings, friends! ❄️☕️

Welcome to 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.

Are you still there? Or are you already in holiday hibernation mode? Either way, we hope you enjoy our final newsletter of 2023. Cheers to another fun, fulfilling year.

This month, we reflect on big changes in 2023, reveal our words of the year, and look into our crystal ball for topics and trends of 2024. 🔮

On Our Minds

2023: Leveling up for Impact, Influence, Innovation

2023 was a transformative year for Intention 2 Impact. The biggest change was leveling up from a network of independent consultants to a full-time team.

Gone are the days of individual contributors chipping away at project timelines and deliverables. We spent a good chunk of this year developing systems and infrastructure to cultivate a collaborative and generative team that facilitates joyful, inspiring experiences for ourselves and clients.

This required a lot of soul searching, figuring out what makes I2I special, and rallying around a shared mission. It turns out, we are values-driven, learning obsessed, and strategic to our core. Our approach to social impact measurement leverages design, technology, and an unwavering commitment to equity; and our shared mission is to accelerate impact, influence, and innovation for a more just and sustainable future.

Here’s how we made progress on that mission this year:

💥 IMPACT: We partnered with 14 clients (8 foundations, 3 nonprofits, 2 donor collaboratives, and 1 government agency) on 25 projects to measure and maximize impact by designing 8 MERL frameworks (implementing 6 of them), conducting 7 strategy/portfolio/program evaluations, and offering technical assistance and facilitation support to 4 organizations.

📢 INFLUENCE: We developed a new niche in the intersection of evaluation and communication — recognizing the importance of using both to harness influence as a conduit of impact. We evaluate communication strategies to assess the impact of narrative change, fundraising campaigns, marketing/branding, and thought leadership. AND we communicate evaluations in creative and compelling ways through interactive websites, videos, and products that delight.

⚡️ INNOVATION: Several of our projects are pushing boundaries in philanthropy by using learning and evaluation to assess innovative ways to deploy capital, such as social bonds, impact investing, and catalytic pooled funding models. We are geekin’ out about the cool things our clients are doing. Internally, we have also spurred innovation through our experimentation with AI in our evaluation practice.

In total, our MERL projects this year provided foundations with data and insights as they resourced approximately 585 grantees with a total of $758,078,228. The donor collaboratives we supported resourced approximately 42 grantees with $1,368,181,109 (you read that right, $1.3B as in Beyoncé).

What does that really mean? At its best, philanthropy can redistribute power and wealth to nonprofits, community organizations, universities, and coalitions working on issues such as racial and health equity, housing affordability, education, power building, environmental justice, climate resiliency, oral health, school-based health, social entrepreneurship, and many more.

It is dizzying and humbling to look back on this year. Thank you to all our colleagues, partners, clients, advisors, friends, and family for being on this journey with us!

We look forward to resting into the holiday season and coming back refreshed, recharged, and ready to rock & roll. 🤘🏽

In Our Hearts

In case you missed it, the “words of the year” just dropped!

Oxford christened “rizz” (Gen Z’s slang for charisma), while Merriam Webster gave the top honor to “authentic” (probably driven by everyone wondering ‘Is it Cake?’ …what a time to be alive!) 🎂

I2I team members, drippin’ in rizz and authenticity, reflected on our own 2023 words of the year and selected words as intentions for 2024:

NINA- 2023: journey; 2024: invigorate
KATHLEEN- 2023: squeeze; 2024: savor
BLAKE- 2023: transformational; 2024: harvest
SAHITI- 2023: whirlwind; 2024: focus

Collectively, this whirlwind journey has been transformational and, hopefully, worth the squeeze. Next year, we look forward to invigorating our passions, savoring the fruits of our harvest, and focusing on what’s most important.

What are your words for 2023 & 2024? Reach out and let us know.

Up Our Sleeves

Speaking of 2024… we launched LinkedIn and Instagram polls last week to ask our followers about topics they were most interested in learning about in future Heart-2-Hearts. Here are the results (N=40):

Stay tuned next year as we explore how to be authentic in using AI and how to inject some rizz in trust-based evaluation (...don’t worry, we don’t really know what that means either; but we’re trying, Gen-Z! 😅).

BTW - follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram to keep weighing in on polls. In 2024, we’ll integrate results in our monthly newsletter. Don’t forget to forward this to folks who might be interested in joining for some Heart-2-Hearts!