Lewis Parker, Chief Strategy Officer at Shape History, on the Impact-First design and measurement approach: where it came from, how it works and why it now sits at the heart of every partnership we take on.
Brand and strategic communications in our sector is being asked to do more than it ever has, and to prove it. The people leading it – comms directors, brand leads, heads of campaigns – are under growing pressure to demonstrate that their work isn’t just visible, but consequential. That it moves people, builds trust, shifts narratives, changes behaviour, secures funding.
Yet the metrics we see many organisations continuing to rely on focus on the outputs and don’t give us that answer. Impressions, reach, engagement rates tell you something, but they don’t tell you whether anything has changed, or whether your communications contributed to that change. It’s this gap between what gets measured and what actually matters where the investment case to senior leaders, boards, or funders gets lost, and where the potential to drive real impact gets missed.
That’s why we built Impact-First. Not as a reporting framework bolted onto the end of a project, but as a strategic approach for designing work around the change it’s intended to create, and for building the evidence to show it and learn from it.
This requires a clear distinction. Outputs are the things we make and distribute. Outcomes are the changes we make. Impact is what endures, the difference that lasts beyond us for organisations, people, and society.
We’ve arrived at this approach through years of working across global health, climate, education and social justice issues. Again and again, we found ourselves returning to the same question: not whether the work was seen, but whether it changed anything. Impact-First emerged from that experience, and from a belief that communications should be designed and measured around the difference they make, not just the outputs they produce.
Starting with the difference, not the deliverable
Every partnership starts with the same upstream questions. What is the real-world change this work needs to contribute to? Where are we starting from, and where do we need to get to? What would tell us we’re getting there?, and what are the resources we have? We discuss those questions until we have real clarity. Only then do we turn to what to make and how to make it.
We think about impact at three levels.
- What changes for the organisation – funding secured, trust built, a stronger position on an issue that matters.
- What changes for the communities or audiences they serve – perceptions, behaviours, access.
- And what changes in the wider world – policy, public opinion, the narrative about what’s possible.
Not every project reaches all three. It doesn’t need to. What matters is being honest from the start about which level we’re aiming for – and what our intended contribution is. In a world where most meaningful change involves many actors, organisations rarely get to claim a shift outright. But they can show how their work moved things in the right direction, for the right people, at the right moment. That’s a much stronger case than a reach figure, and it’s the case this approach is designed to help partners make.
Impact-First is, at its heart, a design process – and in practice it works in four stages.
- Together with partners, we define the intended impact and the change we’re trying to create, grounded in their ambition, resources and operating context. Sometimes that’s clear from the start. Often it’s not.
- We identify and prioritise the audiences who need to think, feel or do something differently for that impact to happen – and where the ambition is longer-term, push for clarity and alignment on the intermediate contribution we can realistically make to furthering that agenda.
- Only then do we design the strategies, campaigns, brands, partnerships, content or experiences needed to get there.
- And at the end, we evaluate honestly and build in the learning for what comes next.
Running through all four stages is a clear set of indicators so we always have a meaningful basis for judging whether the work has done what it set out to do. The result is work connected to a theory of change rather than a list of deliverables, and measurement that is built in from the start.
Through this process, we always push to establish a baseline because understanding where we start from is what makes it possible to identify what shifted. But we also know this isn’t always feasible — budgets, timelines, and the complexity of the systems our partners work within don’t always allow for it. Where a baseline isn’t possible, we work to identify proxy indicators: things that are measurable within the engagement window and that can tell a credible story about contribution to change.
This means Impact looks different across every one of our partnerships.
- A rebrand co-created with communities shifted how major funders perceived the organisation’s legitimacy – doors that had previously been closed began to open, and funder feedback gave us early evidence that the repositioning was landing before a full brand health assessment could show it.
- A national advocacy campaign moved public opinion on a policy issue that hadn’t shifted in decades – the act of parliament hasn’t passed yet, but the conditions for it are meaningfully different than they were, and ongoing tracking showed how target audiences were understanding the issue differently.
- A sexual health initiative we designed for young women in Kenya led to a 25% uplift in girls accessing services.
In each case, the measure of success wasn’t how many people saw the work. It was whether something changed, and whether we could find credible signals to show it, even when the headline outcome was still some way off.
Meeting partners where they are
We know gold-standard evaluation – longitudinal tracking, control groups, behaviour change verified at scale – isn’t always possible. And in our sector, evaluation can feel like a burden: another cost on a budget that’s already stretched.
Impact-First isn’t a prescription for exhaustive measurement on every project. It’s a discipline for being intentional from the start – so that whatever we measure is proportionate and purposeful. A well-placed baseline survey. A tracking question in an existing touchpoint. A proxy indicator that’s already being collected.
We also try to design for what comes after us. We look for ways to generate early proof of concept that the work is moving in the right direction, while building a foundation for longer-term learning and accountability. The goal isn’t just to evaluate a single project, but to leave partners with the tools and confidence to keep measuring progress long after we’ve stepped away.
Evaluation that means something
At the end of every project, we’re honest about four things: what we set out to achieve, what we actually achieved and why, and what it means for what comes next.
For us, a good evaluation tells you what happened, what you can learn from it, and what to do differently next time. The goal is the kind of honest reckoning that makes the next project sharper, the next investment case stronger, and the next conversation with a funder or board easier to have.
Because the only question that really matters, for us and for every partner we work with, is whether we actually changed something. That’s the question Impact-First is built to answer.
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