In business and marketing threads on LinkedIn there are long nerdy discussions, where people dig into strategy, tactics and data with real intellectual depth.

Unfortunately the same level of depth just isn’t there in threads about civil society comms. When Trump won again last month, there was lots of discussion about feelings and lots of heartfelt pledges to fight harder and never give up. What I’d love to see more of is sophisticated and impact oriented analysis on how to create better concrete outcomes. 

In the cause driven sector, too many places struggle to identify what they’re actually working for. Sure, you’re working for human rights. But how do you quantify that? And if you can’t quantify it, how do you know if what you’re doing has any impact?

And unfortunately our opponents, the disinformation strategists in St Petersburg, have a very clear idea of what impact is. The macro objective is always to fragment and weaken the shared narratives that bind their target societies together. And the way they track progress on that objective is through engagement data – the number of people engaging with their ideas. (There’s almost a hundred years of data from advertising that shows that the media people consume influences the way they think. Impact is clear and quantifiable.)

When the cause driven sector integrates the same kind of impact oriented methodologies, it will become exponentially more effective at delivering impact on what it exists to do.