Choose Sense-Making Over Metrics

Data Without Meaning Is Just Noise

If you’ve ever sat in a nonprofit staff meeting, you know the scene: charts projected on a screen, someone narrating enrollment trends or donor churn, nods all around. But ask the room, “So what does this tell us?” and the silence is deafening.

This is the crisis. Not of data—but of meaning.

As Stanford Social Innovation Review (SSIR) outlined in its excellent piece, “The Nonprofit Data Dilemma”, most nonprofit data systems are built to satisfy funders, not to empower staff or inform real-time decisions. Data is collected, cleaned, and coded—but rarely used. And when it is, it’s used to justify past decisions, not shape future ones.

This isn’t just inefficient, it's a misstep. It reinforces a culture of performative measurement.

We’ve Confused Monitoring with Learning

Somewhere along the way, we mistook visibility for insight. In a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy feature, nonprofit leaders confessed that their teams spend more time formatting data for quarterly reports than discussing what the data means for the communities they serve. One called it “death by dashboard”—a relentless cycle of reporting that rarely results in learning.

“If you’re not using data to generate questions, you’re not learning—you’re performing.”

This is a truth too many of us whisper behind closed doors while doing the work anyway.

As someone who’s spent 15+ years helping nonprofits design for equity and impact, I’ve seen this play out again and again. Field staff, fundraisers, finance teams—they’re working with different realities, but expected to align around the same static dashboard. No wonder the insights don’t land.

What This Moment Demands

This is a moment of profound pressure in the nonprofit sector. Resources are tightening, needs are rising, and trust—between institutions and communities—is fragile. In this environment, we need tools that deepen our reflection, not just sharpen our optics.

We need fewer vanity metrics and more honest inquiry.

We need to stop asking, “What did we measure?” and start asking, “What do we need to understand together?”

Because data isn’t the point. Understanding is.

And if our platforms can’t help us get there—then they’re just another shiny object in a sector that deserves better.

Our Response → Build Systems To Support Sense-making

When we built Impactable.ai, it wasn’t just about building a better data tool. It was about building a better way to work together.

Our team—myself, Javier Garcia (who led finance at City Harvest), and Karthik Sridharan (a technologist with marketplace and data expertise)—wanted to create something that would actually help people think better together. Not just track activity.

That meant:

• AI-generated insights that serve as conversation starters, not just performance summaries
• Cross-functional visibility that helps fundraising, program, and finance data “talk” to each other
• Narrative + numbers woven together into a single source of truth
• And yes— a broader definition of data that respects lived experience of non-profits’ clients, and not just logic models built in the office