The Social Impact Strategy Everyone Skips (And Regrets Later)

Here’s how case studies typically happen in social impact work: Leadership asks for a report to share with the board, your team needs content for the annual CSR report or it’s budget season and you need to prove why your program deserves continued investment.

Suddenly, you’re tasked with creating a compelling narrative about impact—except you’re working backwards from outcomes you never clearly defined. You’re hunting through emails for volunteer testimonials, pulling numbers from three different spreadsheets, and hoping someone on your team remembers to take photos at that final event.

The case study gets done—barely—and lands somewhere between “adequate documentation” and “missed opportunity.” It checks the compliance box but doesn’t capture the transformative moments that actually happened, doesn’t tell the full story of what you learned when things went sideways, and certainly doesn’t inspire anyone to take the work further. We end up with boring reports filled with data but lacking soul. Metrics without meaning.

The Reframe

Most of us view case studies as an optional, nice-to-have cherry on top of our work, instead of a foundational part of our strategy. A retrospective, “hindsight-is-20/20” exercise that we’ll tackle when and if we ever get the time.

But what if starting with your case study in mind was the key to unlocking a more meaningful, measurable social impact strategy?

It just might change everything.

Here’s why:

When you ask yourself (and your team) What story do I want to be able to tell in 12 months? What will success look like?, you cast a very tangible vision everyone can rally around.

Your case study becomes your North Star, your strategic plan, your motivation when things get tough. (And things will get tough!). But those difficult moments become the meat, the real value, of your story.

This connects directly to principles we’ve discussed before about goal-setting. Getting clear about the story you want to tell is essentially setting a big goal you want to achieve. This defines the playing field for your team, your manager, and everyone who needs to understand your results.

Start with Five Key Elements

When planning your future case study, define these elements from the beginning:

1. Leadership Involvement – How will leaders be engaged? If you tell them a year ahead of time that you’ll need a quote down the line, they’ll be primed to participate in a way that gives them something meaningful to say.
2. Participation Metrics – Not just numbers, but meaningful engagement indicators. Participation is an important step toward impact, though not impact itself. Break the numbers down into specifics and decide why those numbers matter.
3. Employee Sentiment – How will people feel about the program? What will they do as a result of participating, and what will they know?
4. Community Impact – What tangible difference will you make? Have you listened – really listened – to what your community organizations and their people actually need?
5. Business Value – How does this connect to company priorities? Always connect your activities, partnerships, and program metrics to why it matters at this company, at this time, for these priorities.

The Power of Why

Charles Duhigg’s book The Power of Habit shares an example from Marine Corps training. During the grueling 54-hour “Crucible” challenge, recruits are taught to constantly ask each other “Why?” Why are you doing this? Why does it matter? When you can connect something difficult to a choice that matters to you personally, it becomes doable. Even meaningful.

That’s what we need in social impact. When your team knows the story you’re building together, when they can see how today’s challenges create tomorrow’s case study, everything changes.

Document both the organizational why and your personal why. When you’re six months in and leadership starts getting impatient, when volunteers are hard to recruit, when you’re exhausted – that documented “why” becomes your lifeline.

Never Too Late

If you’re already mid-program, you can retrofit this approach:

1. Stop and assess: What data do you currently have? Define your desired ending: What story do you wish you could tell?
2. Identify the gaps: What metrics or stories are missing?
3. Course correct: Start collecting what you need now
4. Be honest: Your first case study might be about learning and pivoting

Remember, you’re not just creating programs – you’re crafting stories. Every metric you track, every champion you engage, every outcome you achieve is part of a larger narrative about why this work matters. Start with that story, and everything else falls into place.

Case studies were the subject of our most recent RealTalk webinar. To learn more about case studies as a strategic planning tool, access the recording here.