Philanthropy isn’t short on generosity. What it lacks is visibility into whether that generosity is actually changing lives at scale and funding outcomes.

Writing bigger checks no longer feels sufficient, because giving means more than funding organizations. It means funding outcomes. And outcomes depend on seeing whether systems are actually getting better.

As funders shift from activity to impact, visibility becomes nonnegotiable. It changes what funders ask for, how nonprofits work together and how success is defined.

That matters because collaboration only works when people can see it. A 2024 study found that roughly 73% of nonprofit collaborations showed measurable improvements in service delivery, funding reach or program outcomes. Shared work delivers results when it’s paired with shared insight.

For decades, funders asked a simpler question: Did this organization deliver its program? Today, the question is harder and more consequential: Is the system changing for the better? No single nonprofit can answer that alone. System-level challenges require coordinated effort over time, and coordination without shared data is guesswork.

That’s the turning point for reshaping modern philanthropy. As funders move from supporting activities to investing in outcomes, shared data becomes the engine behind momentum.

Funding Outcomes: Say Goodbye To The Static Dashboard

Philanthropy is still measuring progress with tools designed for a different era. For years, the model was familiar: program-by-program funding and retrospective reporting. Dashboards captured snapshots, often months after the fact. They were built to assess performance in isolation, not progress across systems. That approach breaks down when the goal is collective progress.

Static dashboards answer yesterday’s questions. Outcome-driven philanthropy needs answers in real time. When funders try to understand how multiple interventions interact, delayed or fragmented data isn’t just inconvenient but misleading.

The issue isn’t a lack of data. It’s that the data was never designed to move. And the shift underway is structural. If philanthropy wants to fund outcomes instead of reports, it needs infrastructure built for learning in real time.

Shared, real-time data infrastructure replaces one-off reporting with ongoing insight. It aligns organizations around what success actually means and allows data to flow across ecosystems instead of staying locked inside individual nonprofits.

Read the full article about shared data reshaping philanthropy by Scott Brighton at Forbes.