Giving Compass' Take:

• Fast Company details an interview with Ford Foundation's Darren Walker and Apple's Lisa Jackson about the do's and don'ts of measuring impact and how we can scale social change.

• Are some organizations too reliant on concrete metrics, as Walker argues? What are better ways to track progress in the social sector, rather than simply looking at numbers and figures?

• Here's more on the difference between measuring and managing impact. 

Ford Foundation president Darren Walker believes the philanthropy sector is suffering “tremendous harm” by relying too much on concrete metrics as a way to measure success. It’s an unorthodox view, but it’s shared by what might seem like a surprising corporate ally: tech titan Apple.

“Some of the most important things in life cannot be measured,” Walker said during a moderated talk alongside Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy, and social initiatives at the Fast Company Innovation Festival. “I saw a major philanthropist’s website, a new multibillion-dollar foundation. And the headline said, ‘If it can’t be measured, we don’t fund it.’ And I thought, What a shame,” he told the crowd.

Nonprofits in many cause areas typically provide donors with bang-for-your-buck statistics about how their money gets spent to build trust or loyalty. People with money to give away have many options, the theory goes, so it’s important to show them how it will be well spent. But both Walker and Jackson said that some types of socially good impacts are less quantifiable than, say, the number of seeds planted to grow food, or vaccines delivered to help people. These often deal with fundamental values crucial to democracy and demand continued attention–because while victories can build on each other, they can also unexpectedly regress.

Read the full article about the limits in measuring impact by Ben Paynter at Fast Company.