By Manju Menon, CEO NuSocia
The social sector is obsessed with success and terrified of failure. In a space where the most important change is always slow, messy, and impossible to guarantee, that combination is quietly devastating.
Let me start with two projects I’ve seen up close.
The first ticked every box. Activities completed. Targets met. Report submitted. Funding cycle closed. The team moved on. The community moved on. Three years later, nothing remained – not a behaviour, not a structure, not a habit. It had the appearance of success and the substance of very little.
The second was messier. Timelines slipped. Indicators had to be renegotiated mid-course. The implementing team pushed back on the donor more than once. But five years later, that community was advocating for itself. A local policy had shifted. The change had taken root in a way no log-frame had anticipated.
Only one of these projects would get funded again. You already know which one.
The chain nobody controls
Here is the structural problem, stated plainly: the demand for legible success travels down a chain that nobody fully controls – and everybody attempts to reproduce.
NGOs understand, intuitively, what deep impact looks like. They’ve seen it – in a community that begins to organise itself, in a behaviour that outlasts the project, in a shift in how people think about their own power. But their funding cycles, reporting templates, and donor relationships push them toward a different language- Outputs. Meals served. Children enrolled. Training conducted. Real and important, but not the same as transformation. And slowly, organisations begin building programmes around what they can prove, rather than what they believe works.
Donors, in turn, face their own accountability walls. Foundations answer to boards. Government grants come with audit requirements. Crowdfunding depends on compelling narratives. When a donor demands results within 18 months for a problem that took decades to form, they are often not being naive – they’re being cornered. So NGOs perform well for donors. Donors perform success for their stakeholders. The system reproduces itself, at every level, in good faith.
And then come the evaluators – the mechanism most likely to tell us what actually happened – who are frequently hired by the organisations they assess. Critical findings circulate quietly, if at all. Positive findings get published, presented, and rewarded. Independent evaluation, structurally, is rarely independent.
The consequence is striking: the sector generates an enormous volume of learning material, yet learns remarkably little from it.
The cost of only funding what we can prove
Non-profits gravitate toward proven, replicable, low-risk interventions – not because they’re better, but because they’re defensible. The difficult work – systemic change, political advocacy, long-horizon community organising, is precisely what doesn’t fit neatly into a results framework. So it gets underfunded. We end up optimising for reportability, not impact. And that distinction, rarely spoken aloud, may be the most consequential one the sector is not having.
I want to be precise here: I am not arguing for tolerance of inefficiency. The social sector is one of the most resource-constrained spaces there is. Every rupee counts and every instance of ineffectiveness should be named and addressed. But there is a difference between holding organisations accountable for how they work and punishing them for the honest complexity of what they are trying to change. When implementing organisations are pushed to achieve 100% of activity targets rather than being asked why they are struggling and what needs to change, we are not being rigorous. We are afraid..
Failure carries reputational and financial consequences that narrow risk appetite. That is understandable. It is also, at scale, a sector-wide tragedy.
What would it take to do this differently?
The measurement question – what to count, over what timeframe, and who gets to decide, is not a technical one. It is a question of values. And at present, the sector’s values are hinged on funding what photographs well, fund what reports cleanly, fund what can be defended in a board deck.
I don’t think most people in this sector actually believe in that. I think they are caught in a system that rewards the appearance of rigour over its substance.
What would it look like to design accountability that matches the actual complexity of social change? What would funders, NGOs, and evaluators have to give up to get there? And who in this sector is already doing it – quietly, imperfectly, worth learning from?
If you have seen it done well, I want to hear about it. If you are struggling with exactly this, I want to hear about that too.
The photograph is never good enough. Let’s stop pretending it is and start talking about what comes after.
