Who can afford to prove their impact? A question for grantmakers

Over the past decade or so, I worked on the institutional side of development funding, and I kept noticing a gap between (usually) local organizations that create impact and larger, well-resourced organizations that can actually prove it. I recently wrote a piece on the hidden cost of evidence, and I’d love to hear thoughts on it form people here, especially those working in grantmaking. The piece is not too long, and I'm hoping you'll find time to read it. I’m newer to EA, so I may be missing how EA funders already handle this - feel free to share any perspective you think I might be missing here. Any constructive feedback is more than welcome! 

The question that I'm struggling with: do our funding systems sometimes confuse an organization’s ability to create impact with its ability to measure and communicate it?

A few points from the essay I think could be of interest to this audience:

• Creating impact and proving it are two different skills. I’ve seen smaller, local organizations that know their communities really well and deliver good work, but have no baseline data, no monitoring system and not even one person available to put together an evidence package by Friday.
• Evidence costs money, and that money usually isn’t considered a program cost. Evidence capacity is mostly funded from overhead, which is chronically underfunded. Only 25 of 67 Grand Bargain signatories have a policy to fund overheads for local partners. And with official development assistance (ODA) down 23% in 2025, funding evidence is becoming much harder.
• What’s easy to count is what gets funded. Bed nets distributed are easy to count. Whether girls stayed in school because a teacher kept showing up in a conflict-affected community is much harder, and those effects show up years after the grant has closed. If funders reward quick, tidy results, organizations learn to design for them.
• Whoever pays for the evidence usually decides what success looks like. Organizations that can’t afford their own evidence end up reporting against the funder’s indicators, which aren’t always what communities would call meaningful change.

One practical idea from the essay: agree upfront on what level of evidence is reasonable for the size and complexity of the grant. P.S. I've created a practical proportionality checklist that could be useful to some funders; if you made it to this part of the essay, sincere thanks. 

To be clear, I’m not arguing for lower standards. However, I firmly believe that if we ask for credible evidence, we should also fund the capacity to produce it.

So I’d really love to hear from people in grantmaking or evaluation:

• How do you handle organizations that seem promising but don’t have strong evidence yet?
• Do you fund evidence-building capacity directly? If so, what was your experience so far?
• Have you seen funders judge the quality of the paperwork instead of the quality of the work?

Also, if you’ve run a small organization and been on the other side of this, I’d love to hear from you too.

More detail in the full article here.

I used AI to help condense my article into this summary; the ideas and experience are my own.