Don’t get me wrong: “10,000 people reached” is a great metric.
In the right place, it tells me something useful. It shows scale. It can tell a team whether an intervention travelled as far as expected. And once another measure sits beside it, reach becomes the denominator that helps make that next number meaningful.
The question is what happened to those 10,000 people afterwards. Because reach often appears near the beginning of an impact story and then gets asked (quietly) to support claims much further downstream.
Reach has a job
In many interventions, reach sits at or near the output level.
An output is the immediate product of an activity: people contacted, sessions delivered, products distributed or households visited. USAID guidance (back in the day) treated outputs as legitimate results to monitor for programme management and accountability. Outcomes sit further along and concern changes in people, systems or institutions, including knowledge, attitudes or practices.
So there are perfectly good reasons to report reach.
A programme that expected to reach 10,000 people and reached 2,000 has learned something important. If people need to encounter a new service before they can consider using it, exposure matters. A funder may also reasonably want to understand the scale at which an intervention was delivered.
Put another number beside the first one, though, and its meaning starts to change.
Suppose 10,000 people were reached and 40 tried the intervention.
The 10,000 gives those 40 context. It also exposes a large gap between exposure and adoption.
That gap is useful.
The wrong audience may have been reached. Access could be difficult. The proposition may not address the real constraint. Trial may require support the programme has not provided.
The numbers identify where the team should investigate, not the cause.
Now change the example.
Ten thousand people were reached. Three thousand tried the intervention. Only 150 continued using it.
The interesting question has moved downstream. Initial adoption looks healthier; something seems to be happening after trial.
And if continued use remains strong while the behaviour or condition the intervention was meant to influence barely moves, attention shifts again.
I find those movements between the numbers at least as useful as the headline figures themselves.
The path after reach can diagnose the intervention
Different interventions have different paths.
A training programme might move from attendance to completion, knowledge and eventual application. A product may move from awareness through trial and continued use before any behavioural change becomes visible. For an awareness intervention, a shift in knowledge or attitudes may itself be the intended result.
The OECD describes the broader idea through a results chain, connecting activities to outputs, outcomes and longer-term impacts. Its guidance also stresses that the relationships between those stages matter because results information should support learning and management as well as accountability[2]. That distinction can be particularly useful for an early-stage organisation.
If reach is healthy and adoption is weak, there is probably something to investigate near the entrance to the intervention. Strong initial adoption followed by poor continued use points somewhere else. Sustained use without the hoped-for change raises a more fundamental question about the assumptions behind the intervention.
These are product and programme questions before they become reporting questions. They can influence targeting, delivery, communications and design while there is still time to change something.
That is why I don’t see the path after reach as paperwork created for a future report. It is one way of seeing where reality has stopped following the plan.
The storyteller has a role before the story is written
This is also where I think communications professionals can be useful earlier than they often are.
In venture and grant work, I have encountered a familiar combination: a strong reach figure, a few persuasive participant stories, and a hoped-for outcome sitting much further away.
By the time the writing starts, the weakness is usually visible. Nobody has followed some of the changes between the first activity and the eventual outcome.
That does not make communications the monitoring and evaluation function. But if I am expected to connect an intervention to an outcome, I need to understand how the organisation believes one leads to the other.
So I try to reconstruct that path with the team.
If 10,000 people were reached, what did the programme expect them to do afterwards, and is that behaviour being observed? What should have followed from there? Which stages are already visible in the data, and where does the evidence currently run out?
Those questions can produce very different answers. An organisation may already hold useful information that nobody has connected. A small additional measure might be worth collecting while the programme is still running. Or the team may simply discover that one part of the pathway is currently unknown.
Knowing that is valuable. It sets a real boundary on what the eventual story can claim.
The expensive version of the problem arrives months later, when a grant application, investor deck or impact report is due, and the evidence cannot be collected retrospectively. The writer then has to work with whatever stages the programme actually chose to observe.
Involving a storytelling professional earlier can make that pathway visible while decisions about measurement are still live. They can point to the connection an eventual narrative will depend on; the programme team can decide whether observing it is useful, practical and proportionate.
That is a better reason to collect a measure than an empty box on a reporting template.
Early evidence can stay early
Early-stage interventions often won’t have mature outcome evidence.
Some changes take time. Others are expensive to evaluate. Many happen in environments where several things are changing at once. Even when an outcome is visible, working out how much of it was caused by one intervention raises another evidentiary question.
A young programme can still have a useful evidence base.
It might know that 10,000 people were reached, 600 tried the service, and 250 remain active. Interviews with a smaller group might suggest an emerging change in behaviour.
Together, those measures tell a more useful story than any one of them could carry alone. Reach establishes scale; adoption and continued use show movement through the intervention; the interviews help explain what people experienced and identify changes worth investigating more systematically.
There is no need to make the early evidence sound more mature than it is.
For founders, I think that produces a more credible account of progress. You can say what has happened, what the team is learning, and what still needs to be established. More importantly, those open questions can shape what the organisation looks for next.
Come back to the 10,000
A year later, the report may still contain the same line:
10,000 people reached.
By then, the organisation may also know who tried the intervention, who continued, where participation fell away, what people said about those points of friction and whether the hoped-for change has begun to appear.
The original reach figure now has a much richer job. It shows how widely the intervention travelled while the evidence around it shows how people moved through what came next.
And when that movement stalls, the gap deserves attention rather than concealment.
For an impact founder, that may be the most useful reason to build the chain early. The impact story you can tell later matters, but the more immediate value is knowing where the intervention is asking for another look.
Notes and sources
[2] OECD, Effective Results Frameworks for Sustainable Development: Achieving Impact by Design, 2024, and OECD guidance on managing for sustainable development results. The OECD describes results chains connecting activities, outputs, outcomes and impacts, and treats results information as useful for learning and management as well as accountability and communication.