Our campaign materials recorded more than two million digital exposures across our own channels in the 2026 cycle. That number tells you almost nothing about whether anyone is safer.
We publish it anyway, and we publish the sentence that sits beneath it in our impact framework: reach signal only, not impact evidence.
Sector reporting is full of figures that look like outcomes and are actually exposures. People reached. Resources downloaded. Followers gained. Attendees registered. Each is real, countable and honestly obtained. None of them establishes that anything changed for anybody.
The reason they dominate reporting is not dishonesty. It is that exposure is easy to count and change is hard to measure. Faced with a funder who needs a number by Friday, the countable thing wins.
Our impact framework separates four layers and refuses to let them blur. Reach is exposure: who saw the work. Outputs are production: what we made and ran, such as the 150 people at the 2025 conference or the 34 autistic speakers platformed in 2026. Outcomes are what changed for the people involved. Systems change is what changed in the institutions around them.
Each layer is labelled with the method that produced it, the instrument used, and the limitation attached. Our attendee satisfaction figures come from 142 responses to a post-event survey. They are self reported, from attendees only, with no third party validation and no bias mitigation protocol. We print that alongside the figures, not in an appendix.
Three reasons. It is accurate. It makes the strong claims believable, because a reader can see we are not claiming everything. And it is the only honest position available to an organisation whose entire method depends on evidence.
There is a fourth reason that matters more. An organisation that publishes only its best numbers has no mechanism for learning that something is not working. If the reporting cannot fail, it cannot inform anything.
The layer we can least evidence is the one we care about most: whether the behaviour of the people who attended actually changed, in their own settings, six months later. We currently measure contribution to the early links in our theory of change and we do not claim sole causation of the later ones.
Closing that gap is the next piece of work. Until it is closed, we will keep saying so.