A Good Story Gets You in the Door. Data Gets You Funded.

When I first began working with purpose-driven organizations after years of working mainly with business clients, I assumed that both operated largely by the same principles. In business, nobody survives for very long without the evidence to back up their claims. So I was surprised to learn that many purpose-driven organizations don’t rely on data when they seek funding. Not because they don’t care about results, but because saying you care, and proving it, are different jobs. The stories you tell draw people in and get them to care, but the evidence you provide demonstrates that you’re actually solving the problem you say you are.

For a long time, a moving story could carry a funding request a surprisingly long way. But that’s changing, and the organizations that fail to adjust to this new reality risk being passed over for the ones that do. To be fair, for decades, funders have asked for results but mostly received outputs: the number of workshops held, meals served, people through the door. And they rarely paid for the kind of evaluation required to measure outcomes with any depth. Small, one-off project grants can’t fund the evaluation of long-term change.

What’s changed is that now, a lot more rides on the ability to come up with the numbers. With budgets tight and demand climbing (nearly eighty-nine per cent of 1,610 organizations surveyed for Second Harvest said demand for food rose over the past year), hard metrics demonstrating outcomes increasingly decide who receives funding at all. In one 2026 survey documenting Canadian nonprofit technology trends, 46 per cent of respondents said measurable impact is what corporate and government funders most want to see. The pressure is coming from every direction. Ontario has directed its largest granting agency, the Ontario Trillium Foundation, to focus on “outcome-based performance measurement and demonstrating return on provincial investment.” And Carleton University’s Charity Insights Canada Project finds that while 81 per cent of Canadian charities say they measure their impact, only 8 per cent use methods rigorous enough to show what would have happened without them.

Saying you care about results and proving it are two different jobs.

The money itself is concentrated around housing and community infrastructure, food security, community hubs, and healthy aging. Meanwhile, whole areas, like newcomer settlement services, are being cut, with Toronto among the hardest-hit regions. And when the federal budget is released on November 5, just a few days after this newsletter lands in your inbox, the picture could shift again. The House Finance Committee has recommended a dedicated social sector fund. We’ll see if it survives, and if so, to what extent.

Funders no longer follow a single playbook, either. Some are moving toward trust-based giving, which is a grantmaking approach that flips traditional power dynamics between funders and nonprofits and focuses on equity, collaboration, and mutual accountability. Others behave more like investors. They do rigorous due diligence and prefer fewer, larger gifts tied to specific results. Many blend the two, with a simple application, a close relationship and some very hard questions. Knowing which kind of funder you’re talking to is half the battle.

Whichever kind you’re facing, your first challenge is to get noticed. But the uncomfortable truth about the funding world is that you won’t attract funding on merit alone. Small, feisty, entrepreneurial organizations often lose out when the money goes around, not because their work doesn’t deserve kudos, but because funders and donors have simply never heard of them. It’s the names with the boffo marketing budgets behind them that tend to capture funders’ attention.

That said, some diligent funders actively scout for the hidden gems—but you can’t count on being discovered unless you figure out how to get your story and metrics in front of them. As I argued in a previous newsletter, the real threat to your proposal landing in a funder’s slush pile isn’t that you’ll offend them. It’s that you’ll render yourself invisible. Your story is the compelling emotional hook that prompts a funder to notice you, lean in, remember your name and want to know more. But the hook just gets you in the door. You have to demonstrate what you can prove, and doing so depends a great deal on how clearly you’ve defined what you do.

Small, feisty, entrepreneurial organizations often lose out when the money goes around because funders often don’t know they exist.

There’s a common temptation in the nonprofit world to start narrow and then broaden out, adding programs and audiences in the hope of appealing to more funders, but that strategy almost always backfires. The broader you go, the vaguer your story, and the harder it is to prove you’re doing any one thing really well.

I know I’ve mentioned Support House as a model before, but its strategy is such a good illustration of finding your niche then staying in your lane, and the many benefits that can accrue by making that one clear decision, their story bears repeating. Rather than trying to serve everyone, Support House zeroed in on providing supportive housing for people with the most complex needs—the ones other providers often turn away from, such as serious mental illness and addiction. And they did it in a region—Halton—where no other organization of their size was meeting that specific need. By becoming known for doing that one hard thing well, they became known as the experts in that area, attracted more funding, and evolved into Halton’s first Community Health Centre, allowing them to fully integrate housing, healthcare and social supports.

Targeting a niche need will buy you a stronger position. Clearly defined, it will also help you refine your evidence. It’s much easier to demonstrate the size of the need and impact you’re having when you can identify the specific constituency you serve and what has changed for it because you do. Finally, at a time when some government funders are pushing smaller organizations toward mergers, being absolutely clear about what you do best, and backing up your assertion with evidence, will help you preserve some say over your destiny.

Why don’t more organizations have a strong data story, especially when funders increasingly expect one? In my experience, the answer usually comes down to four reasons: They didn’t build the systems to collect the data in the first place. They collect it but never analyze it. The numbers that matter most sit with someone else: if you’ve kept people out of hospital, for instance, the hospital has those figures. Or the organization did collect the numbers, but it simply doesn’t know how to turn what they reveal into a compelling story.

Targeting a niche will buy you a stronger position. Clearly defined, it will also help you refine your evidence.

To understand what kind of data you need to tell a powerful story, consider how a transitional housing organization gathered data. From day one, it tracked who came in, how they were referred, how long they stayed, whether they found work, whether anything went wrong while they were housed, and, for residents who moved on, why they did. Alongside reporting on residents who moved into homes of their own, the program also reported on those who were evicted and whose stays ended badly. That last category is the one many organizations would quietly drop. But paradoxically, it’s reporting the bad news along with the good that makes the latter believable. A report that only touts your successes reads like marketing, whereas one that admits your failures reads like evidence.

That organization did a few other things right: it led with people’s stories, then backed them up with the numbers, which resulted in the reader caring first and trusting second. It reported on what it had learned from the data: the tenancies that failed revealed that some residents needed more connected support, and the organization began building it into the program. And it named its next chapter plainly, including the capacity it needed to grow. But it also did one thing wrong. Its public reports told a warm story with a headline number or two but failed to include all that rich evidence. But if you don’t make your data public, how will the next funder ever see it?

This is especially salient now because the way people find organizations is changing. A new client of ours who went looking for an agency to handle her rebrand found us online, but not through Google. She asked an AI assistant to recommend a Toronto agency for the job. Parcel came up because we publish a lot, and because AI tools look for credible, citable expertise rather than keywords.

A report that only touts its successes sounds like marketing. One that also admits its failures reads like evidence.

That same logic applies to charities. Funders, journalists and donors increasingly start their research with AI tools, which favour organizations that publish evidence: impact reports, data stories, clear statements of what they do and what changes as a result. An emotional story still earns you attention. But a well-documented one will be cited, and getting cited is the new way to get found.

The final piece to consider is your annual reports. I recently reported on how they’re shifting from retrospective to forward-looking narratives and selling future potential rather than past receipts. If you put your story, proposal and forward-looking annual report together, you’ll build a formidable case for support: your proposal will get you noticed. Your evidence will get you funded. Your annual report will get you funded again.

My bet: within a few years, the organizations that thrive won’t be the ones simply with the most moving stories or impressive spreadsheets. They’ll be the ones that know how to weave their stories and evidence together into a convincing, impossible-to-ignore case for support.