Impact Measurement for Funded Projects

In one sentence

Impact measurement connects funded work to verifiable outputs and outcomes.

Short answer

Beyond milestones, programs want to understand what funding actually produced. Impact measurement aggregates data from multiple sources to assess outcomes at the project and ecosystem level.

What impact measurement aggregates

  • GitHub activity and code contributions
  • Smart contract data and onchain metrics
  • Manually reported metrics
  • Community-level rollups

Why this matters

Milestones track execution, but impact tracks change. Without measuring impact, ecosystems cannot learn which types of funding produce the best outcomes.

Challenges

  • Impact is often delayed
  • Attribution is difficult
  • Metrics can be gamed
  • Qualitative outcomes are hard to capture

Related

→ Milestones vs impact→ The grant lifecycle

Karma's role

Karma aggregates impact data from multiple sources, allowing ecosystems to assess what funding actually produced.