Impact storytelling at Honolulu Civil Beat

1,013 and counting. That’s how many examples of impact Honolulu Civil Beat has logged since 2018. It’s something we’re incredibly proud of, especially as the importance of telling our story of impact has grown since becoming a nonprofit.

When Civil Beat first launched in 2010, it was a subscription-based model with over 1,100 readers paying a small monthly fee to access our content. In 2016, we made a bold decision to transition to a nonprofit in order to better align our business model with the organization’s founding mission — “to cultivate an informed body of citizens, all striving to make Hawaii a better place to live.”

These days, our small, but growing newsroom focuses on public-service, accountability journalism on issue areas such as education, climate change, health, business & economy, government & politics, transportation and others. Now, with over 7,000 individual donors, businesses and foundations supporting our work, it has become all the more important that we convey our impact to our supporters and the broader community.

The Impact Architects’ Impact Tracker has allowed us to centralize and organize information as well as think critically about the breadth of impact that can result from our journalism. Specifically, their taxonomy has helped us measure the societal change or reform that our journalism has spurred — Was our story the basis for legislation? Did it reach a national audience? Did it catalyze any action within the community?

And over the years, we’ve cataloged a range of examples such as:

• Government Investigation: Following Civil Beat’s reporting of Red Hill, Hawaii’s congressional delegation asked the U.S. Department of Defense’s Inspector General to investigate whether the Navy “covered up evidence or intentionally delayed” notification to Hawaii regulators about a pipeline leak into Pearl Harbor.
• Institutional Action: The U.S. Department of the Interior cited Civil Beat’s coverage of the impact of COVID-19 on Pacific Islanders in their announcement to grant $1M in CARES funds to support Pacific Islanders in Hawaii.

Hawaii’s COVID-19 pandemic has exposed significant racial and ethnic disparities in our community. In this ongoing series, Civil Beat dives into how the state is grappling with disproportionately high rates of coronavirus.

• Individual Action: In response to Civil Beat’s special series “Let The Sunshine In,” a reader mailed 50 postcards to her legislators in support of government accountability and transparency measures.

But how do you take that list and turn it into something meaningful for readers?

At Civil Beat, we’ve made it a point to communicate impact and tailor it to various audiences, whether it be our board members, institutional funders or individual donors and readers. In our case, we often adapt quarterly board reports for membership emails, which helps us stay on a consistent schedule while highlighting our recent success stories.

An excerpt from a Civil Beat membership email, highlighting its impact journalism for stakeholders.

Along the same lines, we distill lengthy grant reports into personal update emails to major donors, which has been a wonderful cultivation strategy and occasional touchpoint throughout the year.

For a deeper discussion of what impact can look like in your newsroom, I encourage you to check out the 2023 News Philanthropy Summit where I had the pleasure of participating in a conversation with Lindsay Green-Barber (Impact Architects), Alec Saelens (Solutions Journalism Network) and Anita Li (The Green Line) for a panel titled “Measuring impact to foster transformation in funding.”