Messy Beautiful Impact

Kate Purcell
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Conversations about the complexities of making social change. Host Kate Purcell talks with people across the social impact space (and a few unexpected voices) about how we create impact, measure it, and talk about it. Wide-ranging, imperfect, real. Because impact itself is messy.

Episodes

  1. Oct 23

    The Small Stuff is the Big Stuff

    Many communications directors speak to a distinct audience. Matt Davis doesn't have that luxury. As Communications Director for one Episcopal congregation in Norfolk, Virginia, his audience includes people who come through the church's soup kitchen with nothing in their pockets, gay congregants looking for somewhere to be themselves, Trump-voting neighbors, and donors with the means to fund the whole operation. After a career in journalism and then writing for national nonprofits and foundations, Matt found that none of his old messaging training could hold a room that varied together. In this very personal episode, Matt and Kate talk about how to communicate across real difference — and for Matt, it isn't a series of strategies, it's faith. They get into doubt, forgiveness, his own reluctant path to calling himself a Christian, and how small personal interactions are actually "the big stuff"... even when that's the hardest thing to put in a report.

  2. Sep 23

    What Are the Worlds That We're Building Towards?

    Much of social change work focuses on addressing the needs very much in front of us. Becca Leviss wants to talk about the future. Becca is the founder of the Judeofuturism Project, which uses futures thinking (the tools organizations use to imagine and prepare for long-term possibilities) to help Jewish communities rebuild their capacity to imagine where they're headed. In this episode, Becca and Kate talk about the moment that made her start the Judeofuturism Project and how a background in adaptive leadership shaped it. They also discuss holding hope and realism at the same time, and the very practical work of turning a conceptual idea into a brand and an exhibition people can walk through.

  3. Sep 8

    Data Doesn't Make Choices, People Do

    How much do we trust the evidence behind a big decision? Veronica Olazabal has spent two decades building the case that metrics alone don't decide anything. People do, and people bring risk appetites, politics, and untested assumptions to every number they're handed. Veronica helped build the field of Impact Measurement and Management (IMM) during her years at the Rockefeller Foundation and now teaches the next generation of practitioners at Columbia. In this episode, we talk about why a metric can give you "a false sense of security that we know," why a theory of change works as a communications tool and not just a research one, and what she's learned about the gap between generating great evidence and getting anyone to actually act on it. Practical, philosophical, and personal!

  4. Aug 18

    A Hippocratic Oath for Finance

    Most people hand their money to the financial system and hope it's there when they need it. They rarely ask what it's doing while they wait. Scott Kalb has spent his career on the other side of that question. As the former CIO of Korea's $250 billion sovereign wealth fund and now the founder of the Responsible Asset Allocator Initiative, Scott thinks the world's largest public funds could be a quiet superpower for change. In this episode, Scott and Kate talk about a "Hippocratic oath" for finance, why doing good has to make financial sense and not just moral sense, how the biggest pools of capital on earth are starting to listen to their savers, and why redirecting just one percent of $33 trillion could unlock hundreds of billions for the problems that matter. Optimistic, practical, and bigger than it sounds.

  5. Jul 21

    Beauty Is Hard to Find

    At twenty, Melinda went to film school because she believed storytelling could change the world. Two decades and a winding path later, she leads communications at Montana's largest private health-focused foundation, where she makes documentary-style videos that pair patient and provider stories with the data behind them. The throughline of her work is a refusal to lead with deficit. "Beauty is hard to find and challenge is easy to find, especially in healthcare," and that asymmetry shapes everything: how stories are framed, how images are chosen, how she pushes back on the savior narrative still embedded in so much nonprofit communication. In this episode, Melinda and Kate talk about responsible story collection, why media (not policymakers) is her real audience, and what it means to wield the power of visual storytelling carefully.

  6. Jun 30

    Don't Let Perfect Be the Enemy of Good

    There's a paradox at the heart of impact reporting: the organizations that need it most often have the least time and budget to do it well. Courtney Sipes works with nonprofits and social enterprises across the impact spectrum, and her advice cuts through the perfectionism that paralyzes most teams. Start with one goal and one data point. Translate the business metrics you already collect into impact language. Follow up with the people you serve, even with a 10% response rate. Don't let the absence of a perfect measurement framework stop you from learning anything at all. In this episode, Courtney and Kate dig into data translation (how "customers" becomes "people gaining access to a service"), the surprising power of SMS check-ins, transparency as a credibility-builder, and the question every team should ask before investing in another impact report: who is this actually for? Guest: Courtney Sipes is an independent impact communications consultant.

  7. Jun 9

    Steal This From Publishers

    In educational publishing, audience focus isn't a value, it's a discipline. Surveys, focus groups, manuscript reviews with paid reviewers. Every product moves through multiple stages of audience research before it ever ships. "The audience focus was almost like a religion," Jenny O'Reilly says of the eight years she spent at a university press. Then Jenny moved into nonprofit communications and discovered something striking: the rigor she'd been trained in was almost entirely absent. Not because nonprofit teams don't care, but because they've never had the time, the training, or the framework. In this episode, Jenny and Kate talk about descriptive headlines vs. topic headlines, the jargon that becomes the air an organization breathes without noticing, what AI writing does badly, and the editorial discipline every mission-driven organization could borrow tomorrow. Guest: Jenny O'Reilly is an editorial and communications consultant.

  8. Jun 9

    Impact That Doesn't Show Up in the Report

    Some of the most important impact a social change organization creates never shows up in the annual report. It's the way a staff member learned to talk with clients differently or the way a funder finally understood what the work was actually for. Or maybe the slow culture change inside an organization that rewires what's possible. Gayle Carney calls these micro impacts — and they're what she's spent thirty years helping nonprofit leaders see in their own work. In this episode, Gayle and Kate talk about the integrity tensions that pull at every mission-driven organization, why nonprofits only talk to people when they want something, and the counterintuitive advice Gayle gives leaders who are drowning in urgency: stop. Pause. The impact of space. Guest: Gayle Carney is a strategist and executive coach who has spent her career working with nonprofit leaders on the inside of organizational change.

  • 8 Episodes

About

Conversations about the complexities of making social change. Host Kate Purcell talks with people across the social impact space (and a few unexpected voices) about how we create impact, measure it, and talk about it. Wide-ranging, imperfect, real. Because impact itself is messy.

Information

  • Creator
    Kate Purcell
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    8
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Kate Purcell
  • Show Website
    Messy Beautiful Impact