I chair a small foundation, and everything that follows could be read as the grievance of someone who struggles to demonstrate their work, so I shall begin by conceding what must be conceded.

The requirement to measure is reasonable and, in large part, a significant achievement. Public and private funds must be justified, and asserting that one does much good does not constitute a report. For years, the cultural and social sector defended itself with a rhetoric of impact so vague that it served to shield useless programmes, superfluous positions, and activities that reached no one. That one must now state what was done, with what funds, for how many people, and whether promises were fulfilled, is a healthy development. I have no desire to return to the past.

That said, there is a distinction between two matters which forms conflate, and a great deal hinges upon that distinction.

The Law on Foundations requests something modest and sensible. It requires the annual report to detail activities, resources utilised, their origin, the number of beneficiaries, and the degree of compliance with the plan one submitted oneself. The regulations do require indicators, certainly, but of a specific nature: those that allow for the verification of the degree of completion of each activity or the degree of compliance with objectives. In other words: did you do what you said you would do? It is a question that is answerable, verifiable, and fair.

Grant applications demand something else. And here I wish to quote literally, for the literal is more eloquent than any commentary of mine. The state guidelines for the 0.7% income tax allocation, the major state call for the third sector, require the provision of “impact indicators that allow for the measurement of the impact that the programme may, presumably, have”.

One must measure an impact that the regulation itself qualifies as presumed, and one must do so before it occurs, upon submitting the application. The legal text acknowledges in its drafting that it is a presumption and nonetheless demands indicators to quantify it. I do not point this out as a failure of legal technique; I point it out because it accurately describes the real situation of the person completing that section: they are asked for a figure for something that has not yet occurred and which, when it does occur, will not come with a figure either.

And there is a second factor that closes the trap: the deadline. The justification is submitted within the three months following the conclusion of the implementation, with its performance report and the results obtained. Three months. Thus, the effect of a programme, in order to be claimed, must have manifested itself within that window. It is not that what takes longer is valued less: it is that it does not fit within the document.

Let us consider what is left out. A person in their fifties who enters a workshop for the first time and discovers they can paint. What happens to that person, if anything truly happens, will be seen in two years, or in five, or will never be seen in a way attributable to anything. In the form’s cell, that person is a one in the participants column, and in the report, a percentage of satisfaction gathered in a survey at the end of the activity. Everything else—that their relationship with what they observe has changed, that they continue to paint when the programme has ended, that they share this with someone—is real and is impossible to claim.

This is where this aligns with my research, and I wish to state it with precision, as it is easily overstated. I maintain, in an article written with Adolfo Cortés García, that the decisive factor is not that something possesses value, but that there exists a sufficient interval for that value to be affirmed publicly; the mechanics of that affirmability are his contribution. When the interval is compressed, it is not the case that the value disappears: the possibility of sustaining it disappears. A three-month justification period is precisely such a compression. It does not render slow effects useless. It renders them indefensible.

And now, the aspect that concerns the funder, not the applicant. The problem with such a system is not that it is unfair to foundations; it is that it produces inferior programmes. Research into indicators has documented an effect that has a name: when an organisation knows how it will be measured, it reorganises its activity to perform well within that metric. Not out of cynicism, but for survival. I have observed this in my own work and I state it as a witness, not as data: a one-week workshop with forty people is more defensible than a two-year accompaniment with six, and those drafting a project are aware of this before they begin writing. The system is not rewarding impact: it is rewarding what resembles impact within the timeframe in which it must be declared.

I do not request an exemption, and I am wary of those who do. I request a distinction, which is more economical and more honest. Justifying funds is one matter: that every euro is accounted for, with its invoices and audit, and in that regard, the requirement should be absolute. Demonstrating effect is another, and there are better methods than the current one: admitting monitoring periods longer than that of financial justification, accepting that an entity may declare which dimensions of its work it does not consider quantifiable and why—and that such a declaration counts as rigour rather than an excuse—and valuing the report of what has been achieved without forcing the invention of a figure for what has yet to occur.

None of this is resolved by distrusting measurement, which is a valid and necessary tool. It is resolved by recalling what a researcher of cultural value wrote twenty years ago, which remains true: that the value of culture cannot be expressed solely through statistics. That it cannot be fully expressed does not mean that one should not be held accountable. It means that the accounts we render are not the thing itself, and that the document must not be confused with what transpired. I sign those reports knowing that the best work we have done is not contained within them. And I continue to sign them, because that is the reality, and because the day we cease attempting to recount it, there will be no forum in which to discuss it.

On open conversation

This text is written from the dual position I occupy: that of one who researches the conditions under which something may be publicly affirmed, and that of one who chairs a foundation and signs its reports. It is not a request for an exemption, but an attempt to distinguish between justifying funds, which must be rigorous, and demonstrating effect, which requires timeframes that do not currently exist. If anyone wishes to contribute from the perspective of foundation management, programme evaluation, the granting administration, or the experience of those who participate in them, this notebook remains open, and in this instance, I am particularly interested in the voice of the evaluator.

Sources

Law 50/2002, of 26 December, on Foundations, arts. 12 and 25 (BOE).

Royal Decree 1337/2005, approving the Regulations on State-competent foundations, art. 26 (BOE).

Law 38/2003, General Subsidies Act, art. 30; Royal Decree 887/2006, Regulations of the LGS, art. 72 (BOE).

Royal Decree 821/2021, regulatory bases for 0.7% IRPF subsidies, arts. 15, 20 and 21 (BOE, 2 October 2021).

Order CUL/2912/2010, bases for aid for cultural action and promotion, arts. 3 and 12 (BOE, 13 November 2010).

Muller, Jerry Z. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press, 2018.

Espeland, Wendy N. and Michael Sauder. “Rankings and Reactivity”. American Journal of Sociology 113(1), 2007, pp. 1-40. DOI: 10.1086/517897.

Strathern, Marilyn (ed.). Audit Cultures. Routledge, 2000. DOI: 10.4324/9780203449721.

Gregory, Ann Goggins and Don Howard. “The Nonprofit Starvation Cycle”. Stanford Social Innovation Review, autumn 2009.

Belfiore, Eleonora and Oliver Bennett. The Social Impact of the Arts: An Intellectual History. Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. DOI: 10.1057/9780230227774.

Holden, John. Capturing Cultural Value. Demos, 2004.

Cortés García, Adolfo, and Juan A. Esteban Ruiz. Recognition and Surplus. Zenodo, 2026. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21630455