I preside over a small foundation, and everything that follows could be read as the grievance of someone who struggles to demonstrate their work; I begin, therefore, by conceding what must be conceded.
La exigencia de medir es razonable y, en buena parte, es una conquista. El dinero público y el privado tienen que justificarse, y «hacemos mucho bien» no es un informe. Durante años, el sector cultural y social se defendió con una retórica del impacto tan vaga que servía para amparar programas inútiles, cargos superfluos y actividades que no le pasaban a nadie. Que ahora haya que decir qué se hizo, con qué dinero, para cuánta gente y si se cumplió lo prometido, es sano. No quiero volver a antes.
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: that the annual report include activities, resources employed, their origin, the number of beneficiaries, and the degree of compliance with the plan one originally presented. The regulations require indicators, certainly, but of a specific kind: those that allow for the verification of the degree of completion of each activity or the degree of achievement of objectives. In other words: did you do what you said you were going to do? It is a contestable, verifiable, and fair question.
Las convocatorias piden otra cosa. Y aquí quiero citar literalmente, porque el literal es más elocuente que cualquier comentario mío. Las bases estatales del 0,7 % del IRPF, la gran convocatoria estatal del tercer sector, exigen aportar «indicadores de impacto que permitan medir el impacto que el programa puede, presumiblemente, tener».
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 remains excluded. A person in their fifties who enters a workshop for the first time and discovers they can paint. What happens to that person, if something truly occurs, will be seen in two years, or five, or perhaps never be seen in a way attributable to anything. In the form's box, that person is a one in the participant column, and in the report, a percentage of satisfaction gathered in a survey upon the activity's conclusion. Everything else—that their relationship with what they observe has changed, that they continue to paint after the programme has ended, that they share this with someone—is real and undeniable.
This is where this connects with my research, and I wish to state it with precision because it is easy to exaggerate. I maintain, in an article written with Adolfo Cortés García, that the decisive factor is not that something has value, but that there exists a sufficient interval for that value to be publicly affirmed; the mechanics of that affirmability are his contribution. When the interval is compressed, what occurs is not 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 part that matters to those who provide funding, not those who request it. 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 in that measurement. Not out of cynicism, but out of survival. I have seen this in my own work and I state it as a witness, not as data: a one-week workshop with forty people is easier to defend than a two-year accompaniment with six, and those who draft a project know this before they begin to write. The system is not rewarding impact; it is rewarding that which 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.
About the 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