I have spent my career on both sides of the funding table. For fifteen years I built digital systems for the institutions that give, UNICEF, UNDP, USAID, the World Bank, and FAO, and I sat with the organizations that receive, from grassroots teams to national networks. From both chairs, I watched the questions change.
The old questions were about intention. What will you do? How many people will you reach? What are your activities, your timeline, your budget lines? A generation of organizations built their entire reporting muscle around answering them, and answered them well. Proposals, workplans, quarterly activity reports, disbursement tables. The whole machinery of accountability was built for one question: what was done.
The new questions are about consequence. What changed because of your work? How do you know? What is your evidence, and can I see it? What would have happened without you? Show me last year's outcomes before we talk about next year's plan. These are not rumors from conference panels. They sit on application forms, inside due diligence checklists, and in the emails that arrive after a first meeting, in funder conversations leaders describe to us across 35 countries.
Here is the uncomfortable part. Most organizations are answering the new questions with instruments built for the old ones. An activity report answers what was done. A change report answers what is different. Funders stopped asking the first question years ago. Many organizations never stopped answering it, because their systems can produce nothing else.
Our readiness data puts numbers on the mismatch. Across 400 assessments from 388 organizations in 35 countries, the two weakest pillars in the sector are exactly the two the new questions test. Positioning with stakeholders scores 3.4 out of 5. Evidence, data, and storytelling scores 3.6. The pillars the old questions tested, mission clarity and program design, score 4.1 and 4.0. The sector optimized for the exam it used to take.
Answering the new questions does not require heroics. It requires four capabilities. A baseline before the work begins. Change captured while it happens, not reconstructed the week a report is due. Evidence and narrative living in one place, so the numbers and the story never contradict each other. And systems that can produce proof on request without a scramble, because the new questions arrive on the funder's schedule, not yours.
None of this punishes small organizations. It punishes unprepared ones. Readiness, as we wrote last week, is a practice, not a budget line, and every one of those four capabilities can be built by a team of two. The new questions are, in a quiet way, a leveling force. They reward organizations that can show change, whatever their size. That should be encouraging, because showing change is a skill, and skills compound.
This is why we built Alleviate. Fundraising tools tell you who gave. Alleviate tells you what changed. If your next funder conversation is going to ask the new questions, come and see how organizations are answering them: book a demo at alleviate.org. And if you would rather start by knowing where you stand, the assessment that produced this data remains free at readiness.alleviate.org.
Robert Okine is the Founder and CEO of Alleviate Technologies and Executive Director of the Alleviate Foundation. He is a UN SDG Pioneer for Digital Innovation and Inclusion and has spent fifteen years building digital systems across 60+ countries for UNICEF, UNDP, USAID, the World Bank, and FAO.
