We publish what we cannot claim
Somewhere on our impact page there is a list of things we cannot tell you.
We have not tracked our alumni. We cannot give you a retention rate. We do not know what a season costs an Idaho family. We do not know whether a girl who came to one of our camps came back the following year.
It is not a long list, and it is not hidden. It sits under the numbers we can stand behind, on the same page, in the same size type — and each item now carries a date.
People sometimes ask why.
Because a gap with a date on it is a plan
We are two years old. Most of what we would eventually like to report requires time we have not had yet.
A retention rate needs two consecutive seasons, and our first grants were made this year. A cost-per-family figure needs a survey nobody in this state has run. Alumni outcomes need somebody to pick up the phone to eleven years of recipients, which is a job we have not done.
None of that is a philosophical position. It is a description of a two-year-old organization, and writing it down is how we keep track of what to build next.
What the list actually does
Three things, none of them about how we compare to anybody.
It stops us overstating. If the retention rate is on the list, nobody on our team can casually mention one in a grant application. The list is a constraint on ourselves before it is anything else.
It sequences the work. The first honest retention number arrives after the 2026–27 cycle closes. That is now a date in a calendar rather than an aspiration.
And it gives a reader something to check. We publish $17,000 to fourteen scholars, and $115 a season for twenty girls. Small, specific, verifiable. Next to a list of what we have not measured, those numbers read as what they are — early, real, and countable.
Where else it shows up
Once you keep a list like this, it turns out to have consequences.
Our scholarship timeline has two gaps in it. 2020, because of the pandemic. 2024, because there were no eligible candidates. Both are on the page.
Our team page publishes the payroll. Forty-one people, one of whom is paid.
Our gala pages say where the money goes, including the part where some of it covers operations, and that we are working toward the point where it does not.
Our research page shows two sources that disagree. The Women's Sports Foundation says girls leave sport at twice the rate of boys. The Aspen Institute says 1.3 times. We publish both, because the spread is the honest finding.
The part worth being plain about
None of this makes us unusual. Plenty of organizations do a version of it, and plenty of good ones do not, because they are busy running programs.
What it does is make our own numbers legible. We are small enough that every figure on our impact page can be traced to a transaction, and young enough that the list of what we cannot measure is longer than the list of what we can. Both of those will change. The list is how we will know they have.
If you are running something similar
Publish the list. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and it will make every other number on your site work harder than it currently does.
The only cost is that you then have to keep doing it, including in the years when the list gets longer.
