Writing for Impact
Turning Experience into Influence
Last year, I was hanging around the coffee station at a conference about investing for good when someone approached me. He told me he had used something I wrote in his board meeting to advocate for a novel type of startup financing. I didn’t invent this new investment approach. But I broke it down in plain English and told the story of how it had helped my startup align our business goals with our social mission. I shared the human stakes - what this meant for real people we served. That story made this post leap from a Thread to the boardroom of a £100M+ charity. That’s the multiplier effect of writing: a single story can influence how millions in capital flow toward solving real problems.
After three years of writing and 50+ essays, I've learned that personal stories aren't just content - they're tools for systemic change. When we share our lived experiences in the right way, we can shift how decision-makers think, redirect resources, and transform broken systems.
Stories Build Trust Before Change
I made a shift from writing about ideas to telling stories. The way to make people care about your ideas is to ground them in human stories - whether yours or others.
Early in my writing journey, I made a mistake. I thought powerful ideas alone would win me followers and drive change. But I discovered that even the most compelling arguments fall flat without human connection. Here's what worked instead:
Start with a personal story that illustrates the problem.
Show your evolution in understanding it.
Connect your experience to the broader context.
Suggest changes based on your insights.
When I first started writing, I was mad. I was mad about inequality in healthcare access and power dynamics in fundraising and corruption in my interactions with the Kenyan government. My anger gave me a lot of material, but my first drafts came across as… rants. These drafts would have alienated the very people who needed to hear my message.
Here's what changed: I started sharing specific moments where I witnessed these problems firsthand. Instead of just criticizing the system, I showed readers:
The face of a woman who steals to get by
My own frustration navigating donor requirements
The exact moment a government official asked for a bribe
When I’ve softened the points of my spiky takes, I’ve had the unexpected happen. The very groups I’ve been critiquing have called and asked me for advice on how they can improve.
One way a story can bridge to a call to action is by positioning yourself as the person leading the conversation. You can be the person who is holding the space for others to engage and share their ideas. The person who gives permission for others to speak up, or rethink an approach.
Building Your Impact Over Time
Stories are powerful, but they often illustrate just one small piece of a larger picture. It is okay to start writing piece by piece. As you build your body of work, connections you never planned, but somehow knew to build, will emerge. That's the magic of reflection: it reveals the map you've been drawing without realizing it. Here are three practical ways I've learned to reflect and spot patterns:
Map Your Territory
Every few months, I look at a dashboard of my writing and ask myself:
What problems and solutions am I talking about?
What stories and ideas resonated the most with readers?
What themes are easy to see now, with hindsight?
I write a sentence summary of each piece, with the context of my body of work. Then, I use my note-taking system to record insights and feedback gained from sharing each essay. (1)
The distance I have from my older pieces makes it easier to summarise them clearly. I forgot just enough of the detail and the struggle of writing it to explain what it was really about.
For example, in my last essays, I wasn’t just writing about decentralising investment decisions, fighting against paying a bribe, and moving cities. I was exploring how trust breaks down between communities and institutions, and how we might rebuild it. (2)
Connect the Dots for Others
My friend
taught me to organize my essays as if I were writing a book. I’m not working on a book! But thinking of my essays as chapters helps create structure for readers finding my work. I challenged myself to write the introduction to my pretend book and in the process found language I can use to tell people about my perspective and writing.Try this: organize your last ten essays (or your next ten ideas) into a Table of Contents. What flows? What is missing?
Build Evidence of Impact
I'm early in my journey of tracking impact, but that coffee station conversation taught me to pay attention to how my writing ripples outward. Now I use my note-taking system (3) to capture:
Direct responses: who reached out to share what resonated, or asked to talk?
Unexpected connections: Like when my piece about startup financing ended up in a charity's boardroom.
Case studies: where other people are exploring and trying related ideas.
Small wins: a person I influenced to start their own newsletter, a more founder-friendly investment process I played a small part in, a new friend.
Even if you don't have dramatic examples yet, these small data points add up. They help you spot which topics and approaches create real engagement. And like the previous two exercises, logging creates space to rest between the hard work of writing.
Give it a Try
Writing for Impact isn't just about crafting compelling stories - it's about strategically using those stories to create change. If we can be brave enough to lead with our personal experiences, and humble enough to explore issues before declaring answers, we can spark conversations that might lead somewhere.
And if you want to amplify your writing, I’m creating a Writing for Impact community that will start in 2025. It will be a space to reflect on experience, craft stories, and drive action.
I was invited to share my approach to Writing for Impact for the last and final Write of Passage cohort. This essay is adapted from a workshop I ran last October. Thanks Write of Passage for holding space!
(1) My process is inspired by
Karena de Souza, who writes , and started a practice called Rest and Reflect. I love how she structured reflection into her publishing schedule. As an added bonus, this gives her time to rest as opposed to writing more new content.(2) A great hack for this is to use ChatGPT. It is a good tool if you can’t see the patterns, and it is equally useful if you can, and want to make sure those patterns are clear to others. ChatGPT told me this about my last essays: “Your writing often grapples with the tension between the intimate involvement in building something new and the necessity of distance for both personal well-being and broader impact.“
Wow!
(3) Since I’ve said this twice now, for those who care, I use Tana. I’ve built tags like #insights that point towards #big questions, #compliments, essay feedback and more.
This is great. Thank you. I’m working on a table of contents for Letters to My Children. Have you written anything about Tana?
Great reminder, thank you x