On September 16, the 26th Giving Culture Symposium, Giving Korea 2026: What We Call Impact, the Change Donors Want to See, took place at the Seoul Global Center. This year’s symposium revisited the impact nonprofits create from the perspectives of donors and practitioners. Together, we asked what we have recognized and explained as impact.

What do donors Consider as impact?

Part 1 began with an overview of the scale of giving in Korea and recent giving trends. This was followed by two research presentations: 2025 Individual Giving Survey: Donors’ Perceptions of Impact and Resource Allocation and The Invisible Activities That Shapes Impact. The Individual Giving Survey found that donors do not judge nonprofit impact by numbers and scale alone. They also value the process of the work, the changes experienced by the people involved, the capacity to solve problems on their own, and shifts in public awareness. The “invisible activities” study focused on the unseen activities that take place in the field before impact appears. Building the groundwork that makes programs possible, connecting new agendas with the public, and building trust and relational capital through repeated encounters rarely show up in conventional impact reporting. Yet they form an essential foundation for real change.

What impact are practitioners and donors talking about?

Part 2 explored various attempts in the field to understand and explain impact. The Public Interest Program Team at The Beautiful Foundation shared what changed as it redefined and measured the impact of its grant programs. Clarifying impact goals did more than create indicators for evaluation. It also shaped how programs are planned and carried out. For example, after “connectedness” was set as a key impact goal, the team began to design program processes more carefully so that participants could actually connect with one another.

The case of Impact Alliance examined how relationships themselves can be consider as impact. Meeting people, connecting information, and linking people who need each other may each look like small activities. But when these encounters and records accumulate over time, access to relationships grows. This can lead to new collaborations, joint projects, and ultimately changes in policy and the wider ecosystem.

An important question was also raised from the donor’s perspective. Rather than first asking what impact donors want, organizations should be able to speak first about the change they seek and how they will get there. Trust in an organization can also change when it shares not only its successes, but also what did not go as expected, why, what it learned, and what it will try next.

Questions and answers on impact

The presentations were followed by a Q&A session. Below is a summary of the discussion.

Q. Why are younger people more favorable toward spending on indirect activities? What changes can we expect based on these findings?

Hae Jung KIM, Assistant Director, Center on Philanthropy at The Beautiful Foundation

The data show that people in their 20s had a statistically significantly higher acceptance of indirect activities across all items compared to other age groups. We need to look at the data more closely, but several possibilities come to mind. First, the causes they give to and their motivations for giving may differ. If they give to fields other than traditional direct-service areas, they may recognize the need for indirect activities more readily. Second, they may be part of a group of so-called mature donors who see indirect costs as necessary. Third, people in their 20s may project their own lives onto the situations of nonprofit workers. They may see issues such as personnel costs and administration not as something unique to nonprofits, but as something close to their own experience. These are only possibilities for now. We need to look further into who these donors in their 20s with high acceptance of indirect activities really are.

Q. To make the case to donors that indirect costs are essential to delivering impact, should organizations show their program processes through content?

Hae Jung KIM, Assistant Director, Center on Philanthropy at The Beautiful Foundation

I think such efforts are necessary and can be very meaningful. Our findings show that donors and nonprofit workers aren’t actually that far apart in the impact they look for. What matters is how we show the process and make our case. To close the gap between what people know and what they actually do, organizations can include indirect activities in their programs strategically and in engaging ways. Instead of worrying, “Won’t people dislike it if we talk about this?”, organizations need to weave this content in with confidence.

Q. How can we verify that “invisible activities contributed to actual impact”? And as impact management systems become more complex, the administrative burden on field staff may grow. How can we design them in a balanced way?

Young-Ju LEE, Researcher, Center on Philanthropy at The Beautiful Foundation

When I started this research, I was often asked, “So how should we measure it?” But I believe the most important question comes first: “How do we define impact?” For example, if relationships are an important form of impact, the direction of measurement should follow from that. This study looked at relationships and encounters, but there must be other forms of invisible activities that I have not yet identified. What matters is that these activities contribute to impact, so organizations should first consider how they will view that impact. And this should not lead to more administrative work. Donors and other stakeholders each want different kinds of impact. This creates a dilemma about what we should focus on, and it can turn into administrative work or a source of worry. Even so, I think we need to take the initiative in defining and measuring impact.

Q. What changed after the impact evaluation of the public interest grant programs was redesigned? I’m also curious about donor responses and how it differs from the previous evaluation.

Ji Eun CHOI, Manager, Public Interest Program Team, The Beautiful Foundation

Connecting with donors and gathering their responses is an area we have not yet tried. We have not formally met with donors to say, “This is the Foundation’s impact,” or “We ran the program this way, and this was the result.” That is a process still ahead of us. We have, however, seen changes with the organizations participating in our grant programs. Under our core goal of “strengthening civil society capacity,” we set “connectedness” as an impact goal. Once it became an explicit goal, we began to ask, “What do we need to do to achieve connectedness properly?” For example, at the orientation we arranged tables so that people working in the same field or on the same issues could meet. We planned the program more carefully overall. Without connectedness as an impact goal, it would have been hard to give meaning to these efforts and the changes they brought. Compared to the previous evaluation, the overall structure has not changed completely. The biggest difference is that staff now understand it better. The questions in the final report have also become clearer about what they are asking. The questions are still long, but we are shortening them a little each year so that respondents do not get worn out.

Q. When using qualitative evaluation data that is hard to quantify, won’t questions arise about objectivity or accuracy? Isn’t there a risk of overstating impact?

Ji Eun CHOI, Manager, Public Interest Program Team, The Beautiful Foundation

That could happen. Some may say, “This isn’t impact. You’re just attaching meaning to it.” But I think a certain degree of boldness is needed. Rather than saying something is not impact because it cannot be expressed in numbers, we should be able to say, “This clearly matters.” We monitored the work directly, we were in the field, and we followed the project for a year. We know the context and the stories behind it. Fear of being unobjective should not become a reason not to evaluate impact at all. Rather than thinking our work is too qualitative to evaluate, we need to set that fear aside a little and give it a try.

Q. How do efforts to build relationships lead to concrete impact?

Tim PARK, Social-Impact Orchestrator, Community Operations Team, Impact Alliance

I don’t think there is such a thing as invisible activities. Rather, I think we are the ones who make it invisible. There may be a psychological hurdle: “Is it okay to talk about this?” There may be no actual impact yet. Or we may simply not have recognized it as impact. That is why it is important to keep records daily, weekly, and monthly. At Impact Alliance, we even publish what is discussed at board meetings on our website. At first, we wondered, “Do we really need to record this?” But after doing it for three or four years, people started considering it. I think it is important not just to give a rough sketch, but to record who said what. Narrative matters in an ecosystem.

Relationships have also brought real change. Access to relationships has become easier, more efficient, and more diverse. When someone wants to meet a particular person, we can introduce them. We can connect event speakers, project partners, and instructors. Together, we can do things that small organizations find hard to do alone, such as health checkups, shared spaces, large projects, and conferences. Relationships with public officials are continuing, and policy-related activities are taking place. These things seem to become possible not through formal efforts, but through relationships built over tea and meals and accumulated over a long time.

Staying in close contact with the field also matters. At Impact Alliance, we meet people about 400 times a year. He also emphasized that if organizations meet their donors in person often, they will learn what they should do, what data they should collect, and what messages they should send.

Q. What led you to give for productive costs  (the core operating costs that keep organizations running) and for the nonprofit ecosystem? What can nonprofits do to encourage more of this kind of giving?

Kangseok KIM, Donor and Co-founder of Bluehole (now KRAFTON)

It began with a frustration I felt while meeting nonprofits. When I was asked, “What impact would you like to see, as a donor?”, I wondered why they asked the donor first. I thought the organization should first explain what programs it runs and what impact it aims to achieve, and then ask the donor whether they would like to take part. Seeing the sincerity and dedication of people in the nonprofit sector, I wished we could do a little better. I also wanted these activities to be better explained to potential donors around me. That is how my interest grew.

I think nonprofits need some nerve, or to put it more gracefully, boldness. They should be able to celebrate their own achievements, and to present narratives that cannot be proven by indicators or numbers. At the same time, they should be able to reveal their mistakes. When something fails or does not go as expected, they should not simply hide it or end with “it failed.” They should interpret and analyze why it happened, and talk about what they will do next.

To expand this kind of giving, I think we need to show examples. Capacity-building giving that provides unrestricted funding, or giving focused on growth, takes time and its results are hard to confirm. But it can nourish the ecosystem. As good examples emerge from various attempts, I believe donors and capital that trust this approach will follow.

The work ahead

Impact is ultimately tied to our mission and vision, and to the reason we do this work. But it does not always appear in a single form or under a single definition. Sometimes it shows up as numbers. Sometimes it appears as relationships and processes. Sometimes it emerges as change accumulated over a long time. How we understand and explain these many forms of impact opens new possibilities for us. At the same time, it poses difficult questions. Through this process, our perspectives and approaches to impact will likely continue to be refined. That is why this conversation will continue. As we try new approaches and methods, we must keep sight of the larger direction: the change we ultimately want to create.

Written by: Young-Ju LEE
Translated by: Minjung CHUNG
Photos taken by: Da Yun LIM