The social sector is under increasing pressure to measure and report impact at the system-level. As a nonprofit leadership development organization, the Center for Creative Leadership has a mission-based interest in ensuring that our programs create change at the individual, organizational, societal, and community level. CCL’s Societal Impact Evaluation team specifically measures how the lever of leadership development can create change as part of programs and practices in Population Health, Nonprofit, K12 Education, and Higher Education.

This research paper takes CCL’s original Leadership Development Impact (LDI) Framework and both builds on it and applies it directly to the social sector. These insights explore more in depth how we are using measurement and evaluation to understand impact at the community and societal level. Impact measurement at those levels becomes even more challenging, due to the length of time it can take to realize impact as well as the presence of many additional variables to consider. This paper’s deeper exploration of the societal impact level of the LDI primarily explores leadership solution factors as “levers to pull” to achieve larger impact, with linkages to individual, group, community, and organizational impact.