In 2014, a friend of mine, Sam, my father, and I found ourselves travelling through India together. It was one of those trips you don’t forget, full of colour, chaos, long conversations, and plenty of laughs. I still have this vague memory of Sam on a motorbike at one point, which somehow feels about right for the whole experience.

Sam was, and still is, one of the most positive, grounded, and genuinely great people I’ve ever travelled with, and I’ve done a fair bit of travelling.

A number of years later, I gave him a call to chat about fundraising. A lot of the work we do at Vine sits in this space, helping organisations raise support for the work they’re doing, so I wanted his take.

Somewhere in that conversation, he shared a simple piece of advice that I’ve never forgotten and have found incredibly helpful ever since.

He said, when writing anything:

“Cross out ‘we’. Use ‘you’ and ‘them’.”

At first, I wasn’t entirely sure what he meant. But then he unpacked it.

It’s about not starting with yourself. Not leading with what we did, built, or delivered, but instead helping people see the person on the other side, and their place in that story.

From there, he broke it down into something even more memorable:

Input → Output → Outcome → Impact

And his main point was this:

People care about impact. Not just what you did, but what actually changed because of it.

Because a lot of organisations are really good at talking about input and output, what we’ve invested, what we’ve produced, what we’ve run. Sometimes we get as far as outcomes.

But impact, that’s different.

Impact is the real change in someone’s life. It’s the difference made. It’s the story on the other side of the work.

And that’s what people connect with.