Groundbreaking, impactful initiatives deliver transformative outcomes. Or do they?

What do the following have in common: a senior member of staff at a leading children’s charity, charity accounting systems and a website for disabled people?

The answer is that all three were described as “innovative” in the last three weeks. The word has become a charity cliché, according to the US’s Chronicle of Philanthropy. I would add the sector’s other favourite adjectives: “groundbreaking”, “transformative” and “impactful”.

Innovative things are ahead of their time, which makes it impossible for so many contemporary projects to be judged innovative. Projects have to prove themselves and be judged from a distance before they earn the right to describe themselves in that way. Groundbreaking and transformative have the same problem, and impactful isn’t a word.

Invented nouns such as “outcomes” and “deliverables” might sound important, but they run the risk of throwing up smokescreens to sector outsiders, leaving them with the suspicion that charities have something to hide.

It’s understandable that charities want their projects, schemes and campaigns to stand out and to impress donors and decision makers. But problems arise when the words they choose are overused. They echo around the page or the screen, develop a hollow ring and become meaningless. Then you’ve really lost people’s attention.

Better to describe things as they are and avoid value judgements. If charitable services change people’s lives for the better, why not say so and offer evidence? If it’s convincing enough, no one will disagree. Your organisation could be a beacon of clarity in a fog of jargon.

And as CoP points out, if the sector feels everything it does must sound “groundbreaking”, it runs the risk of undermining its difficult, unglamorous day-to-day work.