From Workplan to Why: Crafting Meaningful Community Impact Statements

March 10, 2026 | Anna Bradley Elise Moore

Public health professionals know that behind every data point and deliverable is a story of impact. But how do we tell that story in a way that resonates with leadership, policymakers, and the public? That’s where Community Impact Statements (CIS) come in. These aren’t a new concept: Craft an “elevator pitch” to describe your work and how it relates to healthy communities. CIS help bridge the gap between internal operations and community benefit. They’re not just about what we’re doing — they’re about why it matters and what communities receive through strong, stable public health infrastructure.

CIS Use Cases

Across all these use cases, CIS should be tailored to the intended audience. Use stories, data, and examples that speak to what funders, policymakers, and community partners care about most so that they can further articulate the community benefit to their own networks and become invested in your success.

• Overall Grant Impact: Develop CIS for a variety of workplan items and then combine them into one document to communicate the impact of a funding source. This press release from Big Cities Health Coalition shows how multiple CIS can be combined to communicate a bigger picture.
• Implementing Community Health Improvement Plans: Create one-page issue briefs about a priority health behavior or condition that explain why a priority matters to the community and how coalition actions are improving outcomes for those impacted.
• Legislative Season Communication: Draft a series of CIS demonstrating how public health programs improve the lives of their constituents to help policymakers quickly grasp the importance of these programs.
• Policy Advocacy: Use storytelling to demonstrate how investing in public health results in measurable community health benefits and other outcomes valued by policymakers like safety, emergency preparedness and response, cost savings, quality of life, and resilience.
• Cross-Sector Communication: Create jargon-free statements to explain your work to partners and show how your efforts align with theirs in a way that supports shared goals.
• Make the Invisible Visible: Tell stories about crises averted or wins that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. CIS help the public and community leaders understand impact they can’t easily see. They can highlight agency staff and meaningful ways they’ve served the community or made a difference in an individual’s life.
• Program Evaluation and Reporting: Summarize program impacts in annual reports or other communications materials, including performance management system reviews with agency leadership. Highlight what changed for the community and why it matters for future decisions.
• Grant Applications: Ensure funders understand how proposed interventions will improve population health, the impact funding can have on reducing health disparities, and emphasize expected return on investment, sustainability of efforts, and the evidence base.

Tips for Writing Strong CIS

Ultimately, you want your CIS to answer the question of what the community received through this funding opportunity. Here are some tips for getting to the heart of the work.

Story Highlights

Browse brief highlights from recipients of the Public Health Infrastructure Grant to see examples of paragraph-length statements from state, island, and local jurisdictions that move from “what” to “so what.”

Connect to Shared Purpose

Highlight the ways in which public health programming contributes to strong emergency preparedness, response, and safety for community members, like these stories of heat resiliency in Pima County, improved connectivity and patient care in American Samoa, and faster responses to outbreaks in Utah.

Align with State Goals

Use your State Health Improvement Plan to guide CIS. One health department referenced using the pillars of their plan to underscore the connection between public health activities and overall health improvement. These pillars include strengthening the workforce, cultivating wellness, building community resilience, and improving access. They also tied their statements to a broader goal: “This will help us become the healthiest state in the nation.”

Ask Why — Five Times

Another jurisdiction used the ‘Five Whys’ method to figure out the real reasons behind an internal problem. They started with the issue they could see and kept asking ‘why’ to uncover deeper causes, such as outdated systems or duplicated work. Once they understood the root cause, they identified the internal improvements needed. Then, they developed CIS that connected how the internal improvement impacted the community; for example, making public health services faster and more effective for community members.

Framing Thoughtfully

As you work to frame your CIS, consider using a structured approach to guide how your statements are crafted, such as the following framework:

Community Impact Statement = Big Idea + Why + Outcome

In the book Everyday Business Storytelling, the authors recommend communicating your “Big Idea” to get to the heart of your message. This “Big Idea” comprises a simple structure: What + Benefit. Use simple framing to connect what you are doing to the key benefits it provides (up to three benefits max):

• “To deliver [benefit], we created [action].”
• “We focused on [strategy] to deliver on [goal].”
• “[Action] was the key to our collective [outcome].”
• “We invested in [resource] to achieve [impact].”

Following your “Big Idea,” address why you chose to pursue a particular activity. Often, CIS are read by individuals not involved in day-to-day operations. Describing why your health department decided to invest resources into an initiative helps contextualize the value of the work. It also serves as a bridge to explain the activity’s outcomes, an especially useful element when those outcomes are more difficult to measure.

When explaining outcomes, here are a few recommendations for helping readers retain quantitative information and keep their focus on the core message:

• Convert percentages and scale big numbers (e.g., half instead of 53% and 1 in 5 people instead of 10 million).
• Simplify dates and specify only when it’s important to the statement.
• Round your numbers — for instance, write “more than 150,000 community interactions” instead of an exact number.

Writing Tips

To keep the message focused and high-level — ideal for leadership briefings or public communication:

• Use plain language and avoid jargon. Ask yourself if someone outside of public health or even your agency understands what you’ve written.
  • Replace technical terms with everyday words.
  • Explain acronyms.
  • Use short sentences and active voice.
• Be precise. Instead of saying “we improved,” say how much or in what way.
• Name the known and omit the obscure. If a partner or tool isn’t widely recognized, describe what it does instead.
• Simplify titles. Say “the accountant” instead of “accountant for the XX program.”

Most importantly, be specific. “Enhancing community resilience” could mean anything from helping communities recover quickly after disasters to improving social connections between neighbors, improving access to services during normal times and emergencies, reducing poverty, and more. Whether you trained volunteers to provide a service, reduced wait times, coordinated with local leaders, or more, tell people what you did, why, and what happened for the community as a result. When someone from outside of public health reads your CIS, they should be able to understand what you do without reading between the lines. Specific language turns your invisible coordination, relationship-building, and policy change work into visible action.

Common Challenges in Making the Invisible Visible

When drafting CIS, teams can encounter challenges that make the process more complex than anticipated. Because many activities can support similar outcomes, statements can start to sound repetitive.

There is also the challenge of attribution; explaining how internal improvements directly impact community health takes time and might not jump out at the storyteller at first. Additionally, developing one statement may not be enough to resonate with various audiences and their experiences with public health or what kind of information they are interested in hearing.

These challenges can be compounded by a lack of formal guidance around the development of impact statements, with many teams creating CIS without templates or tools — just logic, collaboration, and a lot of persistence.

As public health leaders increasingly call for the workforce to become more skilled at making the often-invisible work of a functioning public health system more visible, Community Impact Statements aren’t just another checkbox. They’re a chance to connect the dots between what we do and why it matters — to show that even behind-the-scenes infrastructure work is essential to healthier communities.

Additional Resources

• Communicating about Public Health: A Toolkit for Public Health Professionals by the de Beaumont Foundation
• Creating and Communicating a Winning Value Proposition for Public Health: Toolkit by the Kansas Health Institute