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Potential vs reported reach

These are two different numbers, and mixing them up leads to bad conclusions. Potential reach is the combined size of every network a campaign aimed at. It is the ceiling, the most people you could touch if everything went perfectly. Reported reach is how many people volunteers say they actually reached, added up from their reports. It is what happened. Potential is almost always the bigger number, because not every volunteer acts and not every report captures everyone. Use potential to judge whether a campaign was aimed at enough people. Use reported to judge how much of that actually came true.

Two bars side by side: a tall potential-reach ceiling and a shorter reported-reach bar, with the gap between them marked.