One of the things we love about impact is that it doesn’t always have to present itself in the most obvious ways. Sometimes, a business’s positive impact comes from what it is not doing. 

Such is the case for Earnnest, a digital payment platform for real estate that makes earnest money deposits 100% digital. In its 2026 Climate Impact Report, Earnest shared one of those less-obvious outcomes: what happens when earnest-money checks are replaced with digital transactions.

Of the 240,000 deposits processed in 2026, two-thirds replaced paper checks, eliminating the need to drive to a bank, escrow office, or agent to hand off a certified check. Earnnest estimates that each replaced check avoids roughly 1 gallon of gasoline, totaling approximately 160,000 gallons of fuel not burned this year. Using the U.S. EPA Greenhouse Gas Equivalencies Calculator, the company estimates that this equates to approximately 316 cars taken off the road, 3.6 million miles of driving avoided, and 2.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions kept out of the atmosphere.

Impact does not always show up in the most conventional measures. Outcomes like these can help us understand the broader ways a company affects the communities and systems around it. For Abundance, that fuller picture matters as we consider how an investment contributes to stronger, more prosperous communities.