Skip to content

AEA 365 Blog: Friends or Frenemies? Evaluation, Corporations and Sustainability

Sector: Company

AEA 365 Blog: Friends or Frenemies? Evaluation, Corporations and Sustainability

Friends or Frenemies? Evaluation, Corporations and Sustainability by Morgan Buras-Finlay, Veronica Olazabal, Jared Raynor, and John Sherman Does evaluation have a role to play in supporting corporations seeking to advance environmental sustainability and other social benefits? In Friend for Frenemies? Evaluations, Corporations, and Sustainability, TCC’s Jared Raynor and colleagues in the field consider how evaluators … Continued

How Companies Meet Stakeholder Expectations

Companies today are more engaged with and active in society and their communities than ever before, but they have not gained the recognition or trusted relationships they seek from consumers and the general public. Why? They lack a strong impact story.

Three Essential Elements for Evaluating Systems Initiatives

You may be hearing terms like systems change, collective impact, and multi-sectoral initiatives a lot these days to describe situations where multiple actors are working together to tackle complex social problems. If you’re working or considering working within one of these types of initiatives, it’s critical to first recognize the complexity of the system (or set of interconnected parts) you’re working with and to think about what success would look like within that system. Although systems are complex, systems thinking – and the corresponding evaluation design – can be broken down into three essential elements…

Best Practices in Corporate Citizenship Structures

Companies with strong reputations as corporate citizens are respected for providing value to society in a comprehensive way – through their products and services, their operational excellence, and their support of the community.

As companies face increasing pressure from stakeholders to address complex societal issues, many are developing programs and initiatives with ambitious social impact goals, but often, without the requisite structure to ensure the programs are effective.

Be Informed: Developing Content for Media Campaigns (Stage 2)

Media campaigns are intended to affect their audiences – such as convincing people not to text and drive, or persuading people to purchase a product or vote for a particular candidate. There are various touchpoints where media can help lead an audience from awareness to action on an issue .  Being able to track these touchpoints – and the anti audiences engaged – enables organizations and media distributors to more efficiently and effectively test their content as well as intelligently move audiences from awareness to action at a faster, more effective rate.

Referencing the four key stages in a media campaign , this post focuses on the second stage: content development.

Responding to the Call: How to Pursue Legal Advocacy

Without legal advocacy, many norms and rights that people rely on, may have never been established. School desegregation (argued through Brown v. Board of Education), gay marriage (argued through many cases, but before the Supreme Court as Obergefell v. Hodges), clean water and air (argued at both state and federal levels as a myriad of lawsuits) – all were established as part of a legal advocacy strategy.

Three Common Questions about Funding Advocacy

Since the 2016 election, my colleagues and I have noticed one of two things: more funders considering a first-time investment in advocacy, or funders strengthening their existing commitment to fund advocacy work. In response to this surge of activity, we’ve had the opportunity to share our findings – regarding effective strategies to support advocacy campaigns  – with different groups of funders. These engaging and deliberate conversations generated additional questions – from which we’ll highlight three:

What Can Associations of Grantmakers Teach You?

In mid-July of this year, I had the opportunity to attend the Forum of Regional Associations of Grantmakers conference (#ForumCon17) in San Francisco. This conference brings together a large swath of the organizations that provide networking and support functions to foundations across the United States. 

I wanted to share some of my takeaways from time at the conference—some of which relate specifically to the conference and some to the valuable side conversations that happen when you bring smart, passionate people together.