Initiative Design & Implementation

We immerse ourselves in your issue area, along with the communities, influencers, and all other relevant actors. We ask essential questions to clarify your goals. This kicks off a process of deep listening—one that includes a thoughtful mix of ethnographic research, stakeholder interviews, landscape analysis, and engagements to assess and prioritize needs, goals, resources, and opportunities.

We often partner with subject matter experts, facilitators, creative agencies, and specialized research firms based on our belief that innovation comes from collaboration—and that the best thinking emerges from multiple diverse viewpoints and life experiences.

We work with you to align the initiative design to your goals and available resources, creating an implementation framework and preliminary roadmap. For grantmakers, we work with you to design grantmaking programs and complementary elements such as learning communities. For nonprofits and collaboratives, we develop programs to implement the goals of the initiative.

We also provide ongoing management for the programs tied to your initiative. We track results, troubleshoot problems, illuminate ideas and opportunities, and maintain a strategic view for optimization, shared learning, and impact.

We can serve as an extension of your team, co-designing and managing grant programs, grantee support, stakeholder relationship management, reporting, annual reporting, and impact storytelling.

When we design and implement initiatives, we also apply our approach to evaluation and learning. As your initiatives progress, we assess their effectiveness based on a customized evaluation system, tailored to initiative goals and evolution over time. We work with you to share with the field and apply learnings to strengthen the initiative.

Sometimes, this means performing a simple “pulse check” for an initiative. Other times, we do a more thorough evaluation in innovative ways to energize dialogue and build trust beyond the immediate collaborators. Working in concert and informing the initiative as it evolves, this may include pre- and post-initiative surveys, site visits, monitoring programs, evaluating the effectiveness of learning communities, and continuously disseminating insights and lessons learned.

We engage with your diverse stakeholders throughout initiative design and implementation. We emphasize listening to the voices of those most impacted by the issues we’re seeking to solve as essential to help catalyze lasting change.

Strategic communication is baked into everything we do. Often, launching a new initiative calls for communicating with a swath of stakeholders. Particularly for community-responsive initiatives, our clients often invite input and feedback, explain their goals, join the relevant social media conversations, and establish platforms for knowledge sharing. Once your initiative is underway, ongoing strategic communication with partners, grantees, media, internal stakeholders, communities, and the general public is essential for building and maintaining momentum and trust.

We create customized, comprehensive communication plans to propel initiative implementation. We focus on whom you should reach, with what messages, in collaboration with which messengers, at what times, and through which platforms. We develop branding, messages, content, media plans, and timely data collection and analysis, informed by the goals you share with your stakeholders and responsive to emergent opportunities.

We work with funders, nonprofits, government agencies, and community leaders to build and nurture dynamic collaborative learning communities that engage around shared goals, interests, and concerns.  We develop provocative and timely programming that inspires, informs, and animates ideas and action.

Additionally, we provide technical assistance and capacity-building support to help grantees grow and sustain their work, strengthen specific skills and services, and work more effectively alongside others.