Initiative Design, Integration & Implementation

We work with you to align the initiative design to your goals and available resources, to create a theory of change, implementation framework, and preliminary roadmap. We activate innovative stakeholder engagement and community advisory boards to help feed into planning. Strategic communications planning and evaluation often begin at this phase.

Our listening tours are one mechanism we use to help you authentically engage with stakeholders, gain valuable insights, and inform your decision-making processes for more responsive and impactful actions. We work with you and community advisors to custom-design interdisciplinary methodology and collaborative making meaning processes that center language justice principles. Listening tours can strengthen the foundation for ongoing feedback loops to assist you in effective and inclusive strategy, communication, and evaluation.

We offer ongoing management of all aspects of the programs within your initiative, from grantmaking to facilitating learning communities and conceiving and coordinating convenings to managing relationships with community advisory boards and communities of practice. We track results, troubleshoot problems, illuminate opportunities, and maintain a strategic view for optimization, shared learning, and impact.

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 you to craft small- to large-scale convenings to collaboratively learn, share information, and invigorate networks. Convenings are usually limited engagements on a specific theme or topic dependent on your overall goals or theory of change. We co-create and co-facilitate as appropriate, using out-of-the-box approaches that incorporate arts and culture, elevate voices to build power, and center language justice principles. We can partner with you from start to finish, setting shared goals, with an eye toward sharing opportunities that emerged through the convening to propel action.

We see community advisory boards as a flexible structure to strengthen relationships and co-create solutions that align with your goals and reflect the desires, strengths, aspirations, and needs of communities evolving over time. Working groups can accomplish similar goals, but are typically assembled to accomplish a specific project.

We contribute at any and all stages of the process, identifying and engaging diverse knowledge and experiences to bring unique perspectives and create collective solutions. Community advisory boards and working groups are important in our initiative design, informing and enriching the data collection, making meaning process, grantmaking, programming, and community share-back.

Throughout the design, integration, and implementation process, we apply our evaluation and learning expertise, building frameworks, theories of change, and community-collaborative evaluative methods. As your initiatives progress, we assess effectiveness based on a customized system tailored to your goals, resources, and evolution. We also work with you to share learnings with the field and apply learnings to strengthen your initiatives.