Strategy

Successful policy change requires solving your own particular puzzle: putting together the right mix of partners, dollars, and strategies to achieve your goals. For grantors and grantees alike, we’ll help you put the strategic pieces together in the way that best fits your organization and its needs. We don’t use an off-the shelf approach. Rather, we customize our work for each individual client while centering the voices of the audiences and members you care about most. We can help you map the organizational landscape, identify key partners, and strategize for building and strengthening the equitable coalitions you need to effectively enact policy change.

 

Our Strategy Services Include:

  • Strategic research and planning for issue advocacy campaigns and organizations using a participatory, community-based approach of surveys, focus groups, and stakeholder engagement.
  • Comprehensive landscape and ecosystem assessments for funders and grantees looking to move into new areas of work or better target their resources to existing work.
  • Evaluation of funder-led grant-making and technical assistance efforts.
  • Design and execution of strategic initiatives
  • Strategy development and technical assistance for researchers moving from analysis to actual policy impact
  • Strategy and compliance support to nonprofit service providers looking to move into issue advocacy.
  • Coalition engagement, membership engagement, and the development of activist leaders.

Policy

Good policy matters. So does the way policy is developed. Designing sound policy solutions involves deep substantive issue knowledge and a strong capacity for applied research and analysis. But most importantly, it involves collaboration and engagement with key stakeholders, especially those that are directly affected yet historically excluded from decision making. Our policy work helps clients weave together these three elements—policy expertise, sound research, and participatory engagement—to support the development of new policy, evaluation of existing policy, and ongoing technical assistance for policy and program implementation, all with an explicit focus on racial equity.

 

Our Policy Services Include:

  • Collaborative policy development with key stakeholders and members of the public
  • Technical assistance for the design and execution of policies, programs, and initiatives
  • Policy research and analysis
  • Project management and design for complex research projects to completion
  • Coaching research staff through new or complex research projects

Strategic Communications

Every organization has a story to tell. Our team will help you craft that story and communicate it effectively to key stakeholders, including partners, policy-makers, and the broader public. We have deep experience with designing successful communications strategies, developing persuasive messaging, securing earned and placed media coverage, executing highly-covered media events, and boosting online engagement through various social media platforms—all in ways that shape the public debate at critical moments. From strategy to media relations to social media, we’ve got you covered.

 

Our Specific Communications Services Include:

  • Strategic communications planning and execution
  • Media relations and engagement
  • Op-ed generation and placement
  • Digital media and online engagement

Strategic Insights

We’re living through a moment of crisis: COVID-19. Insurrection. Climate change. Attacks on voting rights. An economic recovery that’s leaving too many behind. The future seems deeply uncertain. Our experienced team and national network of contacts provides businesses, nonprofits, and foundations with the strategic insights to understand and navigate these complex and overlapping uncertainties—from the economy, elections, and redistricting to state legislative action, and national advocacy campaigns.

Stay Informed

Stay informed on insights from the street to the state level.

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