We help foundations, large nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and impact investors navigate their most complex measurement challenges. Here's how we've applied StoryScience with a few of our recent partners:
We help foundations, large nonprofits, social entrepreneurs, and impact investors navigate their most complex measurement challenges. Here's how we've applied StoryScience with a few of our recent partners:
CHARTING THE PATHWAY TO POLICY CHANGE
In 2005, the Hewlett Foundation launched an ambitious initiative to strengthen the environmental movement
in California by diversifying and broadening the base of environmental advocates. The New Constituencies for
the Environment program had twin goals: building the capacity of a wide range of organizations – including
doctors' associations, faith-based groups, environmental justice organizations, and organized labor – to participate
in effective advocacy, and creating measurable improvements in air quality, which became the specific focus of the
initiative. Hewlett sought to measure progress toward both goals, knowing that shifts in organizational capacity
are difficult to pinpoint, and that any quantitatively measurable effect on air quality would be years in the making,
and impossible to attribute to the foundation's efforts alone.
See Change spent six months in the field interviewing Hewlett staff and grantee organizations in Los Angeles and
the Central
Valley. We also created a set of social network maps, using an online survey and mapping software, to
illustrate the relationships of these organizations to each other, and more importantly for the policy change goal,
the influence each had over the various policymaking bodies that govern air quality in the state. To better understand
the policy landscape surrounding air quality issues, we partnered with a political consultant to help us sift the most
relevant information, quickly fact-check, and triangulate assertions. Our research with over 38 organizations and
policymaking bodies concluded that the New Constituencies initiative had increased organizational capacity and accomplished
significant policy victories, and we presented these findings in a written report. But the most powerful story was the
relationship between capacity and policy change – the ways in which emerging leaders, political coalitions, and legislative
windows can be leveraged and shaped by an intentional strategy. To tell this part of Hewlett's story, we produced a short documentary film.
