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Impact Evaluation

Are you launching a new government-funded program? Promoting a new initiative to generate awareness? Leveraging media to advance a cause you care about?

Impact evaluation is all about achieving mission success – delivering both Return-on-Investment and Return-of-Impact. We help measure and guide responsible use of government, donor, foundation, and grant funding.

WE’RE NOT A REPORT CARD, WE’RE AN ADVISOR

As our company name suggests, we approach impact evaluation as both a Research and a Narrative exercise:

Measuring impact is a research effort that often requires hearing from a wide range of stakeholders across a variety of evaluative methodologies.
It also requires communicating the impact effectively, aligning the right impact message with the right stakeholder message.

We also believe that evaluation programs shouldn’t be a report card. An effective impact evaluation should guide rather than grade, identifying opportunities to course correct and iterate toward success.

In all of our evaluation partnerships, we advise and guide our clients throughout an initiative, to continuously learn and heighten impact.

WHAT DOES THIS LOOK LIKE?

Each of our evaluation initiatives is custom designed to the scenario, stakeholders, and impact priorities. To give you a glimpse, here are two examples of our impact evaluation activity and the scope of work we craft and deliver:

PROGRAM IMPACT EVALUATION

Funded by CPB in partnership with The WNET Group

OUR ROLE:

Evaluating the impact of American Graduate: Jobs Explained on different stakeholders in the public media system.

OUR APPROACH & SCOPE OF WORK

Station surveys to evaluate professional development efforts and establish future priorities
Station leadership focus groups to understand program impact on station culture and fundraising sustainability
Youth advisory group discussions to unearth opportunities for engaging students and involving teens with driving impact
Social media analytics review to identify key trends, discover engagement patterns, and refine content development priorities
Professional development sessions with social video specialists, teaching them data analytics and integrating insights that heighten storytelling impact
Meeting facilitation with business advisors to clarify workforce development priorities and to select research that could be showcased in Jobs Explained videos

LEARNING DRIVEN ITERATION

Research determined that social videos didn’t have to “go viral” to drive station impact. Opportunity also resided in how successfully the videos could be leveraged at events and job fairs!

KEY OUTCOME

Stations almost immediately reported significant cultural shifts in internal openness to exploring new types of content production. In turn, this enabled new paths to fundraising and local community engagement.

MEDIA IMPACT EVALUATION

Vulcan Productions, Discovery Networks

OUR ROLE:

Reviewing the film Racing Extinction for its impact on raising awareness of and action against species extinction.

OUR APPROACH & SCOPE OF WORK

Pre-Post consumer surveys to identify engagement initiative priorities and to assess areas of potential impact lift
Interviews with film cast members to understand the impact of the film on their careers and on their ability to drive impact in species extinction prevention
Analysis of social media data to gauge follower growth and message engagement
Evaluation of other third-party data, such as petitions and legislative change, that resulted from (or were driven by) engagement campaign efforts

LEARNING DRIVEN ITERATION

Research determined that target audiences already had high baseline awareness of the species extinction problem. This learning helped shift toward (and iterate upon) a bigger impact opportunity: moving audiences toward acting on a solution.

KEY OUTCOME

Academic cast members were able to use the movie as a calling card to drive career impact, including meetings with the Oval Office and production companies creating animated films that could integrate topics like the impact of overfishing on sea life.

Interested in learning more about impact evaluation? Click here to request a free 30-minute consultation!

OUR SERVICES (cont’d)

Audience & Consumer Research
Data-Driven Insights Advisory
Strategic Planning
> Impact Evaluation
Insights Activation
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