Client

Strategic communication team for a major U.S. philanthropic foundation

Prompt

How might we help a major philanthropic foundation’s leadership understand and leverage public conversations around their programs?

Background

One of the largest U.S. philanthropic foundations needed to better understand their public impact and communication effectiveness. While their primary focus is creating positive change, they recognized that strategic communication can amplify social impact by:

• Attracting potential partners and collaborators
• Using their platform to amplify others’ impactful work
• Ensuring funding opportunities reach a wide, diverse pool of potential grantees

The foundation’s leadership team was preparing a comprehensive listening study for their board. With a dataset containing thousands of media mentions (e.g. exports from tools like Sprinklr, Cision, etc), they needed help transforming raw data into memorable data storytelling, actionable insights, and board-ready visualizations.

Key Challenge

Distill vast amounts of semi-structured social listening data into clear, compelling narratives that would resonate with board members while maintaining the analytical depth necessary for strategic decision-making.

Leveraging AI for Scale. Manual analysis of tens-of-thousands of records would have been prohibitively time-intensive. While we approach AI technologies thoughtfully, natural language processing has proven particularly effective for text classification tasks. And some research suggests that large language models can match or exceed human accuracy in detecting key themes and sentiment. By implementing rigorous validation processes, we could harness these capabilities to dramatically accelerate data preparation without sacrificing analytical rigor.

Insightful data stories start with insightful questions. The 3iap approach to collaborative data storytelling pairs qualitative discovery with quantitative exploratory analysis:

• Facilitated, collaborative discovery sessions help surface the organization’s key knowledge gaps and identify compelling narrative elements that resonate with stakeholders.
• Rigorous exploratory data analysis ensures all insights are grounded in empirical evidence.
• This dual approach enables crafting stories that are analytically sound, organizationally relevant, and culturally compelling.

Executive Communication Design. Presenting to board members requires a careful balance between accessibility and depth:

• Primary visualizations need to communicate key insights at a glance
• Supporting materials should anticipate and address most likely follow-up questions
• Documentation and training equip presenting executives with contextual knowledge for deeper discussions

Analysis Pipeline

• Developed automated data engineering workflows for processing raw media mentions
• Integrated machine learning models for topic classification and sentiment analysis
• Created validation frameworks to ensure accuracy of automated systems

Data Storytelling Consulting

• Facilitated structured discovery sessions with key stakeholders
• Mapped organizational knowledge gaps to data-driven insights
• Iteratively refined narrative approaches based on stakeholder feedback

Data Design Services

• Designed primary board deck emphasizing clarity and immediate comprehension
• Developed visualization guidelines and an automated visualization suite for rapid iteration
• Supported detailed follow-up discussions with supplementary materials and ongoing analysis

The automated analysis pipeline and strategic visualization approach have become integral to the foundation’s communication strategy, enabling them to make more informed decisions about communication priorities, better understand their impact in different focus areas, and more effectively engage with stakeholders and potential partners.

Impact Highlights:

• Automated processes reduced data preparation time from months to minutes
• Established reproducible framework for future media analysis
• Client successfully communicated key insights to board members and the broader organizational communication strategy via “road show” presentations