BeHeard!: Inform. Engage. Inspire.

Summer 2006 – Summer 2010

Co-sponsors: Woodcock Foundation, Hattaway Communications, PlanningWorks, Nike Foundation, David and Lucile Packard Foundation, Charles Stewart Mott Foundation, Horizon Foundation, and Bernard F. and Alva B. Gimbel Foundation.

Grantee Partners: Acumen Fund, City Year - New York, Common Good Ventures, International Women’s Health Coalition, National Institute for Reproductive Health, PHI, REDF, Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative, and Young People For.

Over the course of 2005, the trustees, staff and grantees of the Woodcock Foundation took stock of the increasingly complicated and crowded information/advocacy environment in which not-for-profit organizations are working. We canvassed the organizations we support and heard repeatedly that they needed help understanding and responding to the rapidly changing media environment in which their advocacy efforts take place. They needed, they told us, better tools to BeHeard!

Each participating organization was selected on a competitive basis through an application process and was required bring to the table $25,000 from another foundation to contribute to the implementation phase of the program. Starting with a pilot group of five, and later adding a second cohort of four, Woodcock consultants Doug Hattaway and Larry Biddle undertook a communications assessment of each grantee to evaluate communications capacities, advocacy strategies, public awareness, and constituency building. Once the assessments were complete, Woodcock then matched the $25,000 provided by the partnering funder to help implement some of the consultants' recommendations.

BeHeard! evaluation

Since its launch in 2006, BeHeard! has been considered an effective model for helping to shape the messages and thereby strengthen the brand of the organizations participating. But no evaluation to date has brought rigor or specificity to these general impressions. Even where some specifics might be known, conclusions have not been shaped to be easily shared with colleagues in other foundations and organizations.

This evaluation will discern and describe the most valuable lessons in general from BeHeard! and express these as narratives – as opposed to strictly numerical outcomes – that can shared with other interested parties. We hope that the final product will serve as a conversation piece with other funders and organizations and as a stimulus for greater focus by foundations on strategic communications.

To learn more about BeHeard!, see an excerpt from the Ford Foundation's Grantcraft guide on communications. The evaluation and a new BeHeard website will be available in late spring 2010.