THE NEED:

As the COVID-19 pandemic was laying bare the inequities of systems in the United States, certain programs funded through the American Rescue Plan Act started rising to the top as examples of work that could truly deliver outcomes. Those approaches all had one thing in common: strong civic infrastructure, the connective tissue within a community. It is critical to help policymakers and local leaders better understand how targeting investments into their communities combined with leadership expertise from StriveTogether could lead to better, more equitable results.

OBJECTIVES:
It was important to distill the principles and share strong examples of civic infrastructure across the country to overcome partisan challenges. In short, StriveTogether needed to make civic infrastructure sexy. This required heightened awareness, especially for policymakers and investors of social impact work.

THE RESULTS:

I work with members of our policy team to develop a more approachable definition and vocabulary to describe the work of civic infrastructure. This became the main framework adopted by the organization as well as other national partners.

We also developed a series of targeted media placements (both earned and sponsored), with a particular focus on Capitol Hill staff. It resulted in over 7 million impressions across Politico, The Hill, Route 50, and social media. We also created a Medium blog series that powered SEO and SEM efforts to drive traffic to the website (an increase of over 350%) that also had shareable assets for our network members to share. In addition, multiple Op-Eds were placed with national and industry-centric publications that helped drive millions of dollars of support and investment into projects.

Interactive, real-time data dashboards were also created so that users could see results across the country. Audiences could see the level of financial investment, what policies were created, and the impact on local/regional economy, education at critical points in the cradle-to-career continuum, and the partnerships involved.