Changing Minds, Building Communities: Advancing Affordable Housing through Communications Campaigns

"Americans are caught in an image of housing that's over 20 years old -- they are really surprised when they see what affordable housing is now." Nancy Belden of Belden Russonello & Stewart elegantly captured the challenge of the perception gap between public opinion and the reality of affordable housing. On May 5 and 6, 2004, the Neighborhood Reinvestment Corporation, in partnership with The Campaign for Affordable Housing, analyzed the challenge of closing that gap in its fourth NeighborWorks Symposium on Multifamily Excellence.The symposium, held in Minneapolis, was entitled "Changing Minds, Building Communities: Advancing Affordable Housing through Communications Campaigns." The symposium brought together 300 local and national affordable housing leaders from across many organizational and institutional sectors to engage in a day of candid exchange on one issue key to strengthening communities and expanding housing opportunities. The issue? How we can better communicate publicly and through marketing campaigns to advance the development of homes all Americans can afford.While affordable housing stories are often filled with conflict, and projects are completed against the odds, participants were energized and enthused to find that successes are happening across the country. Fifteen successful cases were used as a backdrop against which key issues were discussed and debated. The context for these successes was demonstrated through opinion research that shows untapped opportunities for support -- a kind of new "silent majority" that recognizes and is concerned about the corrosive effect affordability problems have on families and communities.However, the affordable housing industry will only tap that support if it learns to employ professional communications tools to move its message from simply "housing" to "homes, family and community."From case studies, research, and the candid reactions and debate from participants, 10 key points emerged that suggest a communications strategy for the affordable housing community

Evaluating Communication Campaigns

Summarizes presentations from a September 2007 conference on evaluating communication campaigns. Discusses the mechanism of effecting change through communication; the principles of advocacy evaluation; the design, methods, and tools; and lessons learned

Speaking for Themselves: Advocates' Perspectives on Evaluation

"Speaking for Themselves: Advocates' Perspectives on Evaluation" will give you a better understanding of advocates' views on evaluation, the advocacy strategies and capacities they find effective, and current evaluation practices. Based on Innovation's Network's research, the report includes recommendations for advocates, funders, and evaluators. Both the research and publication were made possible by the Annie E. Casey Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies

Non-Profits and Policy Advocacy: Learning from Success

This document is a review of successful non-profit policy advocacy practices. Using case studies and examples from Alberta, Canada, and internationally, this guide outlines how and why non-profits should participate in policy advocacy, and breaks down some of the key features of successful policy advocacy efforts. The appendices contain further policy advocacy resources and contact information for policy advocacy coalitions working on a variety of campaigns

Voices for Change: A Taxonomy of Public Communications Campaigns and Their Evaluation Challenges

Makes the case that communications campaigns cover a broad range of different types and characteristics, and can be differentiated along the axes of purpose, scope, and maturity. Examines what communications campaigns that fall on different areas of these three axes look like, and how where they fall may affect the evaluation approach used and lead to distinct evaluation challenges and needs

Social Justice Documentary: Designing for Impact

Explores current methodologies for assessing social issue documentary films by combining strategic design and evaluation of multiplatform outreach and impact, including documentaries' role in network- and field-building. Includes six case studies

Click Here for Change: Your Guide to the E-Advocacy Revolution

Describes how organizations are using state-of-the-art technology to engage supporters and improve their advocacy efforts. Includes case studies and lessons on how to incorporate electronic approaches in campaign strategies

Greater Power, Lasting Impact: Effective Grantmaker Strategies from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

CPER (also referred to here on as the "Fund") is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. CPER originated in discussions among funders active in Grantmakers for Education's Working Group on Education Organizing.They launched the collaborative in 2007, in partnership with NEO Philanthropy (then Public Interest Projects), the 501 (c)(3) public charity engaged to direct the Fund. CPER's founding funders saw that, in the education debates of the day, the perspectives of those closest to the ground were often left out. These funders recognized that students and families have a crucial role to play in identifying, embracing, and sustaining meaningful school reform. Students and families know their own needs and see first-hand the inequities in schools. Organizing groups help them get a seat at the decision-making table and develop workable solutions, building on community assets that are vital to addressing the cultural and political dimensions of reform. These grassroots groups are essential to creating the public accountability and will needed to catalyze educational reforms and ensure they stick. They can be the antidote to the ever-shifting political conditions and leadership turnover that plague reform efforts. At the same time, they help community members develop leadership and a grassroots base, building individual civic capacity and community power that strengthens our democratic infrastructure for the long term. Because educational improvement requires tackling persistent inequities in race and income, supporting leaders in low-income communities of color also helps build the social capital needed to solve integrally related social challenges. CPER was initially conceived to run for a minimum of three years -- a timeline consistent with most foundation grants but short for the transformative kinds of changes the Fund hoped to achieve. CPER's lifespan eventually stretched to eight years because of the recognized power of its supported work. Over this period, NEO Philanthropy engaged a highly diverse set of 76 local and national funders in the CPER collaborative. Incentivizing new resources through matching dollars, CPER raised close to $34 million and invested nationally in some 140 community groups and advocacy allies in national coalitions and in six target sites of varying scale (California, Chicago, Colorado, Mississippi, New Jersey, and Philadelphia). These groups, in turn, developed local leadership, national coalitions, and cross-issue alliances that helped to achieve over 90 school-, district, and state-level policy reforms that strengthen educational equity and opportunity. CPER's history of impact illustrates the efficacy of community organizing as an essential education reform strategy, along with the more commonly supported strategies of policy advocacy, research, and model demonstration efforts. But CPER's story is also more broadly instructive. In this period of "strategic philanthropy " when focused, foundation-led agendas are increasingly seen as the surest route to achieving desired ends, CPER offered a very different, bottom-up, multi-issue alternative that proved effective. In sharing CPER's story, we hope to deepen understanding of the value of community organizing for education reform while contributing to the larger conversation about how grantmakers can effectively support social movements to strengthen opportunity and justice

Releasing Seeds to the Wind: The Story of Generations Ahead

Generations Ahead is a nonprofit organization that ceased operation on January 31, 2012. This report aims to share the lessons learned by the organization from its work with social justice issues related to genetic technologies and includes interviews with key stakeholders: staff, board members, allies, and funders

Strengthening Collaborations to Build Social Movements: Ten Lessons from the Communities for Public Education Reform Fund (CPER)

This report explores how grantmakers can help strengthen collaborations among supported groups to advance ambitious social change goals. As noted by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in Many Hands, More Impact, grantmakers can play a number of critically important roles in supporting social movement building: investing in a broad range of organizations, change strategies, and issues; brokering relationships among groups and their allies; connecting grantees to one another in impactful ways; fostering learning to grow a field; and influencing peers and policy through these supports. We focus on grantmakers' "connector" role because we see it as a crucial -- and often underexamined -- strategyfor expanding impact. But how, specifically, can grantmakers nurture connections -- and productive collaborations that may eventually arise from them -- while remaining attuned to the strategic intentions of supported groups and the relationships they themselves want to cultivate? And how can the enhanced capacity that genuine collaboration requires be reflected and resourced in ways that meet funders' expectations of collaborative impact? Our perspective on these questions is grounded in the experience of Communities for Public Education Reform (also referred to here on as "CPER" or the "Fund"). CPER is a national funders' collaborative committed to improving educational opportunities and outcomes for students -- in particular students of color from low-income families -- by supporting community-driven reforms led by grassroots education organizing groups. Maximizing collaborative potential has always been central to CPER's DNA, and is encoded in the Fund's vision, strategy, and operational structure. In sharing lessons learned by CPER funders, staff, and grantees over the Fund's eight-year lifespan, we hope to contribute to the conversation about how grantmakers can nurture collaborations that advance building social movements for opportunity and justice