Case Study
Laudes Foundation is a notable leader in the philanthropic sector, specializing in the dual mission of fighting climate change and inequality.
How can we help Laudes Foundation put learning at the center of its ongoing success?
Laudes Foundation
The Need
Laudes Foundation (Laudes) is known for their thought leadership, influence, and robust learning culture. They have an ambitious strategy and theory of change focused on changing global systems. And they wanted to know, “Have we made progress? What’s working? What do we and our partners need to do differently?”
In alignment with their values, they commissioned an annual foundation-wide developmental evaluation to help them make the most evidence-informed decisions possible. To carry out their developmental evaluation, they needed a learning and strategy partner that was enough of an outsider to have optimal distance to give advice yet embedded enough to really understand their organizational realities and goals.
That’s where we came in.
We worked with Laudes to handpick and tailor the perfect collective of Convive experts to accompany them at this pivotal moment of learning and transformation.
What We Did
We began by deeply listening and understanding their context, challenges, and goals. From there, we identified priorities and designed the way forward, which included piloting ideas with their team and institutionalizing those that were working.
Working with their change-oriented team, we carried out the developmental evaluation, co-created a new learning and strategy framework that corresponded with an organizational redesign, and facilitated evidence-informed decision-making at every level of the organization.
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“A standout feature of working with Convive is their genuine commitment to unburdening their clients. Their solution-oriented approach not only lightens our load but enables us to direct our attention towards broader strategic goals."
Denise Brennan
Head of Organizational Learning and Strengthening, Laudes Foundation
Benefits & Outcomes
Developmental evaluations can be transformative learning experiences for philanthropies when they are: connected to transparent decisions, have meaningful engagement from leadership, are supported by a well-resourced and intentional learning foundation, and make the most of creative storytelling techniques to help all audiences engage in reflective practices and strategic adaptation.
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Through a combination of powerful learning experience design and visual storytelling techniques, we supported Laudes in better utilizing evidence in strategic discussions and decisions. This included visual facilitation at Foundation-wide sensemaking workshops, ‘so what’ strategic decision sessions, and an Evidence Day that elevated Laudes’s engagement with their grantmaking and systems change data for smarter, collective decisions.
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Prior to our work together, Laudes had separate organizational learning and evaluation teams, causing confusion, duplication, and missed opportunities for evaluation data being used for learning across the Foundation. In addition, the organizational learning, evaluation and strategy teams had separate and disjointed functions resulting in two separate processes: one for learning and one for strategic decision-making.
Our support to Laudes helped them zoom about to the big picture to see the disconnect clearly. From there, we saw them through the merging of their evaluation and learning teams, as well as the creation of renewed Foundation-wide processes to better connect learning and strategy. This has resulted in increased clarity across teams, as well as a stronger default of strategic learning as “business as usual” for Laudes.
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Prior to our work together, Laudes had already adopted a robust approach to organizational learning and created a sophisticated systems-change evaluation portfolio. But they experienced difficulty with connecting this work to decisions teams, leadership, and their founders were making together.
Through our partnership, Laudes’s decision-making process and style became more clear and transparent.
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