It is making meaning of your current position, what is known, and what is happening—generally for a particular purpose. This can look like data analysis and synthesis to surface: lessons learned; behavioral, audience, or market insights; opportunities for change; or recommendations. It can also be a process of framing, testing, and visualizing to arrive at or refine a model, theory of change or other framework.
We love this work because of its utility in telling your story, setting strategy, guiding action and finding new ways to increase your effectiveness.
Framing and clarifying is useful when…
- Writing proposals, seeking new funding streams and designing new programs
- Preparing to scale an intervention or program
- Communicating about and seeking buy-in for change(s)
- Developing thought leadership and exemplary practice in a particular space
How we approach framing and clarifying…
We take a social and collaborative approach to meaning making, deeply believing that data only takes on meaning through a collective process. We only know what we know together. We do this primarily through participatory, interactive data synthesis workshops, both within our team and with our clients. These are dynamic and deeply insightful events, and filled motion and emotion. You’ll see sticky notes everywhere, data sets made visual, white boards filled with color. We immerse ourselves in the data, get up and move around with our ideas, laugh, play and explore.
For analysis we use data visualization tools to explore and understand the data. In synthesis we use a mixture of grounded theory (listening carefully for what arises from the data) and mapping into frameworks to probe for patterns. During synthesis and as we try out theories, models, and frameworks we stay curious and swim in the data as long as possible, using our problem exploration superpowers to get beyond the obvious, connect ideas, and uncover root causes.
This includes…
- Theory of Change
- Strategic Frameworks
- Results Frameworks
- Model Articulation
- Synthesis and Meaning-making
- Validation Workshops
- Audience Insights
