A community of practice pairing foundation L&E and Communications teams to amplify influence through evidence & story.
Your foundation’s L&E team produces rigorous findings. Your Communications team tells compelling stories. Together, they hold everything a foundation needs to demonstrate real impact, yet most foundations haven’t fully unlocked what happens when these two teams work together.
With tightening budgets, political pressure, growing skepticism about what is actually impactful, the organizations that will hold their ground are the ones that can say something true, credible, and compelling about their work.
The Influence Lab is built for foundations that are ready to make that connection.
Findings don’t just sit in reports, but rather inform narratives, campaigns, and public reports that actually influence decisions, both internally to the Foundation and externally.
Communication campaigns are grounded in real evidence and stories, painting a more honest and credible picture.
Leadership gets both the rigor and the story at the same time, with teams that work together instead of in siloes.
The Influence Lab is a cohort-based community of practice. Each participating foundation enrolls one L&E officer & one Comms officer as a pair.
Together, discover the shared opportunity and create a shared line of sight of how L&E and comms can function together.
L&E officers learn what Comms teams actually need — and leave with a clearer sense of how to make evaluation work travel further.
Comms officers learn the L&E perspective and leave with a clearer sense of how to integrate data in narratives and supercharge their foundation’s voice.
This is where the conversation becomes a collaboration. Pairs bring what they learned in Act 2 back to each other — and build something neither team could have made alone.
A joint work product: a findings-to-story translation guide, a shared impact narrative framework, or a defined set of internal standards or processes for what evidence-grounded communications looks like at your foundation.
The cohort’s learning feeds into a V1 Playbook developed by I2I documenting how effective L&E + Comms collaboration actually works — and what it produces. You help shape it. It extends your impact beyond your organization.
Do you work at a foundation with dedicated L&E and Communications functions? Is your work systems-change oriented with a focus on equity and social justice? Are you experiencing some version of the tension: findings that don’t travel, communications that outpace the evidence, or two teams in silos that would be better together? This might be the lab for you.
Join our free live session, “Evaluation Has Never Been More Rigorous. Why Aren’t We More Influential?”, and see the thinking behind the Lab first.
