Interactive Impact Labs

10-Year Retrospective Digital Report

When The California Endowment finished its decade-long investment in grassroots organizing for “Building Healthy Communities”, we helped them showcase how they had helped bring forth a stronger, healthier California.

Client
Category
Strategic Review,
Data Aggregation,
Digital Storytelling
Delivered

January 2021

Client Challenge:

The California Endowment ended its 10-year philanthropic initiative, dedicated to advancing health equity in California. They sought to tell its story and showcase its grantee partners’ achievements and contributions to impact.
 

ii Labs Solution:

In close collaboration with the Learning & Evaluation team, ii Labs developed a hand-crafted, digital retrospective report consisting of: (1) A slideshow with a concise narrative highlighting key grantee partner milestones, coupled with (2) a timeline to lay out the context of statewide policy changes, as well as (3) mutable maps that described the local impact of people power in its fourteen target communities.
This public-facing report featured an interactive timeline with 14 thematic keywords, as well as a map of each community where investments were made.

Collaborative Learning Process

The Learning & Evaluation team has a huge repository of data from this decade-long initiative, and of course, a thorough audit of past reporting was essential to this project. But this particular initiative also had the benefit of local learnings at each of the partner organizations across the state. ii Labs took the lead in interviewing past and present Program Managers, associates, and other stakeholders. The project was conducted in iterative cycles for surfacing the key, unifying themes, with staff feedback informing every new round.

Creative Process

At the heart of this report is storytelling and sense-making. So the delivery—the final packaging—had to measure up to that task. On this essential step, ii Labs worked with a tight group from the L&E team.

We drew on our past experience for sparking curiosity, writing content that readers want to read. For this retrospective, we chose to engage timelines and maps (which are, essentially, just elegant forms of data visualization), and refined the user interface inside the small team.

One unique feature that came from this collaboration was a series of linkages across the storylines. The interface actually suggests to the reader new jumping-off points as they read, illuminating more  context to the themes they are exploring.