Designed & conducted campaigns

Managed long-term, multichannel efforts to support strategic initiatives.

Challenge

For decades, IREX deliberately kept a low profile while quietly implementing life-changing programs on behalf of US government agencies. As the aid landscape shifted, IREX's strategy called for diversifying its base of donor organizations to mitigate funding risks and create more room for innovation. Our leadership team decided that IREX needed to introduce itself to new donor and partner organizations by becoming a thought leader in strategic areas.

Approach

We met with teams that were planning to create content for this initiative. Drawing upon user interviews from the irex.org redesign and analytics from previous initiatives, we shared what we'd learned about the types of content that our target audiences valued the most.

In the meantime, we started designing a multiyear, multichannel campaign called Learning Signals. We tentatively decided to overhaul our e-mail newsletter to make it more relevant to key audiences and use it in coordination with website content, paid and organic social media posts, employees' professional networks, and targeted outreach to media outlets to earn the interest of key audiences.

Through a comparative analysis of peer organizations' approaches and an analogous inspiration exercise with staff, we discovered that many e-mail newsletters in our industry were "self-centered" in promoting their own content, while influential voices in other industries put their audiences' interests and needs at the center of their work.

With these insights, we structured Learning Signals so each edition would share the following things:

  • A practical guide for practitioners or a credible piece of original research.

  • A selection of related links to other organizations' materials, along with a brief description of why we found them interesting or useful.

  • A Google Doc for sharing work in progress and for inviting feedback, suggestions, and other ideas.

Each edition of Learning Signals includes a featured resource from IREX, links to other organizations' materials, and an opportunity to collaborate on work in progress.

By working in public, we've attracted valuable perspectives from people inside and outside our traditional circles.

Results

We set objectives for each edition and gauged progress through quantitative and qualitative data. Over the course of a little more than a year, the campaign led to a number of key results: