A measurement infrastructure to assess the impact of Lowe’s Foundation’s skilled trades commitment
Industry:
Corporate Social Impact
Offering:
Custom Decision Analysis Tools
Challenge
The Lowe’s Foundation was expanding its focus from its local hometown market to a national focus and needed to measure the effectiveness of its new strategy supporting skilled trades training through community colleges and nonprofit organizations. The foundation required custom measurement tools to gather meaningful insights about public perceptions on skilled trades, as well as data on outcomes and impacts.
Approach
Discover
We conducted landscape research on the issues around and perceptions of skilled trades
We interviewed stakeholders and facilitated focus groups to inform our measurement strategy and identify key evaluation metrics
Develop
- We designed a comprehensive, multi-channel measurement approach for the Foundation that tracked awareness, owned and earned media and key stakeholder activities for both program outcomes and overall impacts. Measurement work included:
- National surveys for pre- and post-campaign awareness tracking
- Quantitative analytics for owned and earned media channels
- Custom tools for measuring event outcomes
- Stakeholder-specific research instruments
- We provided strategic counsel for the foundation on developing metrics to assess grant program effectiveness, including quality, relevance and volume of applications
Deploy
- We used measurement tools across the year-long, multi-channel strategic communications campaign to gather relevant data for the foundation around specific milestones.
- We tracked the overall awareness of the foundation’s work nationally and locally, key message penetration in earned media coverage and event effectiveness in driving media coverage and engagement. Additional partners were engaged to gather grant program data.
Results
This comprehensive measurement infrastructure provided valuable data on outcomes and impacts across various channels, enabling data-driven decision-making, and provided a blueprint for ongoing Foundation measurement work.
We provided the foundation board of directors with impact reports on key milestones, fostering ongoing alignment as we reached established milestones.
The foundation was able to quantify significant improvements; foundation recognition increased by 12.8% while awareness of its community activities rose to 73.2% nationwide.
The foundation met year-over-year awareness goals across key audiences, including associates, potential grant recipients, and professional skilled tradespeople
