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| We believe that great strategy facilitates great downstream decision making, that feeback creates clarity, and that active strategy deserves a shakedown now and then. Our strategy work combines careful research, deep stakeholder and audience discovery, and collective decades of race, gender, and justice work. We empower our partners with actionable insights into the opportunities they hold and the challenges they need to overcome. Design for Progress provides outside strategic perspective through audits, theory of action development, values - vision - mission alignment, and strategic planning for brands, programs, products, and organizations as a whole. |
| Art and design offer not just a chance for audiences to connect with the work, but also the opportunity to elevate their understanding, buy-in, and motivation, in ways that no other set of disciplines can. Whether subtle or exuberant, creative expression is a strategy accelerant. We listen carefully, ideate boldly, and create richness and vibrancy. We understand how design affects audience perception, and how different audiences need different design strategies to motivate them. Design for Progress provides a comprehensive suite of creative support — from complete visual identity design to art direction to annual reports to template design — in service of the greater strategic goals. |
| We know that innovative ideas and practices often run counter to the dominant narrative, that nuance gets lost in bombast, and that the important audience is almost never everyone. We find the right audience and deliver what they need, where they need it, so they’ll do what our partners need them to. Motivation is a function of the percieved value of an outcome and the percieved efficacy of actions toward that outcome. Building audience motivation is the central reason for any communications work. And we believe that 90% of communications work comes down to investigation and execution. The rest, however, is magic. Design for Progress provides scientific communications magic — from strategy and reflection to operations and messages — for organizations as a whole, discrete initiatives and campaigns, or for the launch of a pivotal research report. |
| We've seen that, for reasons ranging from money to mental bandwidth to not quite high-enough output, many organizations don’t have the in-house communications and design capacity to cover their ongoing needs. In response, we offer rightsize fractional partnership across our entire range of services, sothey can do what they’re best at without struggling to scale. These partnerships are bespoke and always evolving. Working in this way, as a semi in-house team that is flexible, giving, and highly responsive, demands a great deal of mutual trust and respect. It also affords us the ability to know the client’s work and domain in greater detail, to anticipate their needs, offer constant insight, and economize their communications and design workflows so they can have the headroom to act on inspiration. Design for Progress usually enters into fractional relationships with longstanding partners, but we are always game to explore this with any organization that is aligned and finds themselves in need of something steadier than a standard client-consultant relationship. |