Sensing On Mainstreet: Designing National Programs + Building Grassroots Partnerships
Corporate Social Impact Team
Corporate social impact teams have the means and motivation to help businesses deliver on a triple bottom line: people, profit, and planet. Many teams with whom we partner are eager to change the world for the better and are open-minded about how to realize their purpose-driven ambitions. We’ve had the privilege of working with many Fortune 500 social impact teams, each dedicated to leveraging their company’s brand promise and core capabilities to improve health, wellness, economic resiliency, belonging, and connection across the U.S. and internationally. In every case, these teams and the well-known companies behind them relentlessly pursue social good that inspires.
Frontier combines our human-centered design practices of deep user research with our data analytics and process engineering capabilities to co-create new programs with these teams, develop and update theories of change for their investments, build measurement processes that don’t overly burden grantees or communities, educate executive leadership and board members on impact best practices, tell their stories credibly and empirically and surface and select promising partners for their inaugural activations.
For one corporate social impact team, Frontier designed its strategy and community activities to expand and accelerate its initial investments to build belonging for those struggling with social isolation. We conducted deep research to inform a framework and identify target populations, created new partnership criteria, recommended new partner organizations, and developed and trained the team on co-creation best practices to use with future grantees.
For another team, Frontier facilitated user research groups of everyday Americans straddling political, social, economic, ideological, and geographic fault lines. Probing sensitive topics such as financial hopes, fears, and aspirations, we analyzed and synthesized this data and crafted data-driven personas to help bring Americans’ financial needs to life for senior leaders. Through multiple design workshops across the company, Frontier co-designed a new national initiative to be voted on by the corporate board and implemented at a significant scale across the United States and, eventually, internationally.
In another example, Frontier developed an impact framework, together with all of the corporation’s social impact grantees, that honored values-based investment centered on experimentation, learning, and adaptation. Through a series of participatory workshops, grantees played an active role in shaping the design of the corporation’s strategy for measuring impact.
One senior collaborator said, “When we started, I didn’t know what design was or even what to expect from this process. Now I know – if it matters, you have to design it!.... I even used your personas in a keynote I recently gave.” Another President of a company’s social impact division told Frontier, “I know that every dollar we spend with Frontier, is one that makes an impact. Thank you for listening so deeply, challenging us, and providing such value.”