In June 2023, The Rockefeller Foundation published its first Impact Report since 2015.
The Impact Report was designed to demonstrate our commitment to:
Measuring our impact by being honest and evidence-backed, without either sugarcoating or underselling that impact
Learning from our and our partners’ successes and challenges, adapting along the way
Transparently sharing impact and insights that may inform internal and external action
Because it was the first report in almost a decade, we chose to create a three-year retrospective, covering Jan 2020 to Dec 2022, coinciding with the height of the COVID pandemic. The goals of the report were to be:
Humble, inclusive, collaborative, and equitable, acknowledging the contribution of our grantees/partners and avoiding overclaiming our impact or influence
Transparent, highlighting both successes and challenges – specifically challenges in RF’s approach rather than calling grantees out — and the learning from both
Balanced, with no stories without numbers, and no numbers without stories
We wanted the report to be visual, using data visualizations, an interactive map, videos, photos, and narrative storytelling to clearly and compellingly convey complex information. For the digital version, we created three separate landing pages for each thematic area of the report - food, health, and opporutnity - so that users interested only in those focus areas could just read those sections and come away with an understanding of our impact. Finally, we wanted to create a version that was downloadable and could be used as a leave-behind PDF for staff and external stakeholders.
Knowing that not everyone in our traditional audience cares about an Impact Report, we determined that we would need to leverage our existing networks and partnerships to help amplify the report to the fullest extent.
This included:
Leveraging our senior leaders to send emails to their networks and share on their social media channels
Asking our feautred grantees and partners to share the report on their own channels
Tagging grantees and partners mentioned in the report in relavant social media posts
We used the following metrics to measure our success.
Clicks to landing page (from social, email, and paid effort)
Report downloads
Web impressions and engagements (Click through rate, pageviews, pages per session, time on page and scroll depth on digital report)
Social media impressions (times that our content was viewed)
Social media engagements (shares, likes, comments)
Brand mentions on social listening
Usage of the social media toolkit
Email open rates and click through rates
We developed a robust email marketing plan which included sending emails from 17 different stakeholders at the Foundation to internal and external networks, including our grantees. Every email was unique and referenced information that was relevant to the sender's intended audience. For example, the email that our VP for Food sent to his networks, highlighted impact that was specific to Food.
Grantees, partners, and the Board received advance notice of the report while external users received emails on the day of the launch - June 28, 2023.
We created a social media toolkit for grantees that were mentioned in the report and for our Board of Trustees to help them spread the word about the report on their social channels.
We also developed a targeted social and digital media plan to serve the theme-specific sections of the report to users with interest in food, health, and opportunity.
The biggest challenge in this project was the timeline. We did not start nearly soon enough and gathering data from three years, distilling it into short, concise report, and then translating it all into a visually compelling web product was difficult. Deadlines were missed and many people had to work over time to meet the launch date. The digital team worked with our web developer to create new interactive components to showcase the content. For example, we created a "number ticker" so that when uses scrolled down the page, our data points would count up in real time, creating a visually appealing experience. We also developed an interactive map showing our global impact by program area and created videos for each section of the report.
In the end, the product turned out beautifully and it was well received by our internal and external stakeholders.
The impact report launched on June 28, 2023 and our amplification campaign ran through the end of August 2023. In that time period, the impact report received 353,737 views and the report or its individual chapters were downloaded 9,543 times (today the number is nearly 11,000). The individual chapters each received more than 56,000 views with extremely high event counts (engagements) on those pages (311,500 to 388,812).
On social media, our organic posts received 173,300 impressions, 6,204 engagements, and 18,698 video views for a 3.6% engagement rate. When we look at impressions from other users’ posts, the number topped 5,657,943.
Our paid campaigns really helped drive link clicks to the digital report. Our ads on LinkedIn, X, Meta and Google generated more than 50 million impressions in total. And the click through rate on our google ads was 19.27%.
As hoped, email was our top performing platform in terms of engagement rate for the Impact report. Both our June eNewsletter and our senior leaders helped push more than 5,000 people to the report.
Using our marketing intelligence platform, we did a sentiment analysis of the posts about the impact report and the results were majority positive: of the 903 mentions, 96.5% were positive and only 3.5% were negative.
Our google analytics reporting showed us that people all over the world accessed the report. Those who most viewed the full report were in the US, India, and UK. For chapter specific views, we saw higher rates in Africa.
