This Foundation Review article offers guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms, outlines five essential steps for developing public policy strategy, and provides two tools to support foundations during the strategy development process.
Martha Campbell
James Irvine Foundation
Julia Coffman
Director, CEI
Foundations trying to better leverage their influence and improve their impact increasingly are being urged to embrace advocacy and public policy grantmaking as a way to substantially enhance their results and advance their missions. In fact, public policy grantmaking has been described by the Alliance for Justice as “one of the most powerful tools available to foundations for creating real change.”
This article provides guidance on how foundations can frame, focus, and advance efforts to achieve public policy reforms.
Five essential steps for developing public policy strategy are described:
- Choosing the public policy goal
- Understanding the challenges
- Identifying influential audiences
- Determining how far those audiences must move
- Deciding how to move them.
The article also includes two tools developed specifically to support foundations during the public policy strategy development process.
