In the Spotlight
A look at innovative communications
practices
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To Tell Its Story, Robert Wood Johnson
Tells (Lots of) Stories About Its Grantees
Most foundations believe that the best way to showcase their work and the causes
they support is to highlight their grantees, and often by telling stories about
who they are and what they do.
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
(RWJF) believes so firmly in that idea that it has made grantee
stories a centerpiece of its website.
Each month, the foundation,
 whose
work is focused on the nation's health and health care issues, prominently
displays a compelling photograph of a featured grantee on
its website.
Click “Enter
Grantee Profile” and the screen changes to a full-size image of the
organization. Click again, and a four- to five-minute video begins to play.
Along with the
video features, the RWJF profiles contain a link to the grantee’s website, a
description of the organization, and other links relating to the foundation’s
program area of which this work is part.
People viewing the
page can also email it to someone else or send an email with comments or
questions to the foundation.
“In the past, we told stories about our grantees in our annual report or in
other special issue-oriented publications that focused on aspects of our work,"
said Hope Woodhead, RWJF's
 director,
creative services. "We still do that, but rather than waiting until we produce
our annual report or single-topic publication, this approach enables us tell
stories year-round about the foundation and the work we are supporting.”
Woodhead oversees
the foundation's grantee story series. She collaborates with communications and
program staff members who recommend the projects and programs that would make
good stories The foundation works with a
team from
DeSantis Breindel,
an external communications firm, that sends writers, photographers and
videographers to capture the grantee stories.
Woodhead says it’s no accident that the grantee vignettes have a journalistic
feel to them. That’s because when RWJF began exploring the best ways to feature
their grantees on the web using film and still photography they consulted with
the New York Times to learn more about
the audio and video features the newspaper produces as companion pieces for
articles on its website.
Since beginning the project about two years ago, the number of stories produced
annually has grown from six to a dozen. All told, it has completed some 17
stories, with another 14 in the pipeline. And while it currently features each
story for a full month on the foundation’s website, as part of a coming
redesign, these stories will rotate more frequently in the future. Woodhead also
notes that the foundation keeps all stories on its website, and visitors can
find them on each of the main pages of its individual program areas or in its “Newsroom”
section.
In addition to using the stories on the website, the foundation produces
versions on DVD that it gives to the featured grantees for their use in
promoting their organizations or for fundraising. Staff also use the stories for
presentations, and new ones are shown to the board at their regular meetings.
Woodhead says that over the course of the project, the foundation has built an
extensive in-house photo library containing some 1500 images. Using software
from Getty Images, one of the world’s leading suppliers of stock photos, the
foundation has catalogued all these photos and made them searchable through key
words for any staff members who need photos to illustrate presentations or
publications.
For more
information, email
Hope Woodhead.
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To see
samples of other RWJF grantee stories, click the links below:
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