DivvyHQ Helps Grant Relief to The Wallace Foundation
The New York-based Wallace Foundation seeks to provide ideas and information for practitioners, policymakers and organizations working to improve learning and enrichment for disadvantaged children and foster the vitality of the arts for everyone. According to Managing Editor Lauren Sanders, demand for the foundation’s commissioned research reports and other products has blossomed over the past decade, as more and more arts and education organizations seek to improve their effectiveness through data and research studies.
“We are really a knowledge shop, so the idea is what is the information we can get by working on the ground with our grantees, so others can learn from their insights and then to create reports that add to the current knowledge in the field. We have seen a spike in the number of reports and products we are producing,” Sanders said. “We knew we had to look closer at the big picture, and that’s what brought us to DivvyHQ.”
In 2017, the Wallace Foundation published more than two dozen formal research reports, as well as ancillary stories to accompany the reports. Working with dozens of researchers and writers, both in-house and outsourced, managing the contributors and content became a challenge.
“In essence, we have become an independent publisher, or a small publishing house. And we needed a way to pull all of it together.”
– Lauren Saunders, Managing Editor
DivvyHQ provides a home base that houses all of the reports currently in production. “The planning and the scheduling are valuable features as well as the opportunity to have all the content in one place for our highly detailed editorial review process,” Sanders said.
Having DivvyHQ as the central location also helps the editorial team to thoughtfully plan additional content for each report—e-blasts, social media, multimedia, etc. The team can also add relevant people to the process in the content creation and review stages.
Recently the team also extended reviewer licenses to a few people at the external agencies they work with regularly, since they too are often involved in product launches and content creation.
“What we really needed was a big, robust editorial calendar,” Sanders said. “… and that’s what we found in DivvyHQ.”
