Make Good Happen

The work has produced results at every level

• $160M+in philanthropic capital directed and aligned toward social change
• Millionsof dollars raised for organizations and initiatives
• PolicyMajor policy and legislative change
• NarrativeNational shifts in the way issues are understood and talked about

• Research translated into action.
• Organizations positioned for new funding and opportunity.
• Leaders placed in national media.
• Op-eds published.
• Fellowships secured.
• Partnerships built.
• Communities mobilized.
• More kids kept in school.
• More people housed.
• Families brought back together.
• More parks.
• Better relationships between police and communities.

And organizations that invested in strategic support and saw that investment returned many times over through funding, visibility, influence, partnerships, and opportunity.

That is what The Public Good means by making good happen.

Strategy should produce something

• A strategic plan is not the result.
• A communications strategy is not the result.
• A fundraising campaign is not the result.
• A coalition meeting is not the result.

They are tools.

The result is what changes because those tools were used well.

• A funder deploys capital more effectively.
• A promising organization wins funding.
• Research reaches decision-makers instead of sitting on a shelf.
• A nonprofit becomes part of a national conversation.
• A leader gains credibility and visibility.
• A new idea attracts partners.
• A community changes a policy.
• A law changes.
• People's lives change.

Capital for good

Money can be an extraordinary lever for change.

It can also be spent with very little lasting effect.

The Public Good works with foundations, family offices, philanthropic collaboratives, impact investors, and other funders that want to deploy capital thoughtfully and effectively.

Barbara Raymond spent years on the funder side of the table, including as a program director at The California Endowment, helping shape and oversee major philanthropic investments and multi-funder initiatives.

Across her work, she has directed or helped align more than $160 million in philanthropic capital.

That experience provides an unusual perspective: not simply how to distribute money, but how to use capital as one component of a larger strategy for change.

The Public Good helps funders with philanthropic strategy, initiative design, portfolio thinking, grantmaking strategy, impact measurement, evaluation, learning, communications, partnerships, narrative strategy, and questions of scale and sustainability.

And because Barbara has also spent years working alongside nonprofits, researchers, public agencies, advocates, entrepreneurs, and communities, the advice does not stop at the funder's conference-room door.

It considers what actually happens when strategy meets reality.

From capital deployed to impact created

Effective philanthropy asks a harder question than "Did we make the grant?"

What changed?

The Public Good helps funders connect capital allocation to measurable impact.

That includes determining what success should look like, identifying meaningful indicators, assessing evidence, understanding contribution rather than claiming simplistic attribution, learning while initiatives are underway, and using what is learned to make better decisions.

Barbara brings a background in research as well as philanthropy, including work at the RAND Corporation and advanced work in impact investing and impact measurement.

The result is an approach that combines rigor with practicality.

Strategic advising that moves things

The Public Good works directly with nonprofit executives, funders, civic leaders, social entrepreneurs, authors, researchers, public agencies, and other changemakers who are trying to accomplish something consequential.

Sometimes the challenge is clear.

• We need funding.
• We need people to understand this research.
• We need a stronger story.
• We need to influence policy.
• We need a strategy for growth.
• We need the right partners.
• We need to reposition the organization.
• We need to decide what to do next.

Sometimes the problem is much harder to name.

• A promising initiative has stalled.
• A leader is surrounded by activity but not movement.
• An organization has strong results but little visibility.
• A funder has many worthy opportunities but no clear basis for choosing among them.
• A startup has a compelling idea but cannot yet make the case to investors.
• An organization is spending money on communications without gaining meaningful influence.

That is where experienced strategic advising matters.

The Public Good looks across the entire landscape rather than treating each problem as belonging to one professional silo.

• Money
• People
• Policy
• Evidence
• Narrative
• Power
• Timing
• Technology
• Relationships
• Organizational capacity

The answer may involve one of those things.

More often, it involves several.

Results that compound

The strongest strategic work should create value well beyond the original consulting fee.

That has happened repeatedly in Barbara's work.

Strategic support has helped clients secure funding, earn national media coverage, publish influential opinion pieces, gain competitive fellowships and opportunities, strengthen partnerships, build funder relationships, sharpen their positioning, and turn previously underused work into assets that create new opportunity.

In multiple engagements, the measurable financial or strategic value created has been several times the client's investment — often around three to four times the original consulting cost, and sometimes more when longer-term benefits are considered.

But financial return is only one measure.

For a mission-driven organization, value can also mean influence.

• Credibility.
• Access.
• Better decisions.
• A stronger network.
• A policy win.
• A story reaching the right person.
• A body of research becoming useful.
• A team learning how to do something it previously outsourced.
• Or a promising idea becoming something other people can finally see and support.

Communications that actually move people

Communications is not decoration added after the real work is finished.

It is one of the ways change happens.

The Public Good helps organizations use communications to build understanding, credibility, support, funding, influence, and action.

That can mean:

• Sharpening positioning and messaging.
• Finding the human story inside complicated research.
• Developing a narrative that changes how people understand an issue.
• Building an earned-media strategy.
• Pitching national journalists.
• Developing opinion pieces and thought leadership.
• Turning reports into campaigns.
• Creating newsletters people actually want to read.
• Building a body of evidence and content that establishes authority over time.
• Or helping an organization stop producing communications that consume staff time without advancing its goals.

Barbara has built communications strategies from the ground up, created large-scale public engagement campaigns, built one of philanthropy's largest early social-media communities, and helped organizations and leaders earn national attention for work that previously had limited visibility.

The question is never simply, "What should we post?"

It is:

What do we want to happen because we communicated?

Evidence + story

Evidence can establish credibility.

Stories can create meaning.

Used together, they can be powerful forces for change.

Barbara began her career as a researcher at the RAND Corporation, and research and evidence have remained central to her work.

But experience has also shown her what happens to research when no one translates it.

It gets admired. It gets filed. It disappears.

The Public Good helps organizations turn research, evaluation, and data into strategy, public understanding, fundraising, media, policy, advocacy, and action.

Narrative change

Sometimes the most important thing to change is the story people believe about a problem.

Barbara's work on school discipline helped contribute to a major shift in the national conversation: away from treating suspensions and exclusion as an unavoidable response to student behavior and toward asking how schools could keep more young people learning and out of the justice system.

That shift did not happen because of one advertisement or slogan.

It required:

• Research
• Organizing
• Philanthropic investment
• Communications
• Advocacy
• Political leadership
• Community voices
• Implementation
• And time

That is how The Public Good thinks about narrative change.

Narrative is not a tagline. It is part of an ecosystem of change.

Policy and systems change

Some problems cannot be solved without changing institutions.

The Public Good has experience across education, public safety, policing, homelessness, justice reform, health, behavioral health, community development, climate resilience, and civic life.

The work has included helping change laws, policies, institutional practices, public narratives, funding priorities, and relationships between systems and communities.

"Systems change" can sound abstract.

The results should not.

• More children staying in school.
• More people moving toward housing.
• Families reunited.
• Better relationships between police and communities.
• Resources reaching communities differently.
• Organizations coordinating instead of duplicating.
• Public policy reflecting better evidence.
• Government behaving differently because the rules changed.

Those are systems change.

Building coalitions that can accomplish something

Large public problems almost always cross organizational boundaries.

That means collaboration matters.

But collaboration is not the same thing as holding meetings.

The Public Good helps organizations, funders, government agencies, researchers, nonprofits, advocates, businesses, and community leaders figure out how to work together around a real objective.

Barbara has built and led multi-sector philanthropic collaborations and worked across institutions with very different cultures, incentives, responsibilities, and forms of power.

A coalition should create additional capacity. Otherwise, it is simply another meeting.

Consultant in a Box

Here is where The Public Good is taking the next step.

Over decades of doing this work, Barbara has developed repeatable methods for making change happen.

• Ways of analyzing a problem.
• Ways of finding the story inside research.
• Ways of identifying the right audience.
• Ways of building funding strategies.
• Ways of assessing stakeholders.
• Ways of turning an idea into a plan.
• Ways of deciding which communications efforts are worth doing.
• Ways of using evidence.
• Ways of building coalitions.
• Ways of preparing a pitch.
• Ways of making a case to funders.
• Ways of using AI to expand capacity.
• Ways of figuring out what should happen next.

These are the same kinds of methods Barbara uses with her own clients.

The Public Good is now distilling them into practical playbooks, toolkits, templates, diagnostics, prompts, checklists, AI-assisted workflows, short courses, and decision tools so more people can use them.

Think of it as consultant-quality strategy in a box.

• Not watered-down advice.
• Not another generic nonprofit worksheet.
• Not a hundred-page guide you will never finish.

Practical tools drawn from real work, designed to help you move.

Why Consultant in a Box?

• Not every organization can easily find the right strategic partner.
• Not every organization has a large consulting budget.
• Not every challenge requires months of outside support.
• And some of the best strategic methods can be taught.

That matters to Barbara because one of the central ideas behind The Public Good is that the ability to create change should not belong to a small group of professional strategists, large institutions, or well-funded organizations.

More people should know how to do this.

• How to understand a problem.
• How to identify leverage.
• How to make a persuasive case.
• How to build support.
• How to find resources.
• How to turn evidence into influence.
• How to build alliances.
• How to use technology wisely.
• How to move from a good idea to action.

The purpose of these tools is not to replace expert judgment. It is to spread it.

Million-Dollar Marketing on a Shoestring Budget

One of the first areas of focus is marketing and communications.

Small nonprofits and mission-driven organizations operate in the same attention economy as companies spending millions of dollars.

They cannot outspend them.

They can outthink them.

Million-Dollar Marketing on a Shoestring Budget is built around that premise.

The strategy that sits underneath a major marketing campaign — understanding audiences, sharpening positioning, building messages, telling stories, using evidence, choosing channels, leveraging partnerships, building credibility, creating useful content, earning media, and measuring what actually works — can be used at any budget level.

The Public Good is turning those principles into practical tools small and midsize organizations can actually use.

The aim is not to make every organization look like a Fortune 500 company.

It is to help good organizations stop wasting scarce resources and start communicating more strategically.

Playbooks for making change happen

Over time, The Public Good's toolkit library will grow across the areas where organizations most often need practical help.

• Fundraising
• Communications
• Marketing
• Media
• Influence
• Narrative
• Strategy
• Funder research
• Partnerships
• AI
• Social listening
• Research translation
• Organizational learning

The unifying idea is not "templates."

It is methodology.

A good playbook should help someone think better, not merely fill in blanks.

Teaching change

The tools are part of a larger mission.

Barbara wants more people to understand how change actually happens.

Not everyone needs to become a policy expert, fundraiser, communications strategist, coalition builder, researcher, or philanthropist.

But people working for the public good benefit enormously from understanding how those pieces interact.

That is why The Public Good is also building learning experiences, workshops, courses, board education, staff training, coaching, and practical instruction around social impact strategy.

AI as a force extender

Artificial intelligence creates an extraordinary opportunity for smaller organizations.

For the first time, a small team can access forms of research, analysis, drafting, synthesis, communications support, and information processing that once required considerably more staff, money, or outside expertise.

Used well, AI can stretch every dollar.

It can extend staff capacity. It can help organizations:

• Research faster.
• Write faster.
• Analyze more information.
• Reuse content.
• Find patterns.
• Improve fundraising research.
• Strengthen communications.
• Organize institutional knowledge.
• And free people from repetitive work so they can spend more time on work that requires relationships, judgment, creativity, leadership, and trust.

In that sense, AI can help level the playing field.

That is particularly important in the social-impact sector, where the organizations tackling enormous problems are often operating with very limited resources.

But AI is only useful if people know how to use it.

And powerful technology needs responsible human judgment.

The Public Good helps nonprofits, foundations, boards, public agencies, and mission-driven organizations adopt AI practically, critically, and responsibly. That includes:

• Staff training
• Board training
• Leadership education
• AI literacy
• Organizational AI strategy
• Responsible-use policies
• AI governance
• Privacy and confidentiality practices
• Quality control
• Verification
• Bias awareness
• Workflow design

And identifying where AI genuinely improves the work — and where it does not belong.

AI should be a force extender. It should not become a judgment replacement.

Training boards for an AI world

Boards do not need to become technologists.

They do need to understand enough about artificial intelligence to govern.

• What is the organization using?
• What information is being entered into AI systems?
• What risks exist?
• What opportunities are being missed?
• How are staff checking accuracy?
• Who is accountable?
• What policies are needed?
• What decisions should never be delegated to an automated system?
• How might AI affect the organization's mission, workforce, strategy, reputation, and constituents?

The Public Good helps boards develop enough literacy to ask better questions and govern responsibly.

Training staff to work differently

Staff training focuses on actual work.

Not demonstrations of clever technology.

• How can a development team use AI without compromising confidential donor information?
• How can a communications team build better workflows?
• How can program staff synthesize research faster?
• How can executives prepare for decisions?
• How can teams build reusable knowledge?
• How do you check AI output instead of trusting it?
• Where can automation save real time?
• Where is human expertise essential?

The goal is not simply more AI use.

It is better work.

Founders, ventures and impact investing

The Public Good also works with founders and mission-driven ventures trying to build something new.

Early-stage organizations face many of the same strategic challenges as nonprofits and social-impact initiatives.

• Is the idea clear?
• Does anyone need it?
• What makes it different?
• Can you demonstrate impact?
• Can you explain the opportunity?
• What evidence supports the model?
• Who should invest?
• What will investors want to understand?
• What story makes the opportunity compelling without overselling it?

Barbara brings the perspective of both strategist and impact investor to this work.

She has advised and coached founders and startups preparing competitive pitches, helped leaders sharpen their investment cases, and brings additional expertise in impact measurement and the relationship between financial return and social value.

For mission-driven startups, social enterprises, and impact ventures, The Public Good can help with strategy, positioning, investor messaging, pitch development, impact narratives, impact measurement, communications, and preparation for capital conversations.

The objective is not simply a prettier pitch deck. It is a stronger case.

Pitches that win

Whether the audience is a funder, foundation, impact investor, fellowship panel, journalist, policymaker, or potential partner, good pitches share important characteristics.

• They are clear.
• They establish stakes quickly.
• They understand the audience.
• They make a credible claim.
• They provide evidence.
• They distinguish the idea from alternatives.
• They explain why now.
• And they make the next step obvious.

The Public Good helps leaders turn complicated ideas into cases that other people can understand, remember, and act on.

Sometimes that results in investment. Sometimes a grant. Sometimes a fellowship. Sometimes national media. Sometimes a partnership. Sometimes an invitation into a room the organization was not previously in.

That is why influence, communications, fundraising, and strategy cannot always be separated.

Everything is connected

• Fundraising and communications are connected.
• Evidence and storytelling are connected.
• Philanthropy and impact measurement are connected.
• Policy and narrative are connected.
• Technology and organizational capacity are connected.
• Strategy and implementation are connected.
• Capital and community are connected.

The Public Good works at those intersections.

Because that is often where progress gets stuck. And it is often where the biggest opportunities sit.

Who The Public Good works with

We work with nonprofits, foundations, family offices, philanthropic collaboratives, impact investors, government agencies, public-sector leaders, civic organizations, research institutions, coalitions, community partnerships, social entrepreneurs, startups, founders, authors, thought leaders, and mission-driven businesses.

• Some need significant strategic advising.
• Some need help deploying capital.
• Some need to raise it.
• Some need a stronger story.
• Some need research translated.
• Some need a pitch that wins.
• Some need an AI strategy.
• Some need to train a board.
• Some need a coalition to function.
• And some want access to the tools and methods Barbara has developed over a career of doing this work.

Different entry points.

Same underlying question:

What will move this forward?

About Barbara Raymond

Barbara Raymond is the founder of The Public Good, a social impact strategist, philanthropic advisor, researcher, communications strategist, impact investor, and former foundation executive.

Her career has crossed philanthropy, public policy, government, research, nonprofits, communications, fundraising, organizational change, civic life, and social impact.

She began her career as a researcher at the RAND Corporation and later served as a program director at The California Endowment, where she helped design and lead major philanthropic strategies and investments.

Her work has helped direct and align more than $160 million in philanthropic capital.

She helped advance major reforms in school discipline aimed at keeping more young people in school and out of the justice system, working across philanthropy, community advocacy, research, narrative change, state leadership, and the White House.

She has worked on public safety and policing, homelessness, health, justice reform, youth opportunity, community development, climate resilience, and civic life.

She has worked with artists including John Legend, Common, and RZA to bring wider attention to justice reform and trauma resilience.

She built one of philanthropy's largest early social-media communities, reaching more than 700,000 people.

She now advises organizations and leaders trying to solve difficult problems, raise resources, build influence, use evidence, deploy capital effectively, communicate ideas, adopt artificial intelligence responsibly, and turn promising ideas into action.

But The Public Good grows from an ambition larger than any individual consulting engagement.

Barbara believes more people can learn how change happens.

And if more capable people have access to good strategy, useful evidence, better communications, smarter technology, and practical ways to move ideas forward, more good things can happen.

That is the purpose of The Public Good.

Make good happen.