Analytical Framework Design

Context An evaluation of international stakeholder relationships for a major UK Foundation. The client had been running partnership programmes for years, but struggled to articulate what made a partnership genuinely valuable, as opposed to just active.

The Challenge The existing processes and tools weren’t working as intended. The client needed more than an assessment of past activities, they needed a new way of thinking about how their relationships with stakeholders actually worked, one that could guide strategy going forward rather than just report on what had already happened. The goal was to understand what partners actually valued, not what the client assumed they valued.

What I Did Designed and conducted an online survey with international partners, followed by in-depth interviews, analysed together to give both breadth and depth within a tight timeline. Then, moving from evaluator to architect, I independently designed an empirically grounded, multi-feature framework, mapping stakeholder influence against values alignment, with four relationship archetypes derived inductively from the evidence rather than imposed from an existing model. I then co-facilitated a workshop with a partner client to test and validate the framework directly with stakeholders. The idea was to give the client a structured, evidence-based way to prioritise its partnerships and plan where to invest its limited resources.

Outcome The core of the new framework was a two-axis relationship matrix, with partnership archetypes derived directly from what partners had told us in the survey and interviews. The framework held up under stakeholder scrutiny in a validation workshop, and surfaced a specific strategic focus area for the client going forward. This work shifted my role on the project from delivering an evaluation to shaping the client’s strategic thinking.