ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Most research gets done to communities: someone extracts the data, publishes the paper, and is never heard from again. Tanisha Tate Woodson built a firm on the opposite premise — and then did the less glamorous thing, which was turn that premise into an actual codified method.
In this episode, we talk with Tanisha Tate Woodson, who runs Woodson Insights Research and Evaluation, working with nonprofits, government agencies, and funders to humanize data and show the impact of their work. She walks us through her approach: four dimensions that get dialed up or down for every engagement, culturally responsive methods that let people tell their stories the way they actually want to, and a sense-making session at the end so the report doesn’t die on a shelf.
Then we get into what having a method has done for the business. Tanisha’s RFP win rate is around 50% in a field where 15-20% is normal, because she’s bidding on one or two instead of five and can answer a proposal from a process she’s already written down. She built an AI skill that knows her red flags and tells her when to pass. And she’s growing on referrals and community relationships with limited social media presence. This is a meta episode — premise, method, methodology in action.
* Storytelling as data: why observation and conversation are data, not just spreadsheets
* Why funders and the nonprofits they fund are speaking two different languages
* Research done to communities vs. research done with them — and the harm history behind the suspicion
* Why every engagement ends with a two-to-three-hour sense-making session, not a report on a shelf
* The through line from a promise made to a community to an artifact that actually goes back to them
* The four dimensions that get dialed up or down for every client — and the myth that community-engaged work is less rigorous
* Culturally responsive method in practice: PhotoVoice, video, and a focus group built on Chutes and Ladders
* Building the Black Data Pulse panel so recruitment stops eating clients’ budgets
* Why a codified process doubled her RFP win rate — and how she decides what not to bid on
* Using AI as a trained junior team member, not a proposal generator
* Growing a business on relationships and referrals with no Instagram account
* What “know yourself first” has to do with whether your AI output sounds like you
“There’s a huge myth in the field that when you’re close to the communities, when you’re doing community engagement work, it’s no longer rigorous, and that’s not true. It’s more rigorous because now we’re embedding community perspectives into their work. We’re not only embedding them into the work, but we’re also articulating the cultural relevance of the work that we’re doing.
Are people telling the stories in a way in which they wanna be told? So if, for instance, if you wanna hear from students, do students wanna take a survey? No. So we think about the culturally responsive methods as also thinking about who you wanna hear from and how do they want their stories to be told.” - Tanisha Tate Woodson
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