Whiteboard Advisors is committed to supporting innovative thinkers and creative organizations working to solve complex problems for the public good. We are a team of policy wonks, former journalists, and storytellers. Our work often puts us in the Room Where it Happens and we hold our team to the highest ethical standards — while ensuring a relentless focus on client service and advocacy.
We appreciate that in nascent, dynamic markets, our clients’ strategies will evolve and adapt over time. And as a result, we are ever mindful of perceived or real conflicts of interest. We take care to ensure that our work to advance the goals of one client does not conflict with the interests of our other clients — and rely on shared trust and transparency with our clients to identify potential problems early.
We select clients that we believe are best-in-class within their field. That practice conflicts us out of a lot of work–but it allows us to foster long term partnerships with our clients.
At the outset of every relationship and throughout the term of our work, we share and discuss our confidentiality and conflict of interest policies:
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- We do not firewall competing teams to pursue conflicting interests.
- We always hold our client’s proprietary information in confidence – and monitor our activities to ensure that confidential material is never co-mingled or compromised.
- Our work for one client will never limit the services we agree to provide to another client, absent an explicit agreement by all parties and implementation of rigorous practices to safeguard confidential information. We hate to turn away work, but often do.
- If potential conflicts arise as client strategies or new opportunities emerge, we rely on transparency:
- Our team will reach out to the parties to disclose the concern, discuss the matter discreetly.
- We will attempt to work with those clients to resolve the conflict and identify a fair course of action.
- If appropriate accommodations cannot be made, we will withdraw from working with a client or if possible, withdraw from the work that triggered our concern.
- We do not disclose the names or the nature of our work without client approval, but we are transparent about our interests when engaged in public dialogue. Many of our team members are regular contributors to national conversations about the intersection of policy and innovation, and we disclose specific interests or biases early and often with public sector colleagues and journalists.
Incubated within a global public affairs firm in 2009, we fulfilled a dream of launching a new kind of social-impact agency with the support of the Morgridge Family Foundation and a network of impact investors in 2016. Today, we operate as an independent agency, owned by the nonprofit Strada Education Network.
Our goal is to make a significant and positive contribution based on shared trust, mutual respect, and responsibility for fostering solutions and ideas that improve outcomes for diverse and, oftentimes, divergent stakeholders. Reach out to us. Find out how we can help you.