In the past our board reports have provided a snapshot of different happenings and exciting things taking place with our grantee network. As we shift to our own programming, we want to shift the kind of reporting that we share with the board. To this end accountability to Bertha Foundation, our stakeholders, our staff and our communities is the primary focus of our board reports for 2025. We want to create a transparent, iterative and dynamic environment for understanding our programs, staying up to date on how effective they are, course correcting when necessary and continuing to stay true to our stated objectives. 

The Bertha Challenge is an opportunity for activists and investigative journalists to spend a year working on one pressing social justice challenge and to deliver a body of work at the end of the Fellowship year.

Our objective in focus this report:

We collect and communicate information about the impact of the Fellowship and actively use this information to strengthen the programme's capacity to meet the three objectives above.

Key result: Contract Monitoring & Evaluation (M&E) consultant and provide the relevant data to evaluate the impact of the program for activist Fellows and their communities

Key result: Develop the plan for designing and integrating a Bertha Challenge M&E framework, using the findings of the M&E consultation.

For the last two months, the Bertha Challenge team have been working with a M&E consultant from INTRAC to: 

Evaluate the impact of the Bertha Challenge Fellowship for activist Fellows over the six years of the Bertha Challenge.

Design a M&E framework that can be incorporated into the running of the program for ongoing evaluation and assessment of impact.

Our intention is that this will deepen our understanding of the role and potential of the Bertha Challenge at a time when activism globally is in crisis; when activists are increasingly criminalized and civil society funding is being cut.

Even in the period since we embarked on this evaluation in January 2025, 40 billion USD of USAID funding has been pulled and the UK Government has announced it will be redirecting GBP 13.4 billion from aid to defense. Since the Bertha Challenge was first conceptualized six years ago, the environment for activism has shifted significantly. We want to understand and respond to these changes.

Over the six years of the Bertha Challenge we have seen an increase in activist applications. Although our applications are up, the quality of activist applications is in decline. We hope this work will enable us to shape the program to respond to the needs of activists in the most effective way.

The evaluation will respond to the following questions:

Does the Challenge program structure strengthen activism and support movements optimally?

Does the program structure enable activists to produce and deliver quality work leading to deep transformations in their communities?

Do Fellows find support/ learning from within the Bertha Challenge cohort?

What impact does Bertha staff mentorship and continuous input have on the Fellowship for activists?

Does the Fellowship support personal growth of activists?

At the end of March we sent out a survey to our 32 activist alumni that focuses on the impact  their work had during and since their Fellowship year and their experiences of the Fellowship. We have selected seven alumni case studies (five activists and two journalists) to be interviewed by INTRAC about the kinds of support that they see as most vital for activist movements.

The case study activists were chosen from across cohorts and were engaged in projects using a variety of activist approaches and geographical contexts. We have included activists who can speak to the benefits of the Fellowship program - those whose work had a significant impact for communities or who were strong cohort members - as well as Fellows who faced particular challenges in their Fellowship year - e.g. their host organization wasn’t a good fit for the Fellowship format or they did good work but struggled to connect the work to a wider audience.

The consultant will also be speaking to activists who have never applied to the Bertha Challenge and to other funding organizations who exist to support activists in order to build up a picture of what activists most need at this moment in time, what funding support structures are most effective for activists and to map the Bertha Challenge’s unique position within the wider ecosystem.

Our Info objective in focus this report:

Bertha Spaces data framework supports
reporting and growth in sales.

Bertha’s Grants Manager has been working on implementing actions that arose following her last trip to Cape Town in 2024. She has been putting in place the necessary adjustments to the Salesforce-based booking system for Bertha Spaces that will help the team to streamline sales and booking processes and enhance the overall experience of users of Bertha House and Bertha Retreat. 

In 2025 Bertha’s Grants Manager will build on this by delivering online training with staff involved in reservations and marketing, in order to embed new processes, provide ongoing support and troubleshooting on the booking system and support the Bertha Spaces team to ensure that their work, particularly in terms of sales monitoring and strategy, is data-led.

Our Comms objective in focus this report:

Bertha's external communications reflect our work and build credibility in the social justice sector.

The Bertha Foundation Website

This year we want to ensure Bertha’s outward facing communications platforms to reflect who we are and the work that we are doing. A big part of this work is refreshing the Bertha Foundation website - last updated in 2021 - the design and content of which doesn't show an accurate or up to date picture of the organization. Sammy, Bertha’s Communications Manager, started the work of refreshing our website at the beginning of this year. 

This refresh will be an update of the entire website, from the design to the information on the page and how we structure the navigation. Building a solid foundation for this work began with conducting a website audit of the year 2024 in order to get a better understanding of how our current website is being used, navigated and interacted with. This will inform us in how we approach the refresh. 

In 2024 the Bertha website received a total of 121,302 views. 74% of these views came from 10 pages - most of which are found on our navigation bar. Our most visited pages were the Bertha Homepage (19%), the Bertha Challenge Call for Applications page (15%) and the Bertha Challenge page (13%).

A key takeaway from this is that we underutilize our homepage, which gets almost 20% of our traffic, is currently very static and doesn’t reflect what we want to draw our visitors attention to. Our homepage can be used to draw attention to our work and what is most important to us at the time; for example when a call for applications is open, when a Bertha story has been published, or a Bertha Space is hosting an event or launching a marketing initiative - this page can be utilized to support our programs in reaching a wider and more relevant audience. 

Another area Sammy looked at was how our users get to the website, with the three most common methods being organic search, direct and referral. Organic searches make up for just under 50% of the traffic on the Bertha website - this is traffic that comes to us via search engines.

Digging a bit deeper into this, the data from google (which makes up 94% of our organic search traffic) suggests that the people who find us, know us - the most popular search terms that brought users to the Bertha website were terms like: Bertha Foundation, Bertha funding, Bertha Challenge and Bertha spaces. It also suggests that a large number of the users that come to our site are looking for further information about us and our offerings; they want further clarity of what Bertha Foundation does and how it’s relevant to them. 

Scoping and Exploration

Scoping and exploration is the final piece of foundation setting before we begin developing content and design for the refreshed website. This process has helped to deeply understand the purpose of the Bertha website and its individual pages, who our target audiences are, what information is the most important and how we can best structure our information to engage these audiences to invest their time and attention on us. This process involved Sammy interviewing team members who would be responsible for a webpage, developing individual creative briefs and then reviewing these as a whole to define the shape of the website as a whole. The scoping and exploration phase has given us a more clear image of what the refresh of the Bertha Foundation website will look like and set the next steps for our process. The website refresh is due to be launched in the 2nd half of 2025.