Strategic and Project Planning
Our strategic and project planning clarifies the impact you will have in your community and gives you the tools to prioritize your work.
We use a four-step framework as an inspiring and effective way to run a well-informed, fun, and useful planning process.
1) Research:
We review your organization’s fundamentals, brand, socioeconomic environment, and more.
2) Modelling:
Together, we build a model that describes your focal areas, their health, and the systems they operate in.
3) Goals and Strategy:
We use your model to create strategic goals, the cornerstones of your strategic plan. Build a strategy model that creates momentum toward your goals.
4) Documentation:
We describe your impact and your measures of success in a public-facing Strategic Plan (or Project Plan) and an internal annual Work Plan.
Our collaboration is interactive, fun, and a terrific opportunity for team building. Typically our clients take six months to complete their plan, but with a high level of commitment by staff and board our clients have finished in as little as three months.
In applying this framework, we draw on best practices as a member of the international Conservation Coaches Network applying the Conservation Standards and from thought-provoking works such as:
Emergent Strategy
Inspired by Octavia Butler’s explorations of our human relationship to change, Emergent Strategy is adrienne maree brown’s framework for inviting us to feel, map, assess, and learn from the swirling patterns around us. adrienne’s approach is useful for teams who want to prepare for, and continuously adapt to, a quickly changing world.
Good To Great
We have referred back dozens of times to Jim Collins’ classic business book, Good To Great, and we have personal experience in getting “the flywheel” moving in new and old programs. It is not easy to move that flywheel, but Good To Great, offers some widely-tested do’s and don’ts for practitioners and leaders looking to grow their organization.
Connecting to Change the World
Plastrik, Taylor and Cleveland offer an insightful approach to decoding complicated problems with their book Connecting to Change The World. Studying the role of networks in social and environmental change, they draw some lessons learned from around the country that can help you scale up or expand into new communities or sectors.
Leading Change
Sometimes your nonprofit organization’s biggest challenges are internal. Good plans and partnerships might not achieve much if your teams are not evolving and changing how and what they do. John Kotter’s Eight Stage Process of Creating Major Change, as published in the Harvard Business Review and his book Leading Change, is a widely-used approach to transform your organization if things feel “stuck.”
Just as no organization is identical, neither are strategic conversations about your organization. Click the “Contact Us” tab below to start the discussion about your needs and challenges.