Nonprofit strategy consulting

As a nonprofit strategic planning consultant, one of the first questions I ask prospective clients is what they want their strategic planning to accomplish. Oftentimes, they’re hard-pressed to say. That’s why I’ve created four strategic planning processes, each having a distinct, clearly-defined outcome.

All of the processes are implemented in facilitated workshops using electronic brainstorming technology and specialized software tools, which makes it possible to conduct the workshops remotely or face-to-face.

Impact Strategy

Impact is the positive effect your nonprofit has on its clients. Following is the process for creating your impact strategy:

1. Segments: Subdivide your clients into segments and choose the segment(s) that will be the target of your impact strategy. At a minimum, this step will identify the geographic target of your strategy.

2. Needs: Use your knowledge of the targeted clients to identify their needs. An optional, but highly recommended, step is for me to perform primary and secondary research to identify their needs.

3. Objectives: Diagram your impact objectives, starting with the overall impact you want to achieve and then dividing the objective into a hierarchy of sub-objectives.

4. Metrics: Establish the metrics (aka measures of achievement) you will use to determine the degree to which the objective and sub-objectives are being achieved.

5. Goals: Set a goal (measurement value) for the overall objective and the sub-objectives.

6. Programs: Identify the programs (ongoing efforts) you will undertake to accomplish the goal for each sub-objective.

7. Activity System: Diagram the system of activities, including resources and skills, required to implement each program.  

8. Mission Statement: Create a 3-4 sentence mission statement that summarizes your mission.

 The output of the workshop should be used as input to a detailed program plan with an executive summary, operations overview, staffing plan, marketing plan, timeline with milestones, and financials.

Challenges Strategy

This is about devising strategies for surmounting the 2-3 most important challenges your organization is confronting:

1. Research: I will review your previous strategic plans, individually interview selected members of the strategy team, prepare a summary report of the findings, and distribute the report prior to the workshop(s).

2. Key Challenges: The strategy team will work to pare down the list of challenges identified in the summary report to 10 to 12 well-defined key challenges. 

3. Highest-Priority Challenges: The key challenges will be further reduced to the 2 to 3 highest priority challenges by identifying those that are both most important for you to address and that you are most able to make good progress on addressing during the next 18 months.

4. Strategies: Your team will develop a strategy for (i.e., a way of) surmounting each of the highest-priority challenges.

5. Action Plans: Your team will create high-level action plans for implementing each of the strategies.

Collaboration (Synergy) Strategy

A growing number of nonprofits are collaborating with each other and with commercial and government organizations. The primary reason is to achieve synergy—to produce a combined effect that is greater than the sum of the separate effects. The following process can be performed by a single organization that wants to identify collaborations that will achieve synergy, or it can be done by two or more organizations that intend to collaborate:  

1. Synergy Objectives: Establish your objectives for increasing impact, increasing revenue, and/or decreasing expenses.

2. Synergies: Identify the resources (physical assets, people, processes, programs, knowledge, skills, etc.) that can be combined in a way that achieves the synergy objective(s).

3. Priorities: Use multi-criteria decision analysis to prioritize the synergy initiatives that will have the greatest effect and are the quickest to implement.

4. Collaborators: If not already identified, identify one or more collaborators (specific collaborators or types of collaborators) that will enable the prioritized synergies to be achieved.

5. Structure: Determine the organizational structure—ranging from a less integrated coalition to a fully integrated merger—that will work best for the collaboration.

Competitive Strategy

Nonprofits compete. They compete for clients, employees, volunteers, and funders. Differentiation is a competitive strategy that involves being different in a way that causes the target of your strategy to prefer you to your competitors. Following is the process for creating your differentiation strategy (see the business strategy page to learn more):

1. Segments: Decide the target of your strategy (clients, employees, etc.), subdivide the target into a hierarchy of segments, and choose the segment(s) that will be the target of your strategy.

2. Existing Strategy: Identify the factors of competition—the things you and your competitors do and offer to compete for the target—and map them to the strategy canvas software. Then determine their order of importance, relative performance, and how well you perform on each factor relative to your principal competitor(s).

3. Research: An optional step is to conduct a set of interviews with members of the target to validate the information on the strategy canvas.

4. New Strategy: Decide the factor(s) of competition upon which you want to outperform your competitor(s) and create new factors of competition upon which to compete. These are your differentiators, the things that set you apart from your competitors.

5. Value Proposition: Decide the key benefit your differentiators will deliver and the reasons to believe you will deliver it.

6. Activity System: For each of your differentiators, diagram the system of activities, including resources and skills, required to implement the differentiator