Services
Services: How Can We Help?
We provide services to help nonprofit boards and staff leaders operate their organizations better and increase their impact.
A proud member of Bay Area Interim Executive Directors (BAIED)
Interim Leadership & Coaching
During times of transition, organizations need a steady hand and experienced leadership. We provide interim C-Level leadership, such as Executive Director, Director of Operations, Development, or Communications. Our years of experience in these roles will help your organization make important decisions, create and execute sustainable strategic plans, and find and onboard permanent leaders.
We also offer 1:1 or small group coaching to help your leaders become more effective, and work better together. Coaching can be a one-off session, a series of sessions covering a particular topic, or an open-ended relationship providing as-needed consultations.
And, if you are considering the use of AI in your operations, evaluation, or communications efforts, we will be happy to help you in that area.
Strategy, Planning, Operations
We can help you create a strategic plan that won’t just sit on a shelf. Our plans are deeply rooted in our experience in growing high impact, sustainable nonprofit organizations. We work with your leadership to understand where your organization is now, and where it is going. Our plans are low on jargon and high in proven strategies for your next 2-10 years of operations.
We can also help you develop new programs, by defining needs and objectives, helping you create programs to address those needs, integrating those programs into your current work, and creating evaluation processes that will enable you to measure your progress.
If you are considering starting a new Community-Based Organization (CBO), we can help you establish the appropriate legal structure, obtain nonprofit status, and get your organization operating.
Finally, we can look at specific areas of your operation, evaluate what is working and what is not, determine the causes of successes and disappointments, and help you create strategic and tactical plans to get any aspect of your operation working effectively and economically. We are especially interested in helping you make your Social Enterprise contribute more, streamlining General Operations, and in improving Marketing and Communications effectiveness. We also help organizations with Board Development and Recruiting.
Executive Recruiting
When you need to fill a gap at the top of your leadership team, your need the very best talent. But often, the Board or Hiring Committee is unsure how to find top-level candidates.
Our work providing interim leadership has often leads directly to finding and hiring the next Executive Director. This makes good sense – after several months providing transitional leadership, our understanding of the organization is comprehensive.
We work with the Board to determine the key competencies the next ED must bring, and evaluate candidate’s strengths in these and other areas. Typically, these include:
Fundraising experience, which may include soliciting high-net-worth individuals or leading grassroots fundraising campaigns.
Communications strengths, especially in using social media to reach both new and log-term supporters.
Personnel and HR understanding that enable a strong team to retain its cohesion and a team in need of improvement to grow and increase its impact.
Business, policy and legal experience that enables the organization to grow by building strong collaborations, programs, and relationships.
For smaller organization, our recruiting skills save money and reduce pressure on the Board. In larger organizations, we can assist with the selection of a search firm and provide liaison to them. We provide recruiting services as part of an interim leadership assignment or on a stand-alone basis.
Development and Fundraising
For many community-based organizations, the best predictor of their success is their bank balance. Finding foundations whose missions are aligned with yours, and writing effective grants proposals are key to obtaining institutional funding. We are experienced in annual appeal design and execution, fund-raising events, and cultivating individual donors at all levels of giving.
Let us help you with:
Donor Research
Grant writing
Fund-raising event planning and presentation
Establishing equity acceptance programs
Developing in-kind donors
Fund-raising from high-value donors
Working with Government funders
Social Enterprise
For many nonprofit organizations, a Social Enterprise (SE) can bring in essential revenue, create workforce development opportunities, and show funders that the organization is doing all it can to attain sustainability.
In many ways, a social enterprise is just like any other business – you provide services or products for a price, and you pay your employees, landlord, utilities, vendors, and others. But in many ways a social enterprise is substantially different from other businesses. When run by a nonprofit, a SE can provide untaxed revenue. Instead of borrowing money, it can seek and receive grants. Many government contracts favor social enterprises. And the public overwhelmingly prefers to patronize business that they see as benefiting the community.
We can help you with these aspects of establishing and operating a successful social enterprise:
Business planning
Raising startup and continuing grants
Program evaluation
Collaborations and partnerships.
Real estate issues
Building your SE management team
Personnel planning management
Marketing, advertising, and sales
Merchandising
Communications and Development
Your internal and external communications are key to your success. Your teams all need to be on the same page – speaking the same language and pulling in the same direction.
Your external stakeholders want to know what you do, how you do it, and why you deserve their support. Your donors need to understand all of that, and need clear communications when you report on the impact of their support and ask for additional resources.
We also can help you in case there is bad news. We offer special services related to crisis management that are based on our years of experience in getting out news about organizations – be it good news or bad.
Click here to get a free copy of our Crisis Communications guide.
We see communications and development efforts as tightly linked and co-dependent. We will help you optimize these critical activities, using all appropriate media, to increase your impact.