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How We Can Help

Strategy

We are strategists 
and agents of change.

At Strategic Impact, we help organizations with Strategy, we help with Planning, and we help with Execution. It is important to recognize that Strategy, Planning, and Execution are three inter-related but distinct bodies of work.

Our proven system helps organizations excel in all three of these areas. And while all are crucially important, we have found that strategies are the biggest determinant of long-term success and impact. As Peter Drucker said, “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all.”

Strategy

An organization’s approach to achieving
maximum social impact in pursuit of its purpose.

Planning

Planning is the act of determining tactics, initiatives, timelines, budgets, responsibilities, and deliverables.

Execution

Execution is the process for getting those tactics, initiatives, and deliverables done in the most efficient and effective manner possible..

Mergers

Mergers as a Strategy to Enhance Impact

In the nonprofit world, few words are used more frequently than “strategy” or “strategic”. Based on many years of research, we have adopted this simple definition: A strategy is an approach used to achieve a major objective, overcome a major challenge, and/or mitigate a major risk. In this context, when you take away the emotions around it, a merger is nothing more than a strategy to help you achieve your purpose, address major challenges, and/or mitigate major risks.

How much more impact could we collectively make if all organizations made major strategic decisions based on what advanced our purpose, goals, and impact, as opposed to what simply advanced our brand, budget, and organization?

What would happen if…

  • We honestly look at the silos, fragmentation, and duplicative efforts of our sector and ask ourselves if there’s a better way to utilize the resources we do have.
  • We commit to making all strategic decisions, including those about mergers, based on what best advances our reason for existence, not based on what keeps our organization in existence.
  • Funders invest in the cost of organizations utilizing mergers, alliances, and other partnership opportunities as strategies to make greater collective impact.

We believe it is time to stop competing and start partnering to maximize impact, outcomes, and results.

Governance

It is common knowledge that Boards must adhere to the Duty of Care, Duty of Obedience, and Duty of Loyalty. In a for-profit corporation, the board member’s legal and fiduciary duty is to the shareholders. But where does the duty of loyalty sit in a nonprofit corporation? The American Law Institute recently came out with a Restatement of the Duty of Loyalty, providing this guidance.

“A fiduciary’s good faith belief in what is the best interest of the charity must be objectively reasonable in light of the charity’s purposes.” In other words… Boards must put the purpose of the organization before the organization itself.

With this principle in mind, we help the boards and leadership of Strategic Impact enterprises:

  1. Get clear on their legal and fiduciary duties, core purpose, and strategies
  2. Draft bylaws and governance policies
  3. Explore ways to partner with other players in the ecosystem
  4. Set up a functional committee structure
  5. Implement practices that are proven to maintain accountability without micromanaging
  6. Improve working relationships between board members and leadership
  7. Establish an annual meeting calendar and checklist that helps ensure that the right work gets done in the right way, in the right cadence