We complement leaders who are already quite busy with their existing work. If you want to launch new services to address community needs, but you don’t have time to fully develop them, we can provide relief. We can design and run sessions for your team. If you are “too close to the action” to view your landscape objectively or to spot opportunities, we can study these matters and guide you toward solutions. Our field experience, plus our cross-industry and international experience, may be especially useful here.

Furthermore, we can teach skills that you might not have learned yet; e.g., strategic thinking, board engagement, alliance planning, impact evaluation, or executive leadership.

You will likely become clearer about your organization’s direction, more persuasive at recruiting and motivating your board and staff, more adept at weighing options and making decisions, and more skilled at communicating a vision to your team, funders, partners, and community.

If we design initiatives together, you can also expect to emerge with exciting new capabilities and services that will advance your mission, strengthen your team’s resources, and earn more visibility and respect in your field.

Along the way, we will produce visuals and narratives together. You can plug these items directly into strategic plans, board and staff learning materials, and grant proposals.

Our approach tends to be more intimate and customized. We provide personal guidance through conversations and we adjust our approach to match the culture and needs of each client. We do not produce the hefty reports or presentations that larger firms might, but our clients usually prefer brief, timely, and nimble guidance.

We also work with clients who have in-house personnel to implement ideas alongside us. This collaborative approach fosters the team engagement that is essential to staff buy-in, adoption, and execution. 

We have sprinkled images from our work into the Inspirations page on this site, plus examples we have studied in the field. To respect clients’ privacy, we only post a few examples and only share client-specific items with permission, but generally speaking, our work has yielded such diverse results as postsecondary learning and employment gains in low-income neighborhoods; vibrant entrepreneurship in several developing countries; mobile health education and caregiving solutions in Central America and India; attractive quality of life designs among suburban and rural communities in the USA; and professional development that has spurred skilled civic leadership among public officials, foundations, and nonprofit executives.

We have also guided clients towards multi-million dollar increases in revenues and assets to propel larger-scale mission impact.

We serve as a thought partner for foundations’ teams and for foundation-supported nonprofits.

We also design initiatives alongside foundations to catalyze systemic impact in areas such as education, employment, or health.

In addition, we teach strategy, leadership, and design innovation courses to cohorts of foundation-backed nonprofits. This approach enables foundations to strengthen the impact, capacity, and ecosystem of nonprofits in a structured manner.

We wouldn’t presume to know as much as you do! We do study and observe, though, so that we can become conversant and knowledgeable about your context. For a team like us, this process involves discretion. We want to know you well enough to develop sustainable solutions together, while we also preserve a fresh perspective. If you are “too close to the action” to see your situation objectively, you might benefit from our unique viewing angle.

Our involvement is usually in the low- to mid-five figures, in U.S. dollars. We will develop a budget together with you to make sure it is reasonable and suited to your needs.

Sometimes our involvement gets funded through a philanthropic foundation, social impact investor, or corporate sponsor.

Our projects have often generated substantial new funding for clients, too, so the investment results in deeper team skills, larger mission impact, and stronger resources for the long term. 

Virtual projects are perfectly fine. We’ve been doing those with clients across the globe since well before the pandemic.

If you have preferred forms of communication, simply let us know. We use Zoom, Skype, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Miro, Mural, Dropbox, Google Workspace, Microsoft Sharepoint, and other online tools and platforms. 

For Thought Partnerships, we usually arrange six- or twelve-month blocks and then decide together on whether to continue with that arrangement as each block nears completion.

For Initiative Designs, some relationships have a natural ending point upon the launch of an initiative, while others advance into new cycles of innovation.

For Professional Development Courses, the length is usually three to six sessions per cohort. We can structure arrangements to accommodate your availability, grant funding timeline, or fiscal calendar.