A guide to finding the right nonprofit strategic planning consultant
“All executives know that strategy is important. But almost all also find it scary, because it forces them to confront a future they can only guess at.”
Roger Martin (1)
If developing strategy is scary then so is finding a strategic planning consultant.
Selecting the right nonprofit strategic planning consultant is one of the most important decisions you can make.
The wrong consultant can be a huge waste of time.
This guide was put together to help guide you in finding a nonprofit strategic planning consultant who is best suited for helping develop strategic plans in the nonprofit sector.
My experience is in the medical nonprofit sector - disease foundations, professional societies, institutes and academic researchers. I use examples from that sector; however, the concepts explained below should be applicable to any nonprofit organization.
In this article, you will learn:
A clear definition of the nonprofit strategic planning process and why it is important
The different types of strategic plans
What a nonprofit strategic planning consultant does
How to decide on what kind of strategic planning consultant you need
The steps to engaging a nonprofit strategic planning consultant
The nonprofit strategic planning process may not be what you think it is.
Strategic planning for nonprofits is not the same as it is for a business.
In business, the goal is to make the company more competitive. The goal of strategic planning for a nonprofit is to create the biggest change. Nonprofits focus more on impact.
Strategy for achieving impact is almost always about maximizing collaboration.
For medical nonprofits (disease foundations, institutes, professional societies and academic researchers), one of the most impactful strategies is forming a consortium, a community or an ecosystem.
The best medical nonprofits create a critical mass of stakeholders.
Even clinical research studies have the most impact when they are of a size that necessitates the collaboration of dozens of centers.
You might argue that a proven strategy is to patent research findings as an individual organization. However, that is not much of a strategy.
Translating medical research into a medical innovation requires the collaboration of a wider array of experts and stakeholders. This reality points to another reason why nonprofit strategic planning is different than strategic planning for businesses.
Stakeholder involvement is key to any nonprofit strategic planning process.
While it is often a good strategy to involve stakeholders in strategic planning for your business, think user-centered innovation, it is not as essential as in the nonprofit sector. In the nonprofit sector, stakeholder involvement is crucial for achieving impact and creating meaningful change.
Nonprofit strategic planning consultants play a key role in facilitating this collaborative process, ensuring that all relevant stakeholders are engaged and aligned towards the organization's mission and goals. By guiding nonprofits through the strategic planning process, consultants help them navigate complexities, leverage expertise, and ultimately drive positive outcomes for the communities they serve.
Stakeholders are both the effectors of and the affected by the change a nonprofit seeks to achieve. In that sense, it is almost a moral obligation to involve stakeholders.
Making a change that affected stakeholders don't want or don't believe in borders on exploitation. This is why on the ladder of citizen participation it is only when there is a true partnership, stakeholders are equal participants in a project, that you move beyond tokenism. Tokenism meaning involving stakeholders in a minimal way just because you have to.
The best nonprofit strategic plans are therefore those developed with stakeholders.
Why is it important to get the nonprofit strategic planning process right?
The biggest challenge for any organization looking to effect an important change is that to achieve that change, you have to get a large enough community of stakeholders behind your vision.
Yet as any group gets larger and larger, there comes a point where it is impossible to maintain the same degree of cohesiveness you have in a smaller group. That, however, does not mean you have to give up on your vision for change.
What tears a larger group apart is a fundamental human need for independence.
This can be a simple one organization or a smaller group of organizations believing their ideas for driving the desired change are better than what the group as a whole is working on.
What you need is a way to align an entire community while giving organizations the independence they desire.
A good nonprofit strategic plan helps you to do exactly that.
A good strategy that different stakeholders have made together aligns everyone around a set of goals and while giving everyone their autonomy to pursue those goals in their own way.
An outstanding nonprofit strategy not only aligns and gives autonomy, it fosters the sharing of ideas between independent groups. Learning from each other's success is a powerful way to optimize your way to meaningful change.
This type of balance between alignment and independence has been credited with achieving unprecedented gains (collective impact) in the very complex problem of improving public education in the US.
The second reason that your strategic planning process is important is that if done well, it helps your organization to focus.
Focus not only helps you to apply your resources, people and funding in the most effective manner. Focus also speeds up your organization.
How long does it typically take to make a decision?
It depends. It depends upon the nature of the decision. The more important and the more complex a decision is, the more time is typically spent.
What are you doing as an organization when you are considering a decision?
Spending time researching that decision. And, if you are part of the leadership, that pending decision is certainly occupying some of your headspace.
Pending decisions create inefficiencies.
A good strategy is like a set of a priori decisions. When a new opportunity arises, ask if it is aligned with your strategy or not?
If not, the decision and the response are much simpler.
I recently reached out to someone in the leadership team of a major medical non-profit to see if they were interested in joining a consortium we were building. Within a day, I got the answer.
"Thanks for reaching out. Such a project is not aligned with our current strategy."
I was impressed with the speed of their decision making.
Thinking about it, I should be more impressed with the quality of their strategic plan. It has made them and indirectly those around them, me, more efficient.
Instead of scheduling and having a meeting and then a series of internal meetings, the answer was simply no.
It's also a great way to say no.
As the requester, I don't have worry about whether or not a better description or a more detailed approach would have resulted in a yes.
The biggest risk
One of the most challenging aspects of a strategic planning process is making sure that it is done from an objective and unbiased perspective.
Anyone working for your organization or your board will never be unbiased.
You wouldn't want them working in organization or on your board if they did not have some sort of bias about your organization.
There are therefore two big risks to internally resourced nonprofit strategic planning:
Groupthink
Confirmation bias
Coming up with strategy is about identifying patterns.
If you are not objective, and you cannot be objective about your own work, you will see patterns that do not exist.
You will look for confirmation by those you work with. When that happens, you may see it as strong evidence to confirm what you believe is the right strategy, but it may not be.
Lastly it is import to avoid the ‘planning’ trap. Everyone calls it strategic planning but as Roger Martin points out becoming too focused on the planning aspects is way of avoiding making the choices at the heart of any strategic planning process (1). A strategic plan and strategy are different things.
So, now the question is can a nonprofit strategic planning consultant help with these challenges?
What is a nonprofit strategic planning consultant?
A nonprofit strategic planning consultant offers a mix of skills to support the strategic planning process. Those skills include:
facilitation
strategic advice
implementation plan development
The most important skill is facilitation. As pointed out above, stakeholder involvement is an essential feature of nonprofit strategic planning process.
A skilled facilitator is adept at listening to stakeholders and integrating their perspective without having to go through a prolonged consensus building process.
What's also important is that a nonprofit strategic planning consultant provides an objective and unbiased view. This helps you and your organization avoid confirmation bias and group think.
Expert advice is intertwined with facilitation. Some would say that a facilitator should not get involved in the actual thinking; he or she should not be a domain expert.
With more than 20,000 hours of facilitating dialogue between diverse groups of stakeholders, I can tell you it is my experience and expertise that helps move the facilitation process along.
William Ury, one of the most prominent high stakes negotiators describes how finding a ‘third way’ that integrates the underlying desires and interest is key to finding ways for where there is an impasse (2).
How can a facilitator move quickly to that ‘third way’ without expertise and experience?
Should you hire a nonprofit strategic planning consultant?
You can run a strategic planning process internally and probably have done so in the past. It is a perfectly sensible choice.
However, internal biases and relationship dynamics are likely to make an internally run strategic planning process slow.
A good nonprofit strategic planning consultant will:
Facilitate interaction between stakeholders and your team with an eye towards teasing out the perspectives of multiple different stakeholders.
Energize and inspire your team and your stakeholders
Provide an unbiased and objective viewpoint
Provide strategic advice.
Enable you to make the best possible decision on how to focus.
Help make your strategy executable
Make the strategic planning process more efficient
Challenge you to avoid groupthink and confirmation bias.
Empower you to be more comfortable with the uncertainty that comes with making strategic choices.
All of the above features mean that a good strategic planning consultant can help you move quickly and be more successful in building the critical mass of stakeholders you need to make the changes at the core of your organization's mission.
Steps before you hire a strategic planning consultant:
Decide what type of strategic planning you need to do. There are many different types of strategic planning that serve different purposes:
Develop some novel ideas
Review direction and invigorate the team
Improve decision making
Focus the organization
Help make a decision
Determine what type of strategy planning consultant you are seeking?
A large firm backed by research teams. A large firm will provide good research that has been tailored to apply to most situations.
This may be particularly useful if you are looking to make a decision such as which IT provider to select or specific questions about your restructuring.
The downside to these types of consulting firms is that you will likely work with the less experienced members of the firm.
Or, a small firm where you will be certain that you will have an experienced strategic planning consultant who will have all the skills above and can thereby help you with the thinking process.
If engaging your stakeholders is important to you, a small firm may be your best option. Such a consultant will help you avoid the pitfalls of group biases while also energizing your stakeholders.
Settle on how you are going to identify the consultant.
Are you going to seek a consultant that fits your needs? This is likely the most expedient process. Whether it be online research or getting referrals from your colleagues.
Will you launch an RFP process? An RFP is obviously a much more drawn out process that depending on the setting may or may not find a better consultant.
An RFP process may be a way to save costs, although you have to be careful that competing consultants do not overpromise and under deliver.
How often should strategic planning be done?
How often you need to conduct a strategic planning process depends upon the context. It can be multiple times a year when used to make decisions and to launch new initiatives.
To improve focus, speed up decision making and invigorate the team and stakeholders of an organization, strategic planning should occur every 2-5 years.
Consortium projects are a special case where multiple stakeholders are working together which means there is a particular and ongoing need to align everyone.
In the early phases of a consortium project, strategy should be focused on how you are going to work better together. You usually start with a project plan which is usually sufficient to start, but after 1-2 years, I have found a strategic planning process where you engage external stakeholders very helpful for focusing and motivating a consortium.
In the latter phases of a consortium project, strategy should be about how the consortium is going to maintain the assets and the network they have built up. Strategic planning can be very helpful in putting momentum behind the ideas and concepts for how you can continue and maintain the assets and collaboration that have built up over the years.
Case study
The Pulmonary Fibrosis Foundation needed help in gathering stakeholder input for their strategic planning process. l was referred to them because of a past client recommending my work as a facilitator of multi-stakeholder discussions. They engaged me as their strategic planning consultant.
We worked together to develop a process where the different types of stakeholders first met as stakeholder-specific groups. For each group, I facilitated a structured dialogue process that began with the topic of what problem the PFF was best suited to solve. We then moved to a strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats analysis. These structured dialogue sessions resulted in lots of different ideas for strategic directions and initiatives for the PFF.
I then used the feedback and my own experience to make a set of strategic recommendations that then became the basis of the renewed strategic plan. One of the initiatives that emerged out of a renewed focus on broadening out the base of their registry resulted in a successful expansion of a community registry where patients and caregivers enter data themselves.
Conclusion
In conclusion, finding the right nonprofit strategic planning consultant is a crucial decision for any organization in the nonprofit sector.
By understanding the unique nature of strategic planning in the nonprofit sector and the importance of stakeholder involvement, you can ensure that your organization is on the path to achieving its mission and creating meaningful change.
A skilled nonprofit strategic planning consultant can provide facilitation, strategic advice, and an unbiased perspective to help align your stakeholders, focus your organization, and make informed decisions.
With their expertise and guidance, you can navigate the complexities of strategic planning and drive positive outcomes for the communities you serve.
If you would like increase the likelihood that the work you are doing will have a meaningful impact on the lives of individuals suffering from disease, reach out.
At BioSci Consulting we help medical nonprofits, researchers and consortium projects develop and implement strategies that can be used to align the critical mass of stakeholders needed to make a real difference. Set up a call.
References:
Martin, R. L. (2014). The big lie of strategic planning. Harvard business review, 92(1/2), 3-8. https://hbr.org/2014/01/the-big-lie-of-strategic-planning
Tim Ferriss Podcast: Link to the podcast transcript"
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