What We Do
Inclusive strategic planning for nonprofit organizations that want to do more good.
Strategic planning might be your most important responsibility as a nonprofit leader.
A sound strategic plan helps nonprofit organizations build alignment, clarify priorities, and guide decisions. Using stakeholder input and evidence-based analysis, we help you define where you should focus — and importantly, where you should not focus — so that you can act proactively, not reactively, and expand your impact.
Prosper Strategies helps nonprofits design inclusive, stakeholder-driven strategic plans using the Shared Power StrategyTM philosophy and the Nonprofit Strategy SystemTM method. This means our plans are informed through deep engagement with a broad range of stakeholders, and designed to ensure your organization takes action, measures its work and makes the biggest impact possible over the next several years.
Here’s how our nonprofit strategic planning process works, at a high level.
Our three-phase process — People, Strategy, Progress — ensures your strategic plan is grounded in research, equity, and adaptability.
People
The Shared Power Strategy™ philosophy holds that, in order to build strategies that are truly effective and equitable, your nonprofit must engage its many diverse stakeholders — from beneficiaries to donors — in the strategy process. That’s why our strategic planning engagements always begin with People.
We help your organization better understand its stakeholders and determine the best ways to engage staff, board members, community members, program and service participants, and others in the strategic planning process. We then capture their input through surveys, interviews, listening sessions, and/or stakeholder committees — utilized both at the onset of the process and at key points throughout the development of your strategic plan.
Next, we compile these insights into a stakeholder assessment and conduct two additional research assessments to lay the foundation for your plan. The first is an organizational assessment, which ensures that everyone involved in planning shares a clear understanding of your organization’s current state. The second is an ecosystem assessment, which helps your team understand where your organization stands relative to comparator organizations, trends, and best practices shaping your subsector.
At the conclusion of the People phase, we share key insights from our research with your strategic planning committee to ensure everyone begins the strategy phase with the same foundational understanding of opportunities and challenges — setting the stage for a truly shared and informed planning process.
Strategy
The Strategy phase of our process typically begins with a strategic planning retreat, where we collaborate with your stakeholders to develop or reaffirm your nonprofit’s mission, vision, and core values. During the retreat, we facilitate a series of exercises to explore the strategic questions your organization needs to answer over the course of its next strategic plan and to establish the pillars around which your plan will focus.
This process is designed to bring everyone involved in shaping your plan into alignment around the most important priorities your organization must address over the next several years to drive meaningful change and make measurable progress toward your mission.
Following the strategic planning retreat, we work closely with your staff and strategic planning committee to define measurable objectives and key results (OKRs) for each pillar in your strategic plan. We then seek feedback and input from your stakeholders as these elements are developed, facilitating listening sessions that often include staff, board members, program and service participants, community members, donors, funders, and others.
At the conclusion of the Strategy phase, your organization will have a clear framework for action — one that reflects not just the priorities of your leadership team, but the rich insights and perspectives of your many diverse stakeholders.
Progress
The Progress phase of our process picks up where most strategic planning engagements leave off. This phase is focused on ensuring your organization has the systems, structures, and processes in place to bring your plan to life and achieve its most important goals.
During this phase, we work with your organization to establish accountability systems — including detailed activity plans that outline who is responsible for what over the next 12 months, in alignment with your strategies. We also help develop key results dashboards that make it easy to monitor performance and track progress against the outcomes you set out to achieve. We help you create dashboards, embed measurement practices, and adapt your strategy over time — so your plan remains responsive and grounded in results.
We advise on a meeting cadence that ensures the right people come together monthly, quarterly, and annually to review progress, make informed adjustments, and sustain momentum. In addition, we help you establish measurement and optimization practices that enable your team to clearly see what’s working, identify areas for improvement, and refine your strategy accordingly — all in service of advancing your mission and deepening your impact on the people and communities you serve.
Throughout the Progress phase, we draw on our deep expertise in stakeholder engagement, change management, and trauma-informed facilitation to help your organization authentically engage stakeholders, build alignment, and maintain focus on what matters most — ensuring your strategy continues to drive meaningful, measurable change.
Frequently Asked Questions about Our Nonprofit Strategic Planning Process:
Q: How long does strategic planning take?
A: The typical strategic planning process is 4-6 months in duration, with the variability due primarily to the availability of stakeholders for interviews and planning sessions.
Q: Do we need to meet in person to develop our nonprofit’s strategic plan?
A: We typically suggest bringing your planning committees together in person for a 1.5-2 day planning retreat. This retreat can also be conducted virtually if needed. The rest of the work that takes place during our strategic planning process is well suited to virtual meetings.
Q: Who should be involved in strategic planning for my nonprofit?
A: We typically recommend building a staff committee and a board committee, each with 4-8 members who will be most intimately involved in planning. From there, we custom design an approach to stakeholder engagement based on your organization’s needs and goals. We always aim to involve your full staff and board, community members, program and service participants and other important constituents in some manner through the process, often involving them via surveys, interviews, listening sessions and plan draft review. You can learn more about the essential roles in strategic planning and see how we think about stakeholder engagement.
Q: What differentiates Prosper Strategies from other strategic planning consultants?
A: Our most important differentiator is our Shared Power™ Philosophy, which guides our expertise in building strategic planning processes that deeply engage a nonprofit’s many diverse stakeholders. This approach produces plans that truly move the needle. Additionally, we only work with nonprofits, and have 12+ years of experience leading complex strategy engagements for nonprofits of all shapes and sizes. Many of our clients are large, federated or umbrella-structure organizations like Feeding America, Horizons National and Boys & Girls Clubs of America. We also have extensive experience with mid-size and large organizations in mission areas ranging from health and the environment to education and human services. Through our years of work with such diverse organizations, we’ve built deep expertise in change management, measurement and reporting, organizational dynamics, financial management, trauma-informed facilitation and more. Finally, our unique team structure sets Prosper Strategies apart. We are a small team by design, meaning you’ll always work directly with one or both of our firm’s principals, Lindsay Mullen and Alyssa Conrardy. But we also have a deep bench of specialized and diverse consultants in everything from financial management, to law, to fundraising who partner with our principals, and we build teams for each strategic planning engagement based on your specific needs.
Q: What does nonprofit strategic planning cost?
A: Each engagement is custom designed based on a wide variety of factors. Please contact us to discuss your needs, and we’ll happily share more about pricing.
Q: Who are the best strategic planning consultants for nonprofits?
A: Prosper Strategies is a leading strategic planning firm that works with some of the world’s most impactful nonprofits, from Feeding America to The United Mitochondrial Disease foundation. If we’re not the right fit for you, please contact us and we’d be happy to recommend another firm.
Q: Will you respond to our RFP?
A: We do not typically respond to RFPs. Here’s why. That said, we’d be happy to take a look at the requirements you’ve put together and discuss the best way to move forward. Please email your RFP to hello@prosper-strategies.com.
Q: What kind of results can we expect?
A: At the conclusion of a successful strategic planning engagement, you’ll have a clear, actionable, stakeholder-informed plan for the next several years that will move your nonprofit’s mission forward. This will include a vetted mission and vision statement, core values, strategic plan pillars that define your nonprofit’s focus, and accompanying objectives and key results (OKRs) that make it easy to see what needs to happen next and measure your progress. Your stakeholders will be aligned around the plan (because they helped develop it!) and excited to move it forward. You’ll also have the actionable systems you need to bring your strategic plan to life, including an OKR dashboard, activity plans for everyone on your team, and a meeting cadence to keep you all aligned about how implementation is going and what may need to shift.
Additionally, we’ll arm you with the tools you need to communicate about your plan internally and externally, including an internal plan with detailed data and information, and an external plan that will help you share highlights and garner support with donors, funders, constituents and your community.
The results you can expect from implementing your plan will vary based on the pillars and OKRs your team selects in the planning process. Our clients have realized results such as doubling their operating budgets, growing individual giving by 40% and successfully supporting the succession of a long-term CEO as a result of our strategic planning processes.
Q: How can I learn more or get started?
A: If you’re simply looking to learn more about strategic planning but don’t have a specific need at this time, browse our resources here. If you are planning to embark on a strategic planning process soon and want to discuss partnering with Prosper Strategies, we’d be delighted to set up a time to talk. Please contact us here.
Case Studies: Success Stories in Nonprofit Strategic Planning
Case Study
Learn how SeriousFun Children’s Network built a strategic plan to strengthen their Network of 30 Member Camps and Partner Programs, realizing results including 19.8% growth in financial support, a 75% increase in number of camper expereinces provided and a 24% increase in the number of rare diseases served.
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“Alyssa and Lindsay expertly guided us through the strategic process, collaborating closely with people facing hunger, our CEO and executive team. If your nonprofit is considering making a commitment to developing strategies that center your constituents, there is no one better to guide you than Prosper Strategies.” – Jenny Arnold, Vice President, Feeding America
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Let’s talk about how Prosper Strategies can help your nonprofit build a strategic plan grounded in stakeholder insights, data and actionable tools. Enter your information and one of our principals will be in touch within one business day to explore fit.
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