Organizational Development & Strategic Alignment

When an organization is aligned, everything feels better. Boards and executive teams lead from one shared vision, staff are engaged and well resourced, a positive culture is promoted, goals are achieved, and missions are served with maximum impact. Raise the Bar offers solutions that help your organization get and stay on track, to meet the promise of your mission and make the world a better place.

As strategic consultants, Jennifer Tersigni and the team at Raise the Bar Consulting help hundreds of organizations like yours clarify their purpose, assess strengths and opportunities, coalesce teams around a common vision, develop Boards and leadership, and build strategic and operational plans that foster growth, alignment and impact.

Knowing where you want to go is the first step to getting there. Our Strategic Planning and Visioning services help your team form a shared vision that everyone can coalesce around and develop a roadmap to grow your organization’s key initiatives.

Our Strategic Planning services align your stakeholders, strategic priorities and programs with your common vision, and place value on the process as well as the final product. We engage and motivate internal and external stakeholders in meaningful participation, providing targeted opportunities for involvement at each stage of your process.

We start by meeting your team, understanding your culture and agreeing on outcomes. If your team has already adopted a strategic framework, we build upon what you use. Otherwise, we partner with you to find a framework that works for you. Our processes may include SWOT, lifecycles, and market analyses; stakeholder and community surveys; focus groups and town halls.

Most importantly, we work to ensure that your final Strategic Plan is a dynamic road map that can and should change with the changes in market conditions. You’ll come away with an Executive Summary and a concise plan that serves as a project management tool that your team can use to stay on track and modify for success.

Because organizations have different needs, we offer:

• Visioning Sessions, to gain agreement and alignment behind broad reaching goals.
• Abridged Strategic Planning Processes, to help engage smaller cohorts develop shorter-term, 12- to 24-month plans.
• Comprehensive Strategic Plans, to offer deeper support to groups looking to engage multiple stakeholders, conduct comprehensive analyses, and develop 24- to 48-month Strategic Plans.
• Succession Planning, to help organizations create next steps for filling key vacancies, whether planned or unplanned.
• Facilitation, as a neutral third-party to assist you in holding productive and efficient meetings and retreats.

Understanding where your organization excels is just as important as understanding where your organization may fall short. Our comprehensive organizational assessments focus on all aspects of the health of your organization. We take the time to analyze your organizational culture and leadership, programs, administrative systems, revenue models, resource deployment and governance. We utilize Nonprofit Lifecycles, SWOT, and other leading industry frameworks to evaluate your opportunities. And we elicit feedback using in-person and anonymous methods to gain a 360-perspective that informs study results.

After thorough analysis, we develop a formal report and present our findings to your executive leadership and Board with strategic recommendations. Some people say these reports help “Tell Truth to Power.” The final report provides your Board and Executive with the data you need to make the best possible leadership and resourcing decisions moving forward.

If your leadership thinks something doesn’t feel right in the organization but they’re not sure why, an organizational assessment is the perfect first step on the road to resolution, course correction, and growth.

Through our Strategic Consulting Services, we offer Boards an opportunity to evaluate their work, position themselves for growth and build a circle of leadership to best move an organization forward. We work one-on-one with your Board leadership to assess your governance model, engage Board members, move Boards away from operational involvement where possible, and empower Boards to lead. We help dormant Boards kickstart recruitment and leadership, we help you build member engagement strategies, we help you better deploy your Board resources, and we guide and support you along the way until your team feels our support is no longer needed.

Our Business and Operational Plans examine your enterprise from top to bottom, using both quantitative and qualitative methodologies to help identify areas of strength and opportunities for growth. From there, we partner with you to create a plan for growth and development that aligns with your organization’s current lifecycle. Plans may include market analyses, revenue growth and diversification strategies, operational design improvements, administrative resourcing, marketing and communications strategies, and more, so that you can reach your short and long-term goals and overall potential.

Startup and Expansion

Starting a program, organization or business can be daunting. We work with you to determine what type of entity is best for you (nonprofit, LLC/small business, fiscal sponsorship), and then assess current market conditions, identify growth strategies, assist with the administrative work of starting a new nonprofit or business venture, and help you design your services to maximize your chances of success.

Horizontal and vertical organizational growth can be particularly impactful, if there is a cohesive, long-term strategy to see it through. We help you build the plan to sustainability.

Mergers, Partnerships and Exit Strategies

We work with your team to analyze the relevance of your programs and the community’s capacity to support them. Often, this work begins with an Organizational Assessment that includes recommendations for possible strategic partnerships and transitions. When you are ready, we assist your organization to partner, merge, or exit programs and/or operations with grace and dignity, in ways that best serve your customers and the community, and that celebrate all you have achieved. We also help shepherd your organization through processes of partnership, consolidation, or closure, if needed.

Seeking guidance and assistance for a range of organizational support needs? Our team offers one-on-one or group consulting support based on industry best practices to help your organization stabilize, course correct and grow. Raise the Bar takes an individualized approach which allows our team to fully understand your organization’s unique landscape and challenges before we partner with you to strategize solutions. Our strategic consulting solutions can be tailored to fit the specific needs and goals of your organization and are offered as bundled hours or on retainer.