Across all our service areas, we employ a core set of strategies to ensure that the ways we work and the solutions we create solve problems and build your capacity, in right-sized and sustainable ways.
Surface & Articulate Needs & Intentions
Whether designing a program or building a system to manage its performance, building a database, improving processes, or facilitating planning, we begin each of our projects by collaborating with a team of your stakeholders to surface and articulate their needs and intentions. We don’t want nonprofits to undertake evaluation, planning, or anything else only because they were mandated to or because it’s become an organizational habit. We want to create tools and processes that are tailored to your users’ needs and intended uses, so the things we build come to life and deliver real value.
Design Efforts Aligned with Intentions
Informed by your stakeholders’ priorities, needs, and intentions, we intentionally design our projects to be right-sized for your organization’s capacity, budget, and timeline while adhering to our theory and approach and applying our expertise and experience. We don’t believe in one-size-fits-all approaches. Don’t settle for off-the-shelf approaches to your most important work. Tune into your organization’s needs, culture, and capacities and design the processes and tools you need to execute on your mission and achieve your goals. We empower and equip you to do that.
Envision and Inspire Cultures of Learning
While creating tactical solutions, we aim to also cultivate a culture of learning within your team by sparking curiosity and questioning assumptions. These mindsets and cultures are essential to sustaining the solutions we create and bringing them to life. Plans, programs, databases, and measurement tools become dead weight unless you are continually engaging with them through self-assessment, reflection, iteration, and experimentation.
Introduce and Demystify Tools & Techniques
There are so many disciplines and toolkits from which nonprofits can draw and adapt to meet their planning, management, and evaluation needs. Too often, academics, consultants, and the business world rely on jargon that makes these concepts and tools seem more complex and less applicable than they actually are. We introduce, demystify, and adapt concepts and tools from many disciplines and toolkits to equip nonprofits to reclaim their time, energy, and attention and channel it all toward impact in the most effective ways.
Design and Build Tools & Systems
We work primarily in four service areas – program performance management and evaluation, data management, quality and process improvement, and planning – to build the tools and systems you need to plan thoughtfully, design intentionally, work efficiently, and learn continuously. Read more about the tools and systems we build on our Services page.