The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution

Project Overview
The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution is the product of a four-year research and development effort at La Piana Consulting. The Strategy Formation Project (2003–2007) was initially conceived as an investigation into the limitations of traditional strategic planning. The pleas of the nonprofit leaders and funders La Piana Consulting met (“You’re going to find a better way, right?” and “Thank God you’re doing this, strategic planning is such a waste of time!”) convinced them early on that the project needed to evolve into a general effort to find alternatives that are more useful than the traditional ways in which nonprofits undertake strategic planning. The project grew in scope and intensity with the following elements.

• A review of the enormous (mostly business) literature on strategic management (the larger field in which we find strategic planning)
• Interviews with two dozen nonprofit leaders
• Interviews with “strategy gurus” whose opinions are widely respected
• Interviews with leading nonprofit capacity builders, colleagues in the larger work to increase the effectiveness and capacity of the nonprofit sector
• The creation of a methodology for piloting some of the new ideas that the La Piana team developed or adapted
• Initial testing of these ideas with two groups of executive directors, totaling twenty nonprofit leaders, located in two states
• A series of one-day sessions with three organizations whose leaders they knew, and who were willing to be the first guinea pigs
• Six-month pilot efforts with thirty geographically (and otherwise) diverse nonprofits, staggered over a period of two years, resulting in the development of a new model, Real-Time Strategic Planning

Funders
The initiative was supported by nine foundations:

• Edna McConnell Clark Foundation
• The Forbes Funds
• Evelyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund
• Hawai’i Community Foundation
• Heinz Endowments
• W.K. Kellogg Foundation
• R.K. Mellon Foundation
• Meyer Foundation
• The David and Lucile Packard Foundation
  

Purpose
The initiative was undertaken to address the need for effective methods of forming strategies in the nonprofit sector. It evolved out of a growing recognition of the shortcomings of traditional strategic planning to meet the needs of nonprofits to form and implement effective strategies to address challenges and opportunities on an ongoing basis, and to effectively advance their missions.  The ultimate objective of the project was to help nonprofits increase their capacity to be more strategic in thought and action on a day-to-day basis.

Milestones
In the first year of the initiative, La Piana Consulting completed a literature review and interviews and discussions with nonprofit, academic, and business sector leaders to learn how organizational strategy is formed.  They drew on the thinking of the business sector and adapted this to the nonprofit sector. Based on this research and their own experience, they developed an initial process and tools for nonprofits to use in forming effective strategy.

In the second year of the initiative they focused on “hands-on” research and development, and tested the initial process and tools with a cross-section of close to 20 nonprofit organizations including a pilot cohort of nine nonprofits based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  At the beginning of the pilot phase in the Bay Area, they began a process evaluation of the project, using an outside evaluator. This has provided invaluable input to the project, as the evaluator worked as a true learning partner with them.

In the third year, La Piana Consulting piloted the evolving process and tools with a cohort of ten organizations located in Hawai’i.  They also applied what they were learning in many of their client projects, which allowed them to try variations on the process and tools, and to test these with a variety of types and sizes of nonprofits located throughout the country.

In the fourth and final year, they worked with a pilot cohort of 6 nonprofits in Pittsburgh, PA.