All children deserve to grow up with the support of a loving, permanent family. Sadly, many do not experience this because of neglect, abuse, behavioral challenges, or delinquency. Unfortunately, our societal response to these challenges is sometimes part of the problem. Far too many families—particularly families of color—are broken up, when they could have been strengthened and kept whole.

We work with nonprofits, funders, and government leaders to help strengthen families and prevent system involvement whenever possible. When system involvement is necessary, we work to ensure that it creates safety, permanency, and well-being for children. Our approach is data-driven and focused on the needs of the children and families affected by these challenges.

Questions We Help Child Welfare Nonprofits Address

Nonprofits play multiple roles in the child welfare field. Some provide direct services, some advocate for system change, some work to strengthen the field, and some do a mixture of all of these. We work with your team to help you get clear on the impact you want to achieve, develop a strategy for reaching your goals, and align your organization and finances to that strategy. Questions we help answer include:

• Growing Effective Services: How can my organization plan for significant growth that creates lasting results for many more children?
• Integrating Services: How do I break down silos between programs and services to ensure children get the help they need when they need it?
• Reducing Racial Disparities: How can my organization help reduce racial disparities in outcomes? What needs to change internally in our organization?
• Developing New Strategies: How can my organization move beyond what it does today to create more impact?
• Addressing Organizational Challenges: What is the most effective way to manage programs spread across many geographies? 
• Making Ends Meet: How do I create financial sustainability when contracts do not cover the real costs of operating my programs and services? Should I exit any programs?

Questions We Help Child Welfare Philanthropists Address

Relative to other causes, there is very little philanthropic funding in the child welfare field. While this is regrettable, it means that philanthropists who do invest in this field have a broad range of impact opportunities. We help philanthropists understand the opportunities for impact, select options that fit with their values and capabilities, and align their grantmaking and non-financial support to make the most of these opportunities.

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• Identifying Focus Areas: Where are opportunities for impact within child welfare that fit with my values and capabilities?
• Finding Grantees: What nonprofits should I support to facilitate my commitment to achieving results in child welfare?
• Supporting Grantees: How do I help my grantees envision and plan for their next stage of growth and development?
• Collaborating with Other Funders: How might collaboration accelerate our progress towards our goals? With whom should we collaborate? How should we do it, and what resources do we need?
• Reducing Racial Disparities: How can our work help to reduce racial disparities in outcomes? What needs to change internally in our organization?
• Building the Field: How can I help to strengthen the ecosystem of organizations (e.g. direct service providers, advocates, funders, researchers, technical assistance providers) that all must work together to create positive outcomes for youth?

Societies have a moral imperative to help every child learn and thrive. Smart investments in early relationships, care and education produce significant health and social benefits and contribute to economic mobility, especially for children facing significant adversity and their families. With equitable outcomes, particularly for children and families of color as an overarching goal, we help philanthropists, nonprofits, and NGOs develop strategies to improve outcomes for our youngest children across the globe.

Questions We Help Early Childhood Nonprofits and NGOs Address

Early childhood NGOs and nonprofits are doing the hard work of service delivery, advocacy, system-building and system change day in and out. We collaborate with visionary teams seeking to dramatically expand your impact, working side by side to find the answers you seek by providing deep expertise and rigorous strategic and analytic support.

• Devising Breakthrough Growth Strategies: How can my organization create a strategy for significant growth that meets the increased demand and creates lasting results for many more children and families, while also ensuring fidelity to our model?
• Going Beyond Directly Delivering Programs: How do I translate what I've learned by directly serving children and families to practices other organizations can use to achieve similar impact?
• Building the Field: What do the organizations and leaders that my organization works alongside need in order to make progress toward equitable outcomes for children and families--and what can my organization contribute? How do we work to ensure cohesion and collaboration, and minimize duplication or isolation among organizations’ efforts?
• Creating a Sustainable Future: How do I understand the economics of scaling and develop and diversify the funding sources and effective operating model that sustains my organization for years to come?
• Balancing Experimentation and Growth: When should we make trade-offs between
• experimenting with new ideas and focusing on growth?
• Centering Equity: How can we ensure that our work centers and creates sustained positive impact for the experiences of children and families served least well by the systems and structures that exist today, and where can we make changes to make progress toward equitable outcomes? How do we strengthen our strategies for amplifying families’ voices and stories, and engaging families as full partners and leaders in the work of transforming opportunities for children?
• Measuring Our Progress and Learning: Are we clear on the near-term and long-term goals we have for the children and families we serve directly as well as for the local/regional/national system of which we are one player? Do we have an approach to measuring indicators of progress on these goals that accelerates our learning and continuous improvement? Should we pursue external evaluations of our work and when? How should we prepare for this? How does our measurement approach illuminate and honor the experience of children and families and support our equity aspirations?

Questions We Help Early Childhood Funders Address

We listen to your philanthropic ambitions, engage communities to help you understand the needs and opportunities for impact, and provide you with options tailored to your goals.

• Supporting Grantees: How do I help my grantees envision and plan for their next stage of growth and development toward equitable outcomes in early childhood?
• Investing Strategically: Given the momentum in the field and the advice of community leaders, where can my philanthropy best be deployed to accelerate existing efforts and address barriers to equitable outcomes at scale?
• Collaborating with Other Funders and Grantees: How might collaboration accelerate our progress towards advancing outcomes for young children and their families? Who should we collaborate with? How should we do it, and what resources do we need?
• Building the Field: How is my foundation positioned to strengthen the broader ecosystem beyond the direct service organizations and programs in my portfolio?

Educators in the United States strive to ensure that a child’s race, ethnicity, zip code, or parents’ education level no longer serve as predictors for success in life. Across the globe, educators pursue similar efforts to overcome the negative effects of bias and inequity based on gender, caste, religion, or income.

We work with philanthropists, nonprofits, and NGOs to confront structural and systemic inequities with innovative approaches designed to create better lifetime outcomes for young people.

Questions We Help Nonprofits, NGOs, and Educators Address

Education nonprofits and NGOs deliver services and advocate for lasting systemic change–against a backdrop of continually declining resources. We collaborate with visionary leaders and teams to accelerate progress towards equitable outcomes, working side by side to help answer questions—such as the following—about overcoming barriers to progress.

• Achieving Breakthrough Impact at Scale: How can my organization achieve breakthrough impact for the learners served least well (and in some cases, oppressed) by today’s systems? And how can I do so at scale?
• Centering Equity and Applying an Asset-Based Lens: How can my organization set universal educational goals for children while targeting strategies to the most marginalized learners? How does my organization counter the deficit mindset in education that focuses on problems rather than potential.
• Creating a Sustainable and Lasting Future: How does my organization secure the required financial resources and develop an effective operating model that will sustain the impact of our work for years to come?
• Innovation and Growth: What is the right balance between investing in innovation and growing our core approach, in particular in service to equity?
• Building the Field: How can my organization best work with like-minded organizations across the broader education sector to make progress towards our shared goals?
• Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning: Are we clear on our impact goals for learners and systems? Do we have the right measurement approach and capabilities to track progress, learn, and innovate? Have we thoughtfully centered equity in our MEL approach?

Questions We Help Education Funders Address

Funders face challenges in identifying how best to use their resources to pursue their goals. We listen to your philanthropic ambitions, partnering with you to engage communities and learn from stakeholders with various experiences and vantage points—including students, parents, educators, researchers, and field and community leaders—and then provide you with options tailored to your goals. We steward your decision-making process, and help answer questions, such as those below:

• Supporting Grantees: How do I help my grantees envision and plan for their next stage of growth and development in delivering breakthrough impact?
• Investing Strategically: Where can I best deploy my philanthropic resources to progress existing efforts and address barriers to equitable outcomes at scale?
• Accelerating Place-Based Improvement: How do I improve education outcomes within a place (or places) about which I care deeply? How do I create lasting change?
• Collaborating with Other Funders and Grantees: How might collaboration improve outcomes for the most marginalized learners? With whom should we collaborate? How should we do it, and what resources do we need?
• Building the Field: How is my foundation positioned to strengthen the broader ecosystem? What systemic and structural barriers must be addressed to accelerate population-level change?
• Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning: Are we clear on our impact goals for our grantees and ourselves? Do we and our grantees have the right measurement approach and capabilities and resources to track progress, learn, and innovate? Have we thoughtfully centered equity in our MEL approach?

A decade ago, few in the social sector regarded the environment and climate change as among the highest-priority issues. That’s not the case today. The field has become increasingly vibrant, with environmental and climate issues moving up the priority list for leading funders, while the urgency to achieve faster progress with greater equity has never been more critical.

Whatever your environmental endeavor, Bridgespan can help you address the strategy and operational issues that frequently cause nonprofits and funders to stumble on the path to becoming high-performing organizations and achieving their visions for a sustainable and just society.

Answering Questions to Help Environmental Nonprofits and Intermediaries Work More Effectively

Your mission is to improve the environment. But with so many players pursuing a similar path, it’s important for your organization to define its unique role, including its relationship to funders. Our consulting teams can help your organization address important questions like the following:

• Strategic Clarity: What segments of the environmental field hold the most promise for impact, given our unique value-added? What’s the most promising role for us to play, individually and in collaboration with other players, including funders?
• Growth and Scaling: What growth options will enable us to achieve the right impact, including how we serve the most marginalized or vulnerable communities? When is collaboration a good idea?
• Funding Strategy: Do I have a funding approach for sustainable growth? Which funders are the best fit for our impact goals?
• Organizational Effectiveness: Are the right leadership development and organizational structures and processes in place to execute our strategy? How should we adapt our operating model to the new requirements of our strategy?
• Portfolio Assessment: Am I evaluating programs and services to ensure they are contributing to our mission and are sustainable?

Answering Questions that Help Philanthropists, Collaborators, and Impact Investors Achieve Environmental and Climate Goals

You care about our planet and the legacy we are leaving future generations. Investing in the fragmented environmental field can be complex and daunting. Often, multiple global actors are addressing discrete and overlapping elements of environmental problems. You may need help creating a strategy that fits the pieces together to have the greatest impact. Bridgespan’s philanthropy consulting teams can help you find solutions to your priority issues:

• Strategic Clarity: With so many funding possibilities, how do we develop a strategy that has coherence and brings a focus to my grants or impact investments?
• Selecting the Right Grantees or Investees: How do we identify and effectively support a diverse range of grantees or investees that represent the communities most affected by climate change and other environmental concerns?
• Collaborating With Other Funders: What are the best opportunities to join with other funders? How do we structure our approach to collaboration?
• Measuring Impact: How do we help grantees or investees collect and analyze the qualitative and quantitative data needed to measure success?

Your people dedicate every day to improving the lives of individuals and families in the communities your organization serves. As a leader, you carry the responsibility to ensure that your leadership team has the knowledge, skills, and diversity needed to work effectively to achieve your goals. Based on years of experience, we understand that developing a high-performing leadership team is not easy. We draw on that rich experience to tailor a leadership development plan to your organization’s needs.

Leadership Development Questions We Help Nonprofits Answer

The people in your organization allow you to have impact. Yet, complexities with hiring, training and retaining diverse and talented people can be overwhelming. We collaborate with your team to develop solutions for your unique leadership development challenges. We can help you with answers a wide range of questions, including:

• Strengthening the Leadership Team: What programs or practices can I adopt to improve my executive team’s effectiveness?
• Building Bench Strength: How do I build the processes needed to create a pipeline of future leaders ready to step into key roles, including executive director to ensure we have impact?
• Making Diversity a Priority: How does our organization create an inclusive, customized talent development process (particularly if you are spread across geographies and cultures?)
• Coping With Uncertainty: Given limited resources and escalating demand, how does my leadership team set priorities and make tradeoffs?

Leadership Development Questions We Help Funders Answer

Funders care deeply about the ability of the nonprofits they support to field effective leadership teams. We collaborate with your team to identify leadership development opportunities for your grantees. We can assist in addressing a variety of questions, including:

• Developing Senior Leaders: How can I best support the leadership training opportunities for senior nonprofit leaders?
• Supporting Diversity: What programs or practices best serve leadership development opportunities for people of color?
• Focusing on Communities: How do I develop a strategy to enhance the effectiveness of leadership teams among grantees that I support within a community or region?
• Building the Leadership Field: How do I identify opportunities to invest in strengthening the field of leadership training for nonprofits?

Social sector leaders work tirelessly to improve the quality of life for those they serve. Yet many are keenly aware of the gap that exists between their current efforts and their long-term vision and goals. Innovation and reinvention can close this gap. Bridgespan helps organizations define their innovation agenda and build their capacity to innovate over time.

Bridgespan supports funders, nonprofits, and NGOs in pursuing social innovation in three ways. We partner with the organizations in: 1) Developing strategies aligned to impact goals, 2) Designing for the organizational capacity and processes required to innovate, and 3) Facilitating collaborative processes, including Impact Labs, that engage stakeholders in generating and supporting the development of innovative ideas and initiatives.

Questions We Help Nonprofit and NGO Leaders Address

Many organizations recognize the need for social innovation to generate greater impact, but they don’t know where to begin. We work side-by-side with your team, helping you answer your most important questions:

• Developing a high-impact, adaptive strategy: What is the gap between your goals and current efforts? Where can innovation help close that gap? In particular, how will your innovation agenda drive towards more equitable outcomes by race and other important dimensions?
• Organizational design and operating model: How will your organization need to change to become more innovative? How will you create the type of diverse and inclusive culture that is key to innovation? What structure, roles, and processes will it take to sustain that capacity?
• Product and program innovation: What are the problems you seek to solve, and for whom, which require a new program or service model? What is the process you will use to develop, test, and refine new approaches, particularly to ensure they support equitable outcomes for those most vulnerable?
• Stakeholder engagement and collaboration: How will you engage key stakeholders and partners to source, co-design, and pursue innovative ideas? How will you sustain those innovative initiatives?
• Measurement, evaluation and learning: Are you clear on the most critical indicators to track with regard to your innovation agenda? Do you have the right measurement approach and capabilities to track progress, learn, and innovate over time? Have you thoughtfully centered equity in your MEL approach?

Questions We Help Funders Address

Funders are often eager to support innovative ideas. But, it can be a challenge to move from wanting to encourage innovation to knowing how to support leaders and organizations to innovate. We listen to your philanthropic ambitions and recommend approaches then help you navigate a number of key questions, including the following:

• Investing strategically: Given your philanthropic preferences and the gaps in the field, where will you need to invest in innovative leaders, organizations, and solutions to achieve greater impact? How can you ensure your support reaches innovators and innovations that meet the needs of those least well served by practices, systems and structures today?
• Supporting grantees: What type of funding and other services will you provide to encourage and support grantees to take smart risks and do the hard work of innovating toward better solutions?
• Facilitating collaboration: How can your organization collaborate with grantees, other funders, and field leaders to source, screen, and support the most promising innovators and innovations?

Measurement is an important topic for funders who want to know how their money is spent, for nonprofits and NGOs that want to show their programs work, and for impact investors committed to financial and social returns. Measurement, however, isn’t just a yardstick for success, it's a tool for learning and decision making that leads to better performance. As such, it aides strategic clarity, facilitates equity and inclusion, and validates innovation.

We tailor our approach to nonprofit measurement and evaluation to meet the specific needs of every client, guiding and gauging progress toward their ambitious goals.

Questions about Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning We Help Nonprofits Address

We think of nonprofit measurement, evaluation, and learning as decision-making tools, and we bring a racial and global equity lens to all of our measurement work. These tools are most effective when used organization-wide and when they incorporate measurement of programs, finance, operations, and leadership. We have helped clients answer questions such as:

• What specific outcomes will we hold ourselves accountable for and over what timeframe?
• What indicators will we use to track progress?
• How do we design performance measurement that considers racial, ethnic, cultural, and socioeconomic factors?
• How do we choose between—or blend—quantitative and qualitative measurement?
• How can we use data to make decisions and innovate, and how do we share it internally and externally?

Questions about Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning We Help Philanthropy Address

As a funder, you may wrestle both with internal measurement concerns as well as how to help grantees measure their progress toward stated goals. We can provide guidance on a variety of topics, such as:

• What outcomes do we care about for ourselves?
• How do our grants map to those outcomes?
• What outcomes do we care about for our grantees?
• What key performance indicators matter most for grantees, and how do we track those indicators?
• What tools (e.g., dashboards) can we use to track impact?
• How do we center racial equity in our measurement strategy?

Questions about Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning We Help Impact Investors Address

We collaborate with impact investors across a range of asset classes—from market-rate private equity to below-market rate “catalytic” investments where there are higher levels of financial risk or expected lower returns. We tailor our support to meet your needs as you seek help with questions such as:

• What impact do I hope to achieve as a fund?
• How do I evaluate the potential social or environmental impact of an investment?
• What quantitative or qualitative measures should I use to track progress?
• What key performance indicators matter most for my investments?
• How will I use performance measures to manage my investments to stay on track for anticipated impact?

Growing nonprofits take pride in reaching more people and places with effective programs and services. Yet expansion often causes growing pains that call for adjustments in an organization’s operating model—its blueprint for how best to deploy people and resources. We work with nonprofits and funders to assess and adjust operating models to reflect changing organizational needs.

Questions We Help Nonprofits and NGOs Answer

As an organization grows nationally or globally, a shift in strategy or confusion about decision-making roles often triggers an operating model review. We collaborate with your team to develop solutions for your unique challenges, providing expertise and rigorous analytic support. We can help you answer to a wide range of questions, including those below:

• Keeping Pace with Growth: As we grow to new regions or countries, how does our organizational and leadership structure need to change? How do we incorporate a new program or funding stream into our organization?
• Getting Better at Decision Making: How do we improve our ability to make timely, effective decisions? How do we define decision-making roles and processes?
• Filling Capability Gaps: Where do we have capability gaps, and what is the right way to fill them?
• Organizing to Serve Networks: What services does our network center provide to affiliates, and how do we deliver them for greatest value?
• Prioritizing Diversity and Equity: How do we build diversity and equity into our revised operating model?

Questions We Help Funders Answer

An ambitious new strategy often requires an operating model change to lay the groundwork for effective implementation. Our collaborative approach places your needs front and center. We listen to your concerns and provide you with options tailored to your goals. We can assist in addressing a variety of questions, including the following:

• Adjusting to a New Strategy: How will our new strategy change staff responsibilities and the way individuals and teams work? What new capabilities must our team develop, and in what office or country should we build them?
• Collaborating with Others: What decision-making approach works best when we are collaborating with other funders and organizations?
• Partnering with Grantees: How do we organize our grantee relationship and support functions to achieve our commitments to a grantee-centered culture? 
• Internal Effectiveness and Alignment: How can our governance practices, including the roles of donor(s), board, and professional leadership, be most productive?

We envision communities where all residents can thrive, regardless of their race or income. Barriers to economic and social mobility, such as limited job opportunities, restricted access to good schools or loans, and substandard medical care, make it hard for individuals and families to thrive. Structural forces of economic and racial inequity make it much more likely for Black, Indigenous, and other people of color to face these barriers. We work with funders, national and local intermediaries, and local nonprofits to understand community barriers and to create new approaches and partnerships that meet the pressing priorities of their most marginalized communities.

Questions We Help Philanthropists Address

We listen carefully to your goals for place-based change and work with you to develop an action plan. Our collaborative approach places your community context, values, and priorities front and center. You control the decisions. We provide you with tailored options.

• Understanding Areas of Opportunity for Impact: How do I identify the priorities of community members and other stakeholders, particularly people of color? How do research, local assets, and momentum inform how I translate priorities into action plans? For community foundations, what are the opportunities to better serve donors and direct their funds to the highest-impact opportunities in the community?
• Learning From and Collaborating With Others: From what past and current efforts can I learn? How might collaboration with others, including across sectors, accelerate change?
• Investing Strategically: What strategy will enable my resources, both grants and investments, to effectively lead to impact while advancing racial equity?
• Changing my Organization to Support Racial Equity: What changes should I make in the funding process, in my team, and in my organization's culture to advance racial equity goals?
• Learning and Improving: How do I measure the impact of my investments? How can I, and the organizations in which I invest, learn and improve over time?

Questions We Help Place-Based Nonprofits Address

Nonprofits that support place-based mobility are up against long-standing disparities in housing, employment, education, and health caused by public policy decisions, market failures, lack of coordination, and patterns of discrimination. To overcome these inequalities, nonprofits must develop new, collaborative approaches to address interrelated issues.

We work with your team to identify high-impact opportunities by providing deep expertise and rigorous analytic support.

• Embedding Community Voice and Authority: What are best practices for bringing in community, particularly those of Black, Indigenous, Latinx and other structurally marginalized groups, to shape and help implement an agenda?
• Devising Strategies for Transformative Impact: What are the right goals to set for my community that will lead to inclusive, sustained change? Where can my resources produce the highest and most equitable impact? How do I measure the change I seek? Who can I collaborate with to achieve these goals?
• Creating a Sustainable Future: How do I understand the economics of scaling and develop the funding sources and effective operating model that sustains my organization for years to come?
• Balancing Experimentation and Growth: When should we make tradeoffs between experimenting with new ideas and focusing on growth?

We believe that good physical and mental health is essential for all of us to live our lives to their fullest potential. Healthy communities provide everyone an opportunity to thrive by providing essentials, such as nutritious food, stable housing, good jobs, and safe places to play. Bridgespan collaborates with innovative public health and healthcare nonprofits and funders (including community health foundations) that seek to make healthy choices available to all, especially for the most vulnerable among us. We aim to bring an equity lens to all our work. 

Questions We Help Public Health Nonprofits and NGOs Address

As you seek to create greater impact on the populations you serve, you may benefit from outside experience and expertise. We work side-by-side with your team, providing rigorous strategic and analytic support to help you answer your most important questions:

• Strategic Clarity: Do I have the right strategy, and are we deploying our resources effectively to achieve the desired public health impact? Does our strategy seek to provide equitable outcomes and eliminate racial and caste disparity?
• Growth and Scaling: What are my options for growth that will allow me to scale significantly to serve many more people and families?
• Funding Strategy: How do I develop a funding approach that balances government and philanthropic funding along with fee-for-service offerings?
• Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning: Are we clear on our impact goals? Do we have the right measurement approach and capabilities to track progress, learn, and innovate?
• Organizational Effectiveness: Does my organization have the right leadership, expertise, and organizational/decision-making structures and processes in place to execute my strategy?
• Network Design and Optimization: Are we organized to work most effectively with our network affiliates and members to pursue our impact goals?

Questions We Help Public Health Funders Address

Our collaborative approach places your needs front and center. We listen to your philanthropic ambitions and provide you with options tailored to your goals. The questions we help you answer include:

• Investing Strategically: Given the issues/populations I am passionate about, what strategies should I choose to create the greatest impact? How can we ensure equitable outcomes?
• Building the Field: How can my philanthropy strengthen the public health field to create lasting benefits for our communities, particularly those experiencing poverty and racial and caste disparities?
• Sourcing and Due Diligence: Given the strategies that I am pursuing, how do I source and conduct due diligence to choose grantees that will have the greatest impact?
• Collaborating with Other Funders: How might collaboration with like-minded funders accelerate progress towards our goals? Who should we collaborate with? How should we do it, and what resources do we need?
• Measurement, Evaluation, and Learning: Are we clear on impact goals for ourselves as a funder and for our grantees? Do we have the right measurement approach to track progress, learn, and innovate on our impact portfolio? Are we effectively supporting our grantees in their own measurement, evaluation, and learning goals?

Nonprofit and NGO leaders share a passion for social change and a dedication to their organizations. Driven by a desire to do more and create a more just and equitable society, you may question whether your organization is on the right strategic path and needs help with planning for the future.

Bridgespan draws on 20 years of experience helping US-based and global organizations with strategy development, growth planning, organizational assessments, and funding approaches. Guided by this experience, we tailor our consulting services to meet your needs, ranging from the support of a consulting team to explore your strategic questions; to local programs in US cities where groups of nonprofit executive teams work together to develop their strategies and improve their effectiveness; to online, self-paced programs that improve your executive team’s effectiveness and strategy.

How We Center Equity in the Design of Our Work

In the spirit of holding ourselves accountable, we apply a racial equity lens in our advisory work. The additional steps we take include the following:

• Centering equity in the design of our work from the first conversations with our clients through to implementation. This means seeking to help every US-based client grapple with the role of structural racism as well as the opportunities to take a racial equity lens in the service of impact. And for clients around the world, it includes raising a range of equity considerations (including ethnicity, gender, and caste) that contribute to disparities in outcomes, as well as supporting more organizations that are directly addressing issues of equity.
• Rigorously examining the role of race and racism in our research and analysis, including tactical steps like interviewing an inclusive range of stakeholders and disaggregating impact data to illustrate the effect of major decisions on communities of color.
• Ensuring that our clients understand the implications of their choices for communities of color. We aim to support nonprofit leaders to have an opportunity to connect with and learn from leaders of color and equity practitioners—for example, when identifying growth goals and designing services.

Strategic planning is one of the most important things you do. It challenges you to grapple with several interdependent questions: Are you clear about the impact you seek to achieve? Which results will you hold your organization accountable for? How do you marshal the talent and resources needed to deliver those results?

We help you clarify your thinking to articulate your organization’s intended impact and theory of change–a description of how you plan to bring about the results you seek.

How We Work With You to Define and Clarify Your Strategy

Whether you need support from our consulting teams, participate in our community based executive team programs, or choose to benefit from our structured online programs, we are there to support you.

• Strategy Discussions Often Raise Difficult Questions: We help you answer those questions by tapping into your values and beliefs, listening closely to the needs of your stakeholders, and analyzing and disaggregating data to ensure equitable outcomes. This process bolsters the strategic clarity needed to prioritize activities and make the most effective programmatic investments.
• Apply Analytical Rigor: We gather and analyze relevant data so that you can make choices informed by qualitative and quantitative evidence.
• Articulate Your Change and Impact Goals: We help you arrive at consensus on your organization’s intended impact goals and articulate a theory of change.
• Align Strategy and Implementation: We help you develop a plan to mobilize staff and resources to ensure that day-to-day operations focus on implementing strategic goals.

Demand for services – whether caused by new needs or longstanding structural inequities – often exceeds a nonprofit’s ability to keep up. Closing the gap puts pressure on nonprofits to grow.

We have 20+ years of experience helping nonprofits and NGOs develop equitable growth plans. Sometimes those plans aim for an incremental increase in the number of people served. Other times, plans call for a fundamentally new approach aimed at transformative scale on a population level.

How We Help You Grow and Scale Your Impact

We help you navigate the complex decisions that accompany planning for growth. Our collaborative process identifies ambitious yet practical solutions for expanding your organization and scaling your impact. We help you:

• Test Your Readiness to Grow: By assessing unmet needs, your program model, and organizational capabilities.
• Establish a Roadmap For Growth: Including growth targets and priorities, opportunities for innovation and piloting, staff needs, and funding goals.
• Develop a Model For Transformative Scale: Including new approaches to achieve the impact you seek, targets for increased reach and impact, and plans for sustainable funding.
• Develop a Monitoring, Evaluation, and Learning Plan: To ensure continuous quality improvement.

Developing and implementing a sustainable funding model tops the worry chart for most nonprofit and NGO leaders. We help you evaluate your current funding model and reshape it to keep pace with your impact and scaling ambitions.

How We Help You With Your Funding Strategy

We collaborate with your executive and development teams to learn what has worked and what has not. We often involve staff, board members, and key funders in a series of workshops that aim to build consensus around your goals and funding strategy. We also look at similar organizations to learn from their experiences. Building on that knowledge, we work with you to identify funding approaches that are a good fit for your organization. We help you:

• Determine Funding Options: We review and advise you on the range of funding models that can put your organization in the best position to achieve its goals.
• Chart an Implementation Plan: We work with your team to develop a plan to put your new approaches to funding into practice.
• Become “Big Bettable”: If your organization aspires to attract a multimillion-dollar “big bet,” we help you become “big bettable” by articulating your goals and describing how you would absorb and manage a major infusion of funds.

As your organization grows or you shift strategy, your organizational structure and processes need to adapt. It is important to reassess and revise how your organization operates to maintain strong and inclusive teams, leaders, and processes.

How We Help You Achieve Greater Organizational Effectiveness

We work with your executive team to clarify strategy, set priorities, structure effective meetings, and resolve roadblocks to effective decision making. More broadly, we help you determine whether your organizational structure, processes, capabilities—your operating model—need updating to more effectively implement your strategy. Our approach involves:

• Talent Development: We guide you to develop an action plan to develop talent across the organization. The plan includes building future leaders and aligns with your equity and inclusion goals.
• Executive Team Performance: We help you define effective CEO leadership, clarify the executive team’s role, and establish processes for productive and inclusive group interactions.
• Aligning Strategy and implementation: We help you evaluate and revise, as needed, your operating model—the blueprint for how you organize and deploy people and resources to translate strategy into results.

Meeting growing needs among your clients while never having enough money to fulfill your mission can be a frustrating experience. Against this backdrop of constrained resources, it’s critical to identify and prioritize the most mission critical programs and services. We help you structure an assessment process to determine where to concentrate your efforts.

How We Help You Assess and Align Your Human Services Portfolio

We help you assemble, analyze, and interpret data to assist your leadership team in making difficult decisions about program priorities. This includes working with your program and finance teams to analyze and understand the actual costs of delivering your programs and services, as well as the impact achieved.

• Assess Programs and Services: We rigorously analyze and disaggregate your data and costs to help ensure equitable outcomes and so you understand which programs and services have the greatest impact and which ones are most financially sustainable.
• Develop Portfolio Priorities and Action Plans: We help you make data-driven and equitable decisions about your programs–whether to improve, grow, or wind them down. We also analyze the resources—financial, human, and organizational—needed to pursue your priorities and map out a plan to secure them.
• Performance Measures: We help you identify the most important quantitative and qualitative milestones that make it possible to measure progress toward intended impact and learn as you go.

Your nonprofit network has significant potential for creating more impact and delivering equitable outcomes, but you also operate in a complex environment involving multiple stakeholders, which complicates when and how to make needed changes. Bridgespan helps you address the unique organizational and management challenges facing your network and central office.

How We Help Your Network Have More Impact

We work with national and global networks to increase their impact across local sites and affiliates as well as at the central office. Rigorous data analysis and assessment of stakeholder perspectives guide us in identifying opportunities for improvement and greater impact. Across all our work, we understand the importance of engaging multiple stakeholders, including leaders and board members at both the network and local site/affiliate levels, in order to advance new strategies and initiatives.

• Design and Execute Bold Strategic and Programmatic Initiatives: We help networks develop a vision and plan to implement and replicate effective programs across the network.
• Build a More “Customer-centric” Central Office to Serve the Network: We help you identify how the central office can better serve and support its affiliates/sites. This includes developing a plan to deliver the most important services and resources that sites/affiliates need to be successful.
• Refine Your Network Operating Model: We help you improve your operating model (governance, structures, accountabilities and ways of working) so you can best organize and allocate people and resources across the network, sites/affiliates and the central office to help translate your strategy into results.
• Improve Local Site/Affiliate Impact and Develop Leadership Teams: We help local sites/affiliates gain clarity on their strategy and build capacity to improve their performance over time. We support local sites/affiliates through our customized consulting services, cohort-based programs and online leadership programs including Bridgespan Leadership Accelerator and Leading for Impact.