Scroll down to learn more about my consulting services for:

  • Strategic planning

  • Organizational assessment & development

  • Evaluation and learning systems development

Strategic Planning

My approach to strategy draws from my dual expertise in strategic planning and evaluation and learning. It emphasizes building enduring organizational systems for learning and planning that can inform ongoing strategy development and refinement long after our engagement ends.

Formulating strong strategies requires your organization to answer the following questions:

1.      How can you clarify and improve your program design to better achieve the outcomes you desire?

2.      What changes to your organization and/or revenue model are most critical to improving your ability to achieve the outcomes you desire?

3.      How can you best respond to, or leverage, opportunities or trends in your external environment?

I will work with you to produce a strategic framework that defines what success looks like for your organization, so you can come up with the answers to these questions that will best position you for sustainability and impact.

Finally - I will help translate those answers into a set of short-term (typically 3 year) strategies that will focus your organization’s activities on what matters the most - and capture those strategies in language and formats that support successful implementation.

Organizational Assessment & Development

I use an open-source organizational capacity assessment tool that I co-developed in 2018 with my then-colleagues at Learning for Action, building on a capacity building study done for a Chicago-area funders group. This tool should take an Executive Director and/or other senior staff members about two hours to complete. The report that I write up for you analyzing the results is an amazing springboard for important conversations about how to strengthen your organization to best deliver on its mission.

After we have had a chance to make meaning of the results, I can work with your organization to design a short-term action plan for acting on the priorities identified as most pressing or strategic, and a longer-term plan for developing needed organizational capacities over time.

I also work with collaboratives and collective impact initiatives to assess and strengthen their capacity to advance the common purpose for which they have been convened. The distilled, simplified framework I use for assessing collaborative performance is customizable, enables self-diagnosis, and creates a roadmap for identifying and making the changes needed to support strong collaborative performance.

Evaluation and Learning Systems Development

My transition from nonprofit direct services into consulting in 2003 was inspired by an experience bringing evaluation tools and concepts to a nonprofit I was on staff of — then watching the impact of that nonprofit be transformed. All of my consulting experience since then has reinforced the foundational role that evaluation and learning capacity holds for nonprofits and foundations of all types.

Drawing on expertise built in the course of designing and delivering foundation-sponsored evaluation capacity building initiatives and consulting to organizations 1:1, I partner with you to expand and accelerate your organization’s efforts to measure your impact and develop learning processes to improve your programs and services over time.

My approach to developing evaluation and learning capacity begins with developing or refining your Theory of Change, which I refer to as a detailed expression of your organization’s mission. A strong Theory of Change describes in detail what you do, with whom, to what end, and the values that underpin your approach.

Once a strong Theory of Change is in place, I will work with you to translate it into a set of learning questions to test your hypotheses about how change is intended to happen, and to generate reflection on how to improve your program(s) to achieve desired results.

Get started with a free consultation

Consider signing up for a free one-hour consultation to help determine if my expertise is a good match for your organization’s needs. Simply email me at alex@sunburst-strategies.com to express your interest and begin the scheduling process.