Consultation Services

Organizational Development

All consulting services are designed to achieve long-term sustainable positive change and growth.

Each consultative project is designed exclusively for the client’s unique situation, size, and budget.  Experience has demonstrated that organizational impact cannot be achieved in a few days, or even a few months. Thus, our consultations use a process that secures input, involvement, innovation, and inspired momentum over time (generally one year or more).

Our project-process-approach uses organizational development techniques and best practices for the nonprofit sector.  We may borrow ideas from the corporate sector, but we remain firm that the nonprofit sector must focus on the mission first, so the money will follow.

Board & Leadership Development

Governance challenges persist, in part because the industry’s “new boards” want more relevance and measurable impact.

We offer a version of board training that is designed to develop the full potential of your board.  Therefore, we do not advocate for a one-time training session.  Instead, we work directly with your board to assess where they are, and where they want to be.

This process may include an assessment, leadership training, team-building, recruitment with on-boarding, and the selection/evaluation of performance metrics.  Our goal is to be sure that your board members perform both individually, as well as collectively.  This means, each board member has a specific role to play during his/her tenure that maximize time and talents, and that the entire board assumes responsibility for its own performance.

Strategic Visioning & Planning

Gone are the days of the one-day retreat strategic planning session; today’s environment requires constant critical analysis and alignment.  That means some things work and stay, and others don’t (including process, procedures and even programs).

Our services guide the organization’s leadership through a series of steps, including a deep dive into fact-finding, that will uncover the information needed to make well-informed decisions.  This may include the development of a long-range strategic plan, or just the development of a new project.  It might also include the creation of a new vision, or just a reinvention of old business model.

The key to strategic planning is actually strategic thinking.  It’s not the written plan that matters in the end, it’s the dialogue that leads to brilliant decisions that come to fruition.

Board & Staff Training

Knowledge is power.  The more board members and staff understand the purpose of philanthropy, the more likely they are to appreciate and participate in fundraising.

Presentations include: the Power of Philanthropy, Nonprofit Trends and Challenges, Marketing Value Exchanges, Motivating Different Donors, Fundraising Innovations, and many more.

All presentations are based on market and academic research, and utilize active learning techniques and measurable outcome goals.  Depending on the organization’s needs, presentations may range from one hour to a full-day facilitated retreat, or somewhere in-between, and they are individually tailored to each client.

Click here to contact Karla to discuss your particular needs.

Clients

For the past 35 years, Karla has served a wide range of both local and national organizations.  Her clients have engaged her in every type of consultation from large scale organizational change, to small group facilitation around advancement or alignment issues.  While she is primarily called in to address what appears to be a fundraising challenge, most organizations have discovered the need for more systemic work around culture and leadership.  With those two in place, fundraising is seldom problematic.

Current and Former Clients

Presentations & Training

The following list is certainly not complete, but it offers a good representation of the scope of her speaking/training work.