Operations Consulting with a Fundraiser’s EYE
Chaos is expensive.
What is it costing you?
Operations consulting with a fundraiser’s eye.
Chaos is expensive. What is it costing you?
OPERATIONS WITH A FUNDRAISER’S EYE
Chaos is expensive. What is it costing you?
Does this sound Familiar?
You have outgrown the way you run, with too much for one leader to carry and not enough budget for a full team, so most of it ends up on you. We know that spot well because we sat in it for nearly thirty years. Most help shows up with something new to add, but we usually start by taking a few things off the pile and then build around how your team works now, so the work keeps running without you holding it up.One of them is you.
The organization is moving slower.
Nothing is getting better.
Who We Work With
We work with the people who help people: the nonprofits doing the work and the consultants who help them do it better.
Nonprofits
Teams carrying more than any other profession would ask, on systems that stopped fitting a while back.
Why We Love Nonprofits →Consultants and Solution Providers
Founders who built the firm and became the bottleneck.
Why We Love Consultants →What is in the way.
Operations is a big word, so we broke it into nine systems in three groups. People own the work, systems run the work and guides document the work. Most people already know which square has been giving them trouble.
Our Rhythm.
Every engagement follows the same four steps, so you always know where the work stands. On the 1st of each month you get a Map like the sample here. It shows what came off your plate, where every piece of work lives and the calls waiting on you.
GETTING STARTED
We put all the proverbial cords on the counter. We look at what you have, what is in the way and what comes out first.
WEEK BY WEEK
The work moves every week. You always know what is with us, what needs you and what is parked with a date.
YOUR MAP
On the 1st of each month you get your Map. It shows what came off your plate and what is next.
WRAPPING UP
We hand it all over.
What we build is yours and it stays yours.
Harbor Lane, this month.
Things that came off the development team’s plate this month.
Where everything is
Calls waiting on you
Our Editor-Architect Framework.
Four moves created with lots and lots of trial and error. Almost every operations engagement in this sector starts at the second move, because building looks like progress and cutting looks like nothing happened, so the new database goes in on top of the old mess, the mess comes along with it, and eighteen months later somebody decides the database never worked. We edit first because we spent years watching it happen the other way and seeing fundraising suffer.
THE FRAMEWORK DEFINED.
Edit the friction
Find what is slowing operations down and remove it before doing anything else.
architect the flow
Design the infrastructure that moves work the way your team actually operates.
CURATE THE SPACE
Keep only what belongs. Remove what accumulated without intention or what no longer serves.
protect capacity
Build systems that protect the people running them, not just the organization depending on them.
HOW WE WORK.
Why a fundraiser built an operations firm.
Most organizations call us after something slips. A campaign stalls, a key person leaves, or the same problem keeps showing up in a different meeting. Before anything gets rebuilt, we spend time on how the work actually moves through your organization, because the distance between how it runs and how everyone believes it runs is where the cost lives.
Our method is to edit the friction, architect the flow, curate the space, and protect capacity, in that order. Editing comes first because the fastest way to give a team its capacity back is to take something off of it, and that requires knowing which processes are holding the organization up and which ones are left over from a year nobody remembers.
After nearly three decades in the fundraiser’s chair, we have seen where operational strain shows up first. It shows up in the donor who did not get thanked, the gift that sat unprocessed, and the report nobody trusts enough to act on. Fundraising is usually where the system breaks in public, so that is where we start looking.
So every engagement ends with people who own the work, systems that run it, and guides that document it. Your team keeps all of it when we leave.
Most operational friction is invisible until someone looks at it differently.
The Clarity Lens gives you five diagnostic lenses for examining any system, process, or workflow inside your organization. Download your copy and see where the friction lives.