GOVERNANCE
Board Development
A highly effective Board of Directors is essential for any nonprofit organization’s success. From building a vision and helping shape the mission to providing legally required financial oversight, raising funds and much more, the board is vital for ensuring the well-being and sustainability of any agency.
Far too many organizations must deal with the challenge of not having a truly effective board. For many groups, getting help with training, motivating and planning for the board can make a difference. The ESC Board Development practice provides dozens of client organizations every year with specially tailored projects to improve the effectiveness and outcomes of their boards.
Working with a client’s board, ESC will help board and staff leaders to address critical issues and questions such as:
- What are a board’s real responsibilities? What should its members be doing for us?
- How do we transition from a hands-on board to one that understands its governance role?
- How do we build a better board? What strengths and abilities do we really need?
- What is/should be the board’s role in fundraising?
- How can we get the board to focus on real priorities? How can we encourage more engagement from our board?
From training workshops and retreat facilitation to strategizing for recruiting future board members and planning for leadership succession, ESC will provide a range of services and craft action plans for addressing board issues like these, and many more.
Strategic Planning
Having the right road map is the key to every successful journey. Developing and implementing the right Strategic Plan is how any organization can ensure that it knows where it is going and how it will get there. A good Plan lays out a direction based on a mission and a vision and details what it will take for the organization to succeed in reaching its chosen destination.
An ESC Strategic Planning project centers on building consensus among a client’s stakeholders and creating do-able, results-driven steps for making necessary progress to overall goals. Focusing on both long-term and short-term goals and objectives, an ESC team will guide a client’s staff and board to identify the most important priorities, and how to measure success at every step along the way.
Among the key elements of an ESC Strategic Planning project are the following:
- Interviewing/surveying clients, board, staff and other stakeholders to establish their desires, satisfaction and potential areas of further need
- Evaluating existing mission and vision statements in light of actual activity and potential change and suggesting revisions as needed
- Noting and reporting opportunities to expand or modify services or structures to maximize potential new or evolving programs
- Developing realistic plans and achievable benchmarks for identified goals
- Providing opportunities for engaging ESC to monitor follow-up and implementation of the Plan once adopted
Fund Development
Ensuring and expanding resources is imperative to achieving an organization’s mission. With the assistance of ESC’s professional fundraising experts, your organization can formulate a plan that can really develop significant funds. With expert facilitation, training and advice, the leaders of your organization will be prepared to take on their role in fundraising while positioning your organization for financial stability. ESC’s consultants will work with your organization in each step of creating a funding plan by:
- Assessing and analyzing total revenue streams, and identifying opportunities for expansion
- Determining an organization’s real capacity for increasing contributed revenue
- Examining the competitive fundraising environment and identifying key messaging and themes for growing contributed income
- Offering training to board members and committees, other volunteers and staff in successful fundraising strategies and methods for individual donors and institutional funders alike
- Reviewing possibilities for developing and/or increasing earned income revenues
- Mentoring for fundraising staff (when needed) within the context of an overall ESC project
Endowment Planning
As the "Boomer generation" begins to retire, vast numbers of Americans are increasingly focusing on longer-term financial planning. This is true for people still far from retirement as well. Nonprofits are also thinking about the long term, and for a growing number, creating an endowment fund is the right thing to do.
Even with ups-and-downs in the stock market, investing in an endowment is always a good idea. Creating and growing this revenue source helps significantly in relieving some of the ever-building pressure to solicit and secure annual contributions in an increasingly competitive fundraising climate.
Establishing an endowment is not as daunting as it may seem. Creating this permanent source of operating revenue is something that needs to be done well and correctly. ESC can help organizations of any size either create a new endowment or revitalize an existing one through a step-by-step process for engaging donors and establishing results.
An ESC Endowment Planning team works with the board and staff of a client organization, walking them through a customized volunteer-driven program tailored to an individual organization’s needs and situation. For a cost far below – but with results similar to – those of the top-tier capital fundraising consulting firms, ESC helps create an endowment that is modest in cost and easy to maintain. To do so, ESC guides a client in:
- Preparing a vision and a strategic plan for growing an endowment, including outlining what will be its impact, as well as how to maintain and increase it
- Establishing key policies and considering investment strategies and methods
- Ensuring engagement from boards of directors, key donors, staff and other stakeholders
- Creating marketing literature and other messaging for attracting prospective donors in the short term, and laying the groundwork for future relationship-building and giving
