Strategic planning for sustainable financing
Conservation finance and advocacy
The client organization:
- Rapidly growing international conservation non-profit – manages expanding endowments of ~$18M and re-grants $1-2M annual conservation funding
- Organization’s Staff, Board, and community spans multiple countries, ethnicities, and languages, facing deep layers of cultural, legal, and political complexities
- Selected by multinational governmental leaders to serve as the regional financing mechanism for foremost conservation initiative
Why they brought in Manifest:
- Founder’s syndrome: lack of Board involvement in organizational decision-making
- Divergent leadership and stakeholder perspectives on future opportunities and path to prosperity
- Difficult business model for stakeholders’ comprehension
- Tremendous fundraising success resulting in demanding performance expectations from funding sources
- Impending culture change resulting from rapid growth and high-pressure successes –> potential morale shifts, changing outcome measurements, and re-alignment needs
How Manifest created solutions:
- Led thorough strategic planning process that spanned the whole organization and Board of Trustees, and leveraged perspectives from external stakeholders and funding sources
- Enrolled Board and Staff in clarifying their roles, and empowered them to coordinated action
- Crystallized their value proposition to their complex service market
- Developed new vision-focused prioritization and goal-setting system to guide day-to-day and long-term decision-making at every level of the organization
What the client says:
- Doug understood our needs with our varied stakeholders and kept everyone engaged and committed to the process.
- Doug facilitated the process exceptionally well, especially with a group that is quite diverse, representing numerous cultural and sectoral backgrounds.
- Manifest led our strategic development process skillfully and produced tools and insights that are invaluable to our staff.
- He shares our core values for successful conservation and sustainability work.
- Thanks to Manifest, we now have a clear picture of where we’re going, and the language to enroll others.
- As a seasoned leader of our organization, I value how Doug balanced my own approach skillfully. He brought new energy and ideas, and ways for our staff to succeed that built on what we were already doing.