Strategy & Coaching

A solid organizational strategy paves the way for stronger fundraising. Real-time coaching elevates those strategies.

Strategic Plans

Your nonprofit’s strategic plan should be a tool for growth and not just a document that gathers digital dust. With a strong plan, you’ll align leadership, sharpen organizational priorities, and strengthen donors’ confidence in your work.

We partner with nonprofits to build practical, actionable strategic plans that guide decisions and position you for long-term success in fundraising and other areas.

Fundraising Coaching & Retained Support

Through monthly coaching engagements, we are caring and trusted advisors who help you in real time with individual donors, your board, and key constituents.

We also review all kinds materials—from gift intention forms to appeals to plans—and provide helpful gut checks when challenges and opportunities arise. We often share templates and best practices from our many years of being in the field (ask us about our “breakup” emails!).

Strategy FAQs

  • First, we assess your nonprofit’s current environment. To do this, we take a close look at your current strategy and mission statement. We review key financials. We conduct leadership interviews and gather input from key stakeholders.

    Then, SJC helps to clarify the organization’s vision and mission. Together, we create clear strategic goals and priorities, identify strategic filters (how to say yes and no), create success metrics, ensure accountability during implementation of the plan.

  • SJC’s strategic planning process typically takes six months. We begin with an assessment and then work with the team to define clear strategic goals, priorities, implementation plans, and accountability. By design, the process is flexible enough to accommodate board, staff, and leadership’s schedules and needs.

  • Sarah J Consulting typically brings together a planning team that includes board members, senior leaders, employees, and sometimes outside advisors. Stakeholder interviews and surveys collect additional key perspectives. Ultimately, we build a plan with broad understanding and buy-in so that it’s fully adopted.

  • Strategic filters help nonprofits to determine whether a new initiative, partnership, program, or investment fits their strategy. During SJC’s planning process, organizations identify core competencies, strengths, and the specific filters they will put in place. These tools help leaders prioritize, say “no” to off-strategy opportunities and remain focused on the work that matters.

  • This step is critical, since we don’t want strategic plans to collect dust on a shelf! Once a strategic plan is complete, Sarah J Consulting goes further. We create implementation steps and accountability criteria to ensure that the plan goes into action. We also define the resources that will be needed to succeed, and establish a quarterly review of the plan to keep it current and practical. And when the planning engagement ends, SJC often moves to an ongoing coaching retainer model. This ensures the CEO and team have all the support they need to make the plan a reality.

Coaching & Retained Support FAQs

  • Through fundraising coaching, Sarah J Consulting provides real-time guidance to nonprofit leaders and Development professionals. We help think through donor strategy, fundraising communications, pipeline management, and much more. Our goal is to help leaders build their skills and confidence in fundraising.

  • A project-based consulting engagement usually focuses on one or more specific deliverables. Common examples are fundraising assessments, capital campaign feasibility studies, strategic plans, or annual fundraising plans.

    Retained support is flexible and ongoing. In this model, a nonprofit regularly meets with Sarah J Consulting for advice on donor strategy, problem-solving, reviewing donor materials, donor conversations, and more.

    Clients often continue working with us on a monthly retainer following a project-based engagement, so that we can help with implementation and accountability.

  • We bring tremendous value to executive directors, CEOs, Development leaders, and nonprofit teams that have internal capacity but could benefit from an experienced, outside perspective. It can be especially valuable for organizations navigating growth, building a major gifts program, implementing recommendations from a fundraising assessment, preparing for a campaign, onboarding a new development leader, or managing complex fundraising decisions without a senior fundraising strategist on staff.

  • Yes! SJC’s training work includes topics such as major gifts, donor cultivation and stewardship, making the ask, board members as fundraisers, and creating a culture of philanthropy.

    We like to connect training to the organization’s actual fundraising landscape so that participants can immediately apply what they learn in their day-to-day fundraising efforts.