Letter to the President/CEO

You’re not just building a better organization.

You’re building a better future.

Your life as a CEO/president is complicated. 

All the moving parts of your organization – your team, your strategy, your day-to-day activities – must work together for the greater good.  To lead effectively, you have to be both intentional and tenacious. You have to liberate yourself from the tyranny of what seems urgent so you can focus on what’s really important.  The future of your organization depends on your ability to find and maintain this big picture perspective. Sometimes, you need a little outside help.

Because of our extensive, front-line experience we have an intimate understanding of the challenges and frustrations you face. The hundreds of college presidents, chancellors, executive directors, and other nonprofit leaders we’ve consulted with consistently tell us how much they value our strategic perspective, tactical advice, and guiding counsel. These leaders especially appreciate our ability to quickly grasp the complex context so we can simultaneously provide both big ideas and practical details.
 

We help you focus your efforts for maximum effect.

A heroic future vision inspires your internal team to work harder to achieve the vision, and inspires your potential donors and allies to provide active support.  Formulating your vision and supporting strategy requires insight, intuition, data, and the resolve to think beyond your experience so you can plan beyond your tenure.  ECG helps organization leaders by providing a facilitated, accelerated strategic visioning and planning process that results in a short list of manageable, high-impact goals.

One, or perhaps two, major strategic goals will, when well-executed, do substantially more to move your organization forward than a complicated, multi-layered plan that is difficult to remember, hard to translate into daily performance, and almost impossible to track with meaningful metrics.  We can help you isolate exactly which initiatives will yield the most value for your organization.

The most effective, highest performing organizations don’t do everything at once. Instead, they carefully select and focus on the key actions that will drive the greatest success and deliver the most value.  Vision and strategy are merely hypothetical until they are implemented. By focusing your energies on a well-defined approach, you can quickly ascertain which hypotheses reflect reality and which require further testing.
 

We help you translate your vision and focus into a winning story.

It is impossible to experience an organization’s heroic future without first imagining in detail what it can be.  We can help with this. 

Imagining and articulating the future, and then marshaling the influence and support required to make that future real are the twin challenges facing leadership today.  Finding and acquiring the financial resources to bring a vision to life is often the biggest barrier to transforming a “hypothesis” into a “proven fact.”  Investors tend to back “winners.” When your aspirations for the future of your organization exceed traditional revenue sources, you must ensure that donor investors perceive your organization as a winner. 

Fostering this perception begins with being able to see the future yourself (your vision and plan) and put it into words (a fundraising case for support) that will inspire donors.  Research and strategy are the keys to success in both these areas.  ECG has decades of experience translating our clients’ visions into successful fundraising. We can do the same for you by providing fundraising feasibility studies, campaign counsel, fundraising plans, and executive coaching for you and your team as you seek private philanthropic investment.

We have the professional background and “in the trenches” experience to help you:

• Navigate a rapidly changing environment
• Identify and pursue key opportunities to meet community and constituent needs
• Prioritize projects and allocate personnel and other resources where needed
• Attract, assemble, motivate, and retain the best fundraising team to ensure success
• Develop critical relationships within your philanthropically capable community
• Establish an essential base of financial and intellectual capital
• Deliver highly prized value to your stakeholders and your community
• Build a sustainable organization with a commitment to its heroic vision
   

We can help you make a real difference and ensure a legacy you can be proud of.  Together we can build a more vibrant future for your organization, one that reflects the vision and passion to inspire internal performance and external donor investment at the highest levels.

To learn more about how we can help you successfully address your specific situation, please feel free to contact us for a complimentary, no obligation consult. We welcome the opportunity to share our experience and expertise and look forward to learning more about your organization and your vision.

Call us: 844.254.5400