The Bridgespan Group: Welcome


The Bridgespan Group is a nonprofit, 501(c)(3) organization applying leading-edge management strategies, tools and talent to help other nonprofits and foundations achieve greater social impact.	Featured Point of View	OF INTEREST
		Leadership Matters: May 2008 View Bridgestar's latest newsletter. Nonprofit Overhead Costs: Breaking the Vicious Cycle of Misleading Reporting, Unrealistic Expectations, and Pressure to Conform Nonprofits and funders alike need to work to change the perception of overhead in the sector. Here’s why—and how. Strategies for Social Impact: Spring 2008 View Bridgespan's latest knowledge letter. More Bang for the Buck As the experiences of Teach for America, Jumpstart, and Year Up attest, nonprofits can achieve significant productivity gains—reducing costs without compromising quality—even when prevailing funding practices and other sector-specific traits are working against them. Going for the Gold: Secrets of Successful Schools A strong school design isn’t enough to drive student graduation and college acceptance rates. Getting to student results requires “sweating the details” of executing its most important elements. The Justice Project: Using Strategic Planning to Increase the Impact of Advocacy How did this advocacy organization use strategic planning to clarify its direction without stifling the flexibility that is so central to its success? Aspire Public Schools: Building the Organizational Capacity for Healthy Growth Two years into an aggressive expansion plan, the leaders of Aspire Public Schools found themselves overtaxed and concerned about maintaining quality outcomes. This case study follows their efforts to strengthen their organization so that it could meet both the immediate and longer-term demands of growth. The Annie E. Casey Foundation—Answering the hard question: “What difference are we making?” How can a foundation better evaluate the difference it's making in the world, when its grantee portfolio is diverse—and it's the grantees who actually deliver? RAPID^SM Decision-Making: What it is, why we like it, and how to get the most out of it Organizational decision-making can be complicated for many reasons. A tool called RAPID^SM is helping nonprofits simplify and clarify that process. Higher-Impact Philanthropy How you give is as important as what you give to. How Nonprofits Get Really Big By defying conventional wisdom, 144 nonprofits went from founding to at least 50 million in revenue between 1970 and 2003. The Nonprofit Sector’s Leadership Deficit The need for 640,000 new leaders over the next decade will shape the future of the nonprofit sector. Business Planning for Nonprofits What it is and why it matters. Zeroing in on Impact What's the best way to make an inspirational mission actionable?
	FUNDING Without adequate funding, a nonprofit can not achieve its mission. Creating a viable funding model, however, is enormously difficult. First and foremost, there is little information available to help the leaders of any individual organization determine the best funding mix for a nonprofit of their size in their domain—or think about how that funding mix ought to change if the organization wants to grow. As a result, “conventional wisdom” such as “Diversified funding makes the most sense,” or “Earned income has a lot of potential,” tends to become the rule of thumb. This is dangerous because conventional wisdom is at best incomplete and at worse can be flat-out wrong, given a particular organization’s size or program activities. More>>>