Nonprofit leaders face tough decisions every day, balancing ambitious goals for impact against constraints on time and resources. Bridgespan’s Leading for Impact has proven effective in other cities and helps nonprofit leadership teams build the skills they need to navigate those decisions by:
Leading for Impact: Philadelphia is a two-year program with a dual focus on executive team development and on the completion of two customized, team-led projects on priority issues. The program accelerates organizational impact and executive team development and does so in partnership with a select group of nonprofit leaders. Hallmarks of the program include:
Leading for Impact: Philadelphia is designed to boost the effectiveness of nonprofit CEOs and their executive leadership teams. In the first six months of the program, teams will participate in monthly classroom-based workshops (or virtual sessions, if necessary, based on COVID-19 restrictions) covering the strategic management and team-focused skills needed to maximize nonprofit impact.
Over the course of two years, Bridgespan will support each team as it completes two customized, team-led projects that address priority issues. These efforts build on concepts introduced during class workshops and include the hands-on assistance necessary to apply those concepts within each organization’s unique context. Projects will address strategy, organizational development, or leadership-development issues. Teams will have access to Bridgespan’s series of online Leadership Accelerator programs for one of their two projects.
A Bridgespan facilitator will provide coaching and feedback—along with tools, guides, templates and examples—to each team throughout the program. Following each six-month project, Bridgespan will provide an additional six months of implementation support, totaling two full years of consulting services.
An online mini-lecture and pre-work precedes each workshop so that teams arrive prepared to dive into the nuances of key concepts and how to apply them to their organization.
A group of local funders have subsidized 80 percent of the program costs, reducing the investment for participating organizations to $18,000 total. (This cost covers an executive team of up to six individuals; there is an incremental charge of $2,000 for each additional team member.) The goal of the program is to increase each organization’s social impact by increasing its effectiveness. Using budgets as a metric for effectiveness, only a ten percent increase in effectiveness for a $5 million organization would yield a $500,000 return on that $15,000 investment. And the time invested by the organization’s leadership is more than repaid by building lasting capabilities of the executive team.
Cohorts will launch approximately every six months over the next three years to reach about 50 Philadelphia-area organizations. Each cohort will be composed of the executive leadership team of approximately eight organizations.
Leading for Impact: Philadelphia is best suited for nonprofits eager to tackle pressing issues and deepen their skills and that have the capacity to dedicate time to working on these issues. In order to participate, an organization must be:
“Leading for Impact has elevated the level of our dialogue as a management team five to tenfold.”
Phil Kilbridge, Executive Director, Habitat for Humanity Greater San Francisco Leading for Impact—Francisco 2012 Participant
