CASE STUDY 1

A Deep Dive into Organizational Effectiveness to Leverage Successful Strategies and Better Articulate Mission

Client Portrait
This six-year old rapidly growing nonprofit organizes and hosts convenings of diverse stakeholders to generate breakthrough solutions for seemingly intractable problems at the national and international level.

Client Challenge
The lean staff of this nonprofit had extremely limited resources and was working to demonstrate proof of concept for their highly innovative approach to enacting change. Staff was overstretched, working on four demanding projects with little commonality between them. Leadership was juggling the competing demands of staff support, budget management, organization building, recruitment of board members and fundraising efforts.

How could leadership identify their most effective organizational processes across all their diverse projects? And how could they translate their approach into a language that resonated for potential stakeholders and funders?

Rally Point’s Solution
Emerging out of a series of conversations with organizational leadership and project staff, Rally Point identified a strategy to enhance their organizational learning and identify best practices to increase impact and organizational effectiveness.

The solution included

information gathering through meeting with project teams, observing stakeholder meetings, and reviewing documents from each project to assess the organization’s success in implementing their theory of change across four separate projects;
analysis of how each project unfolded to pinpoint what was project-specific versus universally applicable;
identification of lessons across all projects and articulation of best practices; and
contribution of Rally Point’s in-depth understanding of their organizational process to inform the development of their evaluation protocol and a new organizational business plan.

Key deliverables included

Powerpoint presentation that articulated their process and how each project fit into their core mission, including identification of key levers for successful implementation of the change process and new language to articulate organizational theory of change;
memo about their work for distribution to staff, board, advisory council and potential funders; and
memo grounding their work in relevant social science theories and current research.

Benefits & Impacts

Thanks to Rally Point’s analysis and recommendations, this organization has a deeper understanding of the levers for successful implementation of their innovative change process and has realized the following benefits:

defined criteria for how to evaluate new opportunities;
ability to articulate their theory of change in compelling and concise language that resonates with funders;
set of resources that enable the organization to more effectively orient new staff, board members, and stakeholders to their mission and methodology of leading change;
ability to use key milestones to assess the progress of existing projects;
frameworks and insights that were instrumental in securing breakthrough funding for the organization; and
in the words of their leadership, “Rally Point made a significant contribution to our thinking. Our horizons expanded quite considerably!”