"I have been doing strategic or organizational planning for over thirty years and I have never seen it presented in such a useful, practical and well documented way as I did this past few days."

Ken Pyburn, formerly of IBM and Executive Director of the Habitat for Humanity, now board chairman of the nonprofit Second Journey.

Strategic Planning:

Our client involvement most often begins with Strategic Planning.

We begin by guiding you through an honest self assessment of your situation so you can then arrive at a clear and comprehensive set of goals and action steps to success.

We facilitate the process, doing much of the heavy lifting. We guide our clients while drawing from them the necessary thinking, insight and perspective to produce a viable roadmap to success with a unique visual system for connecting all of the essential strategic elements. We take our clients from sharpening Mission, Vision and Values through long and short-term goal setting all the way to the tactical steps necessary to keep the organization on track toward its vision.

Our approach is cohesive, comprehensive and proprietary, as are the tools we provide to our clients to manage the process on their own going forward. For example, our "traffic light" system assigns color codes to each goal in the strategic plan – every month the CEO can simply look for any initiatives that are flagged as "red" or "yellow", indicating they are at risk of falling behind schedule. The CEO can instantly see where he or she must focus attention. It sounds simple, and it is, but without this proprietary technique, many plans just sit on the shelf, never executed, their grand visions never realized.

With our approach, when we’re done, everyone in your organization will be working toward the same over-arching goals, and everyone will be accountable for doing their part – in a measured, on-time manner.

Sound interesting? It is essential – it happens to be the proven path to success. Check out our Case Studies for measured successful results our client organizations have enjoyed.

Branding:

One key objective of a good strategic plan, often, will be to strengthen your brand identity. We have learned over the years that most organizations are very good at pursuing their mission related work, but not necessarily cut out to tackle the basics of branding. We can help you to assess the core strengths of your brand – and perhaps for the first time to begin to think of your organization as a brand with which your audiences will identify.

Branding is all about making and fulfilling promises to your funders, your consumers and your community. You know you are doing great things, but how good are you at putting the best face on what you do? Do your key publics look to you as a valuable community resource or are they barely aware you are out there?

We help our clients bridge those affinity gaps.

Our team comes at the task of building brands from every angle – our expertise includes brand strategy, market research and ultimately the top flight creative service that will bring your enhanced brand image to life with a powerful, refined identity reflected in cohesive graphic and language elements. Our experience includes brand building assignments with clients ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to small businesses, through institutions of higher education to very large to small developing nonprofits.

You get all the experience and talent of a big Madison Avenue agency in the nimble, responsive and efficient resource that is MBS Associates (see Who We Are.)

MBS Associates has a long and successful history of helping nonprofits build their capacity to serve. Establishing a strong brand is one of the ways we enable organizations to impact more lives through greater sustainability.

Marketing Planning:

We can help you to spread the word of your good work.

This is a vital extension of the strategic plan that is often ignored by clients. So, we have developed a very successful approach to design a plan to communicate your freshly minted strategic plan goals and brand identity to all your key constituencies.

We are experienced marketers - mentors, guides and teachers who know how to link organizations with their key audiences in ways that provide results. We understand that there is a profit equation associated with every nonprofit - that the enhancement of the quality of life indeed has a dollar value linked to it. We know how to identify the most critical of audiences, the best vehicles for reaching them, how to structure communications and what works in today's new media environment and what doesn't.

Your mission is important - you deserve to be heard.

Plan Stewardship:

Experience has taught us that a plan or branding strategy is not much good unless it is attended to day in and day out.

Often, our clients employ us to help their organizations stay on track – to meet measured plan objectives on specified timetables. They seek our help as they get started executing their plan, often for the first year, because it simply isn’t in their cultural DNA to work against objectives in a methodical, strategic way.

While keeping close tabs on your plan objectives, we also help your organization learn that the plan is a living, breathing guide, one that needs to be adjusted and finessed as the environment and our circumstances change around us. It is not your rigid master – it is your tool. We know how to teach you that essential Plan Stewardship approach.

We can help your organization see the rewards of pursuing their mission in this "business like" way – because there is no greater reward than success, and success comes with day-in, day-out attention to, and commitment to, the plan.