Our Management Consulting Approach

Public Interest Management Group's methods derive from applied research and hands-on experience engineering nonprofit turnarounds and growth.

Great nonprofits tend to share several characteristics:

• A sound business model

• Clear and detailed strategy that address programmatic, operational and financial needs head-on

• Efficient organizational structure

• Disciplined leadership and management

• Organizational culture that supports both mission and business objectives.

Our consulting approach uses hard data to inform robust plans that are both achievable and sustainable. We infuse principles of finance, economics and organizational development into a holistic methodology that empowers nonprofit enterprises to thrive in a competitive world. We’ve developed, honed and tested our methods over the past two decades.

“Thriving” is partly about money. It’s also about people: how organizations engage staff, volunteers and communities. We incorporate best practices in organizational development and business analytics. It's a powerful combination that can guide organizational transformation and advancement. This helps ensure you'll succeed on both sides of the scale.

Strategic and Business Planning

Strategic planning, and its more operations-focused cousin business planning, chart a future direction for an organization. This includes both the destination and details that will guide the process of getting there. The destination includes mission-related results as well as operational and financial outcomes. Without all three, a vision may turn out to be elusive, and a plan may gather dust on a shelf. PIM plans are living documents built to be revised and updated on an ongoing basis.

We employ data throughout the process, ensuring that plans are based on substance, and that goals are tangible and measurable. This includes several steps:

• Assessment of the organization's operations and business model

• Market research, considering service needs and the competitive environment

• Establishment of a range of strategy alternative scenarios

• Financial modeling of operational scenarios

• Facilitation of a group decision-making process

• Composition of a Strategy Framework or Business Plan document.

Read about our unique approach to business model analysis in this white paper. (For more about organizational assessment, see below.)

PIM has deep experience in market research methods, including survey research, focus groups and structured interviews. Projects are cutomized to meet specific needs, and shed light on brand identiy, competitive advantage and market position analysis .

Financial modeling is a signature PIM technique that we’ve deployed with nonprofits in the health, education, housing and environmental fields. Modeling allows us to explore future states of an organization, and we customize models for each client. Through modeling we test scenarios, identify drivers of business model health and conduct sensitivity analysis to understand which variables will most influence financial success. Financial modeling is essential to minimizing guesswork in making critical decisions that can profoundly affect the organization's future trajectory.

In conjunction with modeling, we analyze the full costs of programs and activities, to help further define a sustainable business model, including a mix of programs that will address mission goals and revenue sources that will achieve economies of scale and generate steady fiscal surpluses.

Plan documents - either a Strategy Framework or a Business Plan - are full of details that specify the course of action and rationale, make the case for funding, and lay the groundwork for implementation. Specific milestones and a balanced scorecard will help guide successful implementation.

Merger and Restructuring

Development of strategy for Merger and partnership models like Strategic Alliance often involves facilitation of negotiations. Negotiations between partner groups can effectively determine which partnership strategy is most viable, and how the partnership should be shaped. We systematically explore a range of possible structural arrangements, represented in the Partnership Matrix below, and the operational, fiscal and legal implications of each. Note that the there are many types of partnership (including 12 distinct nonprofit merger structures). PIM's deep content knowledge and negotiation experience allows flexible solutions to many potential obstacles.

Financial and Operational Analysis

We apply a range of methods in analyzing a client organization’s financial health and assessing operations. These include:

• Financial structure analysis, which allows us to see a nonprofit’s true financial position

• Financial modeling (see above)

• Matrix mapping (a technique developed by Bell and Zimmerman)

• Success Factor Analysis, a method that quantifies organizational sucess at a point in time and assists leaders in identifying organizational improvement priorities.

Organizational assessment focuses on human resource needs as well as infrastructure requirements, illustrated below.