LKM Consulting | strategies for greater impact

You want to improve the lives of your clients and community. LKM Consulting can help.

We work with nonprofits, government agencies, and funders to support their ability to achieve greater impact for the people and communities they serve. We’re passionate about improving the lives of those who need additional resources to thrive, and want you to be successful in your efforts to meet their needs. With a results-driven focus, our consulting work centers on strategy development, performance measurement, and building effective collaborations.

Our work is always customized to meet the unique needs of each client. We’ve worked in government and nonprofit organizations, and been the recipient of grant funds as well as the funder. We understand the many challenges agencies face in trying to make a difference, and the limited resources available to them. Our commitment is to work in partnership with you to identify practical strategies that will be both effective and actionable.

Strategy Development

Strategy trumps a strategic plan – The traditional strategic plan is not sufficient in today’s rapidly changing environment. Learning to think and operate strategically, however, is essential. It enables agencies to be more flexible in navigating both the challenges and opportunities that are sure to arise. This requires absolute clarity about mission, values and goals to guide strategic decision-making.

Performance Measurement

Results (and data) matter – The days of being able to explain impact only with anecdotal stories are over. Funders, donors, volunteers – everyone wants to know if organizations are actually achieving the results they intend. That requires meaningful measures of performance, not just counting the numbers served or the units of service. For data to be useful, agencies also need to be able to utilize it to drive ongoing learning and performance improvement.

Collaboration Building

Collaboration is essential – The issues being faced by individuals and communities today are increasingly complex and inter-related. Individual agencies cannot hope to address all of their clients’ needs on their own, making greater coordination with other organizations that share similar goals critical. This requires looking at partnerships differently and building deeper collaborations.

What is Collective Impact? (And why is everyone talking about it?)

April 1, 2016

There’s been a lot of buzz about Collective Impact ever since John Kania and Mark Kramer named and defined this approach to collaboration in their Winter 2011 article in the Stanford Social Innovation Review. But what is it? Is it any different from collaboration? Is anyone using it successfully? Put simply, Collective Impact is a … Read More

Want to Collaborate? 3rd, Move from Linear to Adaptive Thinking

March 1, 2016

What do I mean by linear thinking? Consider the industrial model — take your raw material, feed it through specific processes, and out comes a finished product. Can’t get much more linear than that. To some extent, this is how we’ve been trained to think and act, with detailed strategic plans and logic models to guide our steps. More … Read More

Want to Collaborate? 2nd, Move from Silos to Systems

February 10, 2016

Do you know what’s happening outside your silo? It wouldn’t be surprising if, for many, the answer is “not really.” Organizations, and I think nonprofits particularly, are implicitly encouraged to operate within their own silos – to focus on their own mission, connecting with others only when necessary to achieve their own goals. That’s how … Read More