Don Howard and John Newsome

Ever-changing conditions require nonprofits engaged in reforming systems to learn from experience and change course as necessary to maximize their impact. This process can be incredibly hard, frequently requiring the organizations’ leaders to make difficult tradeoffs between activities that are all doing some good to focus on the ones that will do the most good going forward.

A technique that can help them navigate is to get really clear about what the organization is trying to achieve and how its leadership envisions that happening. This strategic clarity then can become a touchstone for making decisions that reflect the aspirations of the organization’s mission as well as the constraints of its bottom line.

Bay Area Coalition for Equitable Schools (BayCES), an Oakland, California-based school-reform organization, undertook just this sort of strategic exercise with the Bridgespan Group in 2003. BayCES has to influence a complex set of stakeholders—students, teachers, principals, parents, district superintendents, and politicians—to generate sustained improvements in student outcomes; the dynamic nature of the school-reform environment only adds to the challenge. This case study illustrates how BayCES developed strategic clarity to guide its future growth.

www.bayces.org