One of the Packard Foundation’s longtime funder collaborators is The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation (Hewlett). Hewlett’s Effective Philanthropy Group seeks to strengthen the capacity of the foundation’s staff, its grantees, and philanthropy in general to achieve their goals and benefit the common good. It recently released an analysis of various tools used for assessing…

Over the past several years, our sector has been debating the design, relevancy and role of strategic planning as a core capacity building tool. Some say it is too time intensive and the final product too often ends up “sitting on a shelf.” Others deem planning to be a distraction from critical daily, operational and…

Kicking off a series of posts on strategic planning and how it continues to evolve, below is a blog post that I wrote a few years ago while I was a capacity building consultant. This post focuses on the difference between strategic planning and business planning. It is meant to provide some guidelines and understanding…

In 2015, Arts Council Santa Cruz County (the Arts Council), a Packard Foundation Local Grantmaking grantee, received an Organizational Effectiveness (OE) grant to support communications planning. Michelle Williams, Executive Director of the Arts Council, is an experienced nonprofit leader who has implemented several capacity building projects. I recently spoke with Michelle to learn more about…

As a former capacity building consultant and now the newest member of the Packard Foundation’s Organizational Effectiveness (OE) team, it has been my fortune to immerse myself in the work of OE over the last month. There has been a lot to learn, and I am happy to be in a position to share some…