The Work Between Reimagine and Flourish
Why align decides whether a bolder vision ever happens
5 minute read
Summary: Writing a good plan is rarely what stops an organization. What stops it is that the organization it has today was designed for an earlier vision, and a bolder one likely asks for different roles, decisions, culture, funding, operations, and partners. Closing that gap is the work ABW Partners calls align, and it belongs in the planning from the beginning rather than the Monday after the board votes.
Leaders call us about a plan that leads to greater durability and more expansive impact. A strategic growth plan, a revamped advancement program, an integration plan as organizations merge, a big-bet campaign. Getting to a good plan is rarely the hard part. Becoming an organization that can carry it there is, and that work reaches and galvanizes the team organization-wide.
Align is our word for it.
ABW Partners' tagline is Reimagine, Align, Flourish. People ask us about the first word and the third one. Reimagine is the fun part, the room with the whiteboard and the big question on it. Flourish is what everybody wants on the other side. Align is the middle word, and too often it's the underestimated one.
We didn't get that from a book. It came from decades of purposeful work with leaders of visionary nonprofits, and from hearing one version or another of the same realization: we can't get where we need and want to go with the organization we have. That's why we work on philanthropy and organizational development together instead of picking one. Clients asked us for a fundraising plan and then needed something wider, often enough that we have been building and bringing to our clients a transformed way of engaging in strategic organizational development work.
The calls we get
They call because they can see further than their current setup will take them. The board, the CEO, and/or steadfast funders are contemplating a bolder direction. A campaign is being sized. A program has outgrown the philanthropy supporting it. Someone has looked hard at the next five years and knows the organizational design they have now won't get them there.
Sometimes the ask is a fundraising plan, and sometimes it's a strategic plan. Often the second is sitting inside the first, or vice versa, and neither of us knows that yet on the first call.
So we start asking how the place actually runs. Who decides what. Whether the last plan had practical application and the impact it was meant to have. What has changed inside and outside the organization that makes a bolder approach necessary now?. What's the funding model, and how reliable is it?. Each strategic curiosity begets another until we unearth, together, what the plan is really meant to equip the organization to achieve.
By the second or third conversation we're usually looking at the same gap. The emerging vision assumes an organization that doesn't exist yet. A campaign goal that quietly counts on two fundraisers, one of whom hasn't been hired. A commitment to double program reach, written for a program team already running at capacity. A strategy that needs directors deciding things in a place where every decision still routes through the executive director. A board asked to govern a bolder organization than the one it signed on for. Again, the list goes on.
Two engagements that changed shape
A client came to us to reimagine their development program: strengthen the highest-yield campaign areas and the engine underneath them, so the philanthropic work could grow and the organization could carry a bolder vision. Stage one delivered that, a picture of the strengthened department and a pathway to it. Then the real question. Nobody comes in on Monday working differently because a plan was approved on Friday. Part of the gap was talent, which is the part everyone expects. The rest was interdependency. Development couldn't reach those numbers unless IT (CRM and AI), marketing, and program changed how they worked alongside it. The department had been built for an earlier vision, and you can't tweak your way from one vision to a different one. So the engagement widened into an organization-wide change effort, pointed at the same goal we'd started with.
Another client hired us for development strategy, and a few weeks in it was clear the growth they wanted wasn't reachable until the organization settled its own true north, its aspirational vision, as their major prospective funders all asked that same question regarding why greater investment was needed, to achieve what, and why it was imperative now. The work changed with it. We were brought back to run the philanthropic and the strategic planning together, and the work streams converged. Leadership came out with a vision for the next stage, a pathway to it, better alignment across their people, money, operations and culture, and a funding model built for the plan they'd just written rather than the one before it.
Nobody's organization is ready on day one
We want to be clear about this part, because it can be easy to hear as criticism. We at ABW Partners are careful to maintain our humility and our appreciation that our clients are moving mountains while they aspire to even greater heights, navigating complicated organizational dynamics, budgetary constraints, and the like. Our clients come to us when the obstacles in front of them are getting in the way of their desired future state, and together we carry the complexity while figuring out ways to better equip their organizations to propel themselves forward.
A gap between the organization you have today and the plan you're about to write is not evidence of bad leadership or a badly run place. It's the normal condition of an organization that's growing, and finding it is most of what planning is good for.
So when we ask the question we ask all the way through a planning process, do you have the people, the skills, the structures, and the capacities and capabilities to secure the revenue to do this, a no doesn't mean the plan shrinks. It means the organization invests in itself alongside the plan: stronger managers, clearer decision-making, rewritten roles, and sufficient revenue-generating infrastructure. Sometimes it means borrowed capacity while those are being built, which is why one of ABW Partners' core consultants will occasionally embed semi-fractionally inside a client's team, carrying the strategy into the daily work until they hire or promote the person who'll own it.
Six questions worth ten minutes
No research is required. Your instincts are the point. Ask them at your next leadership meeting, then bring them to your board, where questions like these tend to lift the conversation. They travel well with your closest philanthropic investors too, current and prospective. Few things strengthen those partnerships faster than being invited into the thinking behind the plan.
Where are we strong? Where are we exposed? And what do we want this planning to settle?
If the vision gets bolder, what happens to revenue, and what are we assuming?
Who needs to be inspired by this, not just informed?
Who is our quarterback?
Can we plan and still run this year?
When the plan lands, who leads the change?
Hypotheses are enough. Say them out loud so planning starts from something real instead of a blank page, and the places where leaders quietly assume different things surface early, which is where good facilitation is a must.
Reimagine is the vision. Flourish is what happens after. Align covers the critical months in between, and it's the stretch that determines how impactful your organization will become.
If you're heading into planning this fall, put those six on the agenda before the first session. Come with hunches and a willingness to be wrong about at least two of them, and everything that follows will be sharper for it. Please know, ABW Partners is here to help you navigate this exciting inflection point. AND, in any event, you've got this!