In my years working in grant-making institutions, managing portfolios across democracy building, social justice, governance, and development, I discovered that most organisations struggle not because their work is weak but because their strategy does not yet know how to speak about it.
The problem is rarely a lack of impact. It is a lack of the analytical architecture to communicate that impact, to convert that impact into institutional clarity, and to convert institutional clarity into the kind of funding argument that moves donors from interest to commitment. Organisations know what they do. They often struggle to articulate why it matters at the scale and in the register that prospective funders need to hear.
That is the gap I close.
My approach is grounded. Not in the generic sense, but in the specific sense that the word carries for me philosophically. Grounded strategy means strategy that is rooted in the actual conditions of an organisation's existence: its history, its community relationships, its evidence, its governance, its values under pressure, and the honest account of where it is in its institutional lifecycle. Strategy that is not rooted in that soil does not hold. It reads well and performs badly.
I work through a structured methodology called Strategy Arc, a five-layer co-creation process that builds an institutional strategy and a funding strategy from the inside out.
The process moves through five layers working in concert:
- The Problem Architecture Establishing the compound, multi-scaled problem the organisation exists to address. It answers the question a programme officer asks before any other: why does this work matter, and why does it matter now?
- The Theory of Change Articulating the precise mechanism through which the organisation's work addresses the problem. Not what the organisation does. How what it does produces the change it claims.
- The Identity and Legitimacy Narrative Establishing who the organisation is, where it speaks from, and why it is credible and trustworthy as the institution positioned to do this work.
- The Evidence and Impact Architecture Demonstrating with honesty and rigour that the theory of change works. Not what the organisation did. What changed. And how we know it changed.
- The Funding Translation Layer Converting the institutional argument into donor-facing language and structure, calibrated to specific funder archetypes. Different donors read the same evidence differently.
Through this process, organisations produce a sound and usable Institutional Strategy, which informs and underpins a robust Funding Strategy.
Together these two documents give an organisation the strategic foundation it needs to raise money with confidence, maintain funder relationships with integrity, and grow its institutional credibility over time.
Clients who engage it need more than a document. They need a thinking partner who understands both the political environment their organisation operates in and the funding landscape it is navigating. Who can read a civil society organisation's institutional condition with the same analytical rigour brought to political risk. And who has spent two decades learning what donors actually fund, what makes them trust an organisation, and what makes them pass.
This work is for organisations that are:
- Building their first institutional strategy and need a structured process to develop it
- Preparing for a significant funding conversation and need their institutional argument tightened and translated
- At a pivotal moment of organisational transition and need strategic clarity before they can fundraise effectively
- Established institutions that have outgrown their existing strategy and need a framework that matches where they are now
The Strategy Room is also available to foundations and development finance institutions that want to strengthen the institutional capacity of their grantees, commissioning strategy development as a component of an organisational development grant.