Ditching the Strategy Marathon for a Sprint

What can a charity get out of a one-day strategic-planning session?

Kirstin Burch was willing to spend $5,500 to find out.

Burch took the top job at PRG, a 50-year-old Minneapolis charity focused on eliminating racial disparities in housing, with big plans for the organization’s next half century. But like so many charity leaders today, she is being forced to think shorter term. Inflation, federal executive orders, and state government wariness following recent high-profile fraud committed by other nonprofits in Minnesota have all taken a toll, and cash flow at her charity is tight.

Investing in a three- to five-year strategic plan — which can cost $25,000 to $90,000 and take six to nine months to complete — seemed like too much, especially since Burch had little visibility into the organization’s finances beyond a year.

Strategic planning firms have been retooling their work with nonprofits since early 2025, when the swirl of uncertainty hanging over the sector led many charities to begin focusing on short-term scenarios or contingency plans instead.

Imagine Deliver, a firm in Minneapolis, is taking the trend a step further. Its “civic strategy sprint” promised to help participating charities find clarity on their direction, elevate a handful of near-term priorities, and identify projects that could be shuttered if necessary.

The pitch: Bring a handful of top leaders together for just one day and leave with a rough plan for the next 12 to 18 months.

“Sign me up,” Burch told the planning firm. “We are in.”

Light and Nimble

The sprint was held in mid-March in a conference room at the Riverplace office complex in Minneapolis.

Birch and her leadership team — the employees heading up the charity’s three divisions — sat at their own table. Five other charities were also in the room.

The one-day session was envisioned by Kate Downing Khaled, Imagine Deliver’s founder and CEO.

“There is nothing more demoralizing than a plan that is outdated before it is even finalized and approved,” Downing Khaled said. “We had a lot of nonprofits saying, ‘The strategy I built last year, or two years ago — it no longer holds. And I no longer have the money or the resources or the time to waste on a whole other plan.’”

The sprint was designed to be more affordable and less elaborate than the traditional strategic-planning process. “It’s a lighter version that allows you to be nimble, emergent, strategic, and focused, but not have it take three quarters to design,” Downing Khaled said.

After breakfast and a quick ice-breaker — the locals shared their favorite restaurants with visiting nonprofit leaders from Boston and suburban Chicago — the charities got down to business with co-workers at their own table.

For Burch, that was part of the appeal: an uninterrupted day to huddle with her management team, the heads of real-estate development, home-ownership services, and lending and down-payment assistance programs.

“We’re super client-facing,” Burch said. “We’re all just kind of whipping around, doing our thing. We don’t have a lot of time to sit for an extended period.”

The first activity was for everyone: list five work highlights and two challenges from the past year. Then someone from each nonprofit — typically the CEO — was asked to share a “state of the state,” a presentation on the condition of the charity, with others at their table.

“We’re very intentional about how we structure the day,” said Monica Cruz Zorilla, an Imagine Deliver strategist who helped the charities throughout the day. “We bring in the ‘state of the state’ so that charities can ground themselves in a shared understanding.”

Turning Complexity Into Action

Burch came prepared. She had revamped PRG’s leadership structure when she became CEO in late 2024, elevating the three employees she brought to the meeting. But she noted in her presentation that PRG would need to do a better job of expanding organizational capacity to achieve its ambition of constructing and rehabbing more houses, and working with more potential homebuyers, in its seven-county region.  

Next, participants in the sprint were asked to identify top priorities and outcomes that their charity could achieve in the next 12 to 18 months.

Using the highlights and challenges — and the grounding established by Burch — the foursome from PRG started jotting priorities on sticky notes. The team eventually consolidated those ideas into six broad categories.

After a lunch break, the charities were instructed to narrow the list to just four priorities, via a table vote.

“It’s really a day to turn complexity into clear direction,” Cruz Zorilla said. “Leaders don’t need more ideas. The sprint is about having fewer priorities and more follow-through.”

For PRG, the four priorities that made the final cut were largely focused on capacity-building and included:

• figuring out how the charity could build more homes, including by adding new staff members, in its seven-county metro area. 
• determining whether PRG was tracking the right data, so that Burch would be able to tell when things were going well — or off the rails.
• deciding how the charity would cope if delayed payments from the state and federal government continued, including whether to seek a new line of credit from a financial intermediary.
• providing greater resources to the managers of each division, and clarifying lines of reporting, to ensure they can work together to lead the organization to growth.

Forced to choose, PRG relegated two priorities from the morning to secondary status: finding a bigger office to house the growing PRG staff and working with external partners to crystallize a fundraising vision centered on the charity’s next 50 years.

But all six goals eventually will receive some attention, Burch said.

“The six priorities feel spot on. They will shape what we’re focused on for the next 12 to 18 months,” Burch said. “It feels really good to know we all are on the same page about these being the important things for our organization.”

From Priorities to a Road Map

Executives at three other charities told the Chronicle they also made good planning progress at the sprint.

Elevating Equity, an intermediary in Elgin, Ill., that supports grassroots projects that address racial injustice, worked on a more concrete “theory of change” that could help the charity raise money from foundations — and diversify away from the one funder that has sustained it in its first five years.

The Clubhouse Network, a STEM-focused after-school program based in Boston with 157 sites in 20 countries, worked on a plan for moving away from the informal approach of its legacy computer-programming models to a more skills-based approach with real-world applications. 

Another housing charity in Minneapolis, the Beacon Interfaith Housing Collaborative, focused on its supportive-housing division. It tried to get finance and programming staff speaking the same language at a time when the program faces multiple threats.  

“How do you actually balance mission and sustainability in a way that is coherent, especially when the ground is so rapidly shifting beneath your feet?” said Chris LaTondresse, Beacon’s CEO.

Later in the afternoon, the charities worked on road maps for executing the priorities they had identified.

At the PRG table, one of Burch’s colleagues wondered if it was problematic that the charity’s clients weren’t listed as a priority. The team responded by putting the word “clients” at the center of their road map — with arrows pointing outward to the identified priority areas.

But Burch was unapologetic about the priorities she and her team had identified. Building capacity, she said, was mostly about investing in employees. That is the secret to serving clients better, she said. 

“Everything we do is for the clients,” Burch said. “We don’t need to talk about it, because we embody that piece of it. It’s all these other things we need to do to make sure we’re still able to serve the clients well.”