Over the last few months, we've been writing about the gap between where most nonprofit strategic plans start and where they end up. Plans that are too fluffy to act on, or too tactical to inspire, or worst of all, sit in a binder and never see daylight.
Through our Strategy For What's Next series, we introduced a framework called Ariadne, named for the Greek princess whose thread was the solution to the labyrinth.
We're happy to announce that our complete guide to Ariadne is now available as a free download.
Setting Better Strategy: An Introduction to the Ariadne Strategy Framework is a free, 27-page ebook that walks you through the three layers of Identity, Focus, and Execution. It's built on 30 years of experience helping organizations close the gap between vision and action, and is a tool you can use together with your team to create an inspiring strategy that is tactical enough to execute and compelling enough to follow.
The guide walks through each layer of the Ariadne Strategy Framework, with explanations, examples, and questions to use with your leadership team.
Identity is your foundation — your vision, mission, and values. Most organizations have this layer in place, but many haven't revisited it in years. The guide helps you pressure-test whether your identity still reflects who you've become and where you're headed.
Focus is where real strategy lives, and where most plans fall short. This layer tackles three questions that sound simple but are deceptively hard to answer well:
What value do we create, and for whom?
What makes us different from everyone else doing similar work?
And what strategic initiatives will we pursue, knowing that choosing means saying no to other things?
If your plan has a vision statement and a list of quarterly goals but nothing connecting them, the Focus layer is what's missing.
Execution is where strategy meets reality: the annual priorities, metrics, and supporting functions that turn plans into progress. The guide addresses how to identify and strengthen the organizational capabilities that can quietly become weak spots if they're not deliberately maintained.
We wrote this for nonprofit executives, board members, and senior leaders who set or implement strategy, especially those who've been through a planning process that produced a document nobody uses. If you've ever sat in a quarterly review and wondered how your goals connect to the bigger picture, this guide is for you.
It's also useful for consultants and facilitators who lead planning processes for clients. The framework gives you a shared vocabulary and a logical structure that prevents those three-hour wordsmithing sessions.
More organizations need better frameworks. And nonprofit organizations need IP and tools designed for the purpose sector, not business tools retrofitted to philanthropy.
Your work matters to the world, and we want you to do it with gusto. You deserve a strategic plan as passionate and as effective as you are.
If your strategic plan doesn't have a clear thread connecting who you are to what you're doing, this guide will help you find it.