Strategic Planning: The Missing Link for Nonprofits and Consultants Alike

If you feel like you’re spinning your wheels, this article is for you.

Nonprofit professionals do incredible work. But they’re often exhausted, underfunded, and stuck reacting instead of intentionally building. And when they sometimes fail? It’s not because they don’t care, but because they don’t have a plan of action that matches their ambition.

At least, that’s how Funding for Good CEO, Mandy Pearce, sees things.

She’s been in the business of supporting nonprofits for over seventeen years. Over that time, Mandy grew her practice from a modest side hustle to a team of talented individuals serving nonprofits across the U.S. with strategic planning, leadership training, executive coaching, fundraising program development, and executive search clients.

And if that wasn’t enough? She also runs bootcamps for those seeking to start or grow a nonprofit consulting company, providing group and 1:1 support for those who want to grow but don’t quite know how.

Mandy was kind enough to sit for an interview with GrantStation, share her story, and discuss how she supports folks doing good work in the world.

The following transcript has been edited for clarity and succinctness. 

Mandy’s Origin Story

Nick Baird (NB): Let’s start off easy. Why don’t you tell us a bit about your career? How’d you get started? Where have you gone, how, and why?

Mandy Pearce (MP): Back in 1997, I started as an assistant at the American Lung Association in Asheville, North Carolina. They gave me a paper to fill out. I didn’t know what it was, but it ended up being a grant, and we secured it! That’s when I fell in love with, as I saw it back in the day, getting free stuff. 

After college, I relocated to Charlotte, NC, where I worked at a nonprofit until September 11th, 2001. Many nonprofits closed their doors then, including the one where I worked.

My next job was working for a group home for juvenile delinquent teenage boys as a “teaching parent.” I lived in the facility where the kids were for a week, and then I was off for a week, so I had a lot of spare time on my hands. I did a lot of volunteer work and also started getting paid as a grant writer on the side. It started as a side hustle, but in 2009, I went official with the business.

I eventually got tired of working for other people and decided I could do more with my own time and serve more people. So that’s what I did. Last October marked our 16th anniversary in business.

NB: Congrats on your success! And I can definitely relate to not wanting to work for anybody else. I wouldn’t trade freelance writing for anything.

MP: Right?! The initial business was a grant-writing business called Grant C.R.E.W.S (Consultation, Research, Education, and Writing Services). We kept that name for two years, but we realized we’d pigeonholed ourselves a little bit with it and moved to the name, Funding for Good.

We still provide grant writing services, but it’s no longer what we market exclusively. We are known for strategic planning, board and leadership development, and fundraising coaching now.

We also started a completely new segment of the business during COVID. Unexpectedly, we were getting a lot of requests to help people with their nonprofit consulting, so now we have a whole section of the business that works with people who want to start and grow their consulting businesses. 

NB: Could you tell me a bit about the business? How many people work with you? What do they do?

MP: We currently have a team of eleven contractors. We all kind of have the same mindset—that we don’t want to be employees—and I’m perfectly okay with that. Supportive even.

I’ve been working with our lead consultant for 23 years, long before Funding for Good even existed. We have a grants lead, videographer, photographer, a couple of virtual assistants, our guru web developer and all-things tech who keeps everything going on the back end, and then other contractors depending on the type of work we need support with.

We’re also all over the country and world. One of our consultants is an SEO strategist and copywriter. She lives in Italy. But we’ve got people all over the place: East Coast, West Coast, and everywhere in between.

Funding for Good: Strategic Planning Consultants

NB: So, educate me a bit here. Say I’m running a nonprofit. I’m focused on services, fundraising, and all of the things that empower our mission. But I’m not really sure about the value of strategic planning. What am I missing?

MP: What’s the value of strategic planning?

Well, for starters, if you don’t have a plan, you’re flying by the seat of your pants. You can’t tell stakeholders, “Hey guys, this is where we are, this is where we’re going, and here’s how you can help get us there.”

Second, “nonprofit” is a tax status, not a business model. When we talk about strategic planning, it’s really just business planning. That’s what the for-profit world calls it, and it’s exactly the same thing here.

Strategic plans are not your business as usual. We call that “B-A-U.” It’s a capacity-building initiative that goes above and beyond BAU.

How are you growing? How are you serving? How are you creating more impact? Are you creating new programs, keeping the old, or expanding current projects? Are you meeting the needs in your community? Are you expanding to a different demographic or geography?

A strategic plan doesn’t have to be this big pie-in-the-sky dream. It just has to be based in reality. 

NB: Wow. You’ve definitely answered that question before.

MP: [Laughing] Okay, good! Succinct. That’s good.

NB: Follow-up question. Let’s say someone comes to you, and they know they need a strategic plan. They see the value. But they know they need help to get there. What challenges are they facing? And how do you help overcome them?

MP: Well, we start by meeting clients where they are. There are a lot of factors in play, and so we’ll ask where they want to start, figure out where they actually are, and meet them there.

Many times, they’re in one of two situations. Either they have a board person who is very passionate about strategic planning, but they don’t have staff buy-in, or they have executive directors who understand the need, but the board doesn’t see the value. It’s really hard to get an organization to follow through if the executive director doesn’t want to or vice versa. It can become a very contentious process.

Typically, we start with board or executive staff education where we sit everyone down and have a conversation. Sometimes board only, sometimes staff only, and others a mixed retreat.

Our goal is to figure out what the issues are, how we can support addressing them, and what resources they have or need. What are their time frames? How many people are willing to participate? What dollar resources do they have? Do we have X, Y, and Z in place? Do we want X, Y and Z in place? How is this going to work?

Things like that.

Another big challenge is navigating board turnover. Those transitions can be really, really painful because when people move on, you often lose a lot of institutional knowledge if someone wasn’t intentionally passing it down before they left.

NB: This is still very high-level for me. I’m not sure I entirely understand. Could you share a specific example? Maybe a favorite strategic planning success story?

MP: I have this client… they just finished their second three-year plan, and it’s going really well. I’ve worked with them for about a decade, and for the purposes of this conversation, let’s keep it simple and say they run a retirement community for the deaf. 

For the first seven years, we didn’t do any strategic planning. Instead, we helped write grants for capital campaigns. They had some fundraising programs—per se—but not a ton, and they’d never had any staff. They were bringing in revenue, not hand over fist, but enough for their purposes.

But in year seven, they decided they really needed a strategic plan. And I totally agreed. We facilitated their planning process for the first year and then provided annual support for the next three.

As a result of their plan, they restructured their tax status, name, and governance structure, and they are moving along in a much better way. They’re doing their first-ever executive search right now; they’re going to hire their first staff person, with more to come; and over the next 18 months, they're going to start growing in a very intentional way.

And none of that would have come about if they hadn’t started with strategic planning.

NB: What makes that story one of your favorite successes?

MP: Because I’ve been with them since inception. They started out as this amazing, well-intentioned passion project run by a small group of individuals who just wanted to have an impact but didn’t quite know how to get the business pieces in place, to an organization built to last beyond the current board members.

Some of these board members have been there for 10 years, and I can see the relief in their faces because they know their work isn’t going to stop with them. They have a great mission, and it’s a wonderful thing that it’s going to continue to grow. 

Boot Camp: Helping New (and Experienced) Consultants Level Up

NB: Let’s switch gears a bit. We’ve talked about how you help nonprofits, but how do you help consultants? That’s a totally different group with a totally different set of needs. Where are these individuals when they come to you, what problems are they facing, and how do you help?

MP: We don’t have group coaching or masterminds or that kind of thing. Instead, we take nine people at a time into a sixty-day Boot Camp and provide one-on-one support to help each of them get where they’re going. 

Maybe they have a side hustle, or they’re considering starting a business but haven’t taken the leap, or are looking to take a full-time business to the next level. Whatever it is, they define what “next level” means for them.

The most common things people come for are streamlining services. Whether it’s creating them, building new ones, or getting rid of some they’ve had, we help with things like packaging, pricing, contract considerations, how to write a scope of work, how to determine if someone is an ideal client, and how to create content to reach them. 

We also work with people trying to create work-life balance. And my theory is, if you’re not creating the life you want, the work is going to kill you. I’ve had a lot of health problems because, like my mom says, I’m a type triple-A personality. I went really, really hard for a long time, and my body shut down. I’m still dealing with the consequences of that.

Boot Camp isn’t therapy. I don’t ask, “What do you think?” I say, “Please do this, you’re going to get where you want to be so much quicker if you do.”

A lot of people go through Boot Camp, love it, and make great strides in their business. One of the people (she’s actually on our team now) signed up for Boot Camp because she wanted to sell her house in New York and move to Sicily. Eighteen months later, that’s exactly what she did. She just got her driver’s license and citizenship, and she has more business than she knows what to do with.

Other people get into Boot Camp and decide running a business just isn’t for them. And that’s okay. Sometimes you have to invest in a thing to realize it’s not what you want to do. Three of my colleagues decided to leave consulting and return to jobs as employees in the nonprofit sector in 2025. It’s not right for everyone. 

NB: I can definitely speak to the value of “just tell me the answer.” I’ve hired freelance writing coaches myself. But when I talk to my friends or family about it, they’re usually pretty skeptical of the whole online coaching and courses environment. Most of them don’t run businesses themselves, but no matter how hard I try to explain it, they still make jokes about scam artists and grifters.

MP: There are definitely a lot of scammers out there. There’s this company, two years old, run by people who only have a year or so of nonprofit experience themselves, no experience with consulting, and their entire business is telling nonprofit consultants how to start and grow a business.

Honestly, it blows my mind. I don’t even understand it. But they have great marketing, put out great AI-generated content on LinkedIn, and since aspiring consultants don’t always know the right questions to ask, they get away with it. 

NB: Yes exactly. A lot of iffy companies get by because marketing is about hitting pain points and promising solutions. You know, sell the sizzle, not the steak. But when you go to buy the meal, it’s just not any good. Selling and executing are completely different things.

But let’s move on a bit now. 

You mentioned one of the first things you help consultants do is create a specific offer and statement of work. Help me understand, why is that so important?

MP: For lack of a better term, you do need an elevator pitch for when you meet people, and you’re networking, and you’re putting something in the world.

I started as a grant-writing company, and there are still people who think that’s the only thing Funding for Good does, even though my website doesn’t mention grant writing anymore. Do we provide that service? Yes. But I stopped marketing it a decade ago so I could establish Funding for Good as the go-to company for strategic planning.

But just because we don’t market it doesn’t mean we don’t offer it. 

I tell everyone I work with the same thing: You have to have one thing that everyone knows you for. 

Why?

Because you cannot be known as a generalist. No one can send you referrals if no one knows what to send you referrals for. You can offer all these things once you get a client. You can say, oh yeah I can help with that, or that’s something we can do in the future, whatever. But you have to get started with one thing. 

We start there because if I came to you and said I can do anything in the nonprofit world, then no one would have any idea what actual work I do. We want people to get clients they know they can provide great deliverables for. 

NB: Next to last question—is there anything you wish I would’ve asked, but didn’t?

MP: I wish you had asked me, "What’s the best thing about being self-employed?"

NB: Hit me. What is it?

MP: The best thing about being self-employed is having the freedom to create the life-work balance that works for me and my family. 

And the final straw actually was when I was working for someone else. 

The first couple of years, they didn’t care when I came, went, or how I did my job, as long as I achieved or exceeded my expectations. But then, in the third year, they were like, “Why haven’t you been in the office eight hours a day this week?” And I thought, I mean, I’m still overachieving my goals. I don’t understand how being specifically there benefits either you or me.

It’s a priority to be able to take my dogs for a walk when I want, eat lunch when and where I want, set meetings or not, stay up late and work until midnight, or get up at 5 a.m. and work and not have to punch a clock or be somewhere on someone else’s time. 

I was in a really unique place when I started my business, though. I didn’t have kids. I wasn’t married. I could work late, on weekends, or through lunch without anybody counting on me for my time. Not everybody is in that place. But I encourage everyone I meet, regardless of whether they work for someone else or themselves, to build a life where they can put themselves first. 

NB: And our final question—do you have any parting words of advice for folks navigating the nonprofit world in 2026?

MP: So, my mom always said this to me. And I think anybody in the nonprofit world acknowledges this as truth. If they ask you to do it, and you say yes, they will expect it going forward. So if someone says, oh, I’m only going to add this to your job for the next two months, and then we’ll find somebody else to do it, and you say yes? That’s part of your job description now. Because if you’ve been doing it, why wouldn’t you continue to? 

So, I’d say be protective of your time.

The other thing is, people are gonna hate me for this, but everybody is replaceable.

Maybe not your mom, and maybe not your sister, but in a work setting, everybody is replaceable. If you drop dead tomorrow or move across the country, they’ll eventually find someone to take your place. It’s just how it works, right? So don’t think you have to give your whole life to a job. I learned that very young, and it served me well in learning to say “no thank you” to things.

NB: I very much appreciate your time today. 

MP: Of course. Thank you, too, and take care.