Initiative Development
We help chart new waters.
The Canoe Group sees your organization as a well-crewed boat, traveling down a river or across an ocean, employing navigational tools and well-plotted maps, riding the waves that splash across the deck and sometimes sending you off course. For many clients, we work as a “scouting team,” sent ahead to explore what’s around the next bend.
Why This Service?
We love working with visionaries. We are skilled at collaborating with people who have an idea that is bigger than today, a dream that requires tomorrow. We can help move concepts into reality, deepening an organization’s pursuit of mission while engaging new allies in pursuit of common goals.
How We Help
The Canoe Group is known for our work helping clients develop new initiatives. In many ways, these projects are similar to strategic or business planning, but with a different kind of focus, intensity and timing. We can facilitate your earliest brainstorming, sketch concepts, determine core plans – and help you determine what we call your “non-negotiables.”
We help name and engage possible partners, analyze opportunities and develop solid working agreements. We guide you as you examine resource needs and develop support. And we assure that you define the outcomes you are seeking – and how you intend to measure your progress along the way. And finally, we guide and facilitate the meetings where push comes to shove, when you analyze the options and decide future actions.
We strongly believe that information technology informs the future, offering new channels that should be explored as part of almost every future business decision. Through it all, our job is to facilitate innovation, assuring that what you envision is sustainable and effective.
Examples
We’ve navigated and solidified working agreements between six statewide organizations (who had never worked together before). We facilitated decisions between groups of business partners who hold differing opinions about their company’s future. We’ve designed annual fundraising events, conventions, networks, and conferences.
We’ve developed statewide performing arts tours, with presenting partners in many communities. We’ve designed pilot projects and pilot programs that became organizational mainstays. We developed grassroots fundraising strategies for organizations – and for campaigns – that had previously depended entirely upon large funder support.
We worked across sectors, building partnership agreements between social service and arts organizations, between businesses and non-profits, between funders and those being funded. We know the territory and have a kind of pragmatic optimism about possibility.
In short, we are your guide when you intend to explore the unexplored.
|
Print This Page
How To Stay Informed
-
A new initiative developed for a metropolitan portland governmental agency gets a kickoff breakfast to discuss project goals and partnership opportunities.
Join us on facebook