I was previously chief strategy officer at Civic News Company, where I led their strategic planning efforts, and later raised $12M to found Votebeat and Healthbeat, nonprofit news organizations focused on voter integrity and public health, respectively.
I have guided several nonprofits to create robust, funder-ready strategic plans, including LION Publishers and 70 Faces Media.
More about this approach
Weekly Strategic Sprints
60-minute weekly sessions to swiftly move toward a bold and differentiated strategic plan.
Frameworks and Tools
Full access to proprietary frameworks, including assessments, stakeholder interview guides, and strategic plan templates.
Internal Team Authorship
Your team owns the writing and stakeholder engagement, ensuring the final plan is an authentic reflection of your mission.
Ongoing Review
Feedback on every draft to ensure your strategic narrative is logical, defensible, and ready for major funder scrutiny.
Continuous Direct Access
Available via Slack and text between sessions for urgent gut-checks, ensuring project momentum remains steady through daily operations.
A Board/Funder-Ready Result
A finalized, rigorous multi-year plan that your leadership is prepared to execute because they were responsible for building it.
I was brought in to Chalkbeat — a digital news organization focused on local education coverage in multiple states — to help grow its offerings to more geographies. But after working closely with the founder and CEO on the strategic plan, we determined that the outsize revenue potential lay in fundraising for new topics (not just education). In 2020, Chalkbeat raised $5M+ to launch Votebeat — a new local newsroom focused on elections and voting, and then debuted a new parent company in early 2023 with a broader mandate, ready to expand to other critical news topics.
When I worked with LION Publishers on their planning process, they already had the right pieces in place for a strong strategic plan, but they needed to organize and elevate their narrative. Over a swift four-month period, we turned their impact into a clear, powerful story. This included making some hard decisions, like sunsetting a program that was well-funded by a restricted grant but was ultimately a distraction from the core mission. By the end, they had a clear roadmap that simplified operations and gave the team the focus they needed to move faster and with conviction.
'Working with Alison gave me the thought partnership I needed to clearly articulate a vision for our work over the next five years. She asked smart questions and consistently helped push my initial answers to smarter places.'
