FREE WEBINAR FOR NONPROFIT LEADERS

Before You Hire a Strategic Planning Consultant: The 6 Critical Mistakes That Kill Your Plan Before It’s Written

A free, live 60-minute webinar for nonprofit leaders preparing to begin a strategic-planning process. Learn what to examine before you commit your board, staff, time, and budget—so your next plan becomes a useful decision-making tool, not another document that sits on a shelf.

Because when strategic planning goes wrong, the loss is bigger than the fee or the time invested: you lose the chance to use the process to focus your people, make the hard choices, and create real change.

2:00 PM - 3:00 PM ET

Tuesday, October 27, 2026

Reserve Your Seat

A strategic plan can fail long before the first planning meeting.

Many nonprofits do not have an implementation problem.
They have a buying and setup problem.

      
      The wrong scope.
    
      The wrong people in the room.
    
      A board that has not aligned on the decisions it needs to make.
    
      A consultant selected for the wrong reasons.
    
      A process built to document what the organization is already doing
      instead of helping it choose what must change.

By the time the plan is written, the most important decisions may already have been made—and the opportunity to make them differently may be gone.

This webinar will help you recognize those risks before you sign an agreement, launch a process, or ask your team to invest months
of attention in a plan that will not change how the organization works.

WHAT ATTENDEES WILL LEARN

In this session, you’ll learn how to spot the mistakes that make strategic planning expensive, distracting, and ineffective.

        
        Clarify the actual decision your organization needs strategic planning to help make.
      
        Distinguish a useful planning process from one that simply records what is already happening.
      
        Evaluate whether the proposed scope, timeline, and deliverables match the work your organization truly needs.
      
        Identify who needs to be involved—and who needs to be able to disagree—before the process starts.
      
        Ask prospective consultants questions that reveal how they work when alignment is difficult.
      
        Recognize warning signs that a process will create a polished document without changing priorities, decisions, or behavior.
      
        Protect your executive director’s time and keep the planning process from becoming another organizational bottleneck.
      
        Use a practical comparison scorecard to evaluate options before you commit.

You’ll leave better equipped to:

You will receive a planning-consultant evaluation scorecard to help you compare your options.

Reserve Your Seat

WHO THIS WEBINAR IS FOR

This webinar is for you if your organization is considering strategic planning in the next year.

  
  Webinar Audience Fit

            Especially relevant for:
          
                Executive directors and CEOs preparing for a new strategic-planning process.
              
                Board chairs and board members who will help select, oversee, or approve a planning engagement.
              
                Senior leaders asked to shape the scope, outcomes, or consultant-selection process.
              
                Nonprofit teams that have been through planning before and want their next plan to lead to more than a new document.
              
            This session may not be the right fit if:
          
                You are looking for a step-by-step tutorial on writing a strategic plan yourself.
              
                Your organization is not considering a strategic-planning process in the foreseeable future.
              
                You are looking for general nonprofit-management advice rather than guidance on making a planning decision.

WHY ATTEND NOW

The cost is not only the consultant’s fee.

A strategic-planning process can consume leadership attention, staff capacity, board energy, and organizational momentum. But the deepest loss is not the fee, the hours, or even the months of work.

I believe strategic planning is the single most powerful thing a nonprofit leader can do. A hire changes one seat. A grant changes one year. A plan changes what every person in your organization says yes to.

When the process is poorly scoped or poorly chosen, you do not just lose money and time. You lose that chance to create focus and change—and the loss shows up long after the engagement ends:

  
      What the loss looks like
    
          Leaders return to the same unresolved questions.
        
          Staff receive another set of priorities without real tradeoffs.
        
          The executive director becomes the bottleneck for implementation.
        
          The board approves a plan it cannot meaningfully use.
        
          The final document looks good—but does not change what the organization decides, stops, funds, or does next.

A few better questions before you hire can prevent months of wasted effort afterward.

WHAT TO EXPECT

The session includes:

A focused teaching session built around the most consequential pre-planning mistakes.
Examples of successful planning processes—and what to look for so you can create similar results.
A practical scorecard you can use to compare prospective approaches or consultants.
Live Q&A, so you can apply the ideas to the decision in front of your organization.

During this live 60-minute session, Durell will walk through the six critical mistakes nonprofit leaders make when selecting and setting up strategic-planning work—along with the questions and safeguards that help prevent them.

No generic theory. No pressure to have all the answers before you arrive. Just a clearer way to make an important decision before it becomes expensive and difficult to reverse.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

About Durell Coleman

Durell Coleman is the Founder and CEO of DC Design, a social impact design firm that helps nonprofits, foundations, and governments navigate complex challenges through human-centered design and systems thinking.

Over the past decade, he has worked with nonprofit leaders, boards, and cross-sector partners to clarify priorities, align stakeholders, and design strategies that lead to meaningful decisions—not just another plan on the shelf. His work spans child welfare, criminal justice, healthcare, education, and economic mobility, giving him a firsthand view of what helps strategic planning create lasting change—and what causes it to fall short.

A two-time Stanford University alumnus and lecturer, Durell brings a practical, systems-level perspective to helping organizations make better decisions before the planning process begins.

Join us on Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 3:00 PM ET / 2:00 PM CT 12:00 PM PT for this free live webinar and leave with a better way to evaluate the strategic-planning process your organization is about to begin—so it becomes a source of focus and real change, not another costly exercise.

Before you hire, know what can go wrong

RESERVE YOUR SEAT

Registration is free. Limited seats available.

Frequently Asked Questions

Yes. Registration is free.
Executive directors, CEOs, board chairs, board members, and senior leaders at nonprofits considering a strategic-planning process in the next 12 months.
No. This session is most useful before you make that decision. It will help whether you are just beginning to consider planning or already comparing potential consultants and approaches.
You are welcome to attend. The session focuses on the decisions that determine whether a planning process will be useful, including scope, participation, alignment, and the questions the process must answer. It is designed primarily for organizations evaluating outside support, but the lessons apply to any high-stakes planning effort.
Yes. Registrants will receive the replay after the live session.
This is an educational session designed to help you make a better planning decision. If you want to discuss your organization’s situation afterward, you will have a clear, optional way to do that.

Do not wait until the plan is on the shelf to discover
what went wrong

Learn the mistakes to avoid before you hire, scope, and launch your next strategic-planning process—while you can still create the focus and change the process is meant to produce.