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 session for nonprofit leaders about to begin a strategic planning process.

Most plans don’t fail during implementation. They fail in six decisions made before anyone writes a word — what the plan has to decide, who’s in the room, what you’ll agree to stop, who’s running it, what happens the day after the board votes, and what the whole thing actually costs.

By the time you see a draft, all six are already behind you.

This session is about the ones you can still change — before you commit your board, your staff, your time and your budget.

Tuesday, October 27, 2026 · 3:00 PM ET / 2:00 PM CT / 12:00 PM PT · Live online

RESERVE YOUR SEAT

Seats are limited. Register even if you can’t make it live — we’ll send you the recording.

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

Most organizations don’t have an implementation problem.
They have a buying 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 outputs 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.
Know what a real process costs—there’s a rule of thumb, and it’s a share of your revenue, not a list price.
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 consultant comparison tool to evaluate options before you commit.

You’ll leave better equipped to:

Every attendee gets the consultant comparison tool — ten criteria, scored across up to three firms, so you can compare what you’re being sold before you sign anything.

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.

It’s not for you if:

You want a step-by-step tutorial on writing a plan yourself.
Strategic planning isn’t on your horizon.
You’re looking for general nonprofit management advice.

This session is narrow on purpose — it’s built for people with a decision in front of them, and it will waste your time if that isn’t you.

WHY ATTEND NOW

The fee is the smallest part of what this costs.

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 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.

What isn’t recoverable is the three years afterward.

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:

The questions that prevent all of this take an hour. Not asking them costs you the next three years.

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.

  • Slides are sent to everyone who registers. The comparison tool goes to people who attend.

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. No pitch.

ABOUT THE PRESENTER

About Durell Coleman

Durell Coleman is the founder and CEO of DC Design, a social impact strategy firm that has built strategies affecting more than 2.5 million people.

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.

Before you hire, know what can go wrong

Join me on Tuesday, October 27, 3:00 PM ET / 2:00 PM CT / 12:00 PM PT for a free, live sixty minutes on the decisions that determine whether your next strategic plan is worth what you’ll pay for it.

RESERVE YOUR SEAT

Free. Seats are limited. Recording sent to everyone who registers.

Frequently Asked Questions

  • Yes. No cost, no card.

  • 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.

  • Then most of this session won’t apply to you. It’s built around selecting and scoping outside support. The material on who belongs in the room and what question the process has to answer holds either way, but you’d be getting a third of the value. Your call.

  • Yes. Everyone who registers gets the recording, whether or not you make it live. The comparison tool goes to people who attend.

  • No. At the end I’ll mention an optional thirty-minute call if you want to talk through your own situation. That’s it. No pitch.

  • Yes. That’s why I keep the room small. I’ll stay until the questions run out — and if yours is specific to your organization, that’s the kind I most want.

Don’t wait until the plan is on the shelf to find out what went wrong.

The mistakes that matter most get made before the process starts. Learn them while you can still do something about it.

RESERVE YOUR SEAT

Tuesday, October 27, 2026 at 3:00 PM ET / 2:00 PM CT 12:00 PM PT