Our Services
Dexterity Management advances operational effectiveness though strategic planning, new program creation, infrastructure development, and increased staff achievement. Dexterity Management is available for short-term projects or ongoing staffing support.
Fundraising and Development
Grant writing: foundation, corporate, government
Grants and donor management
Individual donor cultivation
Prospecting and outreach
Development strategic planning
Board training and management
Appeal letters
Is highly successful better than successful?
Not in our book.
We dislike adverbs. They sound desperate. Highly successful sounds like you are working too hard to sell me something that you aren’t quite sure about. So you add an extra layer of paint with highly. Leave that off and show me the outcomes.
Details like tone, formatting, word choice (or exclusion) make reading a proposal more pleasant and successful.
Staff Management and Training
Organizational staffing needs assessment
Staff development
Personnel retreats and visioning
Work alignment and action steps
Why are so many people working on this project?
A CEO needed help aligning staffing resources to organizational priorities and revenues. It turned out that while one program had contracted in terms of people served—the staff had not. There were twice as many staff and half as many clients.
Those team members were moved to another program that had a waiting list of clients and exhausted workers.
An objective eye to look at the budget, revenues, programs and outcomes can see opportunities that someone in the middle of it all may not see.
Strategic Planning
Asset mapping
Succession Planning
Strategic analysis
Action planning
Creating and communicating strategic plans
Implementation and monitoring strategic plans
Evaluating strategic plans’ outcomes and impacts
No, You Cannot Retire—you know too much
Dexterity helped a university research center plan its future success. The Principal Investigator started the work 40 years ago and wanted to retire—but held all of the workings of the center in her head. She realized that unless she passed her knowledge and methods to another person, the research would be at risk. Dexterity worked with the Center to create a three year succession plan which the team created and co-trained in all of the aspects of work.
This ensured that the Center would live without its founder and would thrive with new team ownership of the work.
Business Continuity
Threats and impact analysis
Recovery strategies
Plan development
Testing and exercise
Dexterity staff members worked with the US Coast Guard to conduct multi-jurisdictional, multi-party emergency response trainings in Boston. These sorts of trainings were praised after the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing, when the region’s response community came together seamlessly.
Network and Coalition Excellence
Network creation, mission design and implementation
Knowledge management / best practice sharing
Strategic Planning
Design and measure collective work and impact
Member engagement and leadership development
Meeting planning, facilitation and follow up
We Need Camaraderie to Do the Impossible.
After an unforeseen closing of an international education association, Dexterity was asked to maintain network of 20 community education groups, serving over six million students, to foster a learning community and deepen its collective impact work. Work included regular experiential learning at member sites to see methods and success in practice. It also included professional development workshops to ensure that organizational leaders stayed enriched and engaged.
Organizational Creation / Change Management
Facilitate board development
Develop and align mission, values and goals
Plan communications and outreach around change
Develop finance and funding models
Establish infrastructure systems and define programs
Staffing alignment
Dexterity worked with a young non profit serving refugees, asylum seekers and other newcomers to the Washington DC region. This organization has an innovative model and demonstrates great success. They had opportunities to greatly expand programs and serve more people—which they did. However, they needed to learn about managing grants, building internal systems, and diversifying funding. We worked side by side with staff and board to design and strategy and detailed work plans. We continued to mentor and support staff as their internal systems became more sophisticated and their roles changed.