Our Approach
Understand Solid Ground’s values, and you’ll know who we are as people. Understand our core principles, and you’ll know how we define effective organizations.
Sustainable Impact
A plan is only as strong as the organization behind it. That’s why our approach starts with our Four Dimensions of Sustainable Impact model: leadership, strategy, brand, and culture.
These dimensions don’t work in isolation. They overlap, shape, and influence each other. A weak culture can undermine the best strategy. A strong leader can’t outrun a broken brand. The real organizational growth is in identifying and harnessing how the dimensions work together and reinforce each other.
That’s organizational development. It’s the difference between handing you a plan and helping you become the kind of organization that can make the plan happen.
People don’t follow ideas. People follow people.
We work with board and executive leaders to build the skills to govern well, operate effectively, and create a vision big enough to believe in and real enough to make happen. This work is never left to chance. It’s developed with patience, intention, and input.
Our Leadership Services:
- Board / Staff / Team Development
- Executive Search
- Succession Planning
- Coaching
Strategy is the best-known – and at times most overused – dimension. Every organization can benefit from better planning. But the plan is not the most important part of planning – it is the listening, learning, deliberating, and deciding that matters. Plans done well are plans that get done.
If there is to be a difference between vision and hallucination, the plan needs to be both aspirational and attainable. It must inspire and provide the basis for accountability with grace.
We call the guiding piece of a strategic planning process the Strategic Direction. It defines the difference you’ll make, and why it is important to the community. This direction is supported by a Program Strategy (what your work looks like over time) and an Annual Plan and Budget (what you’ll deliver each year, and what it will cost).
The plan is a tool. An organization that can realize the plan is the outcome.
We work with you to understand your organizational problems, devise solutions, and develop specific steps to implement the plan. We guide you through a process that makes sense, solves problems, and builds the ownership needed to do the work.
Our Strategy Services:
- Organizational Assessment
- Strategic Planning
- Revenue Development Planning
- Campaign Readiness Assessment and Planning
- Staff and Community Engagement
When organizations can benefit from working together, we help them explore the spectrum of collaboration, find a place that best serves their missions, goals, and constituent interests, and ensure the right team and human resource policies and practices are in place.
Our Durable Collaboration Services:
- Collaboration Assessment/Plan
- Facilitation of Multi-Party Collaboration
- Facilitation of Full Merger Process
- Due Diligence Management
Your community cares less about what you do and more about what difference you make. Your brand is more than just a logo or color scheme. Your brand is your promise to the community, delivered.
We help organizations get clear on who they are, how they stand out, and what difference they make. Then we help them build community connections and messaging that establish that distinction as part of the organization’s core identity.
Our Brand Services:
- Communications Planning
- Fundraising Case Development
Peter Drucker said that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast.” The culture of your organization influences every aspect of what you do and how you show up in your community. Every organization has a culture. You either get what you get or you get what you want – but you only get what you want by using intention and purpose.
We help our clients identify and build a culture of inclusion, appreciation, and accountability, including confronting the inequities embedded in so many facets of our world. Ensuring equity for all people is foundational to this dimension and is supported by everything we do.
Our Culture Services:
- Culture Compacts
- Team Building
- Coaching