Philanthropy Consulting

TCC Group crafts cutting-edge, customized Evaluation and Learning services reflecting your unique needs and objectives and the perspectives of those you serve. Whether launching a new program, assessing a long-time strategy, or testing out novel approaches, our team will work with you to create a culture of continuous learning that will inform and strengthen your organization’s strategic decision-making by:

• Working alongside you and your stakeholders to unpack assumptions, align language, understand shared and divergent needs, and identify key questions, hypotheses, and learning opportunities.
• Establishing a customized and culturally responsive, methodologically sound, and right-sized framework for your evaluation and learning objectives.
• Using developmental evaluations to show how your interventions are evolving, formative evaluations to provide you with timely learning and feedback, rapidcycle approaches to help you iterate quickly, and retrospective evaluations to show what was achieved.
• Collaborating with you and your stakeholders to lift up actionable insights through analyses and data visualizations that allow for real-time strategy revisions, impactful approaches, and opportunities for learning.
• Helping develop your logic models and theories of change and conduct community-based participatory research that fully and respectfully engages stakeholders, and providing technical assistance and capacity building support to sustain a learning culture.

Guiding TCC’s Grantmaking and Foundation Management approach is the knowledge that you have unique philanthropy consulting needs, goals, and perspectives. We bring deep experience in diverse sectors and a collaborative mindset to every project, which enables us to craft creative solutions across institutional types, stages of development, and issue areas that address the complex social problems in our world by:

• Partnering with you to create grant guidance documents and operational blueprints, and design grant application processes materials anchored in trust-based philanthropy principles.
• Helping you develop, assess, refine, and benchmark grantmaking strategies that fit your budget and maximize the potential for impact, while conducting landscape and feasibility studies to understand the potential of your grantmaking program.
• Fostering a culture of continuous learning that leads to stronger partnerships and better outcomes.
• Developing theories of change and logic models to help establish a shared vision, strong evaluation framework, consistent communication with stakeholders, and concrete perspectives to inform your grantmaking decisions.
• Reducing or eliminating your administrative burden and minimizing operational costs through comprehensive back-office services.
• Facilitating board governance and operations, including grantmaking, finance, stakeholder relations, and more.

TCC Group collaborates with funders and nonprofits to design, integrate, and implement purpose-driven, values-based initiatives to yield the change you seek. We immerse in your issue areas and ask essential questions to a range of internal and external stakeholders that clarify your goals and deploy a process of deep listening to assess and prioritize needs, goals, resources, and opportunities. The results are sustainable solutions-driven approaches that reflect multiple diverse viewpoints and life experiences. Our approach includes:

• Listening and asking critical questions to guide the codesign of innovative listening approaches, including custom mixes of ethnographic research, stakeholder interviews, listening tours, and landscape analyses.
• Aligning the initiative design to your goals and available resources; then create a theory of change, implementation framework, and preliminary roadmap, guided by innovative stakeholder engagement and community advisement.
• Managing all aspects of the programs in your initiative, including grantmaking, convenings choreography, and cultivation and stewardship of community relationships. We track results, troubleshoot problems, illuminate opportunities, and maintain a strategic view for impact.
• Applying our evaluation and learning expertise throughout the process by building frameworks, theories of change, and community-collaborative evaluative methods. We continually assess effectiveness based on a customized system and use learnings to share with the field and apply them to your initiatives.

For TCC Group, organizational strengthening goes far beyond conducting training or creating a strategic or business plan. Through open, informed, and collaborative communication we support a wide range of social sector organizations in identifying and prioritizing critical needs, internally and across the constituencies you serve. Our approach includes:

• Identifying capacity-building priorities easily, quickly, and confidently with our suite of self-assessment tools- Core Capacity Assessment Tool (CCAT®), Foundation Core Capacity Assessment Tool (FCCAT), Relational Capacity Assessment Tool (RCAT), Advocacy Core Capacity Assessment Tool (Advocacy CCAT), Values-based Communication Diagnostic – and preparing a customized plan to make the most impact.
• Optimizing staff capacity by assessing traits, interests, and growth potential and creating organizational structures, cohort learning opportunities, and other means to marry mission-driven goals to your day-to-day processes.
• Partnering with your board to determine ideal size, composition, and function and building a deep understanding of ways to guide organizational strategic direction productively.
• Evaluating revenue streams to increase diversified income sources for your organization, while facilitating messaging that articulates your organization’s effectiveness and impact.
• Maximizing strategic communications by centering your organization’s values to build connections and mission clarity.
• Providing due diligence and research options to increase your impact through strategic alliances or merging with other organizations.

The stories we tell convey values that can unite us or divide us, and we understand the power of words and ideas to build relationships, mobilize people, share knowledge, and propel advocacy. Whether you are designing a complex initiative, advocating for change, embarking on a new organizational direction, or creating a suite of educational materials, strategic communication is essential to social impact work. Our approach includes:

• Developing new or refreshed communication strategies driven by shared values that resonate across audiences and maximize the impact of your programmatic work. Together, we identify the stories, voices, and channels that can drive change internally and externally.
• Examining the storytelling landscape around your issue and crafting a compelling overarching story that can move the needle by changing norms, conversations, and culture through advocacy campaigns, community mobilization, or arts and culture.
• Designing innovative solutions to deliver your message in the most powerful, audience-appropriate way. From immersive theater programs to print and digital collateral, we develop activations that make your messages stand out.
• Identifying, convening, and engaging stakeholders to elevate key voices, build strategic relationships, and inform strategies. Through listening tours, community advisory boards, participatory design, and public and private events, we ensure projects are community-driven, giving them lasting impact and local champions.
• Elevating and amplifying community voices. Through ideation, listening, training, and production, we help you and your community partners tell dynamic stories that leave a lasting imprint.
• Tracking and measuring impact through a range of unique quantitative, qualitative, and participatory methods. These reveal core values and beliefs, trusted messengers, avenues for engagement, and barriers to action to help develop a strategy to engage and mobilize core audiences.

Informed strategy provides a flexible foundation for everything you do, and our services help to inform your priorities, guide your implementation, and foster cohesion across all of your work. Our philanthropy consulting offers strategic approaches for funders, nonprofits, and others grounded in your values, vision, and aspirations that adapt in real time to changing internal and external conditions. Our approach includes:

• Offering strategic planning services that result in actionable plans encompassing mission-driven goals and metrics for success.
• Ensuring your social impact strategies stay current by engaging leadership in developing governance strategies to keep your mission, vision, and values relevant.
• Determining whether your philanthropic investment strategies, program areas, or departmental initiatives are achieving your goals.
• Refreshing or realigning giving strategies or programmatic portfolios, resolve community-based challenges, and embed equity when transitioning program areas.
• Optimizing Board impact, including training, retreat facilitation, recruitment, and onboarding support, or redistribute power to ensure equitable governing.
• Developing and implement strategy solutions for organizations, coalitions, and networks relying on an affiliate or chapter model to maximize impact by ensuring strong commitment to coordinated action.