Structured time from your executive director
working through the questions above.
Succession Planning for Nonprofits
Nonprofit Succession Planning
Succession planning is more than planning for your executive director's eventual transition. It looks at leadership across multiple roles, the depth of your bench, and who's coming up behind your current leaders. How are you growing and supporting talent? Offering real professional development? What structures do you have in place to diversify institutional knowledge, and where does that knowledge actually sit right now?
Whether you're a board looking to build a plan for the stable, successful future of your organization, or an executive director thinking about how to strengthen what you'll someday leave behind, let's make a plan together.
What Succession Planning Is
Succession planning for nonprofits is an ongoing, proactive look at leadership across your whole organization, wider than any single role. It's the bench depth behind your executive director and your other senior leaders, the professional development that grows people into bigger roles, and the institutional knowledge that needs to live somewhere other than one person's head.
What we'll need
What This Requires From You
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Access to 2 to 3 senior staff
for knowledge-transfer interviews.
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Two sessions with your board chair.
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Whatever's already written down:
your org chart, employee handbook, and existing board policies.
The First Look, Built In
Every engagement starts with a focused look at your people policies, leadership pipeline, and institutional knowledge before the deeper work begins. That first look comes built into the engagement. It doesn't require our full Organizational Assessment first, and if you've already had one done, it informs the work.
How Long It Takes
Approximately 3 to 4 months for a complete plan.
What You Walk Away With
A board-adopted succession plan covering leadership across your key roles: the bench behind each leader, the professional development that grows people into bigger roles, and your institutional knowledge documented so it lives somewhere other than one person's head.
The Board Stays in Charge
Succession planning is governance-level work. The board owns the plan and approves it; your executive director and senior staff help build the pipeline and document what needs to be documented. By the time we finish, the plan is written, adopted, and fully your board's to carry forward.
Engagements are project-based, with clear deliverables and timelines.
Pricing
Succession planning is scoped individually, based on your organization's size and how much of the work is needed.
Only need help with the ED role specifically? Executive Transition Planning covers that on its own, at a lower cost. Find out more.
Frequently Asked Questions
What if our ED isn't planning to leave anytime soon?
That's the best time to do it. Succession planning done proactively is simpler, cheaper, and dramatically less stressful than doing it in reaction to an unexpected departure.
Ready to Build Leadership Continuity?
Blue Heron Nonprofit Consulting works with a small number of organizations at a time. If your board, or you as executive director, is ready to think ahead about leadership risk while things are steady, we'd like to hear from you. We respond within one business day.