Executive Transition Planning
Board-facing: a policy document, plus up to 4 hours of facilitated conversation with your board.
Succession Planning for Nonprofits
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.
The definition
What Succession Planning Is
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?
Scope
Two Kinds of Plans
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Full Succession Planning
The larger engagement. Org-wide, scoped individually, typically 3 to 4 months to complete.
Executive Transition Planning
What Your Executive Director Transition Plan Includes
Every engagement includes:
- Facilitated board conversations that work through the scenarios that matter most for your organization: an unexpected departure, a retirement announcement, a resignation with short notice.
- Perspective on how other organizations typically handle each scenario, so your board isn't starting from a blank page.
- A fully written policy document covering multiple scenarios, ready for your board to formally adopt.
How long it takes: This depends entirely on your board's pace. Some boards do it in one focused 2 to 3 hour session and have a finished policy within a week. Others prefer to spread the conversation across a few regular board meetings. Both get you to the same place: a policy your board adopted and knows how to use.
What you walk away with: A written policy your board can act on immediately if a transition happens, whether that's next month or five years from now. It's the standing document your board turns to the day a departure becomes real.
Full Succession Planning
What This Requires From You
Succession planning takes real participation from your team. It requires:
- Structured time from your executive director, working through a list of questions.
- Access to 2 to 3 senior staff for knowledge-transfer interviews.
- At least two sessions with your board chair.
- Whatever's already written down: your org chart, employee handbook, and existing board policies.
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.
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.
What It Costs
Pricing
Succession planning is scoped individually, based on your organization's size and how much of the work is needed.
Executive Transition Planning
$800
Full Succession Planning
Scoped individually
If a Transition Becomes Real
Your policy may call for interim leadership during the gap between one executive director and the next. When that day comes, our Interim Executive Director service covers that period. Margot and Angela lead day-to-day operations while your board runs the search your policy already planned for.
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.
Next steps
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.