Coaching, Consulting & Strategic Planning
Support shaped around your organizationSomeone in your corner
Leading a nonprofit means carrying questions you can’t always ask out loud. Is this budget realistic? How do I bring this to the board? Is this donor conversation going to go the way I hope? What do I do about the gap in March?
You don’t need another report. You need someone who knows your organization, picks up the phone, and thinks it through with you.
KEA Canada Coaching
Leading an organization can be lonely at the top. An executive director carries decisions; there’s often no one else to help think through: the board dynamic, the budget call, the donor conversation that has to go well. KEA Canada coaching gives leaders a strategic thinking partner who understands nonprofit finance and revenue, keeps what you share confidential, and helps you work through exactly those decisions.
We coach fundraisers and teams too. Sometimes that’s the CEO alone. At other organizations we coach several people, like the CEO, the executive assistant, and the donor relations lead, each in their own role. Coaching is especially valuable for someone new to fundraising or working largely alone in it, but the value isn’t only about filling a gap. Even a strong, well-staffed team benefits from an outside perspective, and from a thinking partner with the time and distance to work a problem through. It also helps to have that steady sounding board when facing a challenge you haven’t navigated before, like a first major campaign, organizational change, or board challenges.
Coaching can stand on its own, run alongside a project, or anchor an ongoing relationship. It can also support a new hire through their first months, so the person you worked hard to recruit finds their footing and stays. Wherever it sits, the aim is the same: confident, supported people who do their best work and feel good doing it.
What clients say
KEA Canada provided critical strategic thinking to our fund development approach. As an emerging young organization, their wisdom, experience and practical advice helped us to avoid some potential pitfalls. They also engaged the whole board and staff in building action strategies that will allow us to reach our goals, which created broader understanding and has led to more effective and coordinated action.
Kathy is smart and funny, respectful and inquisitive, a strategic thinker, and absolutely professional in her approach and demeanour. Her fundraising knowledge, network and experience are exceptional. She is a terrific team leader and team player who is skilled at building and leveraging organizational capacity. I was thrilled to hire Kathy as Director of Development at The Banff Centre.
KEA Canada Strategic Planning
KEA Canada designs and facilitates strategic planning processes that connect where an organization is headed with how it will be funded. Too often strategy and revenue are handled by different people, in different meetings, on different timelines. The result is a plan that inspires but never quite gets resourced. We facilitate planning that closes that gap, so every priority you set has a realistic funding pathway behind it.
For more than a decade, we have supported environmental groups, community nonprofits, Indigenous-led organizations, foundations, arts organizations, and social-purpose entities to set clear direction and navigate funding shifts with confidence. Organizations bring us in to lead board retreats, planning sessions, and stakeholder engagement, and to keep the conversation grounded in what the plan will actually take to deliver.
No two planning processes look the same. Some organizations want a focused half-day session revisited each year; others need a multi-phase process that moves through discovery, stakeholder interviews, a facilitated planning session, and implementation support over several months. We help you design an engagement that fits where you are and what your budget allows. At the centre of most of them is a face-to-face facilitated session, where an experienced outside facilitator leads the room so your executive director and team can take part fully as contributors rather than running the process themselves.
Our facilitation style emphasizes listening first, clarity throughout, and practical outcomes your team can act on. We walk beside you and your board rather than ahead of you, so the plan that emerges is one the whole organization understands and owns. Sessions are led by Kathy Arney, supported by the KEA team. She reads the group as the conversation unfolds and adapts in real time, so when an unexpected issue surfaces or the energy shifts, the session moves toward what the group actually needs rather than pressing on through a fixed agenda. A strategic plan is only as strong as the conversation that produces it.
What sets our approach apart is the connection between strategy and revenue. Through the GROW Model, KEA Canada’s methodology for building revenue capacity, we help you develop a plan whose direction is clear and whose funding model can support it.
Where we help
KEA Canada works directly with nonprofit leaders, fundraising teams, and boards on the work that moves an organization forward:
- Strategic planning and facilitation
- Revenue strategy and fund development
- Campaign planning and management
- Board development and engagement
- Fund development assessments
- Executive and board coaching
- Interim leadership through a gap
Every engagement draws on the GROW Model, KEA Canada’s methodology for building revenue capacity. Some focus deeply on one dimension. Others move through all four over a longer partnership.
Every engagement starts the same way
Before we scope anything, we run a Needs Investigation: a structured look at where your organization stands, what’s most urgent, and what a realistic path forward looks like. It’s how we make sure the work fits where you actually are and what you can invest, not where a template says you should be.
Two ways to work together
Project work:
Have a defined piece of work in front of you? A strategic plan, a campaign, a board training, a case for support, a fund development assessment. We scope it, agree to it in advance, and do it with you. Clear start, clear finish.
Ongoing support:
Many clients don’t want the relationship to end when a project does. Ongoing support with KEA Canada gives you continuing access to a strategic thinking partner who knows your organization, your board, and your funding picture, without a meter running. You’ll never have to weigh whether a question is worth the cost of asking it.
Ongoing support includes:
- Regular strategy sessions, one or two a month, time set aside for you: what’s on your mind, what’s keeping you up at night, the things you need to talk through and work out with support
- Phone and email access between sessions, for the questions that can’t wait for a meeting
- A confidential sounding board, for the conversations you can’t have inside your organization
- Continuity, so nothing gets re-explained and nothing gets dropped
- Priority access when something urgent lands on your desk
- Discounts on KEA Canada’s online courses
What clients work through with us: prep before a hard board meeting. A donor conversation they want to rehearse. A funding gap that just appeared. A second set of eyes on a proposal. A decision they need to say out loud to someone who isn’t in it. Sometimes, just a place to think.
Ongoing clients can add hands-on project work whenever they need it, scoped simply and agreed in advance. Ongoing support holds the relationship; projects are added only when you choose them.
Get Started
Book a call. We’ll talk about where you are, what you’re carrying, and whether a project, ongoing support, or one of our programs is the right next step. If the answer is “none of these yet,” we’ll tell you that too, and point you to a roundtable, the book, or a course that fits.
FAQs About KEA Canada’s Coaching, Consulting & Strategic Planning
What does 1:1 consulting with KEA Canada involve?
One-on-one consulting with KEA Canada is customized, direct work alongside an organization’s leaders, fundraising team, or board. Engagements can focus deeply on one GROW model dimension or move through all four over a longer partnership, building the specific capacities that the organization needs most.
How does a KEA Canada consulting engagement begin?
A KEA Canada consulting engagement begins with a ‘Needs Investigation’, a structured process that establishes where the organization stands across all four GROW model dimensions, what its most urgent priorities are, and what a realistic path forward looks like. The work is then scoped to meet the organization where it is.
What's the difference between ongoing support and a consulting project?
What does ongoing support with KEA Canada include?
Who is KEA Canada's consulting best suited for?
What challenges can KEA Canada consulting help with?
Land Acknowledgement
The KEA Canada team is thankful for the opportunity to create, collaborate, play and work on the lands known today as Canada. We recognize that these lands are home to the enduring presence of all First Nations and Métis people, and the Inuit.
We acknowledge that KEA Canada's home office in Canmore is in the area traditionally known as “Chuwapchipchiyan Kudi Bi” (translated in Stoney Nakoda as “shooting at the willows”) and the traditional Treaty 7 territory of the Îyârhe Nakoda (Stoney Nakoda) – comprised of the Bearspaw First Nation, Chiniki First Nation, and Goodstoney First Nation – as well as the Tsuut’ina First Nation and the Blackfoot Confederacy comprised of the Siksika, Piikani, Kainai. We acknowledge that this territory is also home to the Rocky View Métis District within the Battle River Territory (District 4).
We are grateful for the meaningful relationships that we are forging with Indigenous communities across this land that we know today as Canada as we work towards truth and reconciliation in all that we do today and every day.
Connect with KEA Canada
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New book, The Deep End, coming November 2026