“Over the past few years I have contributed to over 45 pro bono projects for non-profits, primarily around strategy, business planning and process improvement.”

“I love supporting non-profits, because of the opportunity to bring benefit to so many people.  I also have a passion for helping groups achieve strong shared understanding of their activities, values and ideas, as a way of making breakthrough progress toward their goals.”

See client testimonials, sample engagements and examples of work products at actionmap.org/testimonials.

ActionMap’s Core Value Proposition

See more details and full work product examples at actionmap.org/examples.

The projects are delivered by Jim Johnson, Co-founder of ActionMap Inc., a consultancy and software provider based in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Jim’s career includes over 40 years of:

– IT development, management, support and sales
– Tier 1 consulting business development and account management
– IT performance management and compliance
– Professional meeting facilitation.

Jim has a B.S. in Mathematics from Harvey Mudd College, where he served as student body president. 

For more details about Jim see Jim’s LinkedIn profile here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jimjohnson

ActionMap Workshops create value for many stakeholder groups

ActionMap services focus on creating detailed business models of current and planned operations.

These business models takes the form of business operations diagrams (“what you do today, or want to do tomorrow”) with comments and evaluations (goals, issues and ideas) about the diagram.

Examples can be found below on this page.

The models can usually be created in two 2-hour online workshops. The resulting work products are exported in PowerPoint and Excel.

In a third workshop, these work products can then be turned into detailed action plans, which can be organized into a higher level (e.g. strategic) activity plan.

These work products contain or point to a large part of the information needed to create the remaining detailed documents for a project (e.g. business plans, standard operating procedures, grant proposals, etc.)  

PLEASE NOTE: I provide planning support and coaching for detailed final document creation, not the creation of those documents. 

The workshops and resulting work products accelerate and support the work of other people to develop the detailed documents, people who would need to cover the same ground in any case.

A key value is creating strong shared understanding of organization operations and plans to improve and expand them. That understanding and the work products can be applied to a wide range of non-profit needs, including:
– business plans
– grant writing and fund raising
– process improvement
– Board and volunteer engagement

How does it work?

An initial conversation will cover:
– The assumption that strategic development will mostly be extending what your organization is doing now.
– Agreement on who should attend the workshops.
  – Could be just one person, or a group of up to about 12.
– Who will be the broader audience for the work products and how they would be able to receive, review and comment on the work products.
– How the work products will support final document creation (e.g. a detailed business plan) and/or your specific planning goals.

Benefits of this approach:
– Produces:
  – Strong shared understanding among stakeholders of the current overall operation (this is useful for many other purposes),
   – Supported by high quality work products that can be used for many purposes
– Low overhead (just schedule the workshops, no prep or training required)
– Fast results: “Hours and days instead of weeks and months”
– Workshops can include other volunteer consultants, and results can be shared with and accelerate their work.