Driving Change and Streamlining Strategy with the Flamboyan Foundation

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us for today's webinar on driving change and streamlining strategy. Today we are welcoming Lindsey Wright, Managing Director of Strategy Management for the Flamboyant Foundation. Interviewing Lindsey will be Ted Jackson, one of clearpoint's two founders. The audience will be muted for the duration of the webinar, but we encourage you to submit any questions into the Q and A tab. Ted, I'll go ahead and pass things on to you.

Okay, thanks. Jenna and Lindsey, thank you for joining us. Can you please tell us. Yeah. Can you please tell us a little bit more about the Flamboyant Foundation?

Yeah, absolutely. So at the Flamboyant foundation, we believe that all children deserve the opportunity to live a fulfilling life. And we work in Washington, D.C. puerto Rico and around the country to transform the lives of children through education, particularly those in communities that have been historically most impacted by inequity. We're an operating foundation, which means that we run the bulk of our work through programs in both of our regions. And we're working towards ambitious goals that we have set for the year 2030. We have three specific programmatic goals that we're working towards that are supported by two internal pillars. And I'd love to just share a few slides briefly to give everyone a sense of what we do in our regional offices in Puerto Rico and D.C.

Yeah, that would be awesome.

Great. Hopefully everyone can see my screen. I'll first talk a little bit about Flamboyant's work in Puerto Rico. Our first goal is related to strengthening K3 reading in Puerto Rico. And our goal for 2030 is that island wide efforts result in K3 students reading in Spanish at grade level by the time they complete the third grade. So we're working to ensure that, like I said, all students in Puerto Rico are joyfully reading on grade level by the time they complete the third grade by working with a multi sector coalition across the island to build student literacy. Also in Puerto Rico, we focus on preserving arts and culture as part of the revitalization of the island. And so Our goal for 2030 is that arts, culture and education are embedded in the revitalization of Puerto Rico, preserving its heritage while building its future. The main initiative that we do to carry this out is called the Flamboyant Arts Fund, which is actually in the process of sunsetting, but will leave behind a legacy for artists to continue sustaining their work. As well as community organizations. We also work in Washington D.C. and our focus in D.C. is catalyzing and sustaining real family engagement. And our goal is for 2030 that real family engagement will be sustained in D.C. and catalyzed across the whole country to promote success for students. So we envision a world where real family engagement is a fundamental part, part of a high quality education for every student in the district. So those are our three programmatic goals that we're working towards. They're supported by two pillars, the first of which is organizational excellence. Our goal statement here is that Flamboyant is a visionary, values driven and high functioning organization with effective operations and programs. And finally, our second pillar is related to external influence. Flamboyant is a highly regarded and catalytic organization that influences and mobilizes others. So that's us in a nutshell.

Excellent. That's actually really helpful. And I was, you know, our, our offices are right in the D.C. area and I did a spring break last year in Puerto Rico. So very, very familiar with your areas. Tell us a little bit more about your role and, and, and how it's evolved over time.

Yeah, certainly. So I've worked with the foundation for almost seven years. I started working in the executive office as the right hand to our CEO and board chair, Kristen Ergood, which I did for about four years. And then about three years ago, I pivoted to focus on strategy. So I'm currently the Managing Director of Strategy Management, which means that I oversee all of our strategic processes, from designing strategic plans and annual plans, helping our teams implement them, and then reporting against our progress so that we can evaluate how we're doing year over year towards achieving those goals that I just referenced. I actually split my time between our D.C. and Puerto Rico offices, which is a part about my job that I love. I get to be on the ground with both teams and serving as a liaison, kind of a bridge between both of our regional offices.

Excellent. So. So you said the word strategy several times. And you know, we even had strategy in our name. So tell me about how you started using clearpoint and, and what were you doing before then?

We had just wrapped up strategic planning and we were looking for a way to house all of our strategy in one place and then use the system to report against it. We hadn't historically had a system like that. In the past, we had used different products like Excel worksheets, PowerPoints to manage our strategy. But at the end of the day, I realized that while products like that are great for different types of workflows, they're really not meant to manage strategy. And so I went through the process of doing some market research to find a product that would help us house all of our strategy in the same place and then help us report against it so that we could understand as we progressed year over year, how we were tracking against the goals that we had set for ourselves. That's how we landed with clearpoint.

No, no, perfect. And, and so you said it's been about a year, so tell me a little bit about the, the learning curve and then ultimately I'm going to push you to share a little bit about what you're doing.

Yeah, certainly. So I would say as with any new software, there was a little bit of a learning curve just getting used to the platform once we got our plan housed in there. But another thing I would say is that it gave us really good insight into our strategy overall to have everything in the same place for the first time. So I'll give you an example. As I mentioned, we build a three year strategic plan, but then we build a annual operating plans to help us execute against that strategy. Putting our first annual plan for this new strategic plan into clearpoint showed us that our implementation plan was actually too complex for what we were trying to achieve. And so once we had all the data in Clearpoint, we were able to see that we had over 115 different measures of success across our five different area focus goals. And it was ultimately too much data for us to really understand at a high level how successful we were in implementing our work. And so I don't think that's an insight that we would have gained had we not had everything in the same place in clearpoint. I think now the reporting processes have become sort of second nature to our team. And I can talk a little bit more later about how we do reporting. But yeah, we have a year under our belt and it's been really useful to have this tool to give us the insight as we report along the way about how our work is going.

Yeah, it's great. Kind of the story about seeing that, you know, you have so much going on that, you know, it's time to focus. I've seen that in a, in a second way too. Sometimes with clients is just migrating from, you know, Excel or something like that. They realized that some things that they thought were measures were actually projects or some things that they thought were projects actually were just ongoing activities. And so sometimes just having a little bit of structure, you know, inside of an application allows you to, to say, well, maybe we're not doing our strategy in the most efficient way that we, that we could be doing it. So it's nice to hear that you looked at it, we're like, okay, this is too much for this kind of level in the organization.

Absolutely. Can I just add briefly to that?

No, please.

From, from those learnings, we made some tweaks to our annual planning process for the second year of our strategic plan, which just kicked off in July. And we went from, As I mentioned, 115 measures of success in that first year down to 44 for the second year. So we over, you know, we cut it by more than half. And I think not only will that allow us to have more lean reporting processes, but will allow us to have just a more intuitive sense of how we're progressing with that smaller snapshot of data.

Oh, that's great. Can you show us a little bit about how you're. You're managing inside of clearpoint?

Yeah, absolutely. Let me just share my screen here. Right. Hopefully everyone can see this. So when we navigate into clearpoint, this is our homepage that has our mission, our values, and then our scorecard here, which synthesizes our strategic and annual plans. For the purposes of what I'm sharing now, I'm using data from our previous fiscal year, fiscal year 2024. Since we just entered our new one, I wanted to give folks just a snapshot of a dashboard that clearpoint team helped us to create, which has been really helpful in terms of tracking progress. So earlier I mentioned that we have these three programmatic goals that are supported by two pillars. So those are our five strategic areas of focus. All of those are reflected here in this dashboard, broken down by measures of success. And then over here, we have an aggregate status calculator that pushes all of them together so we can see across the board for each area how we're tracking, as well as then the synthesis for all of our measures. And it's really helpful to have this sort of quick glance to see where we're above target, where we're in caution, where we're below plan and have use the data to have conversations. You know, something that we talk about with our team is that just because something is in the red or below plan, according to Clarity, clearpoint isn't necessarily a bad thing. Sometimes it just means that we need to reevaluate our strategy. Sometimes it means it's something that we need to deprioritize. And so having this data allows us to have those kinds of conversations. As we go down here a little bit more in the weeds, you can see that there is a table here that's broken down by the measures of success and the analysis for them. I won't go through all of them because as I mentioned, this is from our last fiscal year where we have many, many measures, but there are two that I just wanted to highlight in our different programmatic teams. So this is a measure of success from our K3 Reading team about the ambassadors and champions that we are building to demonstrate knowledge about the essential practices, which is a literacy framework that our team has developed. You can see here how we ended the year above target, and we have some analysis here from our team about the different types of ambassadors that we were able to engage. Additionally, we have space for the team to provide recommendations, which is helpful as we think about planning for upcoming quarters and cycles of work. And then finally, you can see here how this measure of success is linked back to specific strategies and outcomes within our strategic plan. So everything rolls back up to each other. Another quick example here. Yeah, I'll leave it there. Hopefully that gives folks a sense of the way that we're using clearpoint to track progress towards our, our different measures and goals and then use that data to have conversations.

No, that's, that's awesome. I like the way you, you created the, the summary page that just says, hey, at a quick glance, you know, where are we in each of our pillars overall? Let's, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about your reporting process. So, like, how frequently do you report? Do you report at a department level? Or what does it look like overall when you think about, okay, it's time to do strategy reporting? What does that look like?

Yeah, absolutely. So we right now report on a quarterly basis. So quarters one through four of each fiscal year, we have a reporting cycle and we have 10 team leads who lead, as that name suggests, lead the teams that are implementing the work laid out in our strategic plan. And those are the folks who are in charge of reporting. So when it comes time to do reporting, they know to go into clearpoint. This fiscal year, we've actually created personalized reports for everyone where their specific measures are assigned to them for just ease of access. So they go in, they input the data in both quantitative and qualitative, like you saw in that example I gave with the analysis and recommendations. And then that all pushes into a report that we built that includes that pie chart that shows us the breakdown of how everything is going across the whole organization and across those five areas of focus. And then we use those reports to drive conversations with various internal stakeholders. The first level of that would be with our team. We have quarterly meetings, which we call Step Backs, which are a time for our regional and cross regional teams to come together to review the work that we completed over the past quarter. Quarter, which is where we take a look at the clearpoint report. We usually send that out as a pre read for the meeting and then have sessions in the meeting where folks go into breakout rooms and share more detail about how the work they did that quarter rolls back up to the team. Wide successes and learnings and challenges that we've had. What else did I want to say about this? Oh, so that's at the team level. We also use clearpoint to have conversations with our senior leadership team and our board of director. We use the ClearPoint data about twice a year at the midpoint and end of the fiscal year to drive conversations with our senior leadership team about strategy. And then clearpoint has also been really helpful in creating board reports that we bring to our board of directors to give them a high level sense of how strategy is progressing across the organization.

Cool. I'm going to restate some of what you said and you tell me if I heard you correctly. I'm going to this time try to use terms that it might not be as specific to. Flamboyant.

Sure.

So your, your team leads, are they like, are they like a management team? Okay. And, and so they, they kind of look across the whole organization. They're leaders in the organization and they pull together kind of all of your data on a quarterly basis for your overall strategy. And then tell me a little bit more about these. Is it a step back meeting? Is that for the whole, the whole organization? Like all the employees come to those. So it's like a town hall of sorts.

Exactly. We break the meeting into two sessions. We start by having the whole organization, both of our regional offices come together virtually and then we'll split regionally to have more, you know, deeper conversations focused on the programs that each region runs.

Oh, that's great. So then it sounds like you're, you're doing measures kind of organization wide and then you, you drill down into projects in each region and.

Exactly.

And the, the teams that are in those regions kind of have their separate meeting.

That's right.

And are the projects also in clearpoint, Are they done separately now or how do they, how do you think about them?

We do, we run those separately from Clearpoint and clearpoint. We're really just focusing on the metrics. But then different teams use different project planning tools to keep track of all of that work.

Gotcha. And the, the, the, the executive team meets a couple of times a year to talk about strategy. Are they looking at, at those quarterly reports? Are there a separate report in clearpoint or how do you, how do you pull together information for them?

Yeah, so usually we use the reports from quarter two and quarter four. That sort of give us, like I said, a synthesis of how we're progressing at the midpoint and end of the fiscal year. And that helps them to see if there are any pivots that need to be made, anything that we need to pull back or anything that we double down on.

Awesome. From a change management perspective, how much of a change was this compared to what you were doing before clearpoint? Like, were you doing step backs and leadership team meetings before then? Did you end up changing the pace of them, or was it just, hey, here's a new tool to, to view it?

Well, when I think about change management, I think introducing clearpoint was the biggest change. We already had a pretty set cadence of internal meetings, but having the data from clearpoint has enhanced those meetings. We didn't really have codified strategy reporting cycles before we used clearpoint. And so candidly, sometimes we'd get to a certain point at the end of a fiscal year or, you know, preparing a board report or something of that nature, and we'd have to sort of scramble to do some quick synthesis. And now we don't have to worry about that because we're doing things in a really systematic way across the course of the year, every year. And so the data just exists and we can pull it whenever we need it.

No, that's great. I would say it's surprising how, how much of a difference it makes to have like a measure that tracks over time and be the same measure versus sometimes you pull out the raw data, sometimes you pull out the percent. Sometimes the chart looks like a pie chart or a bar chart. And when you do that, you sit in those meetings and you spend most of the time fighting over the measure or talking about it. But having kind of that, that systematic approach will allow you to understand the measures and then you can discuss the impact and how well you're doing and not doing. And I see we do have a hand raised if you could, Yasmin, if you could type your question into the chat or the Q and A, that would be awesome. It'd be easier to run that way. So, so while you do that, I want to ask about. So, so I like the, the kind of, the change of using the tool. Were you able to get like, do you use features in the tool like the email reminders to tell people to update their data or, or how do you get people to, to participate and in the process overall?

Yeah, definitely. So a few different ways. We use the automated workflow tool within clearpoint to prompt people. Additionally, I found it really useful to be the internal champion of all things clearpoint. And so I send out tailored communication to folks as we're approaching each reporting period. I also do things like set up informal office hours. If folks are running into any questions, they can come to me and my colleague Sierra, who is becoming a second in house clearpoint expert. And I found that having those touch points makes reporting more accessible for folks. I think now, especially in our first year as people were getting used to it. Now I think we're mostly over the hump with that learning curve, but it's sort of hand in hand. I rely on the tools from the system and then do some personalized communication as well.

No, I think, I think that's great and it's fun to hear like, okay, your organization, you're kind of bringing people in, you're really focused on kind of how do we, how do we make sure that each person is engaged? We I guess a few months ago interviewed a city where the, the manager in charge of strategy reporting was an ex fire chief. So he was like, I just tell them what to do, tell them their boss is watching and they, they put in the data because it's really important that way. And I can see, you know, it's, you're, you're bending to the culture of your organization. Right? You're saying how do we make sure that, that, that these folks want to be engaged so how do we make sure that it feels easy and approachable to them?

That's right.

That's excellent. I know we skipped a little bit of the board of directors report. They getting a report out of clearpoint, is it kind of with all the details or do you give them a chop down summary version? How does that work?

Yeah, we try to give them a more high level version. We don't feel like they need to be totally in the weeds, but we're able to pull out what we do need to share with them to give them a high level understanding of how our strategy is progressing.

Okay, excellent. And tell me a little bit about some of the benefits that you've seen from moving from Excel and PowerPoint into Clearpoint.

Yeah, I would say first of all we just have a new level of sophistication with our strategy management and reporting that we didn't have before clearpoint. I think that's led to increased accountability and transparency for us related to the goals that we're trying to achieve. And everyone is able to see what everyone else is doing in clearpoint. And so I think that's also led to increased collaboration across our teams. And then finally, I'll just say it's saved us a lot of time. You know, there is a little bit of upfront investment making sure that the plan is in the system correctly. And so the first quarter of our fiscal year is really spent on ironing out all those details with the clearpoint team. But once it's in there and we do our quarterly reporting processes, you know, I think we're saving ourselves a lot of time in both reporting and then creating reports from the data that's in the system.

Yeah, that's great. I mean, obviously time savings is helpful, but I liked what you said of like, we're seeing a little more collaboration in the organization. I think sometimes people, especially in your last year's plan, if you have 115 measures and 10 team leads, they're probably pretty focused on their particular jobs versus being able to kind of understand what's happening in a different part of the organization.

Right.

Any plans for this, this strategy reporting year that are, are different or improvements on what you're doing last year? I know you're cutting down on the measures.

Yeah, that's a big one. That's a big one. I would say maybe playing around with some new dashboards. The clearpoint team has been really helpful in creating some of those templates for us. I also know AI is something that everyone is talking about. I know clearpoint has some AI integrations. That might be something that we start to explore as well.

Yeah, excellent. For an organization that's, that's just getting started with, let's, let's first say, like more professional strategy management. Just kind of thinking about, like, okay, I'm, I'm outgrowing Excel, or as you said, I think, you know, these tools aren't working very well for what you're trying to accomplish. How do you suggest they get started?

Well, I would say, like I just mentioned, it's an upfront investment to get things up and running within the system. But you'll be in great hands with the clearpoint support team and it's well worth the time invested once you're able to start using the data to, to really understand, like I said, in a more sophisticated way, how your strategy is being carried out.

Yeah. Excellent. Lindsey, thank you so much for your time today and thanks for thanks for sharing all these insights. It was really great seeing kind of what you're doing inside of clearpoint, but also how. How your bigger strategy is. Is being executed. Oh, we got one. One additional question came in right before we say goodbye. Is, is how big is the Flamboyant Foundation?

Oh, great question. We're about 45 employees between our two regional offices in D.C. and Puerto Rico.

Okay. And I guess people are holding their questions to the end because I got one more. Okay, can you talk about the. The raw data that goes into the platform? Kind of, where does it come from? What do team leads need to show? Like, how are we getting the data in to the tool?

Sure, that's a good question. So team leads are the ones who are responsible for generating the measures that they'll be reporting against for each fiscal year. And then they, along with their teams, create a plan for how they're going to collect that data when they go into report. We have a data table where all of the targets are laid out quarter over quarter. And then based on the data collection that they do with their teams, they go in and input the actuals. And the way we have it set up in clearpoint is there's a function that essentially calculates the target against the actual, which will spit out a value, whether it's the green arrow that means we're above target, the yellow square that says we're a caution, the red arrow means we're below plan, etc. And so that's nice because we have something objective that's telling us where we stand based on the actual value versus the target value.

That's also. That's a good. Best practice is to put in the. Put in the target, get your owners to put in the actuals, automatically evaluate it, and then you still have that. The analysis and recommendations to explain why you're red or yellow or green or what actions that you're taking.

Yep, absolutely.

Okay. Now with that, I will say thank you again. So really appreciate your time and, and thanks for sharing with us again today.

Thanks, Ted. Thanks, everyone. If you want to find more about Flamboyant foundation, our website is flamboyantfoundation.org and we're on social media, LinkedIn X Facebook. So happy to have had this time today and looking forward to continuing with clearpoint in the future.

Great. Thanks again, Lindsey.

Thank you. Bye Bye.