Strategic Advantage

VisionLink’s Strategic Advantage Department is driven by two guiding principles:

Maximize impact with well designed and highly structured strategic planning Academies built around carefully articulated objectives, specifically trained facilitators, field leading content experts, and high value leadership teams from participating organizations.

Leverage and maximize resources (both human and financial) within multi-agency, multi-sector, collaborations turning high-stakes conversations into strategic consensus, on-going capacity building, communities of practice and measurable results.

This model, created and refined through more than 100 Institutes, Academies and Summits under the leadership of Lois Ann Porter, has proven highly effective in the education, workforce development, social and human services and disaster relief sectors. A small team at VisionLink convenes the proper expertise for each specific effort, and scales support and staffing as appropriate.

Increasing Needs -- Limited Resources

Community leaders constantly face the challenge of balancing the demands of doing more with less. VisionLink’s Strategic Advantage Department can help.

Building on decades of experience working across the education, workforce and social service sectors, VisionLink offers tools, methods, and expertise to ramp up your multi-stakeholder partnership successfully. We use our proven Breakthrough Framework and decades of facilitation experience in politically charged, high-stakes situations. We can begin when you and other leaders, identify a condition or a need, and conclude: “we can do better.”

Most people are familiar with VisionLink because of CommunityOS, our powerful technology that supports the nation's first state-wide integrated 2-1-1 and emergency management system, the nation's first integrated 2-1-1 and homeless management system, what many consider to be the most effective statewide elder care partnership, the mental health referral system for New York City, and so much more---across some 6,000 communities, including the nation’s first disaster recovery network.

And, because we have worked for so many years, in so many communities, we consistently come to the conclusion that the technology is “the easy part.” Our technology helps communities achieve their objectives. Yet, it takes a comprehensive strategy to build the capacity within a community to design, and achieve community--and program-specific outcomes and agree on their impact.

VisionLink Expertise

We bring a unique quality of work to the table by providing three ingredients essential to successful multi-agency initiatives:

Policy-level strategic assistance
Operational capacity-building support
Highly effective tools, customized to meet each community’s needs.

Whether you are launching a new multi-agency initiative, creating a strategic plan, building a technological solution to meet your community's need or evaluating progress and priorities of your work - we can help you maximize impact and reach your strategic advantage.

We have developed an extraordinary process that will help you diagnose and prioritize your particular opportunities and challenges, design a highly successful implementation plan, identify measures of success, and ensure flexible, yet sustainable results. This process is known as VisionLink's Breakthrough Framework.

From highly experimental community programs to billion dollar federal initiatives, the VisionLink team is made up of professionals who have designed, deployed, and managed programs that have impacted the disaster management, education, youth, workforce and social service sectors. And now, as consultants and coaches, helping hundreds of programs across decades of work, we have collected a flexible toolkit of best practices and lessons learned that you will want to use. No more re-inventing the wheel.

To contact us directly about our Breakthrough Framework and Strategic Advantage consulting support, please email us at breakthrough@visionlink.org.