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Call for proposals: The McConnell Foundation is seeking qualified consultants to help define clear and actionable organizational goals.

Ednah Carrick August 7, 2025

0 408 5 minutes read

Closing Date: 18 September 2025

Call for proposals: The McConnell Foundation is seeking qualified consultants to help define clear and actionable organizational goals.

About the Foundation

The McConnell Foundation is a private Canadian philanthropic foundation with a mission to strive for a resilient, inclusive and sustainable society that can successfully address its complex challenges. McConnell Foundation current areas of focus are climate change, reconciliation and community resilience.

Call for Proposals for qualified consultants: McConnell Foundation Goal Setting

Project overview

The Foundation is guided by its vision, mission, values, principles, roles, strategies and annual workplans, but we are missing long-term goals. The Foundation will celebrate its 100-year anniversary in 2037 and aims to articulate ambitious organizational goals to meet by this milestone. McConnell Foundation will imagine one overarching organizational goal, with departmental goals that will come together to allow them to reach it. McConnell Foundation aim to develop goals that are attainable in most cases, but also aspirational. This mandate will help assess the current state, set 10-year goals, and develop an action plan with clear milestones to achieve them.

Organizational context

Through a strategic review in 2021, the Foundation defined its three focus areas, reflecting its funding priorities for the coming years: Climate, Reconciliation, and Communities. In 2022, the Foundation also committed to build a 100% impact portfolio by 2028 through its updated investment strategy. Over the last five years McConnell Foundation have also focused on modernizing the Foundation and improving its processes, policies, and controls. Recently, the Foundation launched several projects to enhance the user experience for its team and partners, expand its reach, and improve its analytical and reporting capabilities. Some of this work is expected to feed information into the goal-setting project. Key projects currently underway are:

Evaluation and re-articulation of McConnell Foundation programmatic theories of change.
Development and implementation of a monitoring, learning and evaluation strategy.
Implementation of a new grants management system (“GMS”).

Project Deliverables

McConnell Foundation has identified the following areas of work that require support. McConnell Foundation is open to adjustments based on the consultant’s recommendations and methodology:

Objective 1 (25%) – Assess Current State

Analyze the Foundation’s mission, current objectives, plans, strategies, relevant internal reports and memos, and evaluate operational performance where relevant. Undertake a SWOT analysis of the Foundation’s environment.
Expectations: McConnell Foundation expect discovery, scoping, and design through collaborative workshops and planning sessions; interviews with key staff and Trustees; analysis of workflows and processes, and; analysis of the roles and responsibilities of the team and governance. McConnell Foundation expect regular checkpoints throughout.
Key deliverables: Comprehensive report on the current internal and external state.

Objective 2 (50%) – Goal Setting

Based on the assessment, facilitate workshops and meetings to develop long-term goals, with short to medium milestones, for the organization and by team. Goals should be aspirational yet achievable, evaluating whether the Foundation has the resources, skills, and capacity needed to achieve each goal. Goals should be rooted in a systems change approach.
Expectations: McConnell Foundation expect the articulation of clear goals, prioritized based on highest impact for its mission. McConnell Foundation expect an analysis of costs, time and resources required for each goal, with consideration given to risks and obstacles.
Key deliverables:

Detailed goal-setting exercise to create a list of long-term goals with short to medium milestones.
Facilitated workshops and meetings for goal setting.
A framework that includes goals, timelines, expected resources and costs, as well as risks.

Objective 3 (25%) – Action Plans & Organizational Development

Help the Foundation integrate the goals into action, by ensuring each department understands and is accountable for their contributions, fostering cohesion and avoiding conflicting priorities.
Develop actionable plans with milestones and key performance indicators (KPIs) to define success.
Share wise practices and provide recommendations for organizational improvements, focusing on risk assessment, resource optimization, skills enhancement, and fostering a work environment that strives for excellence.
Support the Foundation in identifying frameworks to support work towards our goals (e.g. systems change, collective impact, etc.)
Expectations: McConnell Foundation expect facilitated workshops to ensure cohesion and cross-departmental understanding. McConnell Foundation expect the consultant to reflect and gather insights and recommendations for organizational development.
Key deliverables:

Structured action plan framework.
Facilitated workshops and meetings for action plan development.
Comprehensive report with recommendations for organizational development, change management to maximize adoption, and process, policy, and other improvements.

Budget

Budget: McConnell Foundation ask that the proposal provide a project budget broken-down into key milestones and time to complete each stage. McConnell reserves the right to adjust both the budget and related services. Please provide:

Any specific payment terms required by your organization.
The fee structure and the rates for additional services and identify the billing rates relevant to your team members who would work on this project, and, if possible, their job titles and short biographies.
Identify whether subcontractors will be used and for what scope of the project.
An estimate of any travel and other costs expected to incur during contract period, if required. Travel and per diem expenses shall not exceed rates authorized by the McConnell’s Expense Policy.

For 2025, the Foundation has set aside C$40,000 for this project. The Foundation has not yet set the project budget for 2026 and will determine this based on proposals in autumn 2025.

Application Process:

Please send a proposal of a maximum of 10 pages including: overview of your proposed methodology, deliverables, experience with similar mandates, timeline and budget.

If you are interested in submitting a proposal, please notify Marie-Caroline Juneau, Program Manager, Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning at: [email protected] by September 8, 2025, to receive additional information to support your proposal preparation.

Criteria of evaluation

Proposals should include information that will support the evaluation, timeline and budget criteria. The proposal should also include an overview of how you determine success, the analytic tools or services that you use, and the type of information you would report back to the Foundation to meet its shared objectives.

McConnell Foundation will evaluate proposals based on the following questions:

Does the consultant have experience supporting organizations in Canada in projects of similar scope?
Does the team have the resources to meet objectives, keep to timelines and budget?
Does the consultant understand the Foundation’s mission and way of working?
Is the plan to collaborate with the McConnell team effective?
Will the approach bring new ways of thinking and creative ideas to the project and the McConnell team?
Is there a clear path to address each objective of the RFP?
Is the plan SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely)?
Does the consultant have the resources to facilitate workshops and discussion in both English and French?

Additional consideration will be given to qualified consultants who:

Understand and have experience in monitoring, evaluation, learning and impact measurement.
Have experience to share best practices among other foundations both in Canada and abroad, including endowment management and portfolio management.
Have the capacity to provide organizational development recommendations.
Understand equity, diversity and inclusion frameworks and the lived experiences of equity-denied groups.