Your missiondeserves your best.
25 years inside nonprofits, seven as CFO and COO. Executive experience in strategy, governance, outcomes, risk, finance and technology.
touch·stone
/ˈtəch-ˌstōn/ noun
- A fine-grained black stone, such as basalt or jasper, on which assayers rubbed gold to judge its purity by the color of the streak it left.
- A standard by which something is tested and proven real.
A touchstone is the stone assayers used to prove gold was real.
Practice areas
Strategy and governance
Align the board and the plan
A plan with owners and measures, and a board built to hold it.
Finance and accounting
Make the numbers work
Board packets that answer questions. Reporting your board can act on.
Outcomes and evaluation
Prove what changed
One measurement system, organized around what your funders need to see.
Open the live demoTechnology and AI
Put technology to work
Systems, data and AI where they pay for themselves, and custom software when nothing on the market fits.
Homeward Circle
Foster-parent retention software, built from twenty-five years inside a child-placing agency.
See Homeward CircleFive things heard in the first call
Each one has a way out, and every one of them is work done from the inside before it was done for clients.
Start where it hurts. Continue if it works.
One-time
Impact Baseline
A focused engagement scoped to your most pressing need: what is working, what needs to change, and a concrete path forward.
Monthly
The Partnership
The seat, filled. Quarterly strategy sessions, current reporting, and the judgment call when the quarter gets complicated.
Project
Defined engagements
Board governance audit. Strategic plan facilitation. Annual risk assessment. Financial systems review. No obligation to continue.
Organizations that have outgrown their back office
- 01
Child welfare and behavioral health
Foster care, treatment foster care, behavioral health and family services. Privacy-first and accreditation-ready, from twenty-five years in this field.
- 02
Land trusts and conservation
Organizations that steward land for the long run, where accreditation, governance and financial systems have to hold up for decades.
- 03
Funders and community foundations
Capacity-building partners and the grantees they fund, when the question is whether the money changed anything.
About
I know what it takes to run the back office of a nonprofit because I did it for twenty-five years.
Since then I have held C-level operations in manufacturing and clean energy. Touchstone Outcomes brings both halves together: the judgment of someone who sat in your chair, and the tools to prove what your mission changes.
Michael Blinn · MBA, James Madison UniversityThe conversation costs nothing.
Thirty minutes. Bring whatever is hardest right now.