Consulting firm buoyed by contract with Boy Scouts

Plain old search-engine optimization, the humdrum part of digital marketing, paid off in a big way for a Reno consulting firm.

And some the biggest benefits may be yet to come, says Erica Olsen, chief operating officer of the company.

The Boy Scouts of America, looking for a tool to help its 297 councils nationwide develop strategic plans, initially learned about Reno's M3 Planning and its flagship product, MyStrategicPlan, through a Google search.

MyStrategicPlan, a Web-based product, guides users step-by-step through creation of a strategic plan for a business or nonprofit.

The Boy Scouts licensed MyStrategicPlan for all 297 of its local councils a big sale for M3 Planning and then came back for more.

Once strategic plans were in place, leaders of the Boy Scouts wanted to develop customized tools to track their progress toward the goals. Again, they turned to M3.

Olsen says the company developed 17 national benchmarks that track the performance of Boy Scout councils in areas such as leadership, membership, community service and delivery of programming to Boy Scouts and Cub Scouts.

The benchmarking program, branded as "Journey to Excellence," was rolled out by the Boy Scouts of America this month.

"It's a significant piece of business for us," says Olsen.

Just as important, she says, may be the exposure that M3 Planning will gain from the Boy Scouts contract.

Local councils of the Boy Scouts generally are led by top corporate executives, she says, and M3 Planning is more than happy to show off its products in front of a large group of potential buyers.

Because the company relies on a cadre of freelancers to provide software development, graphic design and other elements of the project, it was able to ramp up quickly to handle the big national job.

The Scouting organization is increasingly convinced of the value of strategic planning and measuring its performance against well-defined benchmarks.

"When the Nevada Area Council instills a professional business approach, which includes a strategic plan and community support, you can be assured that Scouting will continue to grow, and that our youth and neighborhoods will be the beneficiary of those time-tested values for generations to come," says Marty Baldwin, scout executive of the organization's Nevada Area Council.

M3 Planning, in fact, has volunteered its time to help the Nevada Area Council create and execute its strategic plan. The council is the only one in the country to be recognized 21 consecutive years with the Boy Scouts National Quality Council Award, which is based on membership, programming and financial management.

Howard Olsen, chief executive officer of M3 Planning, says that flexibility was a key element of the customized management tools that the company developed for the Boy Scouts.

The software, he says, allows for changes in factors that the Boy Scouts want to track as performance benchmarks and can be scaled to allow for new levels of achievement.