Golden Key International Honor Society, a nonprofit organization founded in 1977, recognizes college students solely on the basis of their academic achievements. Since its founding, Golden Key has emerged as one of the most dynamic, forward-thinking organizations in higher education.

Committed to an ethos of recognizing academic achievement and encouraging altruistic service, the Society's on-campus presence has reached over 350 campuses in seven countries including Australia, Canada, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Arab Emirates and the United States. Golden Key has over 1.7 million members worldwide.

Although very successful to date, like any business, the question remains: How do you stay successful given today's dynamic and rapidly changing marketplace and competitive landscape? This is the question CEO Alex Perwich has wrestled with since he joined Golden Key in June 2002. Beyond staying relevant as an organization, he also faced an organization that had been rocked by internal turmoil and challenged by negative media attention.

How We Helped

CEO Alex Perwich, a Harvard Business School graduate and strong proponent of the Balanced Scorecard, knew that a reporting solution built upon the Balanced Scorecard would help drive execution throughout the Golden Key organization. He approached Palladium Group, Inc. to help set up Golden Key's scorecard and start executing their strategy using the Executive Strategy Manager (ESM).

CEO Alex Perwich believes that too often, the nonprofit sector when applying the Balanced Scorecard, fails to give the financial perspective its appropriate emphasis, as if financial resources were a "bad thing." "Reality is that we need financial resources if we are to deliver on our mission. While misuse of scarce financial resources is a 'bad thing,' earning financial resources and applying those resources that aligns with mission is a 'great thing'."

The flexibility of the ESM tool enabled Golden Key to communicate their Mission, Values, Vision, and Strategic Objectives in a format that captures what's really important to a nonprofit, to include an appropriate focus on the financial perspective.

Executive Strategy Manager also improved the communication process for the entire organization. The ability to use Meeting View live during a recent Board Meeting added great value and was the key reason the presentation was delivered flawlessly. More importantly, the internal process of building the scorecard using Palladium's ESM synchronized the leadership team, streamlined their efforts and allowed for effective and efficient transfer of knowledge across the team.

As a result, the leadership team realized they needed to reexamine the number of initiatives they had on their plate and ensure initiatives were truly linked to strategic goals and of significant value and impact. The output of the process was a more focused and rational workload, along with a clearer understanding of the strategy as a whole and in part as it pertained to each leadership team member.

Results

Six months after using the ESM tool, Golden Key has:

• Made its business planning process more effective and efficient
• Developed very SMART goals
• Improved focus of all its staff
• Improved understanding of the plan across functional areas
• Migrated their monthly management meetings to a paperless meeting
• Improved individual productivity
• Saved time

Today they review performance results online, drilling down from their Strategy Map to assess performance of their measures and initiatives - and they do this online in the ESM tool among their US, Canada, Australia and South Africa offices seamlessly. Before each meeting, all of the objective, measure, and initiative owners go online to update their information.

According to CEO Alex Perwich, "Every month we are able to use the ESM to prepare for our detailed Quarterly Business Review without even having to meet. This process and the technology make our live quarterly meetings much more valuable and result in us getting a lot more done."