WHY WE ARE DIFFERENT · SANGHA STRATEGIES
Most agencies sell their team.
We build one for your project.
A specialist marketing and operations partner for sustainability-minded organizations.
A problem-solving marketing agency for sustainability-minded businesses, startups, and local governments. We do marketing and operations work with the right team for the job, not the team we already had.
KATHARINE BIERCE
Founder · PMP · CSM
"Showing up changes things"
THE STRUCTURAL DIFFERENCE
Most Agencies failures
are accountability failures.
In conventional agency structures, the people who pitch the work are not the people who deliver it. The result is a quiet relay of responsibility and the client is left holding the consequences. Our model is built to remove that gap.
The Conventional Model
Senior partners pitch. Junior staff deliver.
An account manager juggles your engagement alongside a dozen others. Specialists you have not met execute the work in isolation. Status meetings stand in for genuine progress. When the work falters, ownership disperses.
The Sangha Model
The senior operator scopes and delivers.
One scoping conversation establishes a single accountable owner. The specialists doing the work are the ones who shaped the proposal. Written progress notes replace the standing meeting. When something needs to move, the founder owns it.
OUR OPERATING MODEL
Diagnose. Assemble. Deliver.
In Sequence. without Exception.
This sequence is the operating spine of every engagement. Reordering it is how most marketing investments fail, pre-assigned teams optimize the wrong specialists, and untested tactics solve the wrong problem. We refuse to compromise on either.
Diagnose
Before tactics are proposed, we audit current performance, interview your customers, and map the competitive landscape. The objective is precision: most failed marketing engagements were misdiagnosed at the start.
Assemble
The team is constructed in response to the diagnosis. Some engagements call for an editorial lead, others a senior automation engineer or technical SEO specialist. We size and source the team to the work never in advance of it.
Deliver
Disciplined project management runs the build. Each initiative carries a documented owner, timeline, and definition of done. Weekly written progress notes keep the work visible. We ship what we scoped.
1 · DIAGNOSE
What a real diagnosis
looks alike.
Most agencies bypass diagnosis entirely and propose deliverables in the first call. We will not scope work without first understanding the system you operate within your customers, your existing performance, your team's capacity.
Influence is rarely a question of new tactics.
More often, it is a matter of seeing the system you are already part of.
01
Who actually buys from you?
We replace stated personas with the empirical pattern across your closed business.
02
Where is the real bottleneck?
Awareness, conversion, retention, and pricing each demand distinct interventions.
03
What is already compounding?
Most organizations have a quietly-working channel. We identify and protect it first.
04
Where is the budget going?
We audit the current allocation before recommending additions. Reallocation is often the answer.
05
What does success measurably look like
We define the outcome metric before recommending a single tactic.
02 - Assemble
Real talent
Matched to the Work.
No two engagements receive the same team. We size, sequence, and source specialists in response to the diagnosis drawing from a vetted bench of senior US-based operators and a global network of contributing specialists, all coordinated under a single accountable lead.
US-Based Project Lead
Your single accountable contact. Scopes the engagement, manages the cadence, and is the operator you escalate to when work needs to move. Always senior. Always domiciled in the United States.
Senior US Specialist
Engaged for regulated industries, executive communications, policy work, and any context where US persons or work authorization are non-negotiable. Strategy, founder voice, and high-context narrative work.
Global Contribution
Vetted, trained specialists who deliver execution-heavy work at sustainable economics. Production, design, ad operations, and technical builds — coordinated and reviewed by your US lead, to identical standards.
This hybrid model is how we deliver senior counsel at Sustainable Economics, work supervised by a US-based operator, executed to a uniform standard, with accountability that does not move offshore.
03 - DELIVER
Operational Discipline
Applied to marketing
Marketing engagements fail on operations more often than on ideas. Our founder is PMP-certified and an Agile Scrum Master, and that operating discipline is built into the default cadence never positioned as a premium service.
Weekly Written Updates
Every Friday: what shipped, what is in flight, what is blocked, and what we need from you. The note is sufficient no standing meeting required to read it.
Documented Initiatives
Every workstream carries an owner, a due date, and a definition of done. You see the same view we see there is no opaque agency dashboard standing between you and the work.
Asynchronous by Default
We reserve meetings for decisions that genuinely require a room. Reviews, drafts, and updates move in writing, protecting your calendar and our delivery time alike.
Monthly Retrospectives
What worked, what did not, what we run differently next month. We accumulate institutional knowledge of your business deliberately long engagements get sharper, not stale.
HOW WE ENGAGE
Priced to your outcome,
not your media spend.
Our compensation is structured around the work itself, never as a percentage of media. That alignment matters: it ensures our recommendations are guided by what your business needs, not by what would expand our retainer.
Fractional Operator
Senior leadership embedded in your team for a defined period. The right structure when you need ongoing direction, hiring counsel, and an operator who compounds knowledge of your business month over month.
Monthly retainer · 3–6 months minimum
Defined Project
Fixed-scope build with a clear start and end: website, go-to-market launch, rebrand rollout, or campaign sequence. Appropriate when the deliverable is understood and the requirement is delivery on a timeline.
Project fee · scoped to outcome
Advisory & Diagnostic
Time-boxed strategic input. Diagnostic of your current marketing program, customer interview readout, or board-prep advisory. Often the right step before hiring or before significant additional spend.
Flat-fee diagnostic · 2–4 weeks
WHO THIS IS FOR
We figure out what you actually need
then assemble the team to deliver it.
WE WORK BEST WITH
Sustainability-minded organizations seeking outcomes, not output.
Climate-aligned companies with material marketing or operations problems to solve.
Founders and senior leaders prepared to engage on the diagnosis, not only the deliverable.
Teams ready to make decisions in writing and reduce reliance on standing meetings.
WE ARE PROBABLY NOT THE RIGHT FIT IF
Your search is for a vendor relationship, not a partner.
The deliverable matters more than the outcome.
Your scale requires a global agency network of several hundred staff.
The lowest bid will determine the engagement, regardless of fit.
Execution is needed this week, before strategy can be established.
MEET THE OPERATOR
Tech Operator.
Climate Organizer
Same Person
Katharine spent over five years inside Salesforce leading marketing and editorial programs for the nonprofit and education industries — managing the org's blog, producing the AI for Good ebook, and building the marketing function for sustainability and impact initiatives. Prior to founding Sangha Strategies, she served as Senior Communications Project Manager at the Building Decarbonization Coalition, where her team helped secure $12 million in grant funding within four months.
She co-leads the Fossil Free 529 Coalition, a volunteer effort that has measurably reduced fossil-fuel exposure in California's state-run 529 college savings plan. The same operating discipline that moves civic outcomes runs every Sangha engagement.
Operating Principles
Six Commitments
We hold without compromise
01
Honesty over enthusiasm.
We will deliver a difficult assessment in week one rather than a comfortable narrative in month six. If a tactic is underperforming, you hear it from us first.
01
Outcomes over output.
Decks, dashboards, and deliverables matter only insofar as they advance your business. We measure ourselves against what your numbers show not what we shipped.
01
Compounding over churn.
Most agencies are at their strongest the day they pitch to you. Our work does the inverse engagement quality compounds as institutional knowledge accumulates.
01
Writing over Meetings
Most updates belong in a document, not a calendar invitation. We default to written communication and reserve meetings for decisions that genuinely require a room.
01
Diagnosis over Prescription
We will not propose a solution before understanding the problem. When that means declining work that does not fit our model, we decline it.
01
Mission over Margin
We work with sustainability-minded organizations because the underlying work matters. Pledge 1% member. California Certified Green Business. Woman-owned.
WHAT TO EXPECT
Your First 90 Days
with Sangha Strategies.
Most agency engagements drift in the opening quarter. Ours follow a defined arc so the standard against which we are measured is established at the start, not negotiated at the end.
Week 1-2
Diagnosis
Customer interviews, performance audit, and current-state assessment. We surface the actual bottleneck frequently, but it is not the one we were brought in to address.
Week 3-4
Plan & Team
A written engagement plan with prioritized initiatives, owners, timelines, and success metrics. The specialists who will execute the work are introduced and onboarded.
Week 5-9
Build & Ship
Execution begins with weekly written progress notes. First measurable outputs land in your hands. The plan adjusts as data arrives, never on a quarterly waterfall.
Week 10-13
Compound
First retrospective. What worked, what did not, what changes for the next quarter. By day 90, your business shows measurable lift and a clear plan for the next 90.
Do you replace our in-house marketing team?
Most often, we augment. We bring senior strategy and missing specialist capacity. Many of our clients have a junior marketer or contractor in place we operate alongside them, not over them.
What if the engagement is not working?
We hold explicit retrospectives at month one and month three with three options: continue, adjust, or end. We use no long contractual lock-ins. We would rather earn a renewal than enforce a clause.
Who is actually doing the work?
Senior US-based operators handle strategy, founder-level communications, and any context requiring US persons. Vetted global specialists supervised by your US lead handle execution-heavy delivery to identical standards.
What does a typical engagement look like?
A senior project lead frequently Katharine supported by one to three specialists matched to the work. Weekly written progress notes. Monthly retrospectives. Meetings only when a decision genuinely requires one.
How is your pricing structured?
Scope-based throughout. Monthly retainers for ongoing engagements, project fees for fixed-scope builds, flat-fee diagnostics for advisory work. Never tied to ad spend or media percentages.
Can you start within a week?
For defined-scope projects, occasionally. For fractional engagements, we typically require two weeks for a genuine diagnosis before committing to a plan. We do not perform speed; we deliver actual answers.
BEGIN WITH A DIAGNOSIS
Tell us what is actually broken
We will tell you what we would do.
A 30-minute discovery conversation no presentation, no sales pitch. A working session in which we listen, ask substantive questions, and offer a clear assessment of whether we are the right partner. If we are not, we will tell you who is.
Sangha Strategies
490 43rd St. #114
Oakland, CA 94609
