180 Degrees Consulting Delft–Rotterdam
What we do Our work Team Mission For clients Students
Rotterdam's Markthal at blue hour, its grey arch curving over a vast painted glass front lit from within

For clients Cycles Oct–Jan & Mar–Jun Uniquely affordable

A rigorous team around your challenge.

We work with almost any organisation doing good. A team of 4–6 student consultants and a dedicated Team Leader delivers uniquely affordable strategy through one full consulting cycle.

Start a conversation See our work

Start here

Start with a conversation.

There is no form and no application. An email is the whole process, and it does not need to be a polished brief.

Three things are enough to start: who you are, what the challenge is, and what a useful answer would let you decide. If the problem is still vague, say that. Working out the real question is part of what the first conversation is for.

Our focus is social impact, but it is not a gate. Out-of-scope inquiries are welcome, and the branch takes projects case by case.

Consulting cycles: October–January and March–June. If you reach us between cycles, we will tell you when the next one opens rather than leave you waiting.

One consulting cycle

A clear route from question to decision.

The engagement follows the cycle rather than a made-up week count. Scope and cadence adapt to the organisation and the problem.

Start of cycle

Scoping call

We understand the organisation, the decision ahead, and what success would look like.

Week 1

Proposal, signed by you

Scope, deliverables, ways of working, and responsibilities are written down before work begins.

Through the cycle

The project

4–6 consultants and a Team Leader research, test, and build the recommendation with regular check-ins.

End of cycle

Board-ready presentation

You receive the final strategy deck and every underlying analysis used to reach it.

Our work

What a deliverable looks like

Every engagement ends in a decision you can act on, with the reasoning left visible. These are the shapes that reasoning takes.

Each exhibit is rebuilt for the web from a real deliverable, and stripped of anything that identifies the organisation. The reasoning and the recommendation are the ones that were given. The layout is not: a page built for A4 does not survive a phone, so we set it again rather than photograph it.

Placeholder — named case studies await client consent. These exhibits are anonymised method, not client results.

  • Market assessment

    Choosing between ten options with one transparent scorecard

    An organisation choosing which product line to take into an unfamiliar business market.

    Delivered: a ranked shortlist, with every criterion and trade-off on one page.

    See the exhibits

  • Operating strategy

    Three priorities, sequenced into four phases

    A rural development organisation deciding which livelihoods to back first, and in what order.

    Delivered: a staged plan naming what happens now, next and later.

    See the exhibits

  • Financial sustainability

    A mixed funding approach, argued against five criteria

    A charity whose income depended on a single grant, deciding what to build alongside it.

    Delivered: two funding routes to pursue first, and the reason the others wait.

    See the exhibits

  • Marketing and engagement

    A content mix a two-person team can actually sustain

    A small foundation with no consistent presence on the channels its supporters use.

    Delivered: a posting rule simple enough to survive a volunteer handover.

    See the exhibits

  • Digital presence

    Lead with the product, treat the mission as the add-on

    A materials company whose sustainability story was crowding out what it actually sells.

    Delivered: a positioning call the client could disagree with, and the evidence for it.

    See the exhibits

Market assessment

Choosing between ten options with one transparent scorecard

The organisation had ten candidate product lines and no shared way to compare them. The work was not picking a winner. It was making the comparison something the board could check.

Exhibit 1 — the assessment frame

How the options were compared

One set of criteria, applied to every option, so the ranking can be argued with rather than trusted.

  • 01InternalFit with what the organisation can already do
  • 02ExternalDemand, competition and available substitutes
  • 03FinancialMargin, and what it costs to start
  • 04ImpactEffect on the people the organisation exists for
  • 05RiskWhat has to go right, and what happens if it does not

Rebuilt for the web from the criteria page of the original deliverable.

Exhibit 2 — the result

The shortlist

Two options separate clearly from the rest. The gap matters more than the order.

  1. Option ARecommended
  2. Option BRecommended
  3. Option CHold
  4. Option DHold
  5. Six othersNot pursued

Bands, not scores. The deliverable carried the underlying figures and the method behind them, which is where a scorecard earns its trust or loses it.

Operating strategy

Three priorities, sequenced into four phases

Several strategic choices competed for the same limited capacity. Connecting them into one sequence mattered more than analysing any one of them further.

Exhibit 1 — the executive summary

Recommendation

Back the three livelihoods together, because each one removes a constraint on the other two.

  • 01Income from local resourcesUses what the region already has, so it does not depend on imports or on a supply chain the community cannot control.
  • 02Energy and water as enablersThe constraint underneath the other two. On its own it earns nothing. Left unfixed it caps both of them.
  • 03Products that spread the benefitStructured so the gain reaches past the first household, which is the difference between income and development.

Rebuilt for the web from the original executive summary, which ran as a page of prose.

Exhibit 2 — sequencing

Why phasing, not parallel

Each phase exists to make the next one affordable. Scaling early is the failure mode.

  1. Phase 1ReadinessMap what the region has, and agree who is involved before committing anything
  2. Phase 2CapabilityBuild the skills the work needs, while demand is still small enough to learn on
  3. Phase 3Market linksTest the route to buyers at a size where being wrong is cheap
  4. Phase 4ScaleOnly what phase 3 actually proved, and only as fast as phase 2 can staff

Rebuilt from the implementation plan, which ran as a two-column table.

Financial sustainability

A mixed funding approach, argued against five criteria

One grant carried most of the income. The question was not how to replace it, but what to build beside it that a small team could actually run.

Exhibit 1 — the funding comparison

Five routes, one filter

Pursue the two a small team can actually run. Reliability is worth less than whether anyone has time to do it.

RouteReliabilityEffort to startCall
Earned incomeMediumHighExplore
GrantsHighMediumContinue
Corporate partnershipsMediumHighLater
Online fundraisingLowMediumLater
EventsLowHighLater

Naming what to stop pursuing was the harder half of the advice. Rebuilt from the funding evaluation, which used an unlabelled symbol scale.

Marketing and engagement

A content mix a two-person team can actually sustain

The organisation posted when someone remembered. The fix was not more content. It was a rule simple enough to hand to whoever holds the account next year.

Exhibit 1 — the posting mix

The rule

Most of what you post should be worth reading on its own. Asking for something is the smallest slice, not the point of the account.

The 70-20-10 split is an established content-marketing heuristic, not our invention. The work was deciding what counts as useful for this particular audience.

Digital presence

Lead with the product, treat the mission as the add-on

A sustainable-materials company led every message with sustainability. The recommendation was to stop, and it was a call the client was free to reject.

Exhibit 1 — the recommendation

Positioning

Lead with the product and what it does. Sustainability sells as the reason to prefer it, not as the reason to consider it.

  • Because buyers search for the product, not for the value
  • Because the mission is a tie-breaker once they are already comparing
  • Because leading with it filters out everyone not already convinced

A recommendation a client cannot disagree with is not a recommendation. This one names a position, which is what makes it useful and what makes it checkable.

Six starting points

Where your challenge may fit

These are the branch's current service areas. We assess every project individually, and out-of-scope inquiries are welcome.

Digital Transformation

Putting the right tools and processes in place so a small team stops losing hours to manual work.

Marketing & Engagement

Reaching the audiences your mission serves, and the donors and volunteers who sustain it.

Financial Sustainability

Building funding models and cost structures that survive beyond the next grant cycle.

Market Assessment

Evidence on where demand, partners, and competition actually are before you commit resources.

Operational Efficiency

Finding where effort leaks out of your processes and redesigning them around your capacity.

Impact Measurement

Defining and tracking the numbers that prove your work works, for boards and funders.

Next step

Bring the unresolved question.

A short conversation is enough to see whether the challenge, timing, and cycle fit.

See who to contact