Non-Profit Chas

I wrote about the strategic planning journey to explain that the process itself has value.

But it would be silly to go through the process and then let that strategic plan gather dust. A strategic plan is a catalyst for change.

In a recent planning session, our facilitator from SCORE made a good comment that I wanted to share, because it sums up the whole point pretty well:

“The end result of strategic planning is specific actions toward achievable goals.”

One of the most hardest parts of strategic planning is getting started. It’s such a nebulous concept. What’s the deliverable? Who should be involved? Where do we start? Last year, we looked at strategic planning process and one of the first phases included a SWOT analysis.

What is a SWOT?

SWOT Analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a preliminary strategic planning method/tool that we will use to identify our strategic issues/objectives. It’s not very hard to get started.

• Read up on SWOT
• Another SWOT resource

How do we start?

Notice the “we” part of that title? This is a group exercise, part of the journey; none of the strategic planning exercises are meant to be individual efforts.

First, let’s put together a basic SWOT template.

Internal vs. External

The internal part of the SWOT is all about your organization. Your strengths and weaknesses. The external are outside factors: opportunities and threats from the rest of the world.

Sample SWOT

Here are some of the items from our organization’s SWOT (this is kind of a bare your soul to the world moment… weird).

What a SWOT is Good For

The SWOT is helpful for identifying strategic issues: the major issues facing your organization, major opportunities, heading off threats, etc. These issues form the core of the final strategic plan.

Get Started!

The next step for you is to actually get started. Pull together your team, bring in volunteers, and invite some donors. As with the entire strategic planning process the SWOT is about self-discovery, facing reality, and building consensus. Our group produced individual SWOTs and then brought them together as a group, consolidating them and noting the issues that appeared most frequently. This helped us build a single SWOT for the organization, one that we can look to throughout our planning.

In a couple of weeks, we’ll resume strategic planning. We took a break to figure out some urgent issues, and like any intimidating task we found it all too easy to put it off for much longer. I’ll be posting more about our efforts as we go.

Exercise Your Optimism!

Anyway, as we get started I want to go through some group and individual exercises designed to get us all thinking, challenging the world around us, and feeling optimistic.

What would you do if we had $20 million dollars?

With money issues out of the way, what would we do? Borrowed from For Impact, this question lets you dream about what you could really accomplish. It’s important to bring this back to the real world and let your dreams and vision inform your decisions.

Share a Mission Moment

I want everyone to tell a story about why they are involved in Camp Fire – why they joined, something that kept them going, etc. I’ve mentioned the Mission Moment in earlier posts, too. It reminds you why you’re here and gives you the strength to keep going.

If we were successful, what would we look like?

What is the profile of a winning organization? Dream big! Write up the characteristics that make up such an organization. Circle the things you already do, and ask what you can do to be ever better at them. How you can aspire to the others?

What are we great at?

Pair off and have each group list things that your organization does well. List only good things, and be as comprehensive as possible. Then, bring the lists back to the group and share what you’ve come up with. Based in Appreciative Inquiry, this approach is the “opposite of problem solving.” Instead, it’s all about creating more of what works.

Any others?

Do you have any team exercises that you’d recommend? Have you tried the ideas here? Share ‘em in the comments!

The business world has an astonishing talent for obfuscation, muddling, and general confusion. Language gets misused and buzzwords trump actual meaning. But that doesn’t mean words don’t have value – it simply means that we must be more careful in their choice and use.

From Lifehack:

So what’s the difference? As simply as I can say it, your mission is what you do best every day, and your vision is what the future looks like because you do that mission so exceedingly well. In fact, I like to compare them to another old debate: management versus leadership.

And that’s supposed to clear things up?!

Sorry, but that does little for me. In a planning meeting once I heard someone claim that “mission” and “vision” were basically just two words for the same dense two-page block of corporate mumbo-jumbo.

I laughed. It’s true. Organizations (corporate or otherwise) often launch into paragraph after paragraph of unreadable garbage. Mission statements and vision statements have lost their way.

Ommmmmm…

It’s worth holding onto words and their meanings. Here’s my contribution to clarity, found after a good cup of coffee and an excellent bit of coffee cake on a Sunday morning.

Mission: What you’re here to do. We’re here to have fun.

Vision: Where you see yourself. We’re going to spend a month on vacation.

Strategy: How you’re going to do it. We’ll quit our jobs, cash out our retirement accounts, and drive to Disney World.

The order here is important. How can you have a strategy if you don’t know your mission?

In my post Planning Your Strategic Planning, I set up the process for strategic planning. It’s a long process and there will be a lot of people involved, so it’s critical that everyone is speaking the same language.

We put together a glossary of terms for our planning process. Consistency and clarity pay off with shorter, more efficient, and more productive meetings. (Which is a good thing.)

There’s a whole lot of obvious going on here, but you have to remember that many people who will become involved in your strategic planning don’t have the same background. You can’t assume everyone knows all of this stuff.

Strategic Planning Glossary of Terms