Digital Arts Service Corps - strategic planning

The DASCorps Survival Guide: Strategic Planning

Bill Brown — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 20:04:22 +0000

At some point during your VISTA year you may asked to take part in or prepare a section for your organization’s strategic planning. You may even be asked to coordinate it as past VISTAs have been. Or your organization may not even have a plan past the next 3 months. This section is an introduction to the concepts and methods of Strategic Planning you may have to use during your service year.

What is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is typically a 1-3 year forecast of what the organization will look like and how it will “get there”. In the case of nonprofits, especially over the last several years, strategic planning has become key to being more "competitive" within the social service sector as funding is dries up for an ever increasing population of nonprofit organizations.

When is the right time to plan?
- There are no major professional or personal conflicts between executives or board members
- The executive director and/or board president are committed to planning
- There are enough resources and time to devote to the process
- There are no major decisions or organizational chaos in the next several months that could undermine the process (i.e. leadership changes)
- Your organization has been operating to several years
- Your organization is committed top-down to implementing any and all strategies developed

Where to Plan
Strategic planning can occur over the course of an organizational retreat where board members, directors, and staff come together for a day or weekend to plan out their future. These retreats usually happen off-site at hotels, restaurants, etc. and are reasonably well catered (or should be!). However, the plan needs to be revisited, revised, and evaluated throughout the year on a regular basis.

Start BIG go small
The strategic planning process typically starts from the big picture (Vision/Mission) and drills down to the most practical action steps (Objectives) needed to fulfill the plan. Each stage in the process determines the shape and detail of the next stage.

The strategic planning process is framed by three key questions:

Where have you been? (What do we do/have we done?)
Where do you want to go? (What will we do/want to do?)
How do you get there? (How will we accomplish that?)

Where have you been?
To know where you want to go you first have to know where you’ve been as an organization. To start, evaluate performance in the last year. Look at both successes and failures and try to understand why in each specific goal your organization did or did not succeed.

If work is not well documented, you can create surveys for staff and/or the community you serve to better understand your organization’s achievements or lack-there-of. Bad news usually never flows up, so your executive staff may not even be aware of certain problems. Anonymous surveys may get at some of these unsaid issues.

Looking back is also a good opportunity to revisit your organization’s mission statement. Good questions to ask when refocusing your mission statement include:

What is the purpose of the nonprofit (this is usually the Vision statement)?
What actions are the nonprofit going to take to achieve this vision?
Who is going to benefit from these actions?

Where do you want to go?
Now that you now where you’ve been, it’s time to look at where your organization wants to go. Before you jump right into defining goals, you first should define all the factors that go into the future success or failure of your organization. The SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) Analysis does this very well. By breaking down both internal and external factors that influence your organization’s growth.

Another great framework to explore the external influences on your organization is the PEST (Political, Economic, Social, and Technological) Analysis. Sometimes added to this are also legal, education, and even environmental influences. Keeping all these external factors in mind is especially critical to nonprofits that work in and impact nearly all these external variables.

How will you get there?
So you know where your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats lie, but now what? It’s time to make your SWOT analysis actionable by putting them in a new chart that pits your strengths to your threats, your weaknesses with to opportunities, etc.

Here are some ways of how this might work using the previous SWOT example. Note that each idea that comes out of this analysis can be categorized as a “Goal”:

By pairing up with other local nonprofits (Opportunity) you can collaborate on projects which will decrease the workload on your staff (Weakness)
Since your last initiative was successful (Strength), you can market this to foundations that now could potentially fund you (Opportunity) while also using your strong board (Strength) to make contacts within those foundations

The Final Product
With goals developed from looking at your SWOT and from staff/director/board/community input, you can now begin the process of further breaking down the plan from organizational goals to specific objectives and next actions. Without objectives and next steps, your strategic plan will be highly ineffective towards reaching goals.

The easiest way to lay out objectives in detail is to give each one to the person whose role it is to complete it and have them generate all the next actions. At this point in your strategic planning process, you begin to find overlap with project management, as each objective becomes more-or-less a separate project.

A finalized strategic plan includes, but is not limited to, the following:

Vision & Mission Statements
Long-term Strategies
Targeted Client/Community Profiles (not discussed in this session)
Stakeholder Analysis (not discussed in this session)
SWOT Analysis
Strategic Objectives for Goals
Next Actions and Steps for Each Objective
Financial Projections (VISTAs almost never engage with these)

Last Minute Tips
Here are some common problems people run into during planning or implementing a strategic plan:

No plan for implementation
No point person to continually evaluate plan’s implementation
No one communicates or disseminates the plan to the entire organization
Getting stuck in the day-to-day and losing sight of long-term goals
The plan is never integrated or looked at as part of the day-to-day
Strategic planning and evaluation occurs once every year or two
No one is accountable for their own objectives or next actions

Further Resources
Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations. Allison, Michael. Wiley Publishing, Inc. 2003.
Strategic Planning for Dummies. Olsen, Erica. Wiley Publishing, Inc.
Alliance For Nonprofit Management
Free Management Library/Management Help

Strategic Planning

Bill Brown — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 15:46:45 +0000

This area is for any and all resources related to Strategic Planning.

Building the Project's Capacity

Erin Taylor — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:57:03 +0000

Recently, I’ve been doing a lot of research on capacity building: What is it? How can we evaluate it? Is there a “best practice” approach to capacity building? Is there a common conceptual framework for capacity building? What are the benefits of doing it? Who should do it? How do you promote capacity building in your organization? In what ways can CTC VISTA build its capacity? How does CTC VISTA help individual VISTAs build the capacity in their organizations?

I’ve found some helpful resources that address some of these questions. I’ve been using them, along with a book titled Communication Planning: An Integrated Approach, to help with CTC VISTA’s ongoing strategic planning. The Project is also working on developing internal communications, outreach, and fundraising plans that summarize the goals and implementation procedures for those areas.

The capacity building work we’re doing so far doesn’t change what the Project does, rather it provides a useful framework that helps us stay focused, productive, and capable of evolving with the needs of those we serve. It also helps clarify the Project and eliminate transitional issues in an organization with an inherently high turnover rate. Eventually the Project might develop new ways in which to evaluate its own capacity building, and the capacity being built by individual VISTAs.

I’d be very interested to hear anyone’s thoughts on or their experiences with these issues. I’m attaching two of the resources I’ve found very helpful in this process. Here, too, is a link to the Free Management Library, which has additional resources and links.

Organize and Execute

Kevin Palmer — Fri, 11 May 2007 00:08:53 +0000

Current Projects:

Project: Develop Strategic Plan for HOME, Inc.

Drivers: AJ McGuire, Alan Michel

Result: A strategic foundation that includes well-defined programming, meta-structuring of how all HOME, Inc. related programs converge, detailing of company roles, an updated organizational mission, etc.

Date of Completion: May 2007

Project: Develop HOME, Inc. Organizational Handbook

Drivers: AJ McGuire, Alan Michel

Result: A series of documents that describe in detail What, Who and When of everything HOME, Inc. does.A matrix of what items need to be accomplished throughout the year, who needs to accomplish each of those items and when each of those items needs to be completed.

Date of Completion: June 2007

Project: Communications Hub for Pilot High School Design Team

Drivers: School Design Team Leaders, Committee Members

Result: Site that allows easy communications between Design Team members while also allowing transparency in Design Team decisions

Date of Completion: August 2007

Project: Develop HOME, Inc. Web Portal

Drivers: AJ McGuire

Result: Website that leverages Web 2.0 capabilities for use with school programs, internal communications and teacher training

Date of Completion: May 2007

Project: Build High School Radio Station

Drivers: Students, School Media Teacher

Result: Low Frequency High School radio station that transmits in a several mile radius across Jamaica Plain/Roxbury/Hyde Park. Student run, produced and broadcast.

Date of Completion: June 2007/Fall 2007

Project: Build High School Web Portal

Drivers: School Teachers, Admins, Students

Result: High School web site that leverages Web 2.0 capabilities to allow students to keep a goals journal, maintain a school media repository and enable greater communications between students, staff and parents

Date of Completion: June 2007

Continuous Programs:

Program: Mosaic In-School and Afterschool Program (Media Production)

Drivers: AJ McGuire

Result: End of the year presentation of all student produced work from December 2006-May 2007 at Social Justice Academy.

Date of Completion: End of Service

Program: ETV In-School and Afterschool Program (Media Production)

Drivers: School media teacher

Result: A closed-circuit television program that is written, directed and produced by High School students, airing once every week and a half at English High School.

Date of Completion: On-Going

Nonprofit Communications 2.0

Ben Sheldon — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:18:35 +0000

Last week I attended NTEN's 2007 Nonprofit Technology Conference and sat in on a wonderful session entitled Nonprofit Communications 2.0: Seven Steps to Transform Your Organization. Led by Lauren-Glenn Davitian of the CCTV Center for Media and Democracy, the session provided a strong framework for nonprofits to better communicate in an increasingly networked society.

(crossposted from my personal blog)

I am also very lucky to serve with Lauren-Glenn on the editorial board of the Community Media Review.

The video itself is approximately 1 hour, 24 minutes long and worth every second, but I included my notes from the session below.

Community building talent is the single most important resource in the modern world.

Peter Drucker

How to engage and mobilize members

A Communications framework for thinking about how organizational objectives are met through interaction. The correlating Development framework is in parenthesis.

Welcome (Prospect)
Educate (Cultivation)
Ask (Involvement)
Thank (Stewardship)

The Seven Steps

Assessment: Defining your goal (What behavior are you trying to change in undertaking a communications strategy?), audience (an explicit, targeted "who" and their values), evaluating your infrastructure (orthodoxies, structure, time, leadership)
Awareness: Start by searching NTEN, TechSoup, Idealware, etc. (Link Research)
Training: A discipline of doing things. How are stories told, infrastructure built and actions communicated to regular people?
Content Production: "The currency of the new world"
Technical Support: An example: how to know when to build and when to buy
Partnerships: Who is going to stand up for you?
Planning: What are the components that revolve around your goal?

Leading by example...sort of

danielle martin — Fri, 29 Sep 2006 21:34:19 +0000

After a spent the week trying to catch up with all the VISTAs under my care, encouraging them all to blog and read the blogs, I realized I haven't really blogged myself. What AM I working on? Well the first three weeks as an official VISTA leader has been a lot about finding a balance between two new roles.

Role 1 : VISTA Leader at CTC VISTA Project at UMass Boston

This role was a little easier to figure out, since I've got the Project pretty much figured out by now. In fact, most of these first three weeks have been about helping the Project HQ staff get on the same page and think strategically about where the Project wants to go. I hosted a little strategic planning retreat at my new apartment in Medford, where we compared assumptions, knowledge of the Project and whittled it all down into some concrete goals and actions for the Project. Most of the fall will be consumed with populating the new CTC VISTA resource portal and putting the Digest together with Erin.

Role 2: Program Coordinator at massIMPACT

[I just got that title today, mostly because we had to figure out something to put on my new business cards.] Now, working with massIMPACT is all new. massIMPACT is a non-profit housed at MassHousing that works to provide support to technology in housing developments accross MA. So far, it's done work in digital storytelling train-the-trainer projects and partnered with Northeastern University among other things.

The first three weeks were mostly shadowing my supervisor, Thaddeus Miles, and being amazed at the amount of people he interacts with and is able to remember all their names and stories. Meeting everyone and figuring out the housing development environment has been fascinating for me because I know a lot about non-profits in Boston but not much about this group. The funniest part is how amazed folks are that I want to take the T to these meetings - I think it's a combo of fearing for the "white girl" in the Roxbury/Dorchester and not liking to walk on their part.

The other sub-role I have at massIMPACT is project managing the development of a collaboration portal for community digital storytelling facilitators at StoriesforChange.net. I've been reading as much as I can of emails from all the volunteers who want to build this site for sharing resources, curriculum, and lessons learned while providing place to publish stories as well. I'm excited because this site is truly a project fueled by the users (and not by a funder or higher power) and I get to work with new VISTA Jessica McCoy at the Center for Digital Storytelling.

On a personal note, I spent a good amount of free time these past couple weeks seriously thinking and researching my graduate school possibilities. I highly enjoyed the session at the Comparative Media Studies Program at MIT, especially because I connected with another prospective student (Ms. Audobon, who moblogs and with whom I had way too much in common with for Fate not to be involved) and a few of the current grad students. Imagine, Danielle at MIT....