The first step of our Executive Strategic Evaluation Process and business intelligence gathering is engagement. Involving key members of staff in addition to the nonprofit board members in the planning process not only provides insight and awareness into the challenges, issues and opportunities concerning various departments; there also comes a clarity into how each department is dependent on and impacts other organizational operations.
We facilitate a dynamic discussion with the board and key staff members to determine how the top 10-15 key strategic parameters (or strategic elements) of your organization are performing and decide where organizational resources need to be focused at this particular time to maximize sustainability and growth. This will include stakeholder management, environmental and capacity analysis.
For the strategic evaluation of nonprofit organizations and charities, our researchers use two umbrella parameters: Scope and Quality Scope includes parameters that are already numerical such as number of volunteers, number of beneficiaries, number of facilities etc. Quality includes everything else that is not numerical or quantified such as employee motivation, community perception, quality of services etc.
The following charts are generic examples from the sector just to give you a brief idea. The parameters and the charts will be different for each nonprofit organization and charity however the methodology will be similar.
In this example, we identified 11 strategic parameters and developed a survey to collect data from the board member, staff and the key stakeholders.
As illustrated in the charts we compared the gap between today and the future and identified the strategic parameters that are above the threshold.
This step uses qualitative and qualitative data to measure and visualize where your nonprofit is today and where you want it to be in the future. This will merge your strategic priorities with your organization’s ‘impact’.
Facilitating communication between the board and staff ensures the valuable ideas your employees provide through this engagement and decision-making process will reinforce their commitment to “buy-in” and to strategy execution success.
At the end of this process, you will also get a chart similar to this one that shows where your organization is today and where you want to see it in 3-5 years depending on your strategic planning period. We will also teach nonprofit organizations how to use this tool so they will be able to measure their strategic performance or progress in certain periods.