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‘What’s the use of running if you are not on the right road?’ (German proverb)

Earlier this week I took part in an excellent course on Strategic Planning, run by CES as part of the National Performance Programme providing support and training to people who work supporting frontline organisations. Beautifully clear, the course clarified issues surrounding strategic planning, and guided us in how to lead others through the process.

Before you groan and switch off at the thought of strategic planning, just give a thought to what it actually is; a way to look at your work and focus it to give the best results for your organisation and your beneficiaries.

The problem, I think, is that traditional ways of explaining strategic planning are awash with jargon and consequently off putting. For many it is seen as a management tool that can only be understood by ‘strategists’. Of course this is not the case, and anyone can and should develop strategy. Indeed, most people do on a daily basis as part of their everyday lives.

So how do you make the world of strategic planning more accessible and understandable? You can use online guidance, or one of the excellent tools that exist to guide you through. Or you can go on the training which is developed exactly for people like us – those supporting other groups to improve their work and make themselves more efficient, effective and sustainable.

Does anyone else have any ideas or successful stories about this? We would welcome your ideas and input…

I went to a talk the other day by Kevin Roberts, the CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi. His theme, Lovemarks , was that organisations should strive for ‘love’ as well as respect (odd to hear such a driven corporation talking about love). He suggested a graph with Respect on one axis and Love on the other. This leads to four boxes.
Low Love, Low Respect: Commodity items e.g. salt
High Love, Low Respect: Fads e.g. Rubik’s cube
Low Love, High Respect: Brands e.g. Intel
High Love, High Respect: Lovemarks e.g. Apple

He suggested that many organisations strive for respect because they think that’s what is needed and do not understand that ‘love’ is also required. In other words there is no emotional connection between the person and the organisation.
Perhaps some charities hover in this box, but others might be too much in the high love, low respect box? In other words the emotional connection is there but is transitory and could easily migrate to another organisation.
A useful planning exercise he suggests is to plot where your organisation is on this graph, along with your competitors, and then work out where you want to be and how you will get there.
You can also play around trying to position everything from celebrities to countries.

Hi there

NCVO’s Strategy and Impact Team has just published a new introductory guide to strategic planning.

In the guide, we propose a five-stage strategic planning process:

1. Get ready – prepare by deciding on your process and timescales.
2. Clarify your organisation’s purpose – revisit vision, mission, values, outcomes, knowledge of user need.
3. Open up options and choices – look internally and out.
4. Make decisions – refining options and priorities.
5. Communicate, implement and review.

It’s a really practical resource for managers and leaders who are either new to strategic planning or just want a clear introduction to how their organisation can develop an effective strategic plan.

It’s full of tips on how to get the most of the process and how to overcome likely challenges. It draws on research that we did during the Performance Hub project into what third sector organisations actually do when they strategise. So the guide’s really grounded in the realities of daily life in our sector.

And it’s a bargain at £8.00!

Order a copy

The Sub-National review is a key driver for the VCS in the regions outside London. It consolidates economic and social planning roles in the Regional Development Agencies and may have the unintended consequence of removing the participation of the Social, Environmental and Economic Partners from through the dissolution of the regional assemblies.

Two Regional Forum Briefings are available here

and here

The consultation runs to the 20th June 2008. More information is on the Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform website

I wonder whether the fact that this trend looks like a growth in single issues isn’t because that’s the way we, as voluntary or campaigning organisations, make it look.

There are lots of people out there who are engaged in multiple ‘single issues’. (See Flexibility, Honesty, Collaboration). That’s because (a) they’re trying to behave like responsible, passionate, angry, caring global citizens, and that involves many issues; and (b) we serve them up with single-issue channels for expressing themselves, rather than a broader ‘movement of global citizens’ to be activists in. And we do that because we’ve learned a lot about how to make change happen. It works.

So the media and politicians see single-issue campaigns, but the real people inside them are as multiple-issue as ever.

‘Bono-isation’ – if that means trivialisation, which is not very fair on what Bono’s actually up to – may be what it looks like from the outside, but I don’t know of any single-issue big-scale campaign that hasn’t been run in the background by hardened voluntary/community sector campaigners who are pulling all the levers of power and mobilising committed activists, as well as trying to achieve broad-span public appeal for those with other things to do with their lives. It’s never been one or the other, it’s both.

What we’re seeing is not necessarily a weakening of popular passion or of its power to change things – in fact, if anything, it’s the opposite – but it probably is a weakening of people’s willingness to devote themselves to one single organisation.

So Robin, I believe, shouldn’t be worried about a decline in people’s willingness to engage in the politics of HIV and AIDS, for example; there are lots out there, some of whom will be willing to understand and campaign on the detail, while others will stick to the short-attention-span outskirts of a campaign.

But he’s probably right to be worried that this won’t translate into so many loyal supporters for his own organisation – not because their politics has been trivialised by the media pictures of Bono, but because they are also engaging in many other issues.

Complex lives mean complex engagements; I wonder if the part-time activists out there aren’t more sophisticated than we give them credit for!