Caroline Copeman

Do you think that organisations go through growth lifecycles?

<>There’s been a fair bit written about lifecycles and nonprofits (1) and lifecycle is another way of looking at growth, as a curve on a graph, over time. Plotting where your organisation is on the curve helps strategic decision making – it’s a useful lens to look through as you ponder future strategies. It’s important to think about growth in terms of impact as well as income too, so if you draw a graph where the bottom axis is...

When you map out your strategic staircase for the next 5 years, what are the big drivers that will create really powerful opportunities and threats for your beneficiaries in the period up to 2012? Don’t say you can’t possibly know – if you don’t have an informed view of that – who will have one?

<>What are the big drivers that will impact your beneficiaries over the next 5 years? How can you lead a strategic conversation in your organisation that will ensure that you can respond positively...

‘Building expertise, sharing experience’ is what this new website is all about. It launches in Spring 2009 and is being built gradually over the next few months.

The site already has some material and a few forums on strategy, and a number of links to Third Sector Foresight. It even has a podcast with Megan Griffith Gray from 3S4 and Fiona Ash from Cass CCE discussing Strategic Analysis!

<>The Strategy section has ‘how to’ guides for each of the different stages of the strategy development...

More pre-requisites:

It must be used in conversation all the time (internally and externally), both during the building of the thinking, testing assumptions etc, and during implementation, testing reality.

It must have beneficiary needs at the heart; if you don’t base your strategy on a powerful and deep understanding of need and how to meet it, then it won’t; it’s as simple as that!

<>I’m with both of you on this, and would add that in forming a vision we often think about ‘the world’ we want to create (as opposed to the organisation…). What this gives us is a recognition that we can’t do it on our own, and thus the strategic push to consider working with others (as opposed to the non strategic, very tactical push that we are more often responding to when we consider collaboration).
nfp synergy have a very useful paper (downloadable pdf from this page on their website –...

<>The model is one by Connolly and York. Proper reference: Connolly, P and York, P (2003) Building the capacity of capacity builders, TCC Group. Basically it helps us think about the resources impacted by drivers: time, facilities, human resources, technology, programme design and model (I like this one very much), finance/funding. So if you take your chosen drivers and consider how each might affect each resource area – you open up your thinking. Need to get my head round how you use them...