Planning for the Future - Strategy
Strategy - A word that is often banded around by Senior Management and Trustees. Many of you will be goals and objectives on strategy. But what does it really mean, how do you create and more impotently how do you check if it’s working?
Strategy is simply defined as “a plan of action designed to achieve a long-term or overall aim.”
They can take many forms, and contain a wide range of material. From Values and Purpose, to Pillars and Objectives. All of these can be important to different organisations for different reasons. But we wanted to share with you some of top tips on where to start with creating a new strategy for your organisation.
Top Tips for Designing a Strategy
Research - This is a vital step, and is something that is often overlooked. You need to find out all about the clients or communities your looking to support, as well as the issue or challenge that your trying. In addition to this, it’s important you understand all your different audiences and stakeholders. Who is it you talk to, why do you talk to them and what are you trying top achieve.
Consultation - If you want your strategy to delivered that not only is it important to focus on your end goal, but also important who will help you to do this. The best way of helping achieve this, is to bring people on the journey. Try to engage ads many audiences as you can, in as many different channels and methods as you can. Just remember to consider best time to bring people on the journey. For example establishing your organisations value is probably going to be achieved better through a workshop with employees, and clients, as appose to funders.
Funders - Whilst you might not sight of the funders you might have for the next five years, it is important to consider how you might secure the funding you need to deliver services, but wither this currently sits within a funders remit. The funding landscape constantly changes. It might be worth scoring different opportunities for funding, or prioritising your objectives based on availability of funds. Finally a really important part of the funding landscape is considering Return on Investment, you need to consider how you get best value for your clients, consider how you might measure this to determine plans and services.
Communication - My top tip would be to ensure you have a cleat communication plan which outlines all your audiences, their priorities, any deadlines that might be associated with them. But in addition I would also consider how you reply to individuals comments or concerns. How do you embed the change process. into the normal business processes? One of my top tips would be an FAQ’s document for different stakeholder group, but most importantly a single document which can be shared with audiences, and clear and conscious. There are some great examples from different charities, so my advice would be google a charity that interests you and take a look at their plan.
How We Can Help
Training - Understanding Strategy Development - What Makes a Good Strategy? - Through this session we can work with you to help your trustees, staff or volunteers understand how to build a strategy, show them case studies of high quality strategies, and start them on the process of building their own Strategy.
Consultancy - Process Design - We will work with Trustees and Senior Management to design a strategy development plan, and along side this an annual business planning process which considers your strategy, stakeholders, finance planning, and evaluation. In addition to this we can also support you to create consultation and communication plans around this.
Consultation - Strategy Design - We will work with you and your stakeholders to develop long term strategies and business plans. We will work with you to engage a range of stakeholders across your organisation supporting your development, consulting on and implementing your strategy or business plan. We will help you to understand your aims, identify priorities and design your objectives. We will also help you to design KPI’s and monitoring processes to ensure you plans are achieved.
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