Skip to main content

A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 1

Nonprofit strategy seemed like a good subject, given that times may be lean for nonprofits for a few years. Well, that was the impression I got from a Chronicle of Philanthropy newsletter. Last time I wrote about a guy named Edward De Bono and a few of the “thinking tools” he invented. This is another post in that series, and it will be a series.

One of the thinking tools is called Consider All Factors (CAF). The point with CAF is to examine various factors that are relevant to a decision. In this case, I want to focus on decisions about the strategic direction of your organization. Where do want the organization to go over the next few years?

If you want to examine factors that are relevant to your answer to that particular question, then CAF is a useful tool. “Doing a CAF” means to take a systematic look at various social or technological factors that might be relevant to your decision. A simple desire to focus on those factors for several minutes is all that’s needed.

When studying organization theories I learned about a model of the organizational environment that uses 21 elements. There are seven dimensions of the environment: cultural, demographic, ecological, economic, legal, political, and technological. Each of those dimensions has three elements – capacity, dynamism (or rate of change), and complexity. The combination of dimensions and elements leads to many possible questions.

A table might better illustrate how this model of the environment could be used as part of a CAF:

CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM
CULTURE
ECOLOGY
ECONOMIC
DEMOGRAPHIC
LEGAL
POLITICAL
TECHNOLOGICAL

Each cell of the table should suggest a question of two about your organization’s environment. I can supply a few questions to help out.

In the Cultural Capacity cell, you might ask this: Is interest in issues like _________ waxing or waning?

The Ecological Complexity cell suggests this question: How many organizations with similar service offerings or positions are competing for peoples’ attention?

The Legal Dynamism cell suggests this question: How much are laws, rules, and regulations relevant to this issue likely to change?

Yes, this was a brief overview of the environmental model. I’ll add more detail in my next post.

If you have used SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) Analysis then consider CAF an useful adjunct to the O and the T phases. In each phase you have a structure for thinking through the various types of opportunities and threats that relate to your organization.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Web Strategy That Works

I was reading a Chronicle of Philanthropy article about online strategies that work in a bad economy. The article presented four different strategies and a nonprofit that used it successfully. This post is about the strategy of using specialized Web sites. Put up a site just for a certain crisis, event, issue, project or program. The Chronicle details how Partners in Health did this for Haiti earthquake relief. Any issue, whether a crisis or not, whether global or local is a potential candidate for replicating the Partners in Health approach. Events of global and local significance are fine subjects for a site. You are probably already familiar with World AIDS Day or World Water Day. Those global events and many others are the subject of special Web sites and advertising campaigns both online and in print. Local events from the mundane, like the beginning of a new school year, to the momentous. A crisis is another good reason to put up a specialized Web site. The epic flooding in...
Post a Comment
Read more

Brainstorming for Fundraising Success

Looking for opportunities to raise more money or just to use your fundraising resources more efficiently? This post is another of a series on brainstorming and fundraising. You need three things to think creatively about fundraising. Openness to new ways of thinking is a requirement. Attitude matters in creative thinking, so you need to be positive and nonjudgmental. You also need to be familiar with one or more brainstorming tools. In recent posts I’ve described some brainstorming tools created by Edward De Bono and described in various books of his. In those posts I referred to using random ideas or objects to spark new ideas. In this post I will rely on a fantasy question, a provocation in De Bono’s terms, as a starting point. Consider this fantasy question: What if every donor supported 1000 charities? That question can potentially spark new ideas, if examined in the right way. De Bono writes about several ways of creating movement from a provocation like that question. I’ll qui...
Post a Comment
Read more

Fundraising Ideas

Raising money is a perennial challenge for nonprofits. The Great Recession has made things tougher for some and nearly impossible for others. Your nonprofit may be working hard to deal with fundraising challenges. Traditional thinking about fundraising might lead to thinking like this - “We need to raise $600,000 more money third year. What do we need to do to make this happen?” A discussion of grant writers, fundraising consultants and mailing lists follows. There is nothing wrong with this approach. At least some of that discussion needs to happen. But, new thinking might also be needed. Lateral thinking may help you get better results. Lateral thinking is (from Wikipedia) “solving problems through an indirect and creative approach.” The point of lateral thinking is to move “sideways” to new ideas and different ways of thinking. The point of this little essay is to point out another way of approaching the subject of fundraising. Lateral thinking itself suggests a broader approach to ...
Post a Comment
Read more