Skip to main content

A Powerful Nonprofit Planning Tool 3

This time I just want to offer a few more questions related to nonprofit planning. These questions hark back to that table I presented in the first two posts in this series. Last time I promised more questions and a concrete example would be coming in future posts.

This post will add a few generic questions on dynamism, or rate of change. See if you can come up with variations on these questions that work for your nonprofit.

Cultural dynamism – The rate of changes in attitudes and lifestyles and beliefs can create opportunities or threats. How much change is there in your organization’s social environment?

Demographic dynamism – How much is the local population changing? What opportunities or threats do you see?

Ecological dynamism – Change in the environment seems to be even more esoteric and hard to relate to everyday nonprofit life. That’s not necessarily so.

Economic dynamism – Are changes in the local economy creating “islands of opportunity” to raise money or connect with corporate sponsors? How much change is there in the distribution of income?

Legal dynamism – How much are laws, regulations, and rules changing? What opportunities or threats do those changes suggest?

Political dynamism – How much is the political landscape changing? Are changing political attitudes or possible changes in legislation creating either opportunities and threats?

Technological dynamism – What trends in (name a type of technology) could we exploit? What new tools or techniques are emerging? Remember that technology can be hardware, software, or a process that helps us do something new or just better.

I’ll say more about complexity next time, then capacity, then a concrete example of using this stuff for planning.

Stay tuned.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How to Crowdsource and Experiment Our Way to a Fairer Economy

Economic and social inequality should be treated as design challenges that, like designs in architecture or packaging can be solved by applying some creative thinking. That's hardly a new idea, but the recession and ongoing concerns about economic inequality make crowdsourcing seem like something worth talking about.  Crowdsourcing as an Economic Justice Tool: Most people have an idea of what  crowdsourcing is and how it works - you let a group work on your problem or challenge and see what they produce. Can they produce a better answer (whatever that means) than an expert or a small group of experts? You can't answer that question until you have some real-world examples to draw upon. That's where social experiments and simulations can prove useful. Maybe there should be specific crowdsourcing projects and a place to organize all of them. We could start crowdsourcing campaigns around a range of topics: New ways of using barter to meet peoples' needs Using buying co...
Post a Comment
Read more

Setting Good Social Change Goals: The Problem of Police Brutality

No one in the United States can say they are totally ignorant of the issues surrounding last week's death of Black Minneapolis resident George Floyd at the hands of a police officer. This post is not about the incident, which has been covered in great depth by others. This post is about setting goals to pursue in the wake of Floyd's high-profile death.  What do protestors want, exactly? This is probably unknowable right now. Sure, they call for justice or for an end to police brutality, maybe in those exact words. Each one of those goals has a huge problem. Let's see why. What does justice look like exactly? Will you know when justice has been served? Theoretically, some felony convictions for the involved officers would work. Right? Maybe.  The goal of ending police brutality is far more problematic. How can we ever achieve a state of affairs where no cop ever abuses any suspect? That is what an end to police brutality might look like. Achieving perfection is a bit too amb...
Post a Comment
Read more

Exploring A Challenge

If you want to solve a problem, have to stop and think about the problem first. Logical, right?  Whether you want to tackle racial inequality, gun violence, climate change, or homelessness in your city you need to explore the challenge. Take notes, ask questions, do some interviews, reflect. This post introduces a couple of techniques you can use to focus on a new (to you) problem. You can use the tools here to help you shift your focus, or reevaluate whether you're focusing on the right thing.  Say your interest is climate change. Maybe you've decided that getting people to consume less stuff is the key to reducing the effects of climate change in the future. If you don't know much about the problem, here are a few key points: 1. The world is warming up with alarming speed, mainly because of human activity.  2. We may not be able to prevent some major changes like a 1-meter rise in sea level and permanent drought 3. Some would argue that adapting to those changes is more...
Post a Comment
Read more