Using SWOT Analysis to Rev Up Your Fundraising

Strategic planning, including SWOT analysis, is for small nonprofits, giant philanthropic foundations, and every other nonprofit. Every nonprofit that seeks financial support of any kind needs a strategy. 

The point is to make a plan and work the plan. Business gurus have shared a bunch of strategic planning tools, some generic and some made for a specific purpose. This post is about looking at your Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats - SWOT. 

Knowing about your organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats is step one in planning your fundraising efforts. 

SWOT - A Quick Review

This is not the best place to run through SWOT analysis, but an overview will make it obvious why we need to do it. First, however, you should write down your fundraising goal. Then, you can do some analysis. Here are the steps:

Strengths - What about your financial resources? What about your reputation and your connections? How big is your audience on social media? 
Weaknesses - Connections, finances, and reputation can be strengths or weaknesses. 
Opportunities - What partnership and marketing opportunities can you think of? 
Threats - What challenges do you face in trying to keep the doors open, the programs running, et cetera. Think about money, fundraising, new laws or regulations that may hurt your fundraising efforts, and so on. 

After making notes in each area, you are ready to look for ways to raise money more effectively. You start by looking at opportunities and figuring out how to exploit them. If a weakness looks like a serious threat, make it a priority. If your organization is going to be shut down by changes in the law, it doesn't really matter if you have a great social media game. 

If you do this in a group, consider making a big table on a whiteboard. You need one box each for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Remember to write your goal on the same whiteboard because you'll need it. 

One of my favorite sites, Mindtools, has a longer guide to SWOT analysis that you might find valuable.  This post and the examples here focus on fundraising, but you should follow the same logic and the same processes with social marketing, advocacy, or any communication challenge. You might want to extend your SWOT analysis by looking at opportunities and threats in depth. How do you do that?

Exploring Weaknesses and Opportunities

As a sociologist, I've encountered lots of research and theory that has some potential to be of at least some use. That's what this section is about. In brief, decades ago two sociologists interested in understanding how organizations change invented a useful classification scheme. This classification scheme used seven dimensions and three characteristics. These are the dimensions:

1. Technological - tools, systems, processes
2. Political - Rules, regulations, ideas about the role of government, public opinion
3. Ecological - water, land, air and water quality, et cetera
4. Legal - Laws and regulations, stability and reliability of the legal system
5. Economic - Growth, access to credit, cost of money, dominant industry, et cetera
6. Demographic - age, gender, size, growth rate, et cetera
7. Cultural - norms, beliefs, lifestyle choices

Those dimensions cover anything outside an organization that might affect its survival or success. Each of those dimensions has three characteristics:

1. Capacity - resources, mostly money or credit
2. Dynamism - the rate of change, regardless of the direction
3. Complexity - how many elements are there, and how many connections there are between them

Those dimensions and their characteristics are not exactly an awesome guide to strategic planning as they exist now. I could ask you to think about the technological dynamism of your charity's social environment, but will that help? Perhaps not. You could try to think about the cultural capacity of your organization's social environment, but will that be useful? No.

Asking the Right Questions

You might not have tons of time to reflect on the nature of your nonprofit's social environment. Fair enough. You can take those dimensions one at a time and use them to spur some practical questions. It might only take half an hour. Read on to find out how that process works.  

Feel free to ignore any combination of dimension and characteristic that doesn't make sense. Maybe demographic change is not all that relevant. Maybe your organization has plenty of money for current and planned programs. The economic dimension might not require attention at all, right now at least. 

Take each dimension one at a time and brainstorm. Look at the characteristics one at a time for a couple of minutes. Write down any fundraising questions that come to mind. Concentrating on anything to do with technology should trigger some useful questions about the technological environment. Perhaps you'll come up with a question about digital marketing. When you look at the cultural environment, you may ask if tastes are changing and this is going to affect your arts education charity. 

Still feeling a little stuck? Start with these questions:

1. How many nonprofits operate in the area? (ecological complexity)

2. How quickly is the natural environment changing and in what ways? (ecological dynamism)

3. How many natural resources are there that we could use? (ecological capacity)

4. How many sources of financial support can we identify? (economic complexity)

5. How quickly is the local economy changing and in what ways? (economic dynamism)

6. How much financial support is available for nonprofit organizations (economic capacity)

7. How many different groups of people are there, and where do they live? (demographic complexity)

8. What is the rate of change in the population we serve? (demographic dynamism)

9. How big is the population, generally? Who might use our services? Donate? (demographic capacity)

10. How many laws and regulations are relevant to our work, clients, or audience? (legal complexity)

11. How many changes are there in the “legal landscape” described by those questions? (legal dynamism)

12. What could laws and regulations allow us to do that we aren't doing now? (legal capacity)

13. How many competing, and collaborating interest groups are there? (political complexity)

14. How much is the political climate changing, and in how many ways? (political dynamism)

15. What is the political climate for change? (political capacity)

16. How many technological options are there? (technological complexity)

17. What new technologies should we be looking at now? (technological capacity)

18. How are those technologies changing? (technological dynamism)

19. How many different cultures and subcultures are relevant to your organization? (cultural complexity)

20. How much are lifestyles, attitudes, and values changing? (cultural dynamism)

21. What opportunities are there in the values, subcultures, hobbies, and attitudes? (cultural capacity)

If you are doing a SWOT analysis, ask those social environment questions in the O and T phases of the analysis. Create a table that lists dimensions on the right and characteristics at the top. Fill in the 21 individual cells with whatever questions come to mind. This table, by the way, is called at OT (Opportunities and Threats) Matrix. Feel free to create your own version and share it with staff, board members, and consultants. 

I have a SWOT analysis guide and checklist in my Etsy store, where you can also find other resources related to fundraising, nonprofit strategy, and digital marketing. 

Do you feel like giving this process a try? Please leave a comment and share if so inclined. Maybe I need to create a set of generic "environmental scanning" questions and share them. Let me know if that would be useful.