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A Powerful Tool for Nonprofit Planning 2

This is the time for another post on the social environment of nonprofit organizations. Yes, I know this is a bit esoteric and complex. I’m just going to break things down into a few (more) concrete) posts.

Last time I mentioned that your organization’s environment has seven dimensions, each with three elements – capacity, rate of change, complexity.

I know I mentioned strategy before, but consider also fundraising, social marketing, and advocacy strategy.

To make it easier, here is the table I presented last time:

CAPACITY COMPLEXITY DYNAMISM
CULTURE
ECOLOGY ?
ECONOMIC ?
DEMOGRAPHIC
LEGAL
POLITICAL ?
TECHNOLOGICAL ?

Because 7 X 3 = 21 there are at least that many questions you could ask about your organization’s environment. Last time I posed some generic strategy questions based on the above table. This time I just want to offer some more questions based on the seven dimensions and three elements.

From the political capacity cell comes this question: What is the potential for federal grant money in the next few years?

Technological capacity raises this question: How many tools do we have available to use alone or in concert with other tools? At the risk of making things too esoteric here I want to point out technologies can be hardware, software, processes, or tools. The process I'm trying to describe here is s technology too

The economic capacity cell raises an obvious question: What is the distribution of household income around here (wherever “here“ is for your organization)?

The ecological dynamism cell leads to this question: Is there anything happening in the natural environment, to forests or water or habitat or the built environment that our organization could take advantage of?

In future posts, I’ll offer more thoughts on how to use these questions by way of a few concrete examples. I’ll also offer a few more questions. In the end, I plan to present a really big table with several dozen questions about the social environment.

In the meantime, why don’t you try to come up with some new questions of your own?
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