The Creative Activist

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 medi...

I was reading about creative ways to generate new ideas yesterday. The subject was “provocations” and the book was Serious Creativity by Edward De Bono. A provocation, or provocative operation, is just a deliberate step taken to break out of the normal ways of thinking about things. A fundraising example will help to illustrate. De Bono writes about several types of provocations. I’ll focus here on three: reversal, wishful thinking, and exaggeration. A reversal is just about what it sounds like, a reversal of an assumption. Wishful thinking is just a fantasy statement that relates to the situation for which you need new ideas. Exaggeration takes one element of the situation and magnifies it or minimizes it. With each type of provocation the point is not to create a perfect idea, but just to get the seeds of useful new ideas. As usual with brainstorming most of the ideas will be worthless or will need lots of work. Reversals Let’s see how these provocations would work for fundraisin...