5 ways to improve your organisational planning

Good organisational planning covers a number of facets, from strategic planning to management, communications and evaluation. As an overview, we’ve compiled insights from six Action Planning Associate Consultants, with links to read more on each topic.

1 Strategic planning

“My question to all the boards I visit,” says Andy Strajnic, “is simply this: ‘Who talks about the future of your charity?’” All trustees are charged with delivering on the objects of the charity and promoting it. This involves some planning, usually called strategy. Help is available from advisors or consultants who can come alongside and get conversations going, plans made and stuck to.

Even a simple plan is better than none and all trustees must together set some time aside, usually with senior staff/leaders, to discuss and plan for the future of the charity. Much can be said about this, but in short, however equipped you feel, as trustees you set regular annual dates for strategy and get good help if needed to get the conversation going. The future of all the good work you do is at stake.

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“Finding a way of squaring the circle between leadership team and trustee board can bring real tension into the relationship,” says Tim Jeffery. “If the CEO and senior staff are too dominant, they can bulldoze their way forward with ineffective governance oversight and little Board ownership of a new strategy. If the Board assert their right to be the ones setting the direction, they can alienate the very people who are supposed to be delivering on it. Either route can lead to the sort of debilitating disagreements, resentments and departures that too often stunt the good work of many worthy organisations.”

At the outset of a strategy development exercise, agree a process. In fact, even before that, discuss and agree between Board Chair and CEO who will be responsible for designing a process. If they can agree a process that clarifies the roles of staff and trustees, then together they can present this to the Board for approval.

In my experience, it is the CEO who should lead the process of strategy development with agreed touchpoints and milestones to report to the Board and regular briefings for the Chair. I have seen a Board suddenly faced with a completed new strategy to sign off that they have had little or no input on. That’s lighting the blue touch paper! Instead, get the Board’s agreement to their involvement at key points in the process so that they feel appropriately involved and have a sense of comfort and clarity about the process, because ultimately they need to believe in it and sign it off.

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2 Getting cross organisational buy-in

“Successful strategies will be accompanied by a unifying plan with which teams and departments can align their own,” says Clare Bamberger.

All sorts of jargon pops up here: “clear line of sight”, “performance framework” and other “accountability mechanisms”. In plain English they actually mean that all the people in the organisation, paid and unpaid, can see the point of what they do day-to-day. Sometimes staff members are not interested – and that’s their choice; they come to do their job to earn a living. Others feel more aligned with the cause and passionate about whether their efforts are making a difference.

Under a unifying plan, each team can work out for themselves the best way to deliver on the objectives. After all, they have been hired for their knowledge and expertise, so trust them to use it. Objectives will be agreed by line managers with individuals, by sections heads with team leaders, heads with department directors; preferably coordinated by someone who has the specific task of pulling it all into a coherent whole.

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“One of the things I find most illuminating is when I ask a range of individuals the same question,” says Felicia Willow. “For example, ‘How comfortable are Trustees in challenging each other?’ or ‘Does everyone on the Board have a copy of the constitution and do they know what it says?’ [Hint – I don’t get the same answer. And that in itself is very revealing].

From the moment you start talking to people, there’s an opportunity to communicate – to raise awareness and understanding and to prepare the groundwork so that later decisions are understood and accepted.

There are also always those who think that looking at operational effectiveness is a waste of time, so the conversation itself can help to improve understanding about how getting organisational effectiveness right is essential to operational success.

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3 Measuring impact

“The benefits of building a culture that values monitoring, evaluation and learning in your organisation are huge,” says Emma Insley. Here are three:

• Inspiring funders and supporters with the difference you make.
• Increasing your chance of successful funding applications by showing that you have good plans to evaluate your project.
• Finding out about what works so you can improve services and focus resources on the things that make the biggest difference.

But how do you create a culture that values monitoring, evaluation and learning so that it becomes more than a frustrating box-ticking exercise? Here are five things your charity could do.

1.     Ensure you have a common understanding of the key impact and evaluation terms. Evaluation terminology means different things to different people. To get everyone on the same page, it is important to agree common terms within your organisation.  

2.     Involve teams in planning how you will evaluate services from the beginning. Monitoring, evaluation and learning cannot be a top-down directive if you want people to take it seriously – and it can’t be left solely to fundraisers. 

3.     Keep it simple. One of the common challenges is “impact paralysis” – when an organisation is stuck in the headlights, searching for the perfect way to measure its impact and unable to move forward. (Spoiler alert: it probably doesn’t exist!).

4.     Gather both quantitative and qualitative data. Stakeholder interviews and focus groups are best for gathering qualitative data, but if you are short on resources, you can also capture this through surveys that ask a few open questions.

5.     Evaluate your data to gain insights that good data brings. Smart organisations get curious and learn from their data about the difference they are making. It can be helpful to develop a set of learning questions that are answered by reviewing quantitative and qualitative data in discussions with colleagues.

Once you have the evidence to show that monitoring and evaluation are beneficial, it will naturally become part of your organisational culture for the long term.

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4 Communications

“When managed well, your reputation will be one of your hardest working assets,” says Kate Nicholas.

A strong reputation engenders trust and can bring direct benefits in terms of the ability to recruit and retain talent, increased influence with government and other partners, more effective marketing/fundraising activity as well as improved favourability in media and social media. A reputation strategically built over time also increases the likelihood that the organisation will be given the benefit of the doubt by key stakeholders if you do find yourself facing a crisis.

Begin by recognising that reputation is a board-level issue that needs to be visibly owned by the CEO and senior leadership team, who in turn need to recognise that in today’s connected society, communication is a way of operating and not just a professional function. Listening needs to be built into the heart of your operations and strategic planning, together with a willingness to take on board and respond to the climate of public opinion.

Strong reputations are also built from the inside out; your staff are some of your most powerful ambassadors and it is essential that they have a shared understanding and belief in the integrity and value of your offering and operations.

Your reputation also depends on the relationship between your brand promise and customer experience – if you are promising more than you are delivering, your reputation is in danger. Of course, you need a good crisis plan, but if you are willing to address some of these issues in advance, it is far less likely that your organisation will end up in intensive care.”

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5 Strategic reviews

“There is a charity development spectrum,” says Felicia Willow. “Every charity has its place on that spectrum, and its next steps are about moving onwards and upwards.”

If you imagine that spectrum has 100 steps, there’s no point telling someone on step 4 about how they need to hit step 78. It’s just going to put them off. What we need to figure out is how to move them along to step 10. Then step 15. But the order of those steps will differ across different organisations. And it’s the job of the reviewer to figure that out.

A strategic review needs to take into account everything from capacity to resources to people. It’s also not about regurgitating the best practice recommendations, but considering whether they need to be adapted to meet the realities of the charity concerned. The options for an international, multi-million-pound charity with 400 staff members will be vastly different from a village hall charity with six Trustees and one part-time underpaid administrator.

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Need help with any aspect of your organisational planning? Call us on 01737 814758 or email office@actionplanning.co.uk