News & Views

By Valyrie Laedlein - Community Resource Exchange (CRE) is increasingly finding traditional methods of strategic planning to be inadequate for guiding nonprofit leaders to define their future and chart their course. Idealistic visioning that suggests growth and expansion needs to be rooted in the economic realities that are defining the terms by which our nonprofit sector must operate. Resources to undertake new directions, new services, and new staff are unlikely; indeed, most of CRE’s clients have had to redefine their programs and organizations based on a reduced budget, and there is no outlook for dramatic turnaround in sight.

In light of that, leaders are being required to think in very different ways about how to meet community needs: with a growing reliance on collaborators and former competitors to round out the service needs, rather than developing a one-stop shop themselves. Finally, the limited resources, increased scrutiny and ever growing disparities in our society demand that we be more rigorous than ever in making sure that every dollar counts and that we are clear about what results we are after for the investments that we and our supporters are making.

This sea change in the environment in which most nonprofits function requires a commensurate change in the methods used for strategic planning. CRE has begun to employ a series of new approaches to planning with Boards and staffs of client organizations:

• Using a program assessment tool – the Macmillan Matrix - to assess what is core programming for the organization, in order to assess what programs and services to sustain and shore up in a climate of dwindling resources;
• Supporting leadership in undertaking an efficient and frank examination of market position, cost and benefits, and comparative strengths & realities via “real-time strategic planning,” in order to isolate key issues to address, develop and select strategies to pursue, and chart priorities for implementation.
• Facilitating day-long workshops with a cross-section of key players in the organization as they think in new ways about fundamental questions about their mission, goals and the results they intend to achieve, as the basis for defining a theory of change that connects mission to outcomes to measures, and casts a new light on what work that the organization must to do in order to get results.

CRE’s consulting staff is prepared to work with clients to determine what their goals are in undertaking planning and to shape a process that is best suited to achieve those goals. CRE can guide organizational leaders in deciding what data is important to assemble to inform the planning, who should participate in the process at what stages, and how to structure the process to leverage participants’ best thinking and to get to conclusions. After facilitating the planning discussions, CRE will support the organization in moving from goals and “a plan” to implementation.