New Planning Resources for a New Year

Yes We Can!

As the New Year begins, I'd like to recommend a few excellent resources to support your strategic thinking and planning efforts.

First, another great article from the Harvard Business Review. Appearing in the December 2008 issue, there is an article entitled Delivering on the Promise of Nonprofits by Jeffrey L. Bradach, Thomas J. Tierney, and Nan Stone. The authors, associated with the Bridgespan Group, propose that nonprofits wanting to dramatically increase their mission impact need to address five interdependent questions: Which results will we hold ourselves accountable for? How will we achieve them? What will results really cost, and how can we fund them? How do we build the organization we need to deliver results? These questions provide a framework for change that combines elements of theory of change, outcomes measurement, strategic and business planning, and organizational development. Included in the article, are a number of case examples drawn from the work of the Bridgespan Group. If you don't subscribe to the Harvard Business Review, you can purchase an electronic or hard copy of the article at www.hbr.org. Order Reprint R0812G.

The second resource is the Severson Center Trend Website. The Severson Center, a division of the Alliance for Children and Families, has opened their trend website to the general public, allowing access to a library of information in a user-friendly format. No login is needed for the website, but some reports are password protected for access by members of the Alliance. Trends and their impacts are organized under the following categories: Business/Economy, Education, Nonprofits, Technology/Science, Demographics/Population, Health, Social Service Issues, and Work. No question about it: this is the only resource of its kind and an invaluable resource for nonprofit strategic planning efforts. Go to: www.alliancetrends.org.

The third resource is Designing Your Future: Key Trends, Challenges and Choices Facing Associations and Nonprofit Leaders published in August 2008 by ASAE and the Center for Association Leadership. According to the authors, Designing Your Future “began with the analysis of several hundred trends. Association leaders and other experts and practitioners have winnowed the lengthy list of impacts to the most critical trends ranging from social to economic to political to environmental to technological impacts likely to affect associations.” Here are some of the chapter headings: Key Challenges: 10 Strategic Priorities Association Leaders Must Address, Key Choices: a Strategic Decision-Making Framework, 50 Key Trends, Scenario Analysis Workshop, Trend and Trend Analysis Workshop. Click here to preview this publication on Amazon.com.


And don't forget to check out our listing of Key Trends included in our weekly feature Nonprofit Picks Of The Week.

Happy New Year!

Two Excellent Trend Documents

I've come across two excellent trend documents recently. While the publications will be of special interest to nonprofits focusing on education, both resources will be useful to a broader audience of nonprofit leaders engaged in strategic thinking and planning. The resources are noteworthy because of the content they offer; they are also noteworthy because of the formats used to make the information more accessible and usable. These formats can be used to better organize trend data that you are gathering for your own strategic planning efforts.

The first resource is the book Sixteen Trends, Their Profound Impact on Our Future by Gary Marx. The author highlights a number of key trends, and then shows how each will influence educational policy in the future. Each chapter focuses on one major trend: there is a summary of the trend, implications for society as a whole and education in particular, and then a listing of questions and activities to stimulate further thought discussion and action.

The second resource is the Education Map of the Decade, created by the KnowledgeWorks Foundation to examine the forces affecting education and the economy. The map includes three key elements: trends, which represent major shifts, new developments and concepts and the driving forces that will shape the future of education; hot spots -- trends that the KnowledgeWorks Foundation thinks will have broad impact on education, and dilemmas -- problems that can't be solved and won't go away which require new thinking and new solutions. This map is more than a trend document -- it has to be experienced online. You'll find tutorials on the use of the map, discussion boards, links to additional resources and much more. This interactive website is a powerful example of how good information -- an essential ingredient of effective strategic planning -- can be gathered, organized and presented in user friendly ways.

Trend Data that Supports Strategic Planning

Here are a number of trend reports that may be useful in your strategic planning efforts: A report by Lewis A. Friedland and Shauna Morimoto that examines the driving forces behind the rise in youth volunteering at http://www.civicyouth.org/research/areas/comm_partic.htm; the latest edition of the Annie E. Casey Foundation’s KIDS COUNT Data Book at http://www.aecf.org/kidscount/databook; Drivers of Change in the Governance of Nonprofits, a chapter in Improving Board & Organizational Effectiveness, published by the Southern Rural Development Center at http://srdc.msstate.edu/nonprofit/module01.pdf; an Annie E. Casey Foundation report that examines the tenure and future plans of nonprofit executives at http://www.aecf.org/publications/data/executive_transition_survey_report2004.pdf; a report from PNN Online that examines the state of E-philanthropy at http://www.pnnonline.org/article.php?sid=6104; a study from the Boston College Center on Wealth and Philanthropy on wealth transfer estimates among African American households at http://bc.edu/research/swri/meta-elements/pdf/aawte2.pdf; and a study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project that explores the impact of the Internet on families, communities, work and home, daily life, education, health care, and civic and political life at http://www.pewinternet.org/trends.asp.

For links to other trend data, see our Trend of the Week feature at http://www.createthefuture.com/trend_of_the_week_2006.htm.

Check back in the future for more links to trend data and post others that you have found useful for strategic planning.

Trend Data You Can Use

Identifying and analyzing trends is a critical part of the environmental scanning described in a previusly post. For links to trend data you can use in your strategic planning efforts, go to our website: http://www.createthefuture.com/trend_of_the_week_2005.htm. Here's a good example of what's available: Gary Hubbell, author of Forces of Change: The Coming Challenges in Hospital Philanthropy, has analyzed the prospective peak giving years by generational cohorts. The peak giving years are ages 55-75:

Silent Generation - Birth Years: 1925-1942. Years of Peak Giving 1980 - 2017

Boom Generation - Birth Years: 1943-1960. Years of Peak Giving: 1998-2035

Generation X- Birth Years: 1961-1981. Years of Peak Giving: 2016-2056

Millennial Generation - Birth Years: 1982-2003(?).Years of Peak Giving: 2037-2078

His conclusions which will be useful for planning by nonprofits in general include the following:
· As we enter the 2010 decade, the last cohort of the silent generation will be reaching the end of their peak giving years.
· Early Boomer cohorts have already entered their peak which will continue for the next twenty years.
· Generation X donors will just begin to enter their peak giving in the middle of the next decade, continuing to the middle of this century.
· At least 30 years from now, Millennials will enter their prime giving years.
· Futurists anticipate longer life spans for each successive generation so peak giving years may represent spans that start later in life and/or last longer than what is known today.

A Good Resource for Environmental Scanning

An important activity in strategic planning is gathering and analyzing information. This activity typically consists of three components: an external assessment, a market or constituent assessment and an internal assessment.

The purpose of the external assessment is to identify and assess changes and trends in the world around the nonprofit likely to have a significant impact on it over the next 5-10 years. We'll look at political, economic, technological, social, lifestyle, demographic, competitive, regulatory and broad philanthropic trends. We then determine which changes are opportunities for us (for example, opportunities to grow) and which could be threats to us in some way (trends that can keep us from being successful). Finally we identify implications for selected changes and trends -- ways the nonprofit might respond to the opportunities and threats we identify. At this early stage of the planning process, saying that something is an implication does not require the nonprofit to adopt that course of action. The external assessment is sometimes referred to as the “environmental scan.”

I recently came across a good resource for environmental scanning. It’s entitled “Scanning the Landscape: Finding Out What’s Going on in Your Field”. It’s published by GrantCraft, a program of the Ford Foundation. While this guide is written for the grantmaking community, the general guidance and the description of approaches for gathering and analyzing information are excellent and applicable to most strategic planning and thinking efforts. Go to: http://www.grantcraft.org/catalog/guides/scanning/index.html.