Five ways to improve your organisational planning

Good organisational planning covers a number of facets, including strategic planning, management, communications and evaluation.

Knowing how to do these things well is invaluable, but it can be hard to know where to start. To help, we’ve compiled insights from six experts from the organisation Action Planning.

1. Strategic planning

“My question to all the boards I visit is simply this,” says Andy Strajnic, a charity specialist and advisor, “Who talks about the future of your charity?”

All trustees are charged with delivering on the objectives of their organisation and promoting it. This involves some planning, usually called strategy.

Even a simple plan is better than none. The secret is to set some time aside for all your trustees, usually with senior staff and leaders, to discuss and plan for the future of your organisation. It can help to invite an advisor or consultant along who can get conversations going – and get plans made and stuck to. You can find more tips on strategic planning here.

During this process it is important to understand and address power dynamics. “Finding a way of squaring the circle between leadership team and trustee board can bring real tension into the relationship,” says Tim Jeffery, who specialises in helping charities and their leaders manage change. “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.”

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, an expert in organisational culture, relationships and working practices.

Getting buy-in is often framed using all sorts of jargon, such as people needing a “clear line of sight”, and talk of “performance frameworks” and other “accountability mechanisms”. In plain English what this jargon actually means is that all the people in your organisation, paid and unpaid, can see the point of what they do day-to-day.

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.

3. Measuring impact

It is also important to track the impact of any organisational plan you have put in place – or any of your work areas for that matter.

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

Doing this can inspire funders and supporters with the difference you make, increase your chance of being successful in funding bids, and help you identify what works so you can continue to improve services and focus resources on the things that make the biggest difference.

Here are five simple things you can do to create a culture that values monitoring, evaluation and learning so that it becomes more than a frustrating box-ticking exercise.

4. Communications

Communication is a key part of organisational planning, and this includes putting effort into building and communicating your reputation.

“When managed well, your reputation will be one of your hardest working assets,” says management, brand and communications consultant Kate Nicholas.

A strong reputation engenders trust and can bring direct benefits like the ability to recruit and retain talent, increased influence with government and other partners, more effective marketing and fundraising activity and improved favourability in media and social media. And a reputation built strategically over time will increase the likelihood of your organisation being given the benefit of the doubt by key stakeholders if you find yourself facing a crisis.

5. Strategic reviews

A strategic review can help your organisation continue to grow and develop. This needs to take into account everything, from capacity to resources to people. This is not about regurgitating the best practice recommendations, but considering whether they need to be adapted to the realities and contexts you work within.

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, for instance.

Charity consultant and interim CEO Felicia Willow suggests thinking about organisational development as a spectrum.

“Every charity has its place on that spectrum, and its next steps are about moving onwards and upwards,” she says.

“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.”

To get help with any aspect of your organisational planning, contact Action Planning on 01737 814758 or [email protected].