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Future of Stakeholder Engagement
Wednesday, March 20th, 2013
“Stakeholder engagement” is one of these things that people agree is important. But what is it? This new survey of communicators suggests successful stakeholder engagement is founded on trust, mutual respect, senior-level commitment and alignment with the organisation’s long-term goals. It also highlights the lack of strategy behind much ad hoc stakeholder engagement. READ MORE
Planning isn’t strategy
Monday, March 4th, 2013
We often find strategy being conflated with planning. This short article explains how strategy is not about KPIs, but about successfully positioning an organisation to strengthen and improve its performance. Strategy is a singular thing, ‘one integrated set of choices’, and not a series of deliverables with associated timeframes and budgets. READ MORE
Evaluation Principles and Practices
Monday, February 4th, 2013
The Hewlett Foundation has recently uploaded this internal working paper to their website. It’s an excellent guide to understanding and implementing evaluation strategy. The paper includes a lot of information on planning and implementing evaluation, as well as discussing how to use evaluation to inform strategy development. READ MORE
Global Risks 2013
Friday, January 18th, 2013
It’s hard to read this and not conclude we’re all doomed. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks report looks at all of the major risks facing the world over the next decade in terms of impact and likelihood. It’s both comprehensive and pretty bleak. Three themes bring it all together: Testing Economic and Environmental Resilience, Digital Wildfires in a Hyperconnected World and The Dangers of Hubris on Human Health. It also looks at a series of ‘X Factors’ with unknown consequences – including runaway climate change, the costs of longer living and the discovery of alien life. READ MORE (pdf)
The 5-minute Nonprofit MBA
Thursday, October 18th, 2012
Nonprofit leadership routes aren’t well defined. Leadership training, including MBA programmes, is expensive and time-consuming. Extended leadership education is often an unrealistic prospect for the heads of smaller charities. This article is a quick overview of useful resources for ‘non-profit executives’ on the subject of people management skills. It’s a helpful reference. READ MORE
Oxfam swallows a giraffe
Friday, September 28th, 2012
Oxfam have recently completed a restructure to bring their 17 affiliates together into a ‘confederation’. This structure recognises that Country Directors are key players. It also reflects a shift in focus ‘towards national level change’ and away from ‘often-fruitless global summitry’. READ MORE
How do small charities get big?
Friday, June 8th, 2012
This article looks at three case studies of non-profits that have enjoyed strong growth for years. Each of them made big, similar strategic choices: to focus on one type of funding, to institutionalise fundraising skills and to focus on the long term. In each case, these choices needed the leadership to accept tough trade-offs. READ MORE
Managing big risks
Friday, May 25th, 2012
Charity insurer Ecclesiastical have written a new report about managing the big risks arising from a changing business model. Whether thinking about mergers, bidding for contracts, setting up new social enterprises or restructuring, it’s a useful checklist of questions to ask. READ MORE
Government mutual launches
Friday, May 11th, 2012
The service that runs the Civil Service Pension Scheme (myCSP) has become the first “Whitehall mutual” and is looking for new customers. It’s an experiment in employee ownership. Staff will share 25% of the equity, the government will own 35% and private sector pensions outsourcer Equiniti will own 40%. It’s an example of the hybrid models forming in the gaps between public, private and charitable provision, but at this stage the “public service mutual” still feels like an answer in search of a question. READ MORE
Making “national strategy”
Thursday, May 3rd, 2012
The Public Adminstration Select Committee published a second report on “National Strategy” this week. Reported as another dig at a wobbly government, it is actually a thoughtful study into what it is for a government or a nation to have a strategy. Their conclusions are that the UK does not have a strategy, and would do better if it did. Some of the submitted evidence to the committee is especially good. It’s interesting for anyone thinking about how governments make decisions. READ MORE