Strategy
If you want to change your world, you need a strategy as strong as your values.
Firetail helps you achieve your ambitions for social progress with bold, independent thinking. You will have answers that give you the clarity and confidence you need to make a difference.
For Firetail, finding strategic answers starts with bringing together different perspectives.
To turn your ambitions into reality, you need to understand yourself and the world around you: your landscape, your stakeholders, your operations and your business model.
All of our clients are impact, mission and purpose driven. Our clients are diverse. From large, complex networks and communities to start-up social enterprises.
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Good strategy is “coherent action backed by an argument”. It is about defining what success means to you and how you will achieve it.
Strategy development from Firetail helps you tell a clear story about the future and your place in it. You need to analyse the situation, engage with your partners, evaluate options and develop a clear, realistic plan. Firetail will support you with defining what success looks like and how to get there. Each strategic step is grounded in data, insight and evidence. Firetail has experience in working in multi-stakeholder environments, with organisations and individuals that balance competing definitions of success, perspectives about the future and capacity for change.
Our experience includes engagements in organisational strategy development, landscape and stakeholder analysis, growth planning, new business models, portfolio reviews, mergers, partnerships and coalitions.
Selected insights:
What is your “theory of the state”?
How can we make better strategy?
Complexity on purpose - Participation, platforms and power
Beyond fundraising - New business models for social progress
Case studies:
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Our futures work specialises in tackling complex questions about the future at the intersection of the public, private and voluntary sectors.
Firetail helps clients consider the future, assess what is likely to change and what is likely to stay the same. We support you to develop responses for these different futures, understand the capacities and capabilities you need to build, think about different types of risk and opportunity, and catalyse new thinking about your strategy.
In our experience, the challenge of futures work is integrating long-range perspectives and surprising insights into actionable ways forward. Too often, organisations are unable to turn the insights of their thinking about the long-term into actions for the short- and medium-term.
Our experience includes engagements in scenario planning, horizon scanning, systems mapping and collaborative co-creation.
Firetail is an approved supplier under the UK Government “Futures Framework”) run by the Government Office of Science. Click here to learn more
Selected insights
Scenario planning for a post-crisis world
Facing future corruption challenges - trends for the next decade
Case studies
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You want to turn strategic direction into co-ordinated, coherent action. You believe current capabilities, ways of working and processes could be better aligned to your strategic ambitions. You are keen to create a culture and instil values that enable your vision.
In these cases, Firetail helps to give everyone a clear framework to make decisions, set objectives and milestones to allocate and secure resources, anticipate change, manage trade-offs and align the organisation with its ambitions.
Our services include organisational development, operational and business planning, values, culture & behaviours, change management and fundraising strategies.
Selected insights:
What can business learn from charities about purpose?
How can you embed your values?
Choices in a crisis v choices for renewal
Case studies
Insights
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Theory of the state
STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
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Lost in transformation
ORGANISATIONAL CHANGE
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The British Paralympic Association
CASE STUDY
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How can we make better strategy?
STRATEGY DEVELOPMENT
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Whose strategy is it anyway?
FUTURES THINKING
Impact
Firetail’s approach to impact sets you up to be more effective, make better decisions and enhance the lives of the people you serve.
There are a variety of tools you can use to measure your impact and progress. We can help you pick the right one for the right moment.
Organisations benefit from our deep experience in developing and delivering monitoring, evaluation and learning reviews and frameworks. Our approach is reflective and collaborative. We help you think systemically about the change you want to see and your progress towards it.
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Good evaluation is always about learning, and the most effective evaluation always connects to strategy.
You want to build monitoring, evaluation and learning practices into your ways of working. You want to ensure you have thought about the people, processes and systems you need to understand your outputs, outcomes and impact along the way, and embed them for the future.
For organisations driving social progress, success has multiple definitions. Success against one set of criteria could mean failure against another. Understanding the context is essential. Too many evaluations are audits. Box-ticking exercises. They are static and backward-looking, when your organisation needs to focus on the future. They promise certainty and attribution, when you know results are normally ambiguous and more about your contribution.
Impact management services from Firetail help you develop a Theory of Change, shape learning questions, conduct impact assessments and establish and deliver monitoring, learning and evaluation systems. We work with you and your stakeholders to build a shared understanding of context, capabilities and definitions of success to embed learning in your organisation.
Thinking about evaluation as a tool for strategy helps to establish a learning culture within your organisation. This can be a powerful driver of change.
Selected Insights:
Common mistakes and practical lessons for developing a Theory of Change
Case studies
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Evaluation from Firetail helps you measure the impact of a specific programme, project or campaign. We evaluate effectiveness, processes and impact. Together with you, we shape how you can improve your programmes in the future. We help you connect the findings to your strategy, planning and operations.
We have led formal evaluations commissioned by national and international development agencies, trusts and foundations, through to small, tailored learning programmes. We have particular expertise around evaluating programmes in complex policy environments, and working in a global, national and local context.
Our services include evaluations of campaigns and coalitions, programmes and projects. We have experience of both formative and summative methodologies, and develop a bespoke approach for every engagement.
Case studies
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To have an impact, you need to understand your sector, your stakeholders, customers and beneficiaries.
Firetail helps you to explore big, complex questions with large, diverse stakeholder audiences.
Our learning and insight work includes a full range of stakeholder engagement tools and qualitative and quantitative research methodologies. We can combine primary insights with synthesis of secondary sources into actionable frameworks. We will work with you to connect the insights from research to real, practical plans.
Our research experience includes bespoke engagement programmes for senior global decision makers, focus groups and research into volunteer needs, audience strategy and engagement. We have conducted literature reviews and synthesis of research landscapes into practical briefing and strategy materials.
We have particular experience working with senior global leaders and policymakers, academics, industry representatives, civil society groups, volunteers and campaigners. We have also conducted a number of assignments helping organisations understand the challenges of inclusion in their organisation and in their wider community.
Selected insights
What did we learn from “Breaking the Barriers”?
Case studies
Insights
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A shield not a sword
IMPACT MANAGEMENT
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Common mistakes for developing a Theory of Change
IMPACT DEVELOPMENT
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The Department for the Economy of Northern Ireland
CASE STUDY
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What did we learn from "Breaking the Barriers?"
LEARNING & INSIGHT
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Women deliver eye health
LEARNING & INSIGHT
