Presented by Impact Catalysts
Thursday, November 12, 2020
10:00am-12:00pm
After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.
“Humans make plans; God laughs,” goes the old saying that seems particularly apt these days. How can you even think about “strategic planning” when you don’t know what the next quarter will bring, let alone the next three years?
Many organizations are nimbly adapting to the pressing needs of their communities, temporarily putting a pause on their long-term plans. But how long is “temporarily?” For example, how will you know when (if ever) you’re able to shift back to your traditional service model? Or will your service model have to fundamentally change?
Facing questions like this can be understandably unsettling. Part of the purpose of developing a strategy—which we define as a framework for decision making—is to help manage that stress. In this interactive session, we will identify the essential components of strategy making in uncertainty, explore how you can get started, and consider how your organization might need to adapt.
For background, we recommend you read these two short blog posts from Impact Catalysts about contingency planning:
Contingency Planning In 5 (not so easy) Steps
Adapting Strategy In The Contingency Planning Era
About Impact Catalysts: Impact Catalysts is a partner to social enterprises and philanthropies. We’re here to help people who have dedicated their lives to social impact develop the systems, tools, and processes that catalyze impact. We work in partnership with leaders of social enterprises and their stakeholders. We believe that, done right, a planning process can reinforce and advance an organization’s commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion. Within the limitations of confidentiality requirements, we seek to include the voices of those with lived experience in our analysis of a client’s options. We’re issue agnostic—we believe that there is no single social issue that improves communities. There are many levers for change, and they all matter to us. And we’re implementation focused—we stick with our clients as they work to make their plans a reality, providing advice and counsel along the way. We’ve led nonprofit organizations and gotten our hands dirty in direct service work domestically and internationally. All of us got into consulting because we want to pay forward the lessons we learned the hard way.