The 1Up Single Parent Resource Centre in Victoria recently rethought and refreshed its fundamental strategy and inventory of programs. Board member Erwin Martinez shares their experience, and a model he invites other non-profit boards to follow.
The 1Up Single Parent Resource Centre (1Up) in Victoria, BC, is not unlike countless other medium-sized non-profits. It has a worthy mission, in our case to serve the needs of single-parent families in the Greater Victoria area. Its highly impactful and important services are free to its clients and run the gamut from counselling, mentoring, food pantries, used clothing, to assistance for special occasions such as back-to-school and the December holiday season. It’s a little bit of a helping hand to single parents with limited resources who may be overwhelmed by their situation. Most of our clients are single mothers – many as the sole caregiver for very young children.
With an annual budget of a little more than a million dollars and non-stop fundraising, 1Up has a paid staff of six, including a full-time executive director. The board of directors is all volunteers and numbers eight. This is a profile similar to that of many other non-profit organizations.
We were concerned that without a strategy refresh, our programs would stagnate and we would miss opportunities to have greater positive impacts on our clients.
Recently our board, executive director, and staff took on the challenge of refreshing and rethinking 1Up’s fundamental strategy and inventory of programs. The existing mission, vision, and strategy were last revisited more than 10 years ago. We on the board were concerned that without a strategy refresh, our programs would stagnate and we would miss opportunities to have greater positive impacts on our clients.
This case study shares our experience in developing a new strategy, providing a model other non-profit boards may want to follow.
Validate the mission
First, we reviewed our existing mission and vision statements. We decided to keep them as is. But the exercise of critical thinking we applied to this process was very helpful, putting us in a mindset to take on the strategy.
In general:
- Vision statements should be a descriptive statement about the future. Vision statements are devoid of the “how” and emphasize what the future will be like.
- Mission statements get to the heart of why non-profit organizations exist. They describe who you are helping, with what services, and to what scope.
Pillars – Defining scope
Before we undertook the strategy refresh, we revisited our scope of services. We could not be all things to everyone, so our first step reviewed and documented what we called the “pillars” of our work. Other non-profit organizations would, of course, have pillars that make sense for their missions.
These are the pillars at 1Up:
- Finances. Utilize financial resources to assure financial sustainability.
- Staff. Build and support staff and leadership.
- Community. Increase community connections.
- Culture. Promote a culture of well-being.
- Programs/services. Create and expand programs by listening to our clients.
- Space. Find a long-term home space to better facilitate our programs delivery.
Defining strategy
To develop our strategy, we sought to keep our approach and terminology simple and plain-speaking.
We covered the who, what, where, how, why, and when of strategy development. In practical terms, strategy refers to:
- where you want to go
- why you want to go there
- how you are going to get there
- what you will do
- when you will do it
- who acts, and who takes responsibility
Other characteristics of our strategy development approach:
- Metrics. We wanted to move from an organization with few metrics that were not often useful for providing feedback on our programs’ effectiveness to one where each major scope pillar had associated metrics that would be visible to the ED and board, and tracked on a regular basis.
- Documentation. We realized that we risked the success and continuity of our services if we did not have adequate documentation defining what we do, and how we do it.
- Open communication and teamwork. We wanted an atmosphere and reality of working openly, without any negativity. ED, staff, and board worked together at all stages of the strategy refresh.
- Timetables. To ensure that the results of the strategy were actually executed, we agreed to develop timetables for the program changes resulting from the new strategy.
- Creative. Our mission statement is appropriately outcome-oriented. We agreed to be creative and think outside of the box with our new strategy. We made it okay to question and challenge how we do things today in order to create a thinking process that would potentially improve outcomes beyond current levels.
Strategy document
We documented our strategy by articulating the following strategy development areas for each pillar:
- primary goal
- owners: board members, ED, and staff
- scope: programs, activities, staff
- constituencies benefited
- success metrics
- program delivery improvements or additions
- risk analysis and risk mitigations
- milestone plan
Expected outcomes
Developing a strategy refresh was a process, an experience that took on a life larger than the strategy document it produced. We defined expected outcomes that we wanted to be long-lasting changes in how we worked and how we thought.
- Improve our knowledge of our current state, and how it aligns with our mission and the needs of 1Up’s single-parent clients.
- Improve how we consider new plans to enhance and add programs and services.
- Keep the strategy alive by reviewing and updating it annually.
- Improve how we monitor metrics that improve our ability to understand the effectiveness of our programs and how well they are benefiting the 1Up parents.
- Explicitly consider and manage risks to our programs’ success.
- Proactively complete the actions called for in the strategy.
Learnings that surprised us
In conducting the strategy refresh, we discovered a couple of items that surprised us:
- Mental shift. It can be difficult to change our thinking from one of focusing 100% on what we are doing today, with all the challenges and constraints, to thinking beyond today to what might be possible tomorrow.
- Takes time. For medium-sized non-profits like ours, the time it takes to work on the strategy is hard to allocate; it takes “extra” time that is difficult to find. Staff are already stretched, and the board members have many other responsibilities outside of 1Up.
New ideas, examples from the strategy refresh
It was exciting to experience the creative thought processes we embraced that led to new thinking and new innovations. Just a few examples of new directions we are taking at 1Up that directly resulted from the strategy development process:
- New finance manager position. We learned that too much of the ED’s time was spent on managing finances and budgets, and reviewing and paying invoices. This happened even though we were already engaging a part-time bookkeeper. Creating a new part-time staff role of finance manager would allow the ED to focus more on our clients and on delivering programs that effectively meet their needs.
- Elevate the importance of public relations. Good public relations and the associated benefits it brings to fundraising were not getting sufficient attention. We agreed to make good public-relations practices more of an explicit job of the ED and board members.
- New service to support families experiencing family violence. As we worked through the most common challenges experienced by our single-parent clients, we realized that our programs were not addressing one of the most common challenges: family violence. We are searching for external programs we may be able to refer our clients to or offer ourselves to address this critical need.
What can you do?
We documented our experience with our strategy refresh in the hopes it can be helpful to the boards of other medium-sized non-profit organizations, and we invite readers to use this article as a template. A strategy refresh is a lot of work, but well worth it.
As you use your new strategy, remember: if you cannot act on it and you cannot measure its successful implementation, it is not a strategy.
