With Everything Going On, is Now the Time to Plan and Evaluate?

Demand for services is increasing. Staff is stretched to the limit. Current funders are reporting the need to cut back. Attendance at board meetings is dropping. Your major special event will net significantly less than last year-etc., etc., etc. You are working ten hours a day, and more, as you wade through the myriad of details, juggling to keep everything going. You just don’t have time to plan or evaluate your organization’s work.

Executive directors often feel isolated and board members frequently feel powerless as they struggle to meet the needs of the organization and its constituents while “putting out fires,” especially in today’s volatile economic climate.

Whether this is a description of your organization, a reflection of some aspects of the challenges it faces or an exaggerated example that is hard to imagine, the foundation from which to move forward successfully is based in planning and evaluation.

While it’s true that you probably don’t have the time, you do need to take a deep breath and step back from the situation long enough to remember what you already know in theory. Evaluation and planning will save you time, energy and resources in the long-run and better assure that you are maximizing your mission achievement and best serving your community. It is especially important in challenging times and has many benefits that will help immediately as well as lay the foundation for years to come.

If you already engage in systematic planning and evaluation, you know this list is much longer, but the following are a few highlights of benefits to a well-developed and executed process. Through planning and evaluation organizations can:

1. Prioritize needs and activities and break down the work to be done into manageable pieces, providing focus and calming the chaos that often creeps into challenging situations
2. Give voice to the board, staff and other key stakeholders in the organization to share their perspectives regarding the organization and how it functions and where it needs to adapt to better meet its mission
3. Channel information collected from those served to guide program/service development and delivery
4. Look externally at community need versus mission alignment, competitors versus competitive advantage, uniqueness versus duplicative efforts, organization brand/reputation versus other providers, trends and organization preparedness
5. Bring the organization together through a framework that unites people to work toward common goals by empowering shared ideas, collaborative solutions, openness to adaptation, and group responsibility. It becomes our plan, not their plan
6. Facilitate development of systematic processes to set priorities and allocate resources, becoming the blueprint for success
7. Create a vehicle to engage more people and renew existing commitments to the organization
8. Serve as a tool to systematically increase efficiencies and effectiveness and consider new revenue streams
9. Document funding needs and reassure funders that your organization is a solid investment

With the results of the recent economic impact of the nonprofit sector in Michigan report (www.mnaonline.org), we now have validated information about what we knew intuitively: the nonprofit sector is a significant economic driver to Michigan’s economy, both as an employer with at least 1 in 10 employees working in the sector, and as an industry with annual operations roughly equivalent to the manufacturing or retail trade sectors. NorthSky Nonprofit Network recently released survey results for nonprofits in its ten-county service region in northwest Michigan that indicated that 80% of those reporting anticipate an increased need for their services in 2009 while 70% of those reporting anticipate significant difficulty with cash flow in 2009. How to bridge that gap is on the minds of many organizations. Systematic evaluation and planning are key tools to utilize.

NorthSky is a program of Rotary Charities of Traverse City. As such, NorthSky is considered a “first responder” to the nonprofit sector in its region. At NorthSky we promote systematic planning and evaluation and are seeing an increased desire by nonprofits to either initiate systematic planning or to modify existing planning processes to become ongoing management tools. As the environment is changing quickly, embracing a planning and evaluation process is a crucial first step to assure the organization can meet its opportunities and challenges appropriately. As planning should not be episodic but ongoing, the tools and process that NorthSky utilizes to facilitate systematic planning and evaluation are designed as such. There are many different planning and evaluation models so it is possible to find the tools and facilitator that best fit the organization’s culture.

At NorthSky, we utilize an organizational capacity assessment tool to guide the organization in evaluating its current capabilities in the areas of leadership, adaptive, management, operations and technology. With the facilitator, the organization’s leadership utilizes the assessment results as the foundation to develop an organization capacity building plan. The plan prioritizes capacity gaps within the organization that it will build in order to best meet its mission. How these capacities will be developed is also outlined. The organization then moves into the next level of planning. NorthSky utilizes a modification of the LaPiana Real Time Strategic Planning model as it is designed as an ongoing process. The organizational assessment and capacity building plan are considered within the planning process to help assure that the organization can implement its strategies to achieve its goals. As part of the implementation plan, organizations design their evaluation and reporting approaches to provide tools to measure how well they are doing in relation to their desired outcomes. Evaluating how the plan is performing is critical and builds in the mechanism for ongoing systematic planning to respond as necessary to evaluation results.

It is the systematic approach to planning and evaluation that will help your organization the most over time. It does take time, energy and resources to establish, but the return on the investment can be immediate and should have long-lasting benefits with continued use. Organizations need to “work the plan,” not just go through the process.

Developing planning and evaluation systems are generally considered organizational capacity building activities. There are funders and service providers throughout the state that can assist organizations in adopting these tools for sustainability. I would recommend contacting the Capacity Building Services department of MNA for referrals to resources in your area.

Submitted by:
Debbie McKeon
Executive Director, NorthSky Nonprofit Network

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