Transcript
WEBVTT
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Remember, a SWOT analysis is a starting point for strategic planning.
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The insights gained from doing a SWOT will really inform your decision-making for the rest of the strategic process.
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Welcome to the Practice of Nonprofit Leadership.
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I'm Tim Barnes.
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And I'm Nathan Ruby.
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All right, Tim, we're going to do some therapy here.
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Let's do a little word association.
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I'm going to say a phrase and you just say whatever pops up into your head.
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Well, I'm not sure I want to do this, but I guess I'll humor you.
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Go ahead.
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Okay, awesome.
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Well, you, you know, feel free to lie down if that would make you more comfortable, or, you know, sit up.
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Whatever you want to do, all right here, it is you ready?
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okay, swat analysis flies flies swat like swat a fly.
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Sorry, I'm sure that's not what you're looking for you said the first thing that comes to mind.
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That's what I was thinking.
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All these flies are flying around, but anyway.
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Okay, you actually got me on that one, I was not expecting that.
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But the other thing you probably thought of.
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The second thing you thought of was a SWOT analysis, and it has been a tried and true strategic planning tool for years and it has been around I don't know long before I was, I haven't, I didn't look it up when it first came into existence, but it's been around for a while.
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So, tim, before we get launch off into this, can you give us a quick description of exactly what a SWOT analysis is?
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exactly what a SWOT analysis is.
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Well you know, Nathan.
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Basically it's being able to sit down and answer or identify four things.
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The first one is what are your strengths, what are the weaknesses, what are the opportunities in front of you and what are the threats that may be coming against you as an organization or as an individual.
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Putting that all together and then helping you take that information and figure out what's your strategy, where you're headed.
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Well, and strategy is so important because it gives us direction, it shows us where we're going, it helps to define answers for us, and I was doing some research on this, and there's some interesting statistics on strategy and SWOT analysis being part of the strategy process.
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But 48% of leaders spend less than a day each month on strategy.
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And when I read that, I was thinking to myself, just evaluating my own time spent on strategy, and because I do it a little bit every day, or I try to do a little bit every day, so I think I do more than that.
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But it also didn't really stick out in my mind of oh yeah, I do.
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You know, this is my defined process for going through strategy and making sure it's incorporated.
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So, you know, even for me it's an issue and it's probably something for most people that are leading an organization, something that that they could do better on moving forward.
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Well, before we hit into our topic for today, we're going to take a quick listen to this.
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Okay, well, yeah, tim and I, like we said, tim and I love the opportunity to interact with you.
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It's the best part of our job.
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It's the best part of our job.
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It's the best part of this podcast.
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So you know, reach out to us, ask us a question, give us a topic, and we'd love to interact with you.
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I'm excited about you talking to us through a SWOT analysis, and I think I just want to say some of you may be like, hey, I just my strategy is just survive one more day, and sometimes when we talk about bigger concepts, bigger things that you can do, it's easy to say I'm just a small organization.
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I'm not sure this really fits me, and I think what we want to say as we start is don't complicate this.
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It's asking some simple questions.
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It's identifying some simple things that will help you be able to make decisions on a day-to-day basis about where you're headed.
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So don't go, I'm going to.
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This isn't for me.
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I'm going to turn off.
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Don't turn it off yet.
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Give us a couple more minutes and I know Nathan's going to take us in a really good place.
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So I just want to say that before we start.
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Yeah, whether your budget is $25,000 or a half a million dollars or you have no budget at all, this process will work for you.
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So this is something for everyone, and Tim and I talked about this before we started to record.
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We don't have to overcomplicate this.
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This doesn't have to be this massive thing that you go through that you spend days and days on and it's pages and pages.
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That's not what this is.
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Typically, you will see SWOT analysis in four quadrants.
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So if you have your blank piece of paper, you draw a vertical line down the middle of the paper vertically, and then you draw a horizontal line in the middle of the paper horizontally, and so you've got upper left, upper right, bottom left, bottom right, and so then you just have a header in each of those four quadrants one for strengths, one for weaknesses, one for opportunities and one for threats, and then it's just bullet points.
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You could also set this up on just a Word document and just use strengths and then bullet points under strengths and then weaknesses and on with the rest.
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So the format in which you look at this and present it, it really doesn't make any difference.
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It's whatever your personal preference is, and what the format is is not the point.
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The point is going through the exercise of identifying what the bullet points are.
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All right, so let's start with strengths.
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So strengths are internal positive attributes and resources that give your organization an advantage.
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So you would want to list unique skills, expertise or resources, things that give your organization a competitive advantage.
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You could have a really strong, let's say, you have a really strong annual gala and you can pack 500 people in a room one time a year.
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Okay, that's a strength.
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Most organizations can't do that, so that would be a strength.
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Or you may have a board that is aggressively helping you fundraise that would be a strength.
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It could be even as an executive director.
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Maybe you have a skill like, maybe you have experience, for example, in the area that you're working in, maybe you spent so many years doing a skill that really benefits the organization.
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You're a strength I mean your leadership is a strength to the organization.
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A strength would be you are the only organization in your community that is doing the type of work that you do, so you're the only game in town for that particular thing.
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That could be a strength.
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There was an organization in our town that was a volunteer, it was a nonprofit organization education organization around cannabis.
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And we're not going to debate cannabis, but the point is there was no other organizations doing education on cannabis.
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They were the only ones and so they had this whole sector to themselves and it was a real opportunity for them to set the stage or to set the narrative or set the discussion on what the education would look like.
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And so they had all of these opportunities or all of these strengths around that, because they were the only one.
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I think one of the things, nathan, as we go through each one of these, I would and again, you may be driving or running or doing whatever, but at some point it would be great for you just to write down what comes to mind immediately, what makes your organization strong.
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Yeah, Okay, so that's strengths.
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Next is weaknesses, and just like strengths, but it's the opposite of strengths.
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Weaknesses are internal.
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Now, the keyword here is internal, for both strengths and weaknesses.
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This is internal factors that puts your organization at a disadvantage, and I think for here, some of the key things is to be you got to be honest about what your weekend and this is not a uh, uh, it's not a uh, uh, what's the word I want.
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It's not a critique of your leadership.
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It's not a judgment of, well, you should have been doing this or you should have been doing that.
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It's this is.
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You just got to be honest and say, ok, we're weak in this, we don't have this.
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And so another way to look at it is is what are the areas that you need improvement?
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And so it could be.
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We don't have enough staff.
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You know the need is way overwhelming.
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We don't have enough staff, or we don't have our staff does not have the right level of education, there's training that they need to be able to do their jobs at full potential.
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And I think some of the things when I do these one of the reasons we're talking about this today, tim, is you, is my organization.
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We just went through this.
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We just finished it.
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Our strategic plan we're at the end of.
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We had a three-year one.
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We're rolling up to the end of it, so we're gearing back up to tackle the next three years.
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And so the first thing we did was a SWOT analysis and there were some weaknesses in there, that there are actually quite a few, and I think none of them really surprised me, because they're things that you deal with all the time and so if you have something that comes up again and again and again, well, we can't because of or now we can't do that because of this, if it just keeps coming up again and again, it's probably going to be a weakness.
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It could be again that there's expertise lacking on your staff or on your board.
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It could be a limitation and you don't have the financial, the connections to the donors that you wished you had.
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So there's a number of different things that could be.
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Basically, we're talking about limiting factors in some ways, but there are things that you are you're weak in at the moment.
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Yeah, so you, you know a weakness could be we have no donors that are a thousand dollars or over.
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That is that is a weakness, or maybe it's.
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You know, maybe all of your donors are under $100.
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So maybe we have no donors over $250 or over $500, whatever that number is, and so that's a weakness.
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If you're at a $20,000 budget and you're trying to get to $50,000, well, you're probably not going to get there without some $1,000 donors.
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So, again, you're identifying this as a weakness so that later you could come back and say, okay, this is something we've identified.
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Now what are we going to do to solve that issue?
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So now we're going to go from internal to external.
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All right, so strengths and weaknesses are about what's happening inside the organization.
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So strengths and weaknesses are about what's happening inside the organization and in some respect, those might be a little easier because you can actually control those.
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Those are things that you have control over.
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So now we're going to look external, outside of the organization, and the first one of those is opportunities, and this is actually my favorite one to talk about, because I'm a vision guy.
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I'm a 40,000-foot guy.
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I'm not so good on the details, but I'm pretty good when it comes to 40,000 feet, and that's where opportunities are.
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And so what are some external factors, what are some things out there that could positively impact your organization.
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So what would that be?
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Partnering with another organization on a new program that you do together.
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Expanding Maybe you have maxed out in the town that you're in and there's an opportunity in the next town or in the next county or the next state to expand your reach.
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Maybe you've identified that, hey, these are our three primary programs.
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But you know what, in the last two months, I've had 10 people come up to me and say, hey, could you guys?
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You know, have you ever thought about this?
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Could you do this?
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Maybe it's launching another program.
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Maybe it's hiring your first fundraiser, maybe it's hiring a program director so that you could spend more time on fundraising and other aspects of the organization.
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Opportunities can come in all kinds of different sizes and shapes.
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It could be new grant opportunities.
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Maybe there's a new grant program starting that you might qualify for New sources of donors that are available.
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Deliver your services better, easier, faster, you know, and that's as executive directors, and that's could do a whole nother episode on that, tim.
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But you know technology, it's just coming at us so fast and so what's out there that maybe you've ignored or you know I don't have the funding for, so I just you know we'll never be able to do that, so I'm not even going to think about that.
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Those things can go on the opportunity list and I think this is a time, don't I mean you can't be.
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It may be counterproductive to be crazy and say we're going to, you know, we're going to make sure every cat in the entire world has a safe home.
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Okay, maybe that's a bit much, but you know, if you're, if you're, if your mission is taking care of cats in your community, maybe it's taking care of cats in your County.
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So don't be afraid to to put some bold things on there and dream a little bit and see what you can come up with.
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I think, nathan, that's really an important word, because in general, we tend to look at what the blockages are, we tend to look at the negative things and I think just blue-skying it, just saying, hey, what are out there, what are the opportunities?
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We might surprise ourselves, we might see things that we hadn't really thought about before.
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So I agree, let it, let it rip, you know, let it, let's go for it.
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Yeah, absolutely, and I, I, I think this of the three of the four categories, I think this is the one that you run the biggest risk of not of limiting yourself, limiting what you believe could be, and so you think of things, but it's like, eh, I'm not even going to put it on there.
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Fourth one is um, assess threats, and so you think of things, but it's like I'm not even going to put it on there.
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Fourth one is assess threats and so, again, this is external.
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So these are external factors that could negatively impact your organization Weather, weather, if you do.
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If a lot of your programming is outdoors, weather could be a threat.
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You could have legal.
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Programming is outdoors, weather could be a threat, you could have legal.
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Maybe your township comes up with a new law that impacts your ability to operate the way that you've always operated.
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That would be a threat.
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If you have a funder that represents 70% of your annual budget, that's a threat.
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That's a threat.
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Or if you have two or three funders that represent 70% of your revenue, that's a threat.
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And for a lot of programs, a lot of organizations who rely on state contracts, and for a lot of programs, a lot of organizations who rely on state contracts, that's probably you.
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You know, if you're the primary source of your revenue and your funding is coming from state contracts, that is always a threat, because if you lose those contracts or if the contracts are diminished, so goes your program.
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So that's a threat.
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It could be your board president, who's an awesome, amazing, wonderful board president, has let you know that they're going to turn off.
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That could be a threat.
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What else, tim?
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What else is a threat that's out there?
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Well, I think, even in our conversation before we went on, sometimes our strength can look like a threat or a weakness, in the sense that if we have somebody, like you say, you have a board member who's really incredible, having incredible impact on our organization, but then they're taking, getting off the board, well, that's a strength right now, but it could be a threat if they're not there anymore.
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In this, in the sense that it can be a strength that you have a great connection into state contracts, state funding, but that can become a threat, as you said, if that stops, if there's a new administration that changes the rules or whatever, and so I know you're going to talk about this.
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We're identifying.
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We're not saying okay, it's time to shut the door.
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We're just saying these are things we need to be aware of, and the question is how are we going to respond to those things as we move forward?
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Yeah, and well, that's a great segue, tim, into our next section.
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And so what do you do?
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After you identify these four categories strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats and you know the, you start to look at those from a strategic standpoint and say, okay, you know, we want to capitalize on our strengths.
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Obviously we want to continue to, to move those.
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If we're really strong in something, then you know we probably make sense to put more resources towards it, get even stronger, make it even more than it already is.
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But then to come back and say, okay, well, you know, if we have a threat and let's say that we have five threats or six, whatever, you know we may not be able to do something about all six of them, but maybe there's something we could do about one of them.
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Okay, so let's take an example of a threat.
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Let's say a new ordinance is passed in your community or a local organization, and an ordinance has been passed that is going to or could be passed let's say, could be passed that is going to negatively impact your ability to do what you do.
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Well, if that's a threat, then you, as an organization, you need to be either you or your donors, or your volunteers or some of your end users, the people who benefit from your organization, need to be going to council meetings and having meetings with the council people or whatever your community calls the board members of the town and say, hey, this is going to impact us and this is how it's going to negatively impact us.
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So the point is is you can't take a piece of paper and draw your vertical line, your horizontal line and put in the categories and put in the bullet points and say, oh great, that was awesome, and then put that sheet of paper you know over to the side and never do anything on it.
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That's not what it's for.
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It is to identify these issues so that you could create a plan to come back then and address them as best as you can.
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A lot of times, a SWOT analysis is a first step in a broader strategic planning process.
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However, that said, it could also be used as just a standalone piece, and I said earlier that we went through one, just got done with it, and it was I started it and this was our process.
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This may not be the process you want to use, but this is how we did it.
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So I started it, I drafted it, um, I took it to staff, uh, and had them look at it, um, and then we as a, as a team, we get together once a week, uh, and so we talked about it, uh, I think it was three weeks, uh, over a three week period.
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We, we looked at it, um, everybody had input.
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We had a lot of good input, uh, we had new.
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Well, I see this as a strength, I see this as a weakness, I see this as a threat, and there was a couple of them that I was like, oh man, I didn't even see that, I didn't even recognize that as a threat, and so staff did an excellent job on adding to it, giving it more robustness.
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And then I took a draft to the committee.
00:22:34.910 --> 00:22:48.648
They looked at it, they dissected it and they came up with a whole nother set of things, because they have a different perspective and they came up with things.
00:22:48.648 --> 00:22:54.894
And you know, it's one of the things that the committee did which I really appreciated was they talked about.
00:22:55.256 --> 00:23:12.913
We didn't have anything in there about staff and the um, uh, about the strengths, because we were strapped staff, so we didn't really we didn't really talk about us, you know, and and and putting us into us, into that.
00:23:12.913 --> 00:23:15.280
But board members did so.
00:23:15.280 --> 00:23:16.165
I think it's important.
00:23:16.165 --> 00:23:21.244
The moral of the story there is to have multiple different people from multiple different perspectives.
00:23:21.244 --> 00:23:24.813
Look at it, because it will be a better document if you do it that way.
00:23:25.940 --> 00:23:28.145
It's a really good tool to do a very.
00:23:28.145 --> 00:23:32.808
It could be used very extensively as you think about the strategy for the whole organization.
00:23:32.808 --> 00:23:38.913
You could bring it down to a specific program or you could even use it.
00:23:38.913 --> 00:23:49.551
Maybe you're trying to make a decision about something and even saying, hey, let's run this decision through a SWOT what's the strengths in this decision, what's the weaknesses, what's the opportunities, what's the threats?
00:23:49.551 --> 00:23:52.480
I mean, it's a very simple thing and we talked about this again.
00:23:52.480 --> 00:23:54.805
We had a good conversation ahead of time.
00:23:54.805 --> 00:24:05.834
But even using this framework to look at your family or even to look at yourself, you know your heart, your passions, where are you headed?
00:24:05.834 --> 00:24:23.502
It's a simple little framework that can be used in a lot of different ways, but we think it's a really good framework as you think about where are you headed as an organization and how are you going to fulfill the mission that you have, the vision that you have for the organization.
00:24:24.464 --> 00:24:33.894
Yeah, and, like you said, even for yourself and you know I looked when we talked about that beforehand, I just went through my head what for me?
00:24:33.894 --> 00:24:36.727
And you know my strength, one of my strengths is major gift fundraising.
00:24:36.727 --> 00:24:42.053
That's my primary strength in my job, in the work that I do.
00:24:42.053 --> 00:24:44.929
And one of my weaknesses is finance.
00:24:44.929 --> 00:24:48.040
I, you know finance and accounting.
00:24:48.040 --> 00:24:51.844
That's not my thing, gives me a headache to look at a spreadsheet.
00:24:51.844 --> 00:24:59.249
So you know, it's just, it's a weakness and I have to be aware of that and make sure I have people around me that are strong in that, because that's not, that's not a.
00:24:59.249 --> 00:25:00.369
That's a weakness for me.
00:25:00.430 --> 00:25:01.911
And and opportunities.
00:25:01.911 --> 00:25:05.473
My problem is is not identifying opportunities.
00:25:05.473 --> 00:25:14.426
My problem is too many opportunities of of saying, okay, you know, I have 10 things that I could do here, but I gotta, I gotta narrow down to one.
00:25:14.426 --> 00:25:19.042
And and so opportunities is is not a an issue that I have.
00:25:19.042 --> 00:25:30.570
And threats, you know, for me personally, alzheimer's runs in my family, dementia runs in my family, and that is that's a threat for me.
00:25:30.570 --> 00:25:32.354
I as a fear that I have.
00:25:32.354 --> 00:25:33.922
So what?
00:25:33.922 --> 00:25:34.864
What does that mean?
00:25:34.864 --> 00:25:37.469
Well, I'm doing things that are.
00:25:37.469 --> 00:25:44.372
I study it, I read on it, I look at you, know what's causing it and and doing things the best I can to combat that.
00:25:44.372 --> 00:25:51.984
So this will work for anything your, your organization, a program, fundraising event, your marriage, family, yourself.
00:25:51.984 --> 00:25:57.553
It's a very versatile tool that has very many, many, many different uses.
00:25:58.641 --> 00:26:10.571
And it's something that, as we've said, don't just do it and set it aside, but use it as a way to get energy and to get a direction so that you can start moving forward.
00:26:10.571 --> 00:26:12.181
That's the key in it all.
00:26:13.063 --> 00:26:23.866
A SWOT analysis is an amazing tool that you can use as a standalone tool or use as a first step in a broader strategic planning process.
00:26:23.866 --> 00:26:36.612
By going through and identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, you will have a good handle on your organization and what needs to be done to lead it into the future.
00:26:36.612 --> 00:26:48.368
But remember, the key thing is after you've done it, after you've got it down on paper, is you have to take action on the things that you have listed on the paper.
00:26:49.310 --> 00:26:50.473
Thank you for listening today.
00:26:50.473 --> 00:26:57.508
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00:26:57.508 --> 00:27:00.509
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00:27:00.509 --> 00:27:05.630
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00:27:05.630 --> 00:27:07.424
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