Chapter 8

Actions Speak Louder Than Words

At some point the rubber needs to hit the road. You are at the point of action when you are ready to go beyond the planning and start doing things. These things include registering the business, getting business cards, and setting up a website. This is when we move from what we should do, to what we are doing.

Action and execution is the next step. For the sustainability of your organization, the ability to implement the action plan is the deciding factor of success.

Often people find this transition difficult to make. Why? There are some critical skill sets that people have who more easily go from planning to execution:

• Task oriented: Most people are either naturally more strategic thinkers or linear thinkers. Often, to come up with a great idea and to be able to come up with the strategic plan behind the idea, requires nonlinear thinking and more strategic thinkers. However, when focused on action, the requirement changes and favors the linear thinker who can move through the tasks quickly without being distracted. So it requires a change in thinking to get the implementation started!

• Self-motivated: Getting started on the actions takes some self-motivation. Staying on task and keeping oneself motivated is more difficult and more important. Having tactics to do this or naturally being self-motivated helps in moving the action plan forward.

• Risk taking: People are naturally risk averse. Even perceived risk takers are actively seeking to reduce their risk. Getting the action plan started is an emotional time. All of the assumptions and the core ideals of the plan will be put to the test and often there will be a need to pivot, if not make a U-turn. Putting an idea out there is a hard thing to do and even veterans will admit that it doesn’t get any easier.

It is barely possible to get the work done that needs to be done, and still get your sleep. That requires superior organizational skills. Which leads us to the fourth skill set:

• Organization: Being organized can help with the other important skill sets. By having a plan in place you can help become task oriented, you keep motivated especially as you are tracking your process, and it appears less risky when you can track your process and record when you need to pivot. It also takes discipline to schedule time for tasks to be done that are prioritized.

The organization behind the action is what this chapter is all about: How to create your action plan and be organized enough to actually do it.

1. Introduction to Action Plans

Action plans are the methodology that ties your organizational strategy to the tactics that need to be accomplished to reach these strategic goals. They set you up for tracking purposes and they provide a vision for where you are headed.

It is the plan that pushes down the strategy to design the tactics. Then it is the results of the tactics that push back feedback of what the future strategy should be.

2. The Strategic Plan

Strategic planning is figuring out the logical way to achieve your goals. The strategy is always tied to how your organization is different than the others in a way that matters to its stakeholders.

In for-profit, a common way to be different is to have a higher quality product than the competition, or at a lower price. For example, if a hotel is four stars and has a competitive price, that is its strategy against the competition for a specific type of customer. There could be other hotels in the area that are five stars and higher pricing, whereas there could be three-star hotels at lower prices. But there is a type of customer that will prefer what the four star hotel is offering at the price. This blend of quality and price allows them to maximize their profit.

In nonprofit or social enterprise, there are more variables that need to be factored in. It isn’t always about selling products and services. They don’t just have one customer. And the social impact is more important than profit alone.

2.1 The vision

The vision is a statement that is clear about where your organization is headed. The best visions do the following:

• Give clear direction: The vision should be clear about the direction that the organization is going. This is where you want to be in the next five to ten years. It is the guiding light of the organization. Having a metric could be helpful to remove any vagueness.

• Offerinspiration: A vision should be motivating for the volunteers, employees, and the stakeholders. Some visions stretch the organization so much that it might never be reached, but it is continuously inspiring.

• Are helpful when making decisions: A vision should be helpful in making strategic decisions. Every time there is a fork in the road, it is helpful to have the vision that determines which path to take.

To get started in creating your vision you need to think about who you are helping and in what you wish to help them.

2.1a Who are you impacting?

As opposed to for-profit visions which are very company focused, the nonprofit or social enterprise vision is focused on the clients and stakeholders that are impacted by the organization.

The scope of who is being considered needs to be part of the vision. The scope could be very small or exceptionally broad. The common targets of people being impacted include:

• Clients: The primary client is the main marginalized community or individual in need helped through the nonprofit or social enterprise.

• Clients and volunteers: The scope expands by being concerned with both the end client as well as the volunteers that are part of the solution. This is the understanding that everyone involved benefits and needs support from each other.

• Clients, volunteers, employees, donors, and funders: The organization may wish to positively impact everyone it touches and is involved in the organization. This scope recognizes that every action has a reaction, and everyone needs to be considered.

• Community: The community focus is when the organization has expanded the scope and recognized a larger focus on creating systematic change (or change that lasts) in society. This could be local, regional/county, state/province, national, or global.

2.1b How much are you helping them?

Once an organization has the scope of the target that it is focused on, it has to decide how it will help them. Some organizations are focused on simply helping the end clients with their immediate needs, whereas others wish to make a deeper impact. The continuum of social justice is as follows:

Figure 1: Who Are You Impacting?

Figure 2: Continuum of Social Justice

• Immediate needs: What is the immediate concern? This is usually when referring to the clients and the most obvious challenge that they face. Example: For people in poverty, the most immediate need might be access to food.

• Secondary needs: There often isn’t a single thing that the clients need. There is usually a plethora of things that would collectively make a bigger impact. Example: For people in poverty the secondary needs might include a place to sleep, haircuts, dental health, and other basic services that would improve their lives.

• Total support: This is the understanding that meeting immediate and secondary needs won’t change the person’s life in the long term. What type of programming could make a long-term impact? Often the old saying used is that you’d rather teach people how to fish than provide them with the fish to eat. If you give them a fish to eat, then you have only helped them in the short term. By teaching them how to fish, you have helped them for the rest of their lives. And they might even teach others how to fish! Example: For people in poverty, the understanding to alleviate poverty is to help with education and job skills training in order to help the individual get out of poverty.

• Holistic benefits: The end client is not the only person who can benefit. Social justice is the understanding that everyone has needs and everyone has something to give. Creating a program that provides for everyone to be positively impacted rather than there to be only a give/take relationship. Example: For people in poverty, at the soup kitchen the volunteers should also sit down and eat with the people that they have served. They would hear the stories and treat each other as equals.

• Systemic change: The final part of the continuum is focused on making a long-term benefit to the existing clients but for future people in need as well. It is to create a program and advocacy work that makes it so that the need no longer exists. Example: For people in poverty, the systemic change might be to provide more access to skills and job training as well as supporting economic development in the communities or regions where poverty is more prevalent. This type of programming would create the foundations to eradicate poverty from the area.

Often organizations begin by recognizing the immediate needs, but as they mature as organizations they recognize and are able to support more of the continuum.

2.1c Creating the vision

Now the vision has to come together. It needs to be phrased in a way that gives clear direction, is inspiring, and is helpful in decision making. It needs to be clear on the scope of who will be impacted and it needs to be clear on how it will help them.

Examples:

• No family will go hungry.

• Everyone who wants a job is given the chance.

• We will cure cancer in our lifetime.

• Everyone’s childhood dream can come true.

All of the above can include a measurable target and initial location(s).

2.2 The mission

How do you live out the vision each day? The mission guides the steps of the employees and the volunteers throughout their day-to-day tasks. It is also a litmus test of whether the right tasks each day are being done.

The mission is more specific in how the vision will be accomplished and describes the purpose of the organization. This should be tied to the vision as something that is more tangible. Here are some examples in Table 2.

Table 2: Vision to Mission

2.3 The future of strategy

Strategic planning is a concept whereby the leaders of an organization meet on a prescribed schedule to do the strategic planning collective. There might be a facilitator and there is a defined amount of time that is dedicated to this process.

Recently there has been a change in how this is done as strategic planning and its processes are too linear. Instead, strategic thinking has emerged with the understanding that defined timelines only once or twice a year limit the amount of nonlinear thinking that is required for the development of a great strategy.

Strategic thinking is the understanding that things continuously evolve and adapt to the changing environment, and a fluid strategy is more responsive. If there are various understandings of scope and ways to support the target clients, then this could change outside of the prescribed times and the organization could adapt on the fly.

For example, strategic thinking would allow a food bank to be more flexible. If a hairstylist offered to come by once a month, a strategic-thinking food bank would be adaptive enough to accept the kind offer. Then it would potentially experiment further with other services. In this way, the food bank has expanded its understanding of the impact it can make without needing a strategic planning session.

3. The Action Plan

With the strategy in place, the social organization now has to develop a plan to make this happen. These are the tasks that have to happen to allow the organization to get closer to achieving its vision.

To move forward, it is important to understand where you are today. You can’t figure out where to go if you don’t know where you are now. You can do this by figuring out what your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are. (See Sample 14.)

Sample 14: Soup Kitchen SWOT

• What are the strengths of your organization including the benefits?

• How many of your target group are you already supporting?

• How much are you impacting them?

• What are the weaknesses of your organization now?

• What are the external opportunities that your organization could leverage?

• What are the external threats that your organization needs to mitigate?

This should all be listed for help in planning your next steps.

3.1 Implementation plan

Based on how your organization is situated today, the next priority is to come up with the tactics that will get you where you want to be.

Make a list of action items. For each part of the understanding of where you are today, you need to brainstorm strategically about how to optimize or minimize these:

• Are there ways to improve the strengths or opportunities that you already have?

• Are there ways to minimize or reduce the weaknesses or threats?

• Are there ways that the strengths could synergize with the external opportunities and be to your advantage?

• Are there ways that the strengths or opportunities could minimize or eliminate the current weaknesses or threats?

• Is there any way to leverage the strengths and opportunities to help move towards the vision?

Example: Soup Kitchen

• Could the soup kitchen leverage its good recognition in the city to do a volunteer drive?

• Could the good recognition help with a fundraising initiative to offset the funding lost by the foundation?

• Could relationships in the community allow it to expand beyond serving food?

• Could the chef expand the programming beyond food?

• Could some of the 100 people served help as employees/volunteers?

Each of these actions would then be prioritized based on matching the mission and in moving towards the vision. This prioritized order can then be turned into a schedule of actions.

4. Measuring Results

Being able to measure the social impact of a social organization’s work is critical to being able to see if it is doing its work successfully. In the for-profit world, it is easy to measure as everything is based on financials, which are quantifiable and relatively objective.

In the nonprofit and social enterprise space, where financials are secondary to social impact when it comes to measuring success, being able to measure the social impact takes priority. Not only is it crucial to being able to determine if something it working, but it is also important to help identify how to improve. The ability to measure an organization’s social impact also allows it to communicate to its staff, volunteers, donors, and other stakeholders in a quantifiable way.

When should a social organization start thinking about measurement? From the beginning. Typically an organization just starts to try to make an impact, and measurement is secondary. But from the very beginning an organization needs to figure out how to qualify and quantify its results. See the download kit for a logframe (logical framework), which is a way to look at a project’s goal, anticipated work, and eventual results.

The main things to measure are:

• Inputs: What is put into the organization to make the social impact?

• Outputs: What are the quantifiable ways that the organization is making a difference?

• Outcomes: What are the qualifiable ways that the organization is making a difference (i.e., what impacts it is having)?

• Impacts: What are the long-term impacts that have been made?

Note: Social Return on Investment (SROI) is a common way for a project or organization to measure its impact. However, as social impact measurement becomes more advanced, there is an understanding that SROI is relatively subjective and there is no standard format for it. Each organization might measure differently what is considered an investment, and each organization might measure the social return differently. This inconsistency is making SROI less standard.

4.1 Inputs

Inputs are all of the investments that the social organization is putting in to get results. Measuring the inputs is important, as you need to be able to understand how much has been spent or invested into the outcomes.

This can include:

• Financial inputs: Was equipment purchased or what are all of the start-up costs? All of the financial inputs of the organization into the project or program needs to be included.

• Volunteer inputs: Time is money. This also counts for volunteers. If they weren’t spending their time on one project, program, or organization, this time could be spent somewhere else. There is value here, and that needs to be added up.

• Employee inputs: How much time employees including the management have spent on the program or project. This can be quantified based on the hourly wages of the employees or the entire salary.

• Partnership inputs: For partners of the social organization to work and invest their resources into a project or program, they are not able to spend their resources elsewhere.

All of these inputs can be quantified and added up to understand the total investment of the organization or a specific project or program.

4.2 Outputs

Outputs are the quantifiable results that the program or project has created. Often it is difficult to ensure that what is being measured is directly caused by the project itself, and there is an entire science behind this measurement. Outputs are helpful as they are a specific number and something that can be compared and understood. However, it is not always the whole story.

Some common types of outputs to measure include:

• The number of clients supported by the programs.

• The specific result that the clients have such as a new job, ability to graduate high school, or other future outputs.

4.3 Outcomes

Outcomes are like outputs, but they are qualitative. These are the stories and other subjective change that have occurred due the program or project. Some types of outcomes include:

• The most unexpected thing that occurred due to the program.

• The stories of the clients who were impacted.

• The stories of the volunteers, staff, or other stakeholders who were impacted through the product or program.

• Secondary impacts that were not quantified (as they were unexpected).

• Predicted cause and effect changes that happened that are not directly attributable to the program or project.

Increasingly the outcomes of the projects or programs are considered equally important as to the outputs that are measured, sometimes even more so. Gathering this information can be done through surveys with clients, family, volunteers, and even staff. These results are usually needed to support grant reporting and to government and corporations who provide support.

4.4 Impact

The final impact is the long-term impact that has occurred. This is often a systemic change or a more widely important impact. Some examples of this:

• More economic development in a region based on employment rates, literacy rates, average GDP, or another metric of national importance.

• The way that the entire industry works in some important way such as the adoption of technology or collaboration.

• The growth or success of a subsector as a whole due in part of the project or initiative.

• The change in attitude about an issue.

• Advocacy and policy change on a specific issue.

These are long-term impacts that have dramatically changed a subsector.

5. Bringing It Together

Putting all of these pieces into one place helps to communicate to everyone the intentions of the social organization. The employees and volunteers can use this information to help guide their actions, but it also helps to motivate them and allows these engaged individuals to talk positively about the plans for the organization.

The funders and donors can gain confidence when they see the thought process of the organization and the plan for making an even bigger difference. A lot of these best practices come from thinking about social justice, volunteer retention, the various stakeholders and communications, and it all comes together to lend more credibility to why these funders and donors should continue to contribute to the cause.

Depending on what needs to be communicated and how this needs to be communicated, there are a few different templates that could be used:

• A one-page business plan: A one-page business plan is brief, however, it has the same categories as a longer business plan would have, and is summarized for the same reasons as a lean canvas (more on that below). Often it is more difficult for someone to write less than more. This is perfect for someone who needs to write a business plan but the audience is either a small team or less formal communication is needed. (See sample on the download kit for a one-page business plan).

• Lean canvas: The lean canvas is a single page of information that summarizes the strategy and action plans of the organization. This is lean as it doesn’t have unnecessary information and is easy for the reader to review. It is also called a canvas because it is something that is visual for people to be able to put up on a wall and add to. This is often used during the ideation and start-up stage of a business to test whether the idea is a good one. It saves time and allows for flexibility in the early stages while being an effective communication tool. (See sample on the download kit).

• Detailed business plan: A business plan includes all of the details regarding the strategy and tactics of the organization. This is often written in order to get financing from a bank or from other investors that want to see more detailed information. The business plan would be accompanied with detailed financial projections. This is often necessary for a business loan or for a larger audience.

In any social enterprise or nonprofit, the most important thing is going to be passion and the ability to implement. With any idea it is always 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.