Strategy development for charities and voluntary organisations
Structured support for boards working out what the organisation should focus on next, built on what you already do and what pays for it.
Boards usually come to us at a point of change. A chief executive has moved on, the current strategy is running out, funding has shifted, or a funder has asked for a plan.
Strategy work often starts with a workshop and a blank flip chart. We start earlier, with the activity and the money, because a board cannot decide where to put its resources until it can see which work is committed for years, which is coming to an end, and which is genuinely a free choice.
Position review
Full strategy development
Strategy and away days
How we work
Most organisations start with a position review and add the rest if it is useful.
Listen
We start by reading. The accounts, the funding agreements and what is restricted to what, your governing document and objects, what the organisation actually does day to day, and what people have already told you through complaints and feedback. Then we ask, through a short questionnaire to trustees, staff and volunteers, and through conversations with whoever you want us to talk to, which can include young people and families, partners and funders.
Reflect
We put what we found back to you in writing before anyone makes a decision. Where activity sits outside your objects, where resources are spread thinnest, what makes you different from others doing similar work, and what the funding position will allow.
Structure
The board session where the choices get made, facilitated under Thinking Differently® and drawing on LEGO® Serious Play® where it helps. You leave with a small number of goals the board has agreed and a clear sense of what the organisation is going to stop doing.
Respond
The written strategy. The goals, what sits under each one, what ends and when, and how the board will know in a year whether any of it is working.
The trustee and staff questionnaire
Every process includes a short questionnaire to trustees, staff and volunteers. It takes ten to fifteen minutes, it is anonymous, and it asks what people think the organisation is for, what it should stop doing, where they think the money comes from, how decisions get made, and what happens when somebody says something has gone wrong.
There is an option to say you do not know, because it matters where the gaps in understanding are.
Results come back broken down by group, and the useful finding is usually that trustees and staff answer the same question differently. It can be run again at the end of the strategy period to see what has changed.
Who leads the work
James Anderson leads all of it. He brings twenty-five years in children's services, ending thirteen years at Newcastle City Council as policy adviser to the executive director of children's services, and he is currently a trustee of two national children's charities.
Separately from Resolution Ready, James investigates statutory complaints, which means much of his working life is spent reading what organisations did when somebody told them something was wrong. That is why the questionnaire asks about it. He has also chaired a board through a merger into a larger charity to keep its services running, so he knows what it costs a board to decide to stop doing something.
All support is scoped and costed in advance, and the first conversation is always free.