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Introducing a Tool for SWOT Analysis

If you want to start a social change effort, launch a nonprofit, or plan for your organization's future direction, you are doing some strategic planning. Whether you call it that or have formal planning sessions is beside the point. You can use an informal process or a formal one. The more important the plan, the important it is to follow a system and take your time. With those thoughts in mind, this post is an introduction to SWOT analysis for nonprofits. I also want to introduce a new tool that can make SWOT analysis more helpful to a nonprofit team or a group of activists.

SWOT for Nonprofits:

Strategic planning should be standard for all nonprofit organizations. SWOT analysis is a method of looking at an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Many business students, and some managers and executives, undoubtedly know how to do a SWOT analysis for their business. In case that lesson came a long time ago, here is a summary of SWOT.

  • Strengths - What advantages does your organization have? Think about money, credit, intellectual property, connections, and skills. The high-value skills and experiences of your employees also count. 
  • Weaknesses - Consider the same things, but with the goal of finding out where you come up short as an organization. Does your credit rating suck? Are you lacking anyone with fundraising experience? Those are significant weaknesses! 
  • Opportunities - What can you realistically do to secure more resources, hire new people, recruit volunteers, form a strategic partnership, get a big in-kind contribution, and so on. 
  • Threats - What factors inside or outside the organization might undermine your ability to carry out your mission or even keep the doors open and the lights on? Make a list. 

Gather up your team around a whiteboard or chalkboard and make a table with four columns labeled "Strengths", "Weaknesses", "Opportunities", and "Threats." Spend as much time as you need making notes in each column.

Identifying your strengths and weaknesses as a nonprofit or as an informal group of activists ought to be fairly easy. Opportunities and threats can be easy to see, but not always. That's one reason I wanted to invent a better way of thinking through those critical parts of SWOT analysis.

Unpacking the O and the T:

Let's just call this an OT Matrix, "O" for Opportunities and "T" for Threats. Here, in brief, is how you create an OT Matrix. Do create one for real instead of just thinking about some of the questions. I'm a firm believer that a degree of formality can discipline the mind and lead to more or better insights.

Sociologists invented a method to describe the social environment of any organization. That method uses seven dimensions and three characteristics. Here are the dimensions:
  1. Ecological - Natural environment, natural resources
  2. Cultural - Norms, beliefs, values, cultural artifacts
  3. Legal - Civil and criminal law
  4. Political - Policy, rules, political views and public opinion
  5. Demographic - Race, age, gender, changes in these and other variables
  6. Technological - Tools, processes and systems that individuals and groups use to do their work
  7. Economic - credit, markets, trends in giving or spending
All nonprofit leaders should consider those seven dimensions when they do strategic planning. Each dimension has three characteristics:
  • Capacity - The available resources. People, money, credit, raw materials, and intellectual property are resources.
  • Complexity - The number of elements, such as competitors, stakeholder organizations, and potential strategic partners.
  • Dynamism - The rate of change in one or more elements of the environment. Rapid in-migration translates to high demographic dynamism. 
This academic effort at characterizing the environments of organizations does have a practical use in strategic planning. You can use each dimension and characteristic to generate a set of strategic planning questions, which form a unique OT Matrix for your organization. 

Using the OT Matrix:

The 'matrix' part of the name comes from the way you might organize your questions. You could create a table with seven rows, one for each dimension, and one column for each of those three dimensions. Then you would ask questions that apply to your organization and write them in the correct box. 

If you think about the social environment your organization operates in, some of the resulting 21 cells will raise obvious questions to answer. You don't even really need the table for this. Just skim those lists of dimensions and characteristics again. 

If you'd like some advice on creating an OT matrix for your own organization or activist group, don't hesitate to get in touch.





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