SWOT analysis - strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats.

Doing a SWOT analysis is fun! Let your imagination run free when you're thinking of possible opportunities - don't discount any ideas, however wacky they might be. Start by looking inward to assess your organisation's strengths and weaknesses. These questions will help:

• What do you expect your organisation to be doing?
• Are you still fulfilling your original aims?
• How well does your organisation's structure serve its purposes? Trace the decision-making through the staff and committees.
• Is everyone - trustees, managers, staff and volunteers - clear about their roles and responsibilities?
• Do you agree about your objectives?
• Does everyone know what they are?

Look at your accounting, personnel, fundraising, investment management, operations, public relations, and at your facilities and buildings. What are your strengths? Where are your weaknesses? Be honest! You might want to use the 'Strengths and weaknesses' and
'Opportunities and threats' charts to help you in this task.

Other external factors will affect your organisation including these STEPs:

Social trends
Such as the birth rate or numbers of older people in the population.

Technology
What implications do new technologies have for your organisation and your area of work?

Economic trends
Consider both the national and local contexts which can affect your organisation. For example, interest rate changes may affect your organisation's investment income.

Political and legal matters
Politics, both local and national, influence the environment in which charities and voluntary organisations of all sizes operate

People's views
You'll need to know what the users of your products and services think of your organisation.

Agreement with results so far?

It's good to pause here to confirm that you all agree about the results of this preliminary planning exercise. If you are not wholly in accord, have you at least agreed that you can live with your differences in going forward?

This point in the planning process can be a watershed in an organisation's life and an appropriate time for individuals to reconsider their involvement.

Opportunities

What opportunities exist for new services, or new income, or new partnerships? Assess each of your current activities for opportunities to develop. Do they draw on your strengths? Will an organisational weakness make any impossible? Should you cure the weakness in order to grasp the opportunity? Would any compromise undermine the values of the organisation? If so, what do you want to do about that? (see Chart 4: Assessing current workload). Concentrate on opportunities which fit best with your objectives and your culture (see Chart 5: Assessing future workload).

Threats and barriers

Look for the barriers or threats that make your work difficult, or impossible. And for those that might emerge if you were to take up some of the opportunities you have identified.

Finally, make a list of all the opportunities you rejected and in each case note why. This will be useful to explain the group's thinking to people who suggest ideas which you have already rejected and for future planning exercises.

At the end of the analysis you should know which activities you can develop or introduce against the lowest barriers, and which are impractical for one reason or another. You can now set your objectives (see Chart 6: Objectives).

Be aware that there can be organisational tendencies to overstate the opportunities and strengths, or to focus too much on weaknesses and see no opportunities. Try and keep a balance. An external facilitator may be useful.

Find out more about other strategic planning issues and examples in the In more depth section.