How to do a SWOT Analysis to Grow a Nonprofit or Social Enterprise

When you are starting or growing a non-profit  or social enterprise and you're planning your strategy for the years to come how do you know  what to do what actions to take in order to be successful? Using a SWOT analysis - that's s-w-o-t  - can be a great way to brainstorm and strategize for the next year or three. So that's what I'm  going to talk about in this video. How do you do a SWOT analysis to plan out your strategy for  success for your non-profit or social enterprise? Hi! I'm Amber Me

lanie Smith. Welcome to my channel  or welcome back if this is not your first time! I'm a non-profit founder and executive director  and I make these videos here on YouTube to help people who are out there trying to make an impact  whether that's through starting a non-profit or fundraising for the causes that they care about  or doing service or leading in other ways. I hope that you find this video educational and helpful,  and don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to my channel for mor

e content like this. I  also have a website, FounderToFullTime.com for folks who are looking to start a non-profit need a  little guidance on how to get that up and running, I have some online trainings there on that and  also on some fundraising topics. Be sure to check those out. All right so let's get into our topic.  A SWOT analysis that's s-w-o-t helps you think through your organization's strategy by helping  you assess its strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats swat so why do one

well because it's  really hard to just sort of intuitively know what exactly to do next for your organization help it  grow and expand and be successful doing this SWOT analysis especially if you have some great team  members who are joining and lending their brains to the process also can help you think through  where your organization is currently excelling what it needs to work on and most importantly  what its priorities should be for the near future in order to achieve its ultimate goals so

let's  talk about how to do a swot analysis step by step the first thing you need to do is prepare to have  your swot analysis meeting here's what you need to gather to prepare the first is obviously your  people you need to gather your key leaders for the organization this could be your fellow  founders board members key volunteers staff key staff leadership staff anyone who is going  to know the history of the organization its goals and how it is progressing towards its goals in  the past yea

r or so it's also really helpful to have people with a variety of expertise  because you want to be able to study the issues that your organization may be facing from  a variety of angles and come up with a lot of creative solutions and of course that creativity  is going to require a lot of cross-sector and cross-industry types of thinking the second thing  you want to gather to prepare before your swot analysis is your data or your metrics so these  are basically metrics about how your organiz

ation has been performing towards its goals so far any  survey results from the people that you're serving your stakeholders any data about the number of  people you're helping and how you're helping them the effectiveness of the ways that you're  helping them you want to gather all of this in one place and make sure that your people who are  participating in this process have access to it beforehand so they have time to take a look at  it next you're going to need to set a meeting time a swot a

nalysis can take a couple of hours  it could take a couple of days it really depends how in depth you and your team want to get into it  and of course during your meeting time creating a schedule that will allow you to take a couple  of breaks here and there to give your brains some rest you'll need a meeting space you want to  have an adequate space for all of the people that you are gathering to join in of course you can  do it virtually though i personally prefer in person i personally find t

hat it's a lot easier to  collaborate when you can all look at like the same whiteboard or screen together through this  process but you can certainly try it virtually and and try this in um you know different  breakout rooms and stuff as needed and then of course your writing and collaboration  tools uh i mentioned a whiteboard a moment ago so a place where you can record information  where the whole group can see it and ideally also help and collaborate in recording the  information writing in

formation on that board or pieces of paper as well all right so step number  two is to create your swot table um this is at the point where you're already got your your meeting  is scheduled you're gathering all your people now you're just kind of setting the groundwork to have  this discussion around your swot your strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats and  so a swat table is this grid that basically has a quadrant for each of those things your  strengths your weaknesses your opportuni

ties and your threats if you're meeting in person you  could draw this grid on a whiteboard you could have each of them separated onto a different giant  piece of paper or take up the whole whiteboard with just one of them at a time it's really  up to you so now you're ready for your swot analysis gathering to begin and to engage your  participants that you've gathered to brainstorm with you for each of those four things your  strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats what your participants

are basically gonna do is  take some designated amount of time to just let all of their thoughts out on paper or on your  screen or on your whiteboard whatever mechanism you're using you're just going to ask them to  write everything that comes to mind under that category so under strengths we're going to talk  about what that includes next so strengths these are things that are internal to your organization  basically what are some of the things that your organization is doing really well righ

t now what  is it excelling at these are going to be important later because they are basically your advantages  you're going to be able to use these strengths to tackle the threats that we'll talk about later  or capitalize on those opportunities so what are some examples of strengths to kind of help  you think through this well it could be that you have a very large audience on your social  media pages it could be that you have some really well-trained very skilled knowledgeable  staff or lead

ership that's definitely a strength it could be a very clear mission that is very  understandable and compelling to a lot of people it could be that you have a personal connection  to local leaders or even a celebrity who can give your cause a little extra credibility it could be  that you have a very effective proven program with really strong data to back up its success all of  these could be strengths so after your team has brainstormed and written down everything that  they can think of unde

r the strengths category you're going to then move to the w and that is  weaknesses weaknesses similar to strengths are also things that are internal to your organization  these are the things that your organization is not excelling with things that they're struggling  with these are shortcomings that may impact your ability to be successful and everyone's got  them so don't worry but this is important because knowing what your weaknesses are and being honest  about them and discussing them will

help you see what obstacles you might need to overcome in  order to be more effective at achieving your goals some examples of typical non-profits or  organization weaknesses might include a very small budget it might include a disengaged board of  directors it might be that your specific cause is very misunderstood or not really well known about  in the public could be a lack of staff or enough volunteers it could be any number of these things  that are basically obstacles to achieving your ul

timate goals once your participants have  covered those two internal things the strengths and those weaknesses then we can move on to the  opportunities and the threats all right let's get into opportunities that's the oh opportunities  are external these are things that are happening in the current moment in the outside world in your  community that you serve it could be in your state it could be in your country it could be in the  world but basically these are things that are going to impact y

our organization somewhat  somehow or they could and they're things that you could take advantage of in order to further  your goals so thinking through a couple examples of opportunities let's say there's a new increased  interest from the media or the general public in the particular issue that your organization is  tackling that's an opportunity it could be that there's going to be a local vote in your city or  county on some funding opportunities that would be applicable to your particular c

ause it could  be that there are new emerging opportunities for partnerships with organizations where partnerships  weren't possible before this is where having a really diverse group of people can come into  play because people from different industries and sectors they're going to be thinking about what  opportunities might exist for your organization in different ways and you really want to get a sense  of all of them then we move on to threats the t in swat similar to opportunities threats a

re external  things happening in your local community the state the nation the world it could be any number of  things but these are things that could logically impact your organization or its work negatively  and the goal of studying your threats is to understand how you might mitigate some of those  threats before they even happen or before they get really bad so that you can be more resilient  and survive them a couple of examples changes to laws that might make your organization and its  spe

cific mission harder to do its day-to-day work it could be an economic recession that decreases  donations from individual donors that you perhaps count on quite a bit another example might be  and this is very realistic right now increasing prices for materials that your organization  commonly relies on let's say food or clothing or special equipment on to the step that comes after  the swat it's time now that your team has recorded all of these things in each of these  four categories to just

have a discussion you want to read through all of the items you  want to ask any clarifying questions that need to be asked about any of the items that people wrote  down and you want to start as a group prioritizing which of the things under each category are  probably the most urgent or important when i say important what i mean is what are the  factors or things that are most likely to contribute to the success or failure of achieving  your organization's mission within the next year or a cou

ple of years so which of the strengths  that you listed are the biggest which weaknesses are the biggest which opportunities are the  most promising for your organization which threats are the most uh carry the biggest risk  for your organization you want to as a group be thinking about the following questions how can we  use our strengths to take advantage of these key opportunities and on the converse how can we  use our strengths to mitigate the risk of the biggest threats that we identified

and then on  the weaknesses side which weaknesses might play the biggest role in preventing our success and  what might we be able to do right now to decrease or mitigate those weaknesses once you've gone  through all of this discussion and prioritized these key things with your participants you should  have a handful of maybe two or three of the top actions that your organization is going to want to  focus on for the next year at that point you can plot out what tasks you need to complete in or

der  to achieve those actions and the goals associated with them it also helps you with budgeting for  the next year because now that you know what actions you're going to focus on you might be  able to think about what equipment or services or support or technology you're going to need  in order to successfully achieve those actions I'd love to hear from you what did you think  of this exercise can you see it playing a role in some of your planning and strategy for your  organization be sure to

share in the comments below i'd love to see what you thought and  don't forget to check out my website founder to fulltime.com that i mentioned earlier with some  trainings on starting a non-profit developing a sustainable fundraising plan etc. I hope that you  find those helpful to you i also have a newsletter that you can subscribe to i'll leave the link in  the description where i send out tips and funding opportunities and other articles that i'm reading  that might be helpful to you as cha

nge makers and leaders in your community final thought i have  a group on Facebook called change the world or bust where we have people from all over the world  literally having some great conversations about the impact they're working towards so i hope  you can join us there. Once again I'm Amber Melanie Smith and I hope that you found this  video helpful don't forget to give it a like and subscribe to my channel for more content  like this and I'll see you next time - bye! you