Discussion: Strategy development process

Discussion: Strategy development process

In this case study, you serve as the executive director for a local nonprofit organization in your city that serves the needs of homeless veterans in the community. Your organization has decided to engage in strategic planning in order to improve some of the processes associated with maintaining relationships built between volunteer workers and the organization. Over the last year, 75% of volunteers were “one-offs,” and everyone would like to see more consistent service from interested parties and people.

Before developing a strategy to update the communications and outreach processes, it is important to consider the areas below.

§ There are a large number of ex-homeless veterans who make up the vast majority of your organization’s consistent volunteer base. Although they are happy to assist their fellow veterans, there is an obvious degree of burnout occurring as more events and low, inconsistent staffing has resulted in almost all of the burden being placed on these volunteers. As such, there are slight but obvious pressures for quick, tangible changes to be made in involved areas.

§ Your organization’s advisory board shares some of the same priorities as your volunteer group; however, two of the board members are close with state representatives, and there is pending legislation that will require special training (two 3-hour seminars on separate weekends) for those looking to volunteer with certain specified populations (veterans being one of the probable populations). Because of this, the advisory board is already pushing for all volunteers, existing and prospective, to register for the seminars.

In a minimum of two pages, discuss the areas below:

§ the pros and cons of attempting to make a “big splash” to appease your organization’s stakeholders in the establishment of new policy,

§ how the preferences of the advisory board would likely impact your strategy development process, and

§ how the stakeholder interests and advisory board priorities differ and how these differences could be resolved or compromised.

You only need to use your textbook as a resource, but please be sure to properly cite any work/content that you use that is derived from other works.

You must proofread your paper. But do not strictly rely on your computer’s spell-checker and grammar-checker; failure to do so indicates a lack of effort on your part and you can expect your grade to suffer accordingly. Papers with numerous misspelled words and grammatical mistakes will be penalized. Read over your paper – in silence and then aloud – before handing it in and make corrections as necessary. Often it is advantageous to have a friend proofread your paper for obvious errors. Handwritten corrections are preferable to uncorrected mistakes.

Use a standard 10 to 12 point (10 to 12 characters per inch) typeface. Smaller or compressed type and papers with small margins or single-spacing are hard to read. It is better to let your essay run over the recommended number of pages than to try to compress it into fewer pages.

Likewise, large type, large margins, large indentations, triple-spacing, increased leading (space between lines), increased kerning (space between letters), and any other such attempts at “padding” to increase the length of a paper are unacceptable, wasteful of trees, and will not fool your professor.

The paper must be neatly formatted, double-spaced with a one-inch margin on the top, bottom, and sides of each page. When submitting hard copy, be sure to use white paper and print out using dark ink. If it is hard to read your essay, it will also be hard to follow your argument.