Since 1989, ORS Impact works alongside renowned social impact leaders, supporting their work to accomplish their missions.
In the world of social impact strategy, understanding where you are now is a key step in planning where to go next. Any given organization can find itself at a crossroads in evolving its social impact strategy. For instance, there may be times when an organization realizes that long-held strategies are no longer appropriate, culturally responsive, or equitable. Other times, strategies made behind closed doors may need to be refreshed with a more inclusive, participatory approach to incorporate the voices of those at the heart of the strategy. And sometimes, the data simply suggests that a strategy isn’t cutting it anymore—that it’s time for a conversation about pivoting.
Navigating these pivots can take many forms. Some organizations take an exploratory approach, which requires time and resources to test strategies through trial and error. Others anchor their potential strategies to an individual program or idea, thinking in terms of activities and outputs as opposed to actual outcomes, even if those activities represent only a fraction of the impact they could have. These approaches and others like them often fall short, as they don’t leverage important inputs in the strategy development process—inputs like having a clear vision for impact, including diverse perspectives and voices, and building a foundational knowledge of the current state of affairs. Without these inputs, leaders are thrown into the deep end of the complex, ever-expanding waters of social impact work as they discern where to take their organization next.
For nearly 35 years, ORS Impact has helped leaders navigate these complex waters across a variety of large foundations, corporate philanthropies, and nonprofits, meeting them where they are in their strategy development process. One of the tools we frequently use in this space is a current state assessment (CSA), which is a process to help leaders design a social impact strategy that is grounded in a shared understanding of the current state of the root issues the organization is addressing, its focal programs and interventions, the organization itself, and the broader landscape of the field.
More than that though, we believe that this CSA process cannot be a neutral effort but rather must center an equitable and inclusive approach to have its intended impact. For that reason, we approach the CSA process with an intentional lens for equity and inclusion, grounded in the belief that a social impact strategy will be more impactful to the extent that it includes the voices of those it serves and explicitly seeks to dismantle barriers to access and opportunity across systems. Through our past work with social impact organizations, we’ve refined a set of guiding practices and steps for this process, and we want to share our insights here. Following are four steps for how you can leverage an equitable and inclusive CSA to accelerate your organization into its future social impact strategy.
1. Define the strategic waters you want to explore. If you’re navigating new waters, a helpful first step can be to identify where you want to explore—in other words, defining the scope of your CSA. For instance, maybe you want to explore new ways to support nonprofit capacity, but you want to focus specifically on technology capacity. Or perhaps you want to explore how to advance policies that promote affordable housing, but you want to focus your efforts specifically in rural communities. These are key parameters and boundaries that shape not only where you look for information in your CSA but also what you look for altogether. Moreover, these decisions often present opportunities to consider how your organization can more intentionally center equity within those parameters. For instance, how could an organization advance equity in supporting nonprofit technology capacity? What would it look like to center equity in promoting affordable housing in rural communities? The more you can define your CSA in areas that are inspirational and aligned with your goals, feasible with your organization’s capabilities, and supportive of a commitment to equity, the more useful the process will be for developing your strategy.
2. Ensure inclusive, participatory, and triangulated data. Once you have a clearer sense of the scope and definition of your CSA, the next step is to collect and analyze the core data sources that will allow you to understand your current state. At ORS Impact, we believe in the value of an inclusive data approach, not only because it elevates the perspectives and voices of those at the heart of the strategy, but further because it’s one of many steps that can be taken to dismantle barriers to power and ensure equitable engagement of an organization’s clients. In a CSA process, the voices of those clients should be represented. We typically develop a multipronged approach, which includes gathering data from the organization’s staff and leaders, its current clients, people with lived experience in its focus areas, field influencers or leaders, and other relevant partners who can speak to the waters you want to navigate. We also triangulate these primary data sources with a review of secondary data from academic research, publicly available data across the field, and internal data from the organization (e.g., impact data, budgetary data, operational/administrative data). Aiming for a comprehensive view of triangulated data across a diverse array of represented voices will only help your strategy become more impactful for the people it intends to serve.
3. Use an organizing framework to make sense of the data. If you take the second step to heart, you’ll likely find yourself swimming in mounds upon mounds of data. Compared to its alternative, this is a good challenge to have. Having worked with hundreds of social impact organizations to make sense of complex, messy data, we see tremendous value in leveraging a framework to structure your CSA observations. One historically common strategy framework to categorize insights is a SWOT (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats) analysis, but it is far from the only way to organize your learnings. Other situations may call for a simpler framework such as defining internal and external observations, grouping learnings in terms of gaps and solutions, or organizing themes by data sources. Still, other situations may warrant using a framework from the field or an existing theory of change to organize learnings. As you consider what framework makes the most sense for you, it is important to keep in mind whether or not the framework supports your organization’s ability to center equity in the analysis process. For instance, does the framework support new and different ways of understanding information? Does it help you to surface insights related to power and inclusion? Guiding frameworks like these can help you take an equity-centered approach while translating large quantities of complex, diverse information into more consumable and accessible insights.
4. Move from assessment to visioning. Far too often, data and insights from a CSA are looked at once and then left to sit on a virtual shelf. Following the preceding three steps should help to prevent this by creating an actionable, useful, and equity-centered assessment. Nonetheless, more may be needed to ensure that your CSA insights actually end up in the conversations about developing, articulating, and planning for your strategy. To do this, we typically work with our clients to bring together an inclusive set of leaders and individuals with shared decision-making power in a multi-workshop format to dive into the CSA observations, wrestle with their implications, and give genuine time and space to discerning new ideas that come from the process. Dedicating space for multiple sessions to envision the future strategy is essential for ensuring that the strategy you create reflects both your aspirations for the future and an informed foundational knowledge of the current state of affairs. These workshops also serve as a great opportunity to begin to move through the process of strategy development into strategic planning, bringing your new vision to life with detailed steps for implementation and future measurement, evaluation, and learning practices.
This CSA process is not a cure-all for all your strategy woes, but it does have many benefits that permeate the strategy development space. In addition to equipping leaders with valuable insights for strategic decision-making, a CSA also helps organizations identify gaps in current strategies and prioritize where to dedicate resources to maximize impact going forward; it centers the voices of those served at the heart of a strategy; it builds an organization’s muscles for adaptability, change, and responsive work; it helps to uncover opportunities for partnerships or synergies with others doing similar work; and it can help an organization establish a baseline against which the impact of strategy pivots can be measured. We hope you find these guiding steps helpful in your work, and we invite you to explore our strategy development page for more helpful content to transform your social impact strategy!