Informing future strategy and planning

Non-profit organisations need well thought out strategies to help them achieve the maximum benefit in their field of work without duplicating the efforts of others. To create these strategies, organisations need information and insights from a broad range of sources: their clients or beneficiaries, their employees and supporters, experts in the field, private and public sector stakeholders, as well as information about market and societal trends.

With our broad spectrum of research techniques, nfpSynergy can help find the information your organisation needs to set its future course and create effective strategies.

Case study: British Council partnerships and income generation project

The British Council works in over 100 countries around the world and builds relations with other countries through cultural dialogue. The Council has a new strategic plan, one part of which aims to substantially increase the income from commercial and business partnerships. nfpSynergy were commissioned to review its current approach to partnerships and to find out how the income from partnerships could be increased. nfpSynergy carried out three strands of work: desk research on partnerships, interviews with over 30 British Council staff across the globe from Poland to Hong Kong, and interviews with a dozen organisations who were either partners of the Council or who raised substantial funds from partnerships such as UNICEF and WWF-UK.

The final report brought together all of this information and came up with a useful set of recommendations for the Council. It also set out new projections for partnership income. Recommendations included:

• Establishing a clearer account management process, in order to identify and develop the most important global relationships, to maximise income.
• Marry the products that the Council is already developing with key global partners and have small local partners and more large global partnerships.
• Examine the potential for earning income from companies as well as from more CSR-type activity. These activities might be teaching English or other forms of training.
• Link members of the senior management team with an individual company or organisation in order to ensure that the relationship potential of a partner is championed at the most senior level.
• Develop support functions, such as a global database of partnership knowledge, so that opportunities can be spotted and exploited.

In addition, nfpSynergy provided information on the critical success factors for growing partnership income; such as the need for additional investment, as well as setting out the structure and staffing levels of other organisations that have high levels of partnership income.