Charity Strategy – Building Advantage

A key concern of (charity) strategy is about building and maintaining advantage.

• Strategic pillars, strategic intent and strategic themes in a Strategic Plan should describe how the charity will build and maintain advantage, while upholding its charity values.  The Charity Mission is about the destination.
• Building advantage includes building up charity resiliency (including to ‘black swam’ events) as its foundation.
• The value of the advantage is described by the impact made (output and outcome stats).
• Your advantage allows you to hold and strengthen your position. Consider both charitable activity scope and charitable service quality in your positioning.
• Don’t be overly constrained by how your current funders or current beneficiaries see you. If your charitable activities sit across areas that multiple regulators regulate, that’s also fine.
• Your board and SLT need to see their primary role as building advantage, for your strategy to succeed. Ask them at interview, what experience do you have in building advantage?
• The opposite of building advantage is drift – your charity is forced by circumstance into a place it hasn’t planned for.

Simon