We believe that innovation, competitiveness and efficiency are the three key ingredients to sustainability in 2017, so we’ve highlighted 3 key actions for the year.
1. Innovation
- Undertake primary research with your beneficiaries to find out what they need, and seek their ideas for service development. Funders love to see that you have evidence of demand and need from your stakeholders.
- Evaluate any feedback forms from 2016, and review what people are saying – identify what needs changing or improving and create an action plan for change.
- Consider becoming socially enterprising. If traditional revenue streams are drying up, look at other ways to generate income by selling products or services. The first step is undertake market research, have internal dialogue and do a feasibility study. Check out this article to read more.
2. Competitiveness
- Communicate your immediate and wider impact concisely and clearly to demonstrate your unique selling points, and value for money to potential purchases of your service. If you need help, participate in our Impact Measurement workshop and become an Impact Ambassador for your organisation
- Seek external validation for your impact measurement process to demonstrate independence and trust to funders – find out more about our support packages.
- Understand your costs per beneficiary or intervention, and assess if and how it demonstrates value for money and what the return on investment might be.
3. Efficiency
- Look at embracing digital tools and systems to speed up processes and reduce administration. Talk us about Salesforce CRM solutions.
- Facilitate internal workshops to review processes and create or revise process maps to detail how, who, when and what is undertaken by different members of staff with stakeholders.
- Refine a personalised stakeholder communication strategy to ensure engagement is maximised with existing stakeholders, to re-engage, generate referrals, cross promote or upsell ways to get involved with your organisation.
If you plan to make any changes in 2017, make sure you have a change management strategy in place. Attend our Change Management Workshop to find out more.
