Stakeholder Engagement & Strategy Design for Nonprofits with Jessica Whatley
Stakeholder Engagement & Strategy Design for Nonprofits
January 5th, 2024
Watch the video recording above, or find the audio-only version through your preferred podcast platform through the links further below.
According to a recent article from McKinsey & Company, growth is determined by a leader’s ability to build organizational buy-in, including from the board and their investors. This is especially true for nonprofit organizations, which rely on investment from the board, leadership, and stakeholders to innovate successfully.
But how do you keep a board involved in strategic planning? What does the leadership team need to know to articulate, imagine, and mobilize a new strategy?
Jessica Whatley, CEO of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Chattanooga and a historic client of Bridge Innovate, joins us in this episode of the Leaders in the Arena podcast to answer these questions and more.
Read on to learn how she's utilized her unique organizational leadership and nonprofit board development skills to guide the Big Brothers Big Sisters organization toward fulfilling its mission — to create and support one-to-one mentoring relationships that ignite the power and promise of youth.
The following is a condensed summary of the conversation between Jenny Whitener & Jessica Whatley:
How to Launch a Strategic Planning Project
Jenny Whitener: Jessica, tell me a little bit about your thoughts as the CEO about your nonprofit launching a strategic planning project.
Jessica Whatley: Essentially, the strategic planning project gave us the freedom to say no to things. There are so many things we could do, and that's all great, but if we're trying to do all of those things, we tend to do a couple of them well but do a lot of them not very well.
So, a strategic plan helps us say — what is the most important, what rises to the top that we need to focus on to serve our kids and our families best? That was really just the push to get something in place — the freedom of what we should do and should not do right now. It doesn’t mean we won’t do it later, but we don't do it right now.
Jenny Whitener: I often think other leaders see the strategic plan as adding to the day-to-day work, but you share the perspective that it actually creates prioritization, establishes the most important things, and gets your team rallied around that. That’s insightful!
Board Involvement in Strategic Planning
Jenny Whitener: In our partnership, you were very dedicated to ensuring that your board was involved in the strategic planning process. Can you talk a bit about your perspective on board involvement and any tips that you would provide other nonprofit leaders?
Jessica Whatley: We created a long-range strategic planning committee on our board. Their role was to help us find a partner, create a strategic plan, and monitor its execution.
Having that committee that could really get behind the strategy was important. And the chair of that committee, who was our past president and now our president, championed the strategic plan and the process. It was great to have another peer who was saying, here's what's being done. And then also being able to celebrate our team a little bit with the board, saying, here's all the hard work that these people that we've hired to do this work are doing on the back end.
Jenny Whitener: It’s really great that you identified the chair as your next president because the strategic plan is the guiding instrument for the entity's next generation of work. Because she was a part of the process from the beginning and then moved into that senior leadership role as the board chair, she's aligned with you now.
Finding Success in Your Strategic Plan
Jenny Whitener: What are your top three recommendations for success to other leaders in the arena?
Jessica Whatley: I think the biggest thing is a good partner. When you would give us an agenda of what we're going to get done, I would laugh. Like, no way, we're not getting all that done today; that's impossible. You guys challenged us to work faster and smarter.
Next would be a good team, which I've already mentioned. I'm really fortunate — we've built a great team that is open to change and wants to improve processes so that we can better accomplish our mission.
Last, be open to change. Avoid the idea that something has always been done a particular way or that we tried that before, and it didn't work. Be open to change and create a safe environment where people can come up with any idea.
The Power of Embracing Change
Jenny Whitener: When leaders have a long-term tenure with an entity, they seem to get stuck in imagining things. That's not your case. You're saying, let's be open to change. How do you do that? How do you bring that mindset to the table daily for your team?
Jessica Whatley: I'm not great with the status quo, but I think it's a balance. At times, I can tell our team was a little burned out on change. We needed to step back. Sometimes, you need a year or two of the status quo.
But we're constantly bringing ideas to all of our staff meetings, asking, is this still working? Plus, we work with kids and volunteers whose lives are rapidly changing, so if we're not open to change, we'll become irrelevant very quickly.
Jenny Whitener: Sometimes, it’s the role of the leader to observe their team, to be connected with the pace and capacity of their team, and to know when to throttle back.
One of the fears for many leaders is that if they put in this bold strategic plan, there's a possibility of failure. So, how do you manage that?
Jessica Whatley: First, I must be okay with some ideas not working. We're going to fail and make mistakes. But one of the beautiful things about the planning process is that hundreds of ideas came out of the strategic planning process. So it's really easy if something doesn't work.
You're learning and evolving rather than starting off with a pass-fail or success-and-fail viewpoint. That's empowering for the team because they know they can try something out, learn from it, and then iterate it to the next level.
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Strategic planning helps align your organization around a unified goal with clear priorities so you can realize your full potential. Bridge Innovate partners with both nonprofit and for-profit organizations, helping them clarify their mission and values and supplying them with a strategic design that everyone on your team can buy into. Learn more about our strategic services and embrace the power of growth and change today.
Founded in 2003, Bridge Innovate is an SBA-certified woman-owned small business with 20+ years of experience in business innovation, leadership development, and organizational change. We’re on a mission to make a difference and to ignite creative leadership for growth and good.
Are you looking to reinforce your strategic plan? Bridge Innovate® has a wide variety of growth services related to strategic planning, business innovation, and human-centered design.
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