Your development plan should cover all aspects of your operations. It should seek to answer the following key questions.
What’s your organisation all about?
The first step in creating a development plan is to be clear on what your organisation’s purpose and vision is. Think about what’s most important to you and your people. Write down your shared values.
Having a clear and united understanding of this from the outset will help you identify your future aims and actions as you move through the stages of creating a development plan.
What’s your organisation's current position?
Be sure to find out what your current position is.
You can do this by conducting a thorough analysis of your strengths (S) and weaknesses (W), and the opportunities (O) and threats (T) you may face.
When creating your SWOT analysis, be sure to consider all aspects of your organisation, including your:
- Participants and membership (including who you currently reach, who you don’t and who you want to target).
- Workforce (voluntary and paid).
- Training and qualifications.
- Facilities.
- Activities (including those you offer and those you may wish to).
- Finances.
- Marketing and communications.
- Community links.
- Governance structures.
Example SWOT analysis
| Strengths (what we do well) |
- Strong volunteer workforce
- Wide variety of activities offered to participants across varying age groups and abilities
|
| Weaknesses (what we could improve) |
- Limited finances to support the development of our organisation
- Limited social media following and promotion of our activities
|
| Opportunities (chances to improve) |
- Attract participants, members and volunteers from different backgrounds
- Create more partnerships with local organisations to raise awareness of our offer
|
| Threats (things that could impact our offer or delivery) |
- Tenure leased facility expiring in 18 months
- Cost of living (decrease in disposable incomes)
- Increased costs for the organisation (energy and consumables)
|
Once you’ve completed the SWOT analysis, discuss the findings and implications with your committee or leadership team. Use this opportunity to identify any challenges to address and priorities to develop. You can use these to create a set of goals and objectives that align with your overall vision and mission.
Where do you want to be and by when?
Once you’ve analysed where you are, focus on where you want to be in the future. Think about the findings of your SWOT analysis and your overall vision to determine some short, medium, and longer term aims. Be sure to build on your strengths, address any weaknesses, capitalise on any opportunities, and be aware of and mitigate against potential threats.
Ensure your aims are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) and are realistic in terms of timescales, cost, and the resources that you have available.
What actions will you need to take to achieve your targets?
The next step is to plan how you’ll achieve the SMART aims you have set. It’s good to break down aims into smaller, easier to achieve actions which can form the basis of your organisation’s development. Ideally, your action plan will cover your:
- Aims: what you want to achieve.
- Actions: the specific steps that will need to be taken to achieve each aim.
- Timescales: when each action will be achieved (short, medium, or long term).
- Responsibility: the person/people that’ll be responsible for each action.
- Resources: how much it will cost, what people, equipment and time is needed.
- Success measure: how you will track progress and know you’ve succeeded.
Once you've developed your action plan, be sure to make it available to your participants, members, workforce (both paid and voluntary), sponsors and community partners. If you’re applying for funding, you may also want to share your plan with funding organisations to demonstrate what you want to achieve and how you will do this.
How will you know if you’ve achieved your targets?
It’s important to regularly monitor your progress against the aims and actions you have set. This will ensure you continue to move in the right direction and help you recognise, celebrate and measure what you’ve achieved. Your development plan should be a working document, not only will this enable you to monitor progress, but also update or make revisions due to unforeseen delays or changes to circumstances e.g. people or available finance.
