April 14, 2023
Established in 1982, Community Impact North Carolina, Inc. (CINC) is a community-based nonprofit organization that promotes and enables community-centered substance misuse prevention through education, prevention initiatives and programs, and policy advocacy. Since 2002, CINC has provided education and other support to community-based coalitions across North Carolina.
The Opportunity
CINC has a long history of successfully working toward its mission. When agency leadership at the state level signaled that policy and funding changes were on the horizon, CINC’s Executive Director saw an opportunity to take stock of the organization’s strengths and weaknesses and develop a strategic plan to move the organization into the next 2-3 years, ensuring readiness for the coming changes.
Goals
CINC leadership sought to conduct an organizational assessment and stakeholder engagement to inform the development of a strategic plan.
Approach
Organizations undertaking organizational assessment and strategic planning activities often benefit from facilitation by an external party. Third-party facilitation allows participants to remain anonymous to the organization, often resulting in candid feedback. As the CINC organizational assessment facilitator, Atrómitos engaged with external stakeholders through key informant interviews and CINC team members who completed an organizational capacity assessment tool to gain insights and perspectives about the organization. Questions focused on assessing the organization’s internal capacities and external market forces impacting CINC.
Atrómitos used the information gathered through this assessment phase to develop a Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis. A SWOT is a tool that facilitates vital situational analysis—analyzing the current situation to identify important pieces of information. Through a SWOT analysis, Atrómitos helped CINC identify opportunities, assess strengths, determine how to maximize them, and identify weaknesses and threats that must be remedied or minimized.
The SWOT analysis was shared with the CINC team during a two-hour feedback session. This discussion was the first step in the strategic planning process. Bringing the entire team to the table allowed them to share reactions to the SWOT and begin collaborating on potential strategic directions for the organization.
Leveraging the information and perspectives gained during the SWOT feedback session, Atrómitos developed strategic recommendations for CINC. These recommendations included proposed revisions to the organization’s mission and the development of a strategy map. While some organizations may benefit from a lengthy strategic plan, a strategy map is a diagram that shows the organization’s strategy on a single page. The strategy map would allow CINC and its team to focus on big-picture objectives and develop action plans to help the organization achieve them. Atrómitos facilitated a strategic planning retreat with the CINC team to review and revise the proposed strategy map. Full team participation ensured everyone had a voice and understood how their job functions impacted the overall organizational strategy.
Conclusion
With Atrómitos’ facilitation support, CINC collaborated as a team to update its mission to address changing policy priorities and needs in the marketplace. The tools that Atrómitos created, a strategy map and action plan framework, were embraced by CINC leadership to plan and implement operational and service-focused changes that leveraged organizational strengths and capitalized on external opportunities and system needs.
“Because of our organizational assessment experience with Atrómitos, we were able to discover our strengths and our areas for improvement in a way that felt constructive and tangible. Atrómitos took the guesswork out of how to best assess our work and impact. Our team left the process feeling hopeful, inspired, and prepared to move toward our goals.”
