By Rosie Ferguson, ACEVO chair.
Today we’re delighted to share ACEVO’s new three-year strategy which comes into force on 1 April. The new strategy reflects our strapline ‘imagine, inspire, improve’, which articulates the difference leaders can make.
It has been a fun and challenging process developing the strategy with the staff team, trustees and members, and we wanted to ‘show our workings’ in the hope it may help others embarking on a strategy review.
The development process for the new strategy was carried out in three phases:
- Understanding where we are now
- Agreeing where we want to get to
- Working out how to get there
We kicked off the process in August 2020 with me (as chair) and Vicky Browning (as CEO) brainstorming the key strategic questions we should be thinking about in the next three years. We held a workshop later that month with the senior management team to hone the questions and took these to a staff team away day in January 2021 for review. Meanwhile, lots of background work was underway by the team, including SWOT, PESTLE and membership data analyses.
Some elements of our offer were here to stay: our member focus and the need for connection and support for CEOs. But everything else was up for grabs.
We reviewed our theory of change strategic outcomes to make sure we felt they were still the most important outcomes or if we were missing anything. We considered the extent and scope of our public affairs activity – do we have the balance right between ACEVO’s “support” role and our political/advocacy/influencing work? What is an ideal ratio for the volume of members vs depth of engagement? What is our strategic vision for delivering race equity within ACEVO? How actively should we be pursuing the idea of greater collaboration with other infrastructure bodies?
Working with consultant Jean Barclay, we held a series of focus groups in spring 2021 with members of large and small, national, regional and local charities – including some members who were highly engaged and others who were less active. We asked members about the level of challenge vs support they wanted from ACEVO (in our ‘leading the leaders’ capacity), how much emphasis we should be placing on our leadership development programmes, what our offer should be to those members who are leaders of local or regional organisations, and what unique role ACEVO should play in promoting the image of civil society and its CEOs.
The message we received loud and clear was that members were really positive about the services that ACEVO offers and its positioning as the voice of sector leaders. They told us they wanted us to build on what we were already doing rather than tear up the script and start again. In other words, the new strategy needed to be evolutionary rather than revolutionary.
Another board meeting in March to answer the agreed strategic questions was followed by a further staff away day in May to review. A draft version of the strategy was discussed at the June board, and approved in October.
We decided to form our strategy around our three-word strapline: imagine, inspire, improve – ACEVO’s ‘how’. This is what we call our ‘ripple effect’: effective leaders are driven by imagining a better, brighter, more equal world. Through their vision they inspire others. And together with their teams and peers they deliver impact – improving lives, our society and their own performance.
The three elements of the strategy form concentric circles as we recognise there is overlap across the strands – but ACEVO’s members remain firmly at the centre. Many of the strategic objectives are cross-organisational, with delivery shared across teams to prevent silo working. Specific objectives include: to paint a bold, ambitious picture of what society, the sector and its leaders could look like; to strengthen and deepen collaborative work with civil society infrastructure bodies to deliver cross-sector shared objectives; and to develop innovative approaches to learning and crisis prevention work, encouraging members to grow as leaders and people. We also have objectives around EDI and workplace culture, the climate emergency, and good governance, as well as our core objectives of supporting, connecting and developing our members.
Alongside the strategy development, we wanted to ensure we are making ACEVO a safe and inclusive organisation, involving a parallel strand of work which you can read about here. This resulted in a new organisational value of inclusion, strengthening our code of conduct and fleshing out our complaints procedure.
Our new strategy goes live on 1 April and we hope soon after that to announce the new CEO who will help the board and staff team deliver it. I believe it’s an exciting, positive direction for ACEVO and look forward to working with our members and new CEO to bring it to life. This continues to be a tough time for civil society leaders, and ACEVO is here for you.
