By Chris Keating, CEO, Connection Support
When I first became CEO, I was handed the board’s strategy, which could be summed up in one word – grow. All the KPI’s were focused on increasing our turnover and expanding our geography. As a dyed-in-the-wool charity bod, none of this was inspiring to me, so I was keen to review our strategy as soon as possible. And by review, I mean completely rewrite.
Build the trust and relationship capital you need to get it over the line.
As a first-time CEO stepping into the role after our founder’s 25 years in post, I knew I had big shoes to fill. If I wanted to get my board to sign off on a radically different strategy, I first needed to ensure that they knew and trusted me. To do this, I learned their motivations, what they were looking for, and their backgrounds. I shaped my reporting around their immediate priorities , whilst slowly building in a culture change to move away from a focus on financial growth and towards becoming more purpose and values-led. For some, this was a giant learning curve and not to be underestimated, but by communicating at a heart level, sharing stories of life change and introducing lived experience into our board, we gradually moved the dial. This created the foundations for developing the strategy we needed.
Deeply connect to the purpose of your charity.
Connection Support was originally founded as a homelessness prevention charity, but having followed tenders for many years, much of our work had shifted towards crisis response rather than prevention. Looking across the wider sector, I couldn’t see much difference between ourselves and the other homelessness charities around us, so why did we all need to exist? Having previously been a youth worker, I was increasingly noticing that our adult client base could link their homelessness experience back to childhood or adolescent experiences. This inspired me to develop a strategy that reconnected us to our original purpose, moved our support further upstream, and aimed to prevent crises from having to occur, rather than just resolving them when they happened.
Be humble and collaborate.
When it came to forming a strategy, my previous people-pleasing, conflict-averse instinct would have been to start with a blank sheet of paper and ask everyone else for their ideas. This time, though, I decided to do it differently. I wrote my ‘manifesto’, what I felt our strategy needed to be, and then I consulted against it. By consulting, I mean that I shared it with every staff member, volunteer, trustee, and every beneficiary who wanted to be part of it. Through facilitated focus groups (all of which I personally attended), I managed to elicit over 400 people’s feedback. It felt risky, sharing my passion and advocating for a radically different approach could’ve been too much for some. But I was pleasantly surprised, our team was eager for change. They, too, were frustrated with the status quo, with always entering people’s lives too late. They wanted something new.
Be informed by the world around you.
The timing for this radical shift was exactly right for us. Central and local government were almost solely focused on resolving rough sleeping, rather than preventing it from occurring. Children living in Temporary Accommodation was at a national high. More and more people were turning to us for support as the cost-of-living crisis was biting. The complexity of our client base was also increasing as it became clear that a lack of early intervention meant people’s situations were much more severe before any support was offered. By determining to move upstream and work preventatively, we were bucking the trend and moving into a potentially unpopular and controversial space. But I’m fairly certain that charities are meant to live in the spaces where we’re most desperately needed. So, it felt scary, but right.
Get your metrics right
By moving from chasing tenders to declaring a mission counter to the government’s approach, it would’ve been unrealistic to assume increasing financial growth. In fact, we needed to assume that the charity would likely contract in size, whilst becoming more purposeful and impactful. This was a terrifying decision to make. When money was tight, one of my trustees asked, ‘Does this mean the strategy needs to be on hold?’ I explained ‘No’, our strategy is our strategy, and our mission is our mission, whether we have £1 or £100million, our focus is the same. Our metrics were no longer financial; they were about lives changed, crises prevented, and futures-at-risk restored for our beneficiaries.
Of course, funding remained important, but our sources needed to be amended. We needed to find the funders and people who were aligned with our strategy. We needed the people who could see and share our vision and were willing to invest in it. And I knew this would take time, so our strategy wasn’t built as a radical about-turn, it’s been a measured transition from who we were to who we’re becoming.
And now, 18-months in, we’re a lot further along the road than we anticipated we’d be. There have been challenges along the way – turning down funding or opportunities that don’t align, putting ourselves into positions that respectfully oppose the local authorities we partner with, equipping our team to work in a different way. But there have also been incredible wins too – finding a long-term major donor who is absolutely on board with our approach, the government launching a new homelessness strategy that is much more closely aligned with our approach, having opportunities to design new services with our client base. We’re constantly tweaking, reviewing and evolving. It’s never easy, the work is never finished, but it’s purposeful, it fills my life with new meaning, and sometimes (dare I say it) it’s fun.
More resources about charity strategic planning: