Video Transcript: Introduction to SWOT & PEST

Good morning everybody, and welcome to another session of marketing. 201,  here at the Christian leaders Institute. My name is Tom Tubergen, and we are  going to spend probably the next three modules. There's quite a few lectures  that we're going to do talking about a subject called SWAT and PEST. And you  know, those are kind of funny terms. You almost sort of wonder if we're going to  be dealing with fly swatters or some sort of aerosol sprays to kill some sort of  insects. But we're going to talk about two concepts called SWAT and PEST over the next several sessions. One of the overviews that we're going to get out of  this particular session here, the introductory on the PEST and the SWOT  analysis, is, what is a SWOT analysis? What is a PEST analysis? And we're  going to compare, do sort of a comparative analysis of both of these types of  marketing management tools. Why are SWOT and PEST important to you?  Relatively important in two different contexts. One of these would be as a  marketing management tool. The other thing is that you can also modify this  stuff, and this is probably really critical if you were to take these two analysis and modify them to measure your own personal strengths, your weaknesses, your  opportunities and threats in the context of you and your ministry in your  community. The second reason is it helps you to clearly understand the overall  environment in which you plan to work, the political environment, overarching  economic issues, social influences that are pushing that you're pushing against,  the cultural for example, and technology resources that you could be taking  advantage of. SWOT analysis stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities  and threats, and it's laid out on a very simple quadrant, as you see here on this  particular slide, the first one is you'll see four different quadrants where we list  the different results. And I'm going to have to kind of squint to read some of this  stuff, but we're looking at the positive, we're looking at the negative on the two  vertical columns, and then on the sides, we're looking at external factors and  internal factors. And you'll see in each of the four boxes, we label these things  as strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, and this is how you start to categorize the whole overall environment of what you're trying to achieve and  where you're trying to achieve it. And we'll get into a lot more depth on this later.  And in fact, in subsequent lectures, we'll work through the process of actually  building one of these things out for either yourself or for your ministry or a  marketing firm or business or whatever. So a SWOT analysis, when it's broken  down into its basic elements, simply means analyzing the following components  of your specific situation. The S stands for strengths, the advantages that you  have over any competitors concerning your particular project. And the W  obviously stands for weaknesses, and these are the disadvantages that you  have internally compared with your competitors. Where are you weakest?  Where do you probably need the most help to achieve a goal that you're trying  to achieve with a particular project, whether it's a business or ministry. O stands  for opportunities, current external trends, which are waiting to be taken 

advantage of things that you can achieve, uniquely achieve that competitors  might not be able to so these are all just the events that are waiting for you to  capture. If all of the planets come into alignment, you might say T stands for  threats. These are external movements, external activities which could cause  significant problems for you and have a negative impact on either you or your  business or your ministry situation, and these are things that you need to be  very tuned into. And so these four particular components of a SWOT analysis,  the strengths, the weaknesses, the opportunities and threats, if you take the  time to actually go through these and do some very honest soul searching about each of these four categories you'll do, you'll have a much greater opportunity  for success in what you're doing going forward. So when do we do a SWOT  analysis I mentioned earlier that one of the greatest things that you can do is to  set up a SWOT analysis for yourself and for your capabilities and your particular  goals that you're trying to achieve, whether you're trying to run a business,  whether you're trying to set up a new ministry or a nonprofit of some sort. This  SWOT analysis gives you an opportunity to really kind of dig deep. What are  your strengths? What are your weaknesses that you need to compensate for or  outsource them? You can do a SWOT analysis for your ministry, for your church, for your organization. What are, what's this group of people good at doing?  What is kind of in their culture that gives you an opportunity to do things better  than someone else that's in that area, for example, or for your nonprofit to  achieve specific results in the community that you're working the other time that  you might want to do a SWOT analysis, especially in a business setting, is when is for every competitor that you're dealing with, what are their strengths? What  are their weaknesses? And it shows you very clearly where you need to  compensate, to take advantage of that competitive situation. So you don't just  do it for yourself. You don't just do it for your ministry or your church or your  organization or whatever. You actually identify all the different competitors that  you're working with or are working against or are in your universe. And you'll  want to understand what's making them tick. You're going to want to do a SWOT analysis relatively frequently. You know a lot of church programs or even  nonprofits will operate on a somewhat seasonal basis. And I would recommend  that at the very beginning of every program year, and probably perhaps at the  end of every program year, you may want to do a SWOT analysis. What did we  learn from this past year? What are the lessons that we need to apply for the  next year. The other thing that we talked about was the PEST analysis. And  again, this is not what you think it is. We're not talking about what sort of PESTs  there are or competitors that are going to turn into PESTs. PEST is stands for  political, economic, social, technology, technology, opportunities and threats. So  you're gonna it's more focused on an environmental situation. And it's actually  structured as developed the actual document, the PEST analysis document, is  structured in much the same way that the SWOT analysis is. And you see the 

different quadrants here. We talk about political factors. We talk about economic factors, social and the technology, technological factors. And again, this is where you're kind of looking at all the different aspects of the world that's immediately  surrounding your community and and you're saying how, how is that going to  affect what I'm trying to do to get how I'm going to get things done? In recent  years, PEST has been expanded on a bit. It also can be known as the PESTLE,  which includes two other factors, such as legal legislation, for example, that  might be proposed may come into effect in any legislation that's already been  passed. For example, what is the trend? What is the legal environment in which  you want to operate. So if you're going to start a food kitchen, for example, what  sort of requirements do you need to meet in your area to certify that you have a  sanitary kitchen, serving environment, to take care of that sort of thing. So you're going to want to be aware of the legal aspects, depending on what it is you're  out to do, environmental issues, either locally or globally, and then also the  related social and the political factors of these environmental issues, and  different regions of the world, for example, will be much more sensitive to.  Environmental aspect of the PESTLE equation. So let's take a look at the  comparative analysis of a SWOT analysis versus a PEST analysis, and you see  the chart here where we talk about opportunities, threats, strengths,  weaknesses of the SWOT analysis versus the political, economic, social and the technological aspects of this. And what this diagram is really showing you is that opportunities can present themselves on all four levels of a PEST analysis, the  political environment changing. How is that going to enhance any opportunities  that you might be presented with in the next nine months or six months, or your  next program year, or whenever economic what kind of trends are coming?  Right? Do you foresee in the near future, and again, and if we're talking in a job  in a nonprofit scenario here, how does, how does helping the jobless or the  homeless tie into the economic factors? Are we going to be looking at a large  ramp up of people without jobs, of people without homes because they don't  have jobs, all this sort of thing. So this kind of helps you to start relating the  different threats, the different opportunities that are related to the material you've uncovered during your PEST analysis. So you're going to do the PEST analysis  first, before you do the SWOT analysis and you're going to include some of  these results as appropriate in the SWOT analysis and the opportunities and the threats section of your SWOT analysis, some of this stuff will carry over from  your PEST analysis into your SWOT analysis. So So let's talk a little bit about  some of the outcomes that you get from your SWOT analysis. By performing a  SWOT analysis, you're going to get a thorough understanding of your personal  strengths and your weaknesses, and if you're doing this in the context of a  ministry or a nonprofit, it's going to help you very, very much to identify those  types of strengths and weaknesses, opportunity strength, and it's going to help  you to understand where you're going to need to attract additional resources or 

people to assist you with achieving your vision. And I'm specifically thinking of  weaknesses. For example, if you can be honest with yourself about your  personal weaknesses, or your personal or your business or your ministry  weaknesses where you really kind of need the help, then it kind of helps you to  focus on, what do I need to get accomplished over the next six months, nine  months type thing, and you can actually start focusing on solutions to those  weaknesses. A PEST analysis outcome helps you to understand the overall the  bigger world, the bigger environment that you are actually a part of. And it could  be a bigger environment, as in the community that you're in, it could be a bigger  environment as of the metropolitan area that you're located in, the country, the  continent, or even the world. So it's kind of a relative concept, and I'm talking  about the PEST environment here. So you know, on different levels, you're  going to need to talk about how the political influences, the social cultures, will  be affecting what it is you're trying to get accomplished. And for example, is the  neighborhood that you're going to be located in? Is it dealing with issues of  homelessness or poverty or crime or lack of education resources. For example,  are there strong social cultural influences, such as a predominantly strong  Muslim or other religious culture in your particular area that might very much  impact what it is you're trying to achieve with your own particular ministry goal.  So let's talk a little bit about the outcomes of a PEST analysis. We talked we just spent a few minutes discussing the SWOT analysis. Let's talk about some of the outcomes that we get from a PEST analysis. A thorough PEST analysis is going  to help you to understand that environment that we were just talking about. It's  going to help you to understand the environment that you're going to be  operating in, or maybe you already are understanding political. Influences. And  again, it could range from zoning ordinances restricting large meetings in a  home to government sanctioned repression, or even violence towards  Christianity, or maybe they just simply have rules and regulations about health  department procedures relative to food kitchens, you know, that kind of a thing.  So it could be a whole variety of things, but you want to really take some time. I  mean, if you're pre launch, is your nonprofit, if you're, you know, you're making  plans to kind of get things rolling. You got an idea, and you want to make things  happen. You want to spend a lot of time doing research on this PEST analysis  portion of your I don't want to say business plan, but sort of your overall plan for  your reason to exist. You want to spend a lot of time on the PEST analysis  portion of this, a complete analysis of the technology. Again, that's not maybe it's not even available. Maybe the people in your community are at the poverty line,  and having their own email account is probably not something that's very high  on their list or even doable, but you know, maybe it is available to your target  prospects. Maybe it's not, so you've got to really just step back for each  component of the PEST analysis, the political economic, social technology  analysis, you need to kind of get a really thorough, clear picture of each one of 

those elements.