So welcome back to implementing SWOT for your ministry application for your maybe as a profit making venture. But again, SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. We've done a basic introduction to the SWOT we've also looked at each individual element of a SWOT analysis, the strengths, identifying your weaknesses, identifying your opportunities, but especially identifying the threats that your nonprofit might face as we go forward. So you filled out the template. You kind of put all the little different bullet points on each of those four quadrants on your SWOT analysis. Here's how we're going to go through the process of prioritizing and finalizing your SWOT analysis. All of the information that you collected in the previous four modules, the strengths, the weaknesses, opportunities and threats, should actually be on your template at this point and at the beginning of the challenge, you probably downloaded a lot of the the you downloaded the Foursquare template, and all your information should really be found. You know, the discoveries that you made should be identified on this particular Foursquare quadrant type chart. And if you need the template, it is available online. Transfer your information to it. It's easier for you to read and understand it if it's in this format, rather than on separate pieces of paper or computer files. And you're going to understand why I said that here as we go forward through this and we and I show you how to use this information in a SWOT analysis. Look at some of the other examples that are. You can find online about a SWOT analysis and you haven't done that already. Look them up, go to Google, and so you know what yours really should look like. Use bullet points. Everything that's listed in those four boxes should be in a bullet type format. You don't need complete sentences. What you really need is high level concepts. You might need some high level, hey, we need to just check this out. Kind of stuff. You don't need to have complete descriptive sentences. Is the point here? Bullet points over, boil down each point, each bullet point should be short. Just a few words are going to do. And if you need to even simple, it take the time to simplify each of those points, basic, concise points that really articulate one of the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities or threats. So take a few then once you've done that, and you really have kind of got a very concise, very targeted list of information in each of those four quadrants, spend some time refining your information. If you come up with a healthy list for each of your strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It's really time, time for you to spend the time to refine that information. Look for redundancies, combine bullet points, where it's necessary, where you're able to do that eliminate, eliminate any of the information that isn't valid, that isn't vital, that just doesn't seem to really belong there. And then the next thing you want to do is you kind of want to scan through all four of those quadrants. And what's really important here is that you start picking out the low hanging fruit. What problems do you have that are most pressing? What opportunities do you have to provide your specific services and specific whatever it is your nonprofit is doing, what kind of opportunities do you have to really get out there and hit a home run with it, and you're going to want to put each of those low hanging fruit, low hanging opportunities, or your most pressing issues, at the top of each one of these squares, each quadrant on your SWOT analysis. So once we've done that, you've got a really concise chart, you've really boiled this down, and you've got a document that's got a lot of validity to it, a lot of credibility to it. How do you take this from a mere SWOT analysis to strategies? And what you're going to want to do is you're going to have this list of strengths, your weaknesses, opportunities and threats. It really does make a very handy business guide for you, but you need to take this whole exercise of the SWOT analysis one step further to really create the strategies and the tactics that you need to implement. To put into place to improve the products and the services that your nonprofit, that your agency, is delivering. And we call this process a toes analysis. And if you notice, it's exactly the reverse of a SWOT analysis to ws analysis, and the exercise that really is the name of the exercise that we're dealing with here. But what the whole purpose of this toes analysis is, is to help you connect the dots between each of these four quadrants on your slot analysis. See they're all related. Strengths are related to opportunity. Strengths are related to potential weaknesses and etc. And you're going to we're going to show you a process of how you work around this quadrant the square, combining information from two of the quadrants to create actionable strategies. So simple process, once you understand it, but we'll point out how you do that. And here's how you do that, strengths and opportunities. Use your internal strengths to take advantage of your biggest opportunities. Focus on those issues first and again. The technical term for it is low hanging fruit, big strengths that match up with big opportunities. There's a whole lot of synergy there, and you're going to find people lining up to donate money, to donate goods, to donate services, to help you deliver what it is that you want to deliver there. Strengths versus threats. Use your strengths. Make sure you know what your biggest threats are, and then take the strengths of your organization and focus it directly at those threats that give you the most heartburn. Weaknesses versus opportunities. I improve your weaknesses by taking advantage of specific opportunities. Weaknesses versus threats, working to eliminate weaknesses to avoid threats that those weaknesses may allow to exist. So the chart that we got here, the chart that you see on the screen, is really a good visual explanation of this exercise, and you'll see what is a appears to be a SWOT analysis here, and you're listing out the different strength and opportunity strategies and your strength threat strategies, and you can kind of start to see how this all works. So as you answer a lot of the questions, you're going to start to create actionable strategies. For example, if one of your strengths is that you have an experienced grant writer on your team, you should put that person in charge of taking advantage of new federal or state or private foundational grant opportunities that are available in the coming year. That's a strategy that you can implement immediately to improve your revenue and stream that improve your funding, your donations, and your ability to deliver products and services that are core to your mission statement, to your reason for existing, you simply just add a couple of blocks if You want to your SWOT analysis to get a lot of these strategies down on paper. And again, there are examples here that we're showing you of completed toes analysis from the University of San Francisco. They apparently did one of these for Volkswagen a number of years ago. And it shows you what the exercise looks like, and it gives you an idea of the strategies that are actually can be developed from this specific analysis. And here's that particular document, right here, and you can look at this at your leisure, so that you can format your own toes analysis document, your strategy planning document, kind of after what's happening here in this example. So your finished product, when you're finished with the SWOT analysis and your toes analysis, you're going to have a very deep level of introspection and insight at your particular nonprofit agency that is accompanied by a very specific list of strategies that you, as the Managing Director, as the lead person, as the CEO, can implement during the next coming year to really make your organization flourish. Take the list of strategies and make plans to start implementing them. And the big thing here is not that you necessarily need to do all the work. You have the vision, and you can direct other volunteers who have specific talent, for example. So. To be responsible, be accountable for achieving certain goals that are critical to the strategies that you've identified here. Some of the strategies are long term plans. Break them down into specific steps and put each one of them on your calendar so that you implement this change over time. A big exercise that I'll do with a lot of my consulting clients that I'll work with is I'll tell them identify what it is you want life to look like 12 months from now, 24 months from now, and then you do sort of, you step back, say, well, here's where I'm at today. And then you start developing quarterly three month milestones. Here's where I need to be three months from now on my journey from here to my vision for what life will be like a year from now, a year away. And you do that for every three month time period. But then you break those three month time periods down into monthly time periods. And you say, Well, each month, I need to achieve certain specific objectives. And you break it down into weekly tasks that might need to be done. And this gets back into the whole issue of systems and processes that are put into place that enable a lot of these tasks, these work tasks to be completed, weekly, daily, weekly, monthly, and even quarterly, on your journey from here to where you want to be 12 months out. So this is really important about taking this list of strategies and implementing them on a long term basis. And one of the analogies that I'll use with a lot of people is, you know, you look at big plans and you just kind of get overwhelmed, and you think, Well, my goodness, how am I going to get this and be able to achieve this? I mean, it's so big, it's just so comprehensive, I don't understand how to do that. The important thing for you to remember is the question of, how is it that you eat an elephant? You eat an elephant one bite at a time, and taking a list of strategies, and you keep breaking it down, breaking it breaking it down and knocking it down into its most basic elements, and then you start eating it one bite at a time. That's how you eat elephants. That's how you conquer big strategic initiatives that you may need to take with your nonprofit agency. So now that you have this particular business resource of the SWOT analysis and the toes analysis. As the Managing Director, as the CEO, you need to keep this handy. You need to throughout the year. You need to be referring to it. You need to be spending time holding yourself accountable to achieving these particular goals and strategies that you've identified, put it on your office wall, keep it on your desktop so that you reference it regularly throughout the year. It's just critical when you're doing these quarterly milestones, when you're doing these monthly objectives and weekly work tasks, that you have metrics where you're measuring yourself. Am I me? How? How am I making progress towards my goals, towards my strategy of delivering my services? So it doesn't do a lot of good to have all strategies and all wonderful tactics if you're not measuring it, and you're not saying we're getting off the rails here, or we're doing a very good job, or we need to make some adjustments, so make sure that you're measuring that stuff so your hard work is paid off. Aside from strategic plans, there's a few other additional benefits from your participation in the slot analysis, and that is, you're going to have very improved you're going to have laser focus. It puts everybody on your team on the same page, whether they're volunteers, whether they're people that are actually employees. It puts everybody on the same page. There's a single vision. There's a reason that they show up every day or every week or every weekend, and they have, they share this common goal of working as a team to solve a specific issue, and it identifies as well where you should really be working towards during the next 12 months with some of the people that are working When you have everybody working towards the same goals. Management level, people, especially the managing director, the Board of Directors, can really kind of just sort of step back a little bit and continue to build and especially monitor the strategies that you're working with here. To identify a lot of the unknown aspects, you're going to discover aspects of your nonprofit business that you didn't even know about from unknown strengths, people who sort of dig down and and they start to unleash talents that they didn't even know they had two hidden threats or threats that just come out of nowhere, like comment on covering this information, it's going to really protect you and keep you on track. It'll keep your organization on keep your little train on the track as you're going forward throughout the year. Strategies for success, above all else, you walk away with strategies from this whole exercise of doing the SWOT analysis and the toes analysis that are going to immensely help your business, your nonprofit agency or your ministry, 



Last modified: Monday, March 24, 2025, 2:57 PM