Danica Frazer and strategic planning for government-funded charities
June 19, 2006
By Nicole Zummach
EDMONTON, AB // Nonprofits spend a lot of time and energy
trying to attract donor support, and rightly so. However, the fact
remains that government funding accounts for more than 50% of the
charitable revenue in this country, and some charities are almost
entirely funded by government. That's the case for the McMan
Youth, Family and Community Services Association in
Edmonton. It might sound like an ideal situation, but relying on
government funding creates its own set of challenges, one being the
inability to plan long term. Danica Frazer knows
first-hand how this can impact an organization. She has been with
McMan for more than 20 years, and has served as its executive
director for the past eight years. For her organization, and others
like it, strategic planning can be an exercise in futility. Although
she knows that money is coming in, how the government chooses to
allocate it can change from year to year. Charting a course for the
future is not always a realistic option. So, when she was selected as
a Muttart Fellow in 2004, Frazer decided to delve deeper into the
realities of being a government-funded organization and what the
planning process could look like for such organizations.
CharityVillage spoke with her about the conventional notion of
strategic planning and the need for charities to remain flexible and
responsive to change.
CharityVillage: What did you do during your year as
a Muttart Fellow?
Danica Frazer: What I was doing was looking at how
effective 'conventional' strategic planning could be in the nonprofit
sector when agencies are government-funded. To a large extent, I
don't think that conventional strategic planning is particularly
useful or effective in the environment that [McMan] operates in. This
is because of a couple of factors, and this may apply equally across
the nonprofit sector. One is that it's difficult to accurately
determine what mix and what types of services are going to be needed
at any given time. That makes it difficult to do long-term planning,
both for the government and for the agencies they contract with. As
well, no matter how we cut it, there is a power imbalance between the
funder and the fundee.
So I talked a lot about a different approach to
planning, and not making it so linear and detailed. Really, our
planning needs to be based on how to be flexible and responsive, and
how to let go of the need to predict and control what is going on in
the world around us.
CV: How did you define 'conventional' strategic
planning for the purposes of your work?
DF: Most of the literature I found on strategic
planning was still very much based on thinking long term - five years
out - and trying to predict or anticipate what was going to happen.
It's a very linear model: what's you strategy, what's your action
plan, what's your timeline? And the reality for many of us is that a
lot of that [planning] just doesn't come to fruition.
CV: Did you come to any conclusions about strategies that
could be employed by organizations such as yours?
DF: I was hoping, in the beginning, to propose a
new model; what I ended up proposing was a new way of thinking. I
didn't say that we should scrap planning altogether. What I argued
was that we should have a model for planning that makes us the most
flexible and the most responsive, as opposed to 'what are we going to
do for the next five years?'. We have no idea what we're going to be
hit with in the next five years, so what can we do within our
organization to ensure that we can respond?
It's about trying to create an organizational culture that
obviously has a solid foundation and some structures and systems in
place, but if there is a fundamental shift in services being
delivered, that we can do that.
We need to plan on how to be flexible and
responsive, not to plan on how to deal with things we don't know are
going to happen. And we need to be prepared to accept that things are
going to change, and quit trying to fight it.
CV: What are the problems you see in
terms of how governments distribute funding?
DF: I think in the nonprofit sector as a whole -
and this speaks to organizations across the country - it is the
short-term project funding. It is a real problem. The other thing is
the seemingly complete lack of understanding that there has to be
administration dollars attached to funding. Agencies have to operate;
they can't just go out and provide services without the supports that
go along with that.
CV: So, in light of your work, what advice might
you give to other nonprofits?
DF: This is tied to one-year funding and agencies
scrambling to apply for whatever grants are out there. Nonprofits
don't exist to support themselves; they actually exist for a purpose.
And although there are problems with the way governments are funding,
we have to stay very clear that our organization exists for a reason.
We have a mission and a mandate and that needs to drive what funding
we go after, as opposed to taking whatever comes along - mission
drift, for lack of a better term. That is really hard, because it
might mean that certain agencies don't survive, or they become much
smaller.
CV: How has your time as a Muttart Fellow
impacted you and the work you do?
DF: Some days I am really able to go back to some
of what I wrote about in my paper about letting go of the need to
control. Then I feel like I have a ton of energy to tackle whatever
is happening. But I also have days where I feel like that is
impossible. [The experience] has given me a different energy, because
prior to the fellowship I was sort of lost in the forest. Since I've
been back at McMan I've been able to step back and say, 'Yes, it's
chaotic. It's always been chaotic, and probably always will be.' The
reality is that we are still here and we're still doing good work.
It's about a shift in mindset more than concrete actions.
Danica Frazer's forthcoming book, A Certain Chaos:
Strategic planning in not-for-profit organizations, will be
published in the next few months.
To learn more about the Muttart Fellowship Program, visit: www.muttart.org/fellowsprogram.htm.
