Transcription:
Hello Everyone! Welcome to Part 3 of the Impact Finesse. We’re speaking about all of those tools, all of the pieces of the insights that you need so you can be impactful with the audience that you serve.
So like I said, this is Part 3. Be sure that you visit the link in the description so you can download this worksheet and follow along with me.
If you have not seen the first two videos, you can visit the Youtube channel. They are listed. Watch those, share them with all of your staff, and your Board members.
So, Part 3 is all about Strategic Issues Management. I want to stress the importance of this concept because I am not a fan of strategic planning. I always push this management style of operation with the group that I work with. The reason is it allows you to pivot and adjust and it allows you to take in what’s coming into you from your surrounding and your environment and then kick out your deliverables.
So, the first thing that you need to touch on as it pertains to strategic issues management is the very first concept that we spoke about in Part 1 of this series and that’s the Issues Statement. Do you know the issue as it relates to your serving audience? Do you know the issue or the issues? And do you know their outcome and their causes?
So, you want to spend some time crafting and identifying that because that’s going to be the basis of how you devise your efforts. And that’s really gonna signify what you put your hands on and what you engage in this organization. So that’s
No. 1, you have to identify the issues that concern your serving audience.
After you do that, you then have to look at how do you monitor these issues. How will you know those issues are changing? How do you keep up with them? So you want to take your Board, you want to take your staff. And you want to strategically place them in the atmosphere where these issues are discussed. And where they can be altered or where you’re getting updates, right? So, a good place to stay abreast or a good way to stay abreast with these issues is by turning on your Google Alert for certain things or having Board members being part of coordinating councils or coalitions or any type of network that may discuss something that surrounds your serving audience. For example, I’m from an organization and I serve a community that hears differently. I don’t know the proper terms so do leave me a comment either a hard of hearing or just differently-abled when it comes to the hearing capacity. So, if I serve an organization that deals with that then I got to-- want to make sure that I’m at city council meetings to see if there are ordinances or any type of law that is passed to where certain things have to be in place so that everyone is able to hear effectively when there are in a store or they’re able to shop or they can go to the library and take advantage of public services and not be altered. Does this make sense?
So, if I know something is going to benefit or affect the livelihood of my audience because it’s tied to some issues that I didn’t find, I wanna make sure that I am in these spaces where those issues are spoken about and where they’re brought to attention. I hope that makes sense.
No. 2
So, you want to think about how you can manage those issues. So strategic placement within your board, within your staff, and the things that you subscribed to, the things that you stay abreast to, the newsletters that you read. You want to be sure that you have a way of intaking the process or the movement of those issues. So that’s No. 2.
The third thing that you wanna do is
No. 3 set aside time to analyze those movements that you’re intaking.
So, you want specific time with your Board, with your staff, with your leadership team, and an area where you can unpack and reveal whatever turns are associate or whatever value or meaning to the movements that you are tracking concerning the issues. And that’s a mouthful but these things matter. And when you operate from this position where you’re intaking the process of the issues, you’re intaking the news, the updates, you’re analyzing it, you’re spending time with your Board to unpack and figure out what this means for your audience, you didn’t put yourself in a position where you can change your efforts, where you can build new strategies, new tactics because you’ve done the leg work. There’s no way that you can get out into a community and start solving issues if you aren’t a good steward of those things that effectively alter their livelihood or influence their livelihood.
So, that’s really quick. It was easy, it’s pertinent. I want you guys to spend time with it. Be sure to again download the worksheet so you can follow along. There are different tidbits on there, there are prompts that are included there that got to make this a quicker revelation. So, be sure to draft your issues statement, make sure that you can appropriately identify the issue concerning your serving audience. Remember you can do that in several ways. You know you’ve done it correctly if you can speak to the issue with the public and social sector lens and if it’s associated with some credible metric like some statistic. So you want to do that, you want to identify the outcomes and the causes of the issue so you have the proper framework, the proper grounding to devise your effort.
I hope that makes sense. I appreciate you guys for tuning in. Be sure to share this video with your leadership team and also tag your organization because I wanna keep up with you and your social impact journey.