In 2011, the NAACP launched a strategic planning process that resulted in the creation of a powerful vision for the future and set organizational goals to guide its work in the 21st Century. These five goals — Economic Sustainability, Education, Health, Public Safety and Criminal Justice, and Voting Rights and Political Representation — are its “Game Changers.”

After its pivotal role in achieving some of the greatest civil rights victories of the nation’s past 100 years, the NAACP was not content to rest on its laurels, but instead asked “What’s next?” This meant returning to the Association’s original motivations: passionate dreams, audacious goals, and a united focus.

The Challenge

How do you go about developing strategy for the nation’s largest and oldest civil rights organization?

The NAACP had a tremendous legacy to build on, but it had also weathered its share of difficulties. In Benjamin T. Jealous it had a young and dynamic new leader, and he, in turn, assembled a top-notch staff. Still, the NAACP was a very dispersed organization, with hundreds of local branches and units nationwide, each operating with a high level of independence. At the same time, the organization (like many other venerable movement-based nonprofits) had struggled with shrinking membership. The challenge of strategic planning was how to engage the membership in a meaningful way and to point a direction the entire organization would embrace.

Getting Back to the Mission

The Association had never engaged in a formal strategic planning process before, but had a unique lens through which to consider its future, having recently celebrated its 100th anniversary. Working with a strategic planning committee of 15 board and staff members, we asked these leaders to reflect on the NAACP’s greatest accomplishments of the past century, and then posed the question, “What would constitute equivalent achievements in its second century?” A board member quickly provided the answer: complete the journey to full equality. From this starting point, we embarked on a wide-ranging and collaborative consultative process to determine what, precisely, that would look like, which included affirming the NAACP’s mission and exploring what it means in today’s dynamic social and political context.

“It’s very easy, especially when you have organizations with impressive histories, for staff, boards, and members to lose sight of why we do what we do. What strategic planning empowered us to do was to get back to the mission.”  — Ben Jealous, President/CEO

Because of the dispersed nature of the organization, we knew that any strategic plan would have to be high-level, easy to grasp, and immediately actionable. Through a process of deep reflection, research, and consultation, the strategic planning committee identified five big-picture goals and supporting strategies to move the needle toward real equity for all people.

Turning Strategy into Action

The Game Changers were adopted unanimously by the board in 2012. For each goal, the NAACP identified specific indicators it will use to gauge its progress over time using U.S. government data (realizing this will be a long battle and requires reliable data for the duration). Each is stated as a measure of equity. For example, instead of saying, “More African Americans will achieve a Bachelor’s degree or higher,” the aim is that, “The same proportion of African Americans achieve a Bachelor’s degree or higher as in the general population.” The goal is not an idealized future, but a fair one.

To align all of its efforts, and its unique competitive advantages in reputation and reach, toward advancing these goals, the NAACP articulated an overarching organizational strategy rooted in its identity as a movement:

To achieve equality in these areas the NAACP will pursue its organizational strategy, which is to: educate, mobilize, and grow its membership, constituting a powerful grassroots civil rights movement, and energizing the nation through activism, civic engagement, and mobilizing voters at every level of the political process.

Knowing that successful implementation of the new strategy will require support and commitment from all across the organization’s large and diverse national network, the planning committee provided for local ownership of the work. For the NAACP, this meant offering opportunities to customize the strategic goals to unique state and local needs as well as building the capacity of state and local units so that they can more effectively participate in advancing the organizational goals. In one community, this might mean working to get an African American sheriff elected in hopes of fairer policing. In another, it might be blood pressure screenings to reduce disproportionate mortality rates among African Americans due to hypertension.

Aligning for Long-Term Achievement

As a result of this strategic planning process, which included surveys, focus groups, and sessions at the Association’s national convention, the entire organization, from the board and CEO to the hundreds of local branches and units, is now clear as to the NAACP’s purpose and priorities for the next decade.

“The identification of the Game Changers was a huge effort to bring a very complex organization into unity around a simple set of objectives.”  — Ben Jealous, President/CEO

In addition to the strategic plan, the NAACP went a step further, creating a video summary for YouTube (embedded above), along with 90-second videos describing each Game Changer.

In the end, the nation’s oldest, largest, most powerful civil rights organization broke the mold. Instead of a traditional strategic plan for incremental change and short-term wins, the NAACP opted for a game-changing vision for the future, a compelling and powerful set of goals that will serve as the organization’s road map for as long as it takes to complete the journey.

“Strategic planning has empowered the organization to, over the next couple years of implementation, get back to being what we were 100 years ago: driven by dreams and mobilized all the way down to the grassroots.”  — Ben Jealous, President/CEO

In 2009, the Great Recession set the nonprofit sector (and the rest of the world) back on its heels. To help California’s domestic violence organizations navigate the economic crisis and emerge stronger in the years to come, Blue Shield of California Foundation initiated a sustained investment in providing grantees of its Blue Shield Against Violence (BSAV) program with educational opportunities, relevant research, and technical assistance in collaboration and strategic restructuring.

To date, this commitment has supported nearly two dozen grantee organizations in exploring and/or implementing integrated partnerships to strengthen operations and enhance services. The initiative has also led to increased knowledge about how strategic restructuring may be a helpful option among domestic violence grantees and created the conditions under which more organizational leaders feel confident in considering strategic restructuring as an option for moving their missions forward.

Strategic restructuring — including but not limited to administrative consolidation, joint programming, and merger — is a tool nonprofits can use to respond to strategic challenges and opportunities. Several foundations and funders have created funds or initiatives aimed at making resources available to nonprofits to explore these kinds of collaborative opportunities. BSAV’s multifaceted approach to supporting its grantees created a “learning arc” that met grantee organizations where they were every step of the way.

Working in partnership with a core team of La Piana Consultants, BSAV sponsored educational webinars introducing information about strategic restructuring, providing customized consulting and technical assistance support to those organizations that indicated interest in pursuing partnership opportunities, and then sharing the stories of those efforts through case studies so that peers could see one another engaging in this work. This created a virtuous cycle that was further fueled by resources BSAV invested in research into the use of strategic restructuring in the field, which also served to inform and inspire additional partnerships. Bess Bendet, director of BSAV, reflects on the goals of this initiative:

“We aim to provide our grantees every opportunity to find the best way to serve their clients. Part of this is encouraging grantees to partner with each other, or with other organizations, to more effectively and efficiently meet the needs of their community.

To do this, we knew we needed to first open doors by making the idea of partnerships real and accessible. Then we wanted to help grantees make the idea a reality by providing support for collaboration, negotiations, and integration.”

Some of the partnerships that were formed as a result of this support include:

• Haven House, notably California’s first domestic violence shelter program, merged with Jewish Family Service of Los Angeles in 2010, giving survivors access to a wider range of social service resources supported by a more robust organizational infrastructure.
• East Los Angeles Women’s Center, a community-based organization serving survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, in 2011 deepened an existing relationship with the L.A. County and University of Southern California (LAC+USC) Medical Center to provide on-site advocacy services for survivors.
• The Women’s Center of San Joaquin County, a provider of comprehensive services to survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault, merged with Family and Youth Services, and organization serving homeless and runaway teenagers, to create a more integrated community resource for these overlapping and interrelated client populations.

Throughout, BSAV has maintained the role of providing neutral support and resources, never promoting or expecting a merger or other specific result from any of these engagements. This allows partnerships to develop for the right reasons, not in response to a funder’s wishes. Many organizations served by this initiative have not yet cemented a formal alliance, but as a result of this support were able to assess their readiness for partnership, consider their options, and come to an informed decision about whether strategic restructuring is right for them. One BSAV grantee and technical assistance recipient shares with us what this support has meant for her and, more broadly, for leadership in the field:

“We appreciate Blue Shield being willing to provide this guidance and support. As leaders in the nonprofit field, we so often feel the pressure just to stay afloat. Trying to build in the time and space to think about the big picture, get outside the box, and be creative is rare. But it’s the only way we’re going to change things so that we aren’t always just trying to keep our heads above water.”

The challenge is that while collaboration is highly valued by many domestic violence service providers, strategic restructuring is a complex undertaking. Often concerns about preserving organizational identity or nuances in serving different populations must be addressed. Strategic restructuring is not just an important business decision, but one that affects individuals and communities. It is important to do it well. Bess notes how the design of this initiative contributed to good results:

“We couldn’t be more pleased with the way that communities have embraced this combining of services, and how the initiative has led to better outcomes overall. We have witnessed grantee organizations stepping into the complex and challenging world of partnership exploration, and have seen them emerge successfully — with real results in the consolidation of services and administrative infrastructure.”

BSAV has supported its grantees in forming partnerships to create stronger infrastructure to support solid programs, to address overlap in services by reducing duplication, to make service delivery more efficient, and to enable the more effective use of resources. We have also seen programmatic synergies among domestic violence organizations — and with service providers in related fields such as child welfare, health care, or criminal justice — leveraged using integrated partnerships. Even those organizations that chose not to enter into a partnership now have a greater understanding of the process and options, so they are better prepared to consider a future alliance, if and when the situation is right.

By making a multi-year investment of this kind, BSAV has not only helped build the capacity of individual organizations to use strategic restructuring as a tool to advance their goals, but has created a resource to help the field become more effective through partnership.