Strategic Planning for Emerging Nonprofit
With exciting growth on the horizon, An Infinite Mind partnered with eGuide to develop goals, structure, and technology tools that would prime them for the year ahead.
Overview
With the onset of the pandemic An Infinite Mind Executive Director, Jamie Pollack found herself in a place to transition the organization’s in person conference, Healing Together, into a virtual event. After finding much success due to reaching a broader audience, and reducing the overall price of attendance, the organization was ready to look to the future of virtual and live events.
When the shift to virtual events was paired with a feature in an upcoming documentary, Jaime knew that it was time to bring in some support to help her navigate the next steps for the organization. Through a series of one-on-one planning workshops that culminated in a board of directors retreat, eGuide was able to assess, understand, and cultivate an environment that increased transparency, decentralized authority among board members, and provided structure to the plans for the following year.
Approach
To understand the organizational structure on a fundamental level, eGuide combined strategic planning methodology, project management tools, and a virtual collaborative environment to create an organic and conversational approach to the structure of An Infinite Mind.
Through five (5) hour long sessions between Executive Director, Jaime Pollock and eGuide Owner, Gregory Perrine spanning the course of 4 weeks, it was made clear that the majority of both information and responsibility was falling to Jaimie. By combining a staff & board assessment, SWOT analysis, collaborative voting, and idea synthesis in a collaborative environment on Lucid Spark, we were able to identify the organization’s most important next step: Increase organizational workflow and efficiency through technology tools.
To pair with the strategic planning sessions, the board for An Infinite Mind was planning to come together to further workshop the road ahead. eGuide stepped in to create an agenda for the two-day retreat and a collaborative document that allowed the board a centralized location to take minutes during the retreat.
Conclusion
Following the completion of both the eGuide workshop and retreat we were able to begin implementing change with a clear direction and complete buy-in from all stakeholders.
eGuide was on hand to help the organization migrate to Box (due to the platform’s HIPAA compliance) for cloud storage vs. email and hard-drive storage.
We helped assess whether to leverage Salesforce Nonprofit Success Pack, which comes with 10 free licenses for accredited nonprofit organizations, ultimately concluding that the jump from no operating system to the infrastructure of Salesforce NPSP would result in confusion and failure.
As an alternative to Salesforce NPSP, we introduced Trello as a transitional tool to introduce collaboration and technology into what historically had been done manually.
Beyond technology, eGuide was also able to source and procure liability insurance for the organization to ensure any liability for in-person events was appropriate.
Tools We Used
About An Infinite Mind
An Infinite Mind is an accredited 501c3 organization based in Florida with a mission to provide accurate information on all Dissociative Disorders, especially DID. They believe in promoting and showing the positive truth to dissociative identities through offering education and outreach programs to dispel myths and stigmas; providing low to no cost supportive therapies to survivors and their families; and training to improve the quality of care survivors receive from their therapist as well as train new therapists to enter the trauma field.
