Studer Community Institute

Helping nonprofits chart their future

November 13, 2014
/ Carlton Proctor
/ training-development

Lynne Cunningham is a senior coach and speaker for Studer Group. One of the original team members of the healthcare consulting firm, Cunningham has more than four decades of experience in the health care industry, including 30 years experience as a consultant specializing in facilitating group dynamics and strategic planning. Cunningham will be the lead facilitator for a Studer Institute-sponsored seminar in strategic planning for local nonprofit organizations and small businesses Friday. Pensacola Today caught up with Cunningham earlier this week as she was on her way to speak to a group in Minnesota. Question: Would you describe plans for the seminar Friday and what you hope to accomplish? Answer: We are going to talk about how to develop and execute a strategic plan so that it's not such a grueling process that one never gets implemented. It's the process of assembling a strategic plan that I'll be teaching to the attendees Friday. And I'll talk about how to apply this overall process to their individual organizations. Q: How many individuals do you expect to attend the seminar? A: Maximum registration was supposed to be 200, but there was such a demand we ended up cutting it off at 240. That's a very good indication, in fact, that there's a lot of interest in the topic in this community. Q: Walk us through the day, both morning and afternoon sessions. A: In the morning I'm going to so some teaching about how to apply the process to a small business or not-for-profit. Then we'll do an an interview with the executive director of a Pensacola non-for-profit that has been using this process for the last three or four years to develop and update their strategic plan. Then in the afternoon we're actually going to be doing a case study with real data for Manna Food Pantries. We're going to develop a strategic plan right there in the room for everybody to see. Q: You're going to have so many individual groups and businesses with very diverse goals in the room, how can you develop a strategic plan that they can take away and effectively apply to their organization? A: Picture an hourglass. and at the top of the hourglass there is lots of input from lots of different people. And as you reach the narrow part of the hour glass fewer and fewer people are involved as they sort through the data and information, and analyze strengths and weaknesses and developing strategic goals. Once you develop strategic goals you go into the bottom part of the hourglass and you start communicating very broadly what you're going to be doing and how people are going to be impacted by the work that you're doing. Q: How data-driven is this process? A: It needs to be as data-driven as possible, and I think that's one of the difficulties facing smaller not-for-profits or small proprietary businesses. Typically, they don't have a lot of data. Getting usable data frequently is the biggest challenge we have when trying to development an effective strategic plan for small organizations. It's not like working with large hospitals, which have lots of data. Q: Overall, do you find these day-long seminars are actually beneficial to small business owners and not-for-profits? A: Yes, they are effective. I just feel like strategic planning is as much about having a mindset about looking ahead to the future and where you should be going as anything. I'll give you an example: We send out pre-surveys to people who will be attending the seminar, and one of the questions is about their board of directors. One of the participants in Friday's seminar wrote back and said, "Our business is just my husband and me, and I don't know if this question about our board of directors is applicable." And my response was, "Whether it's a formal board, or just you and your husband, it's a way of thinking about how you go about making decisions for the future."

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Helping nonprofits chart their future

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