Action with Impact: Making Longer-Term Plans in 2019

By the WILPF US Development Committee

What drives our successful actions? YOU do! Planning NOW for success will allow you to have greater impact in your communities.

Ask any major funder what moves them to invest in an organization and most will prioritize one thing above others: Action with Impact.  

That’s right. They want to see not only what we did, but what impact it had.
 
So the Development Committee is asking members and branches to plan and report in a new way on their actions.    

Why? Because the way you plan, evaluate, and document your work affects our ability to obtain grants and major gifts.  
   
Why Short Timeline Events Are Low Impact

Planning must be a more strategic and long-term effort. Flexibility in scheduling is good and important, but we can’t continually allow so much flexibility that we agree to take on an event or protest or community forum with only a month or two to get it off the ground.

Of course our expert and experienced members can organize an event in a month or two. But should we?

Such a short timeline almost always guarantees less visibility and low impact.   

With only a month or two to plan:

• the audience will likely be limited to ‘the usual suspects,’ with no time or energy to reach out beyond our members and ‘friends.’
• the number of WILPF members who work on the event preparation will be a very small contingent, so the majority of the branch will feel little to no investment in the event’s success.
• no energy will be dedicated to media outreach and little to ally engagement/collaboration, so even without a dedicated mailing to a large segment of the community, no one will hear about the event outside your inner circle. If a tree falls in the woods and no one hears it……

For all of these reasons and more, the final impact for the branch, the members, and the community for such efforts is very ‘light.’    

An astute evaluation might question the gain compared to the effort. And what will have changed because you held this quickly planned event?   

You can have the best speaker in the world, on the most urgent topic, but without enough lead time to get the word out, that speaker will be wasted. She might have had a much more important impact with a larger crowd elsewhere.

The Importance of Collaboration

Close on the heels of impact measurement for importance to funders, is the amount and quality of collaboration an organization undertakes. The public outcry for organizations to combine efforts, not duplicate them, has filtered to funders. And with good reason. This is a sensible thing to expect.

Co-sponsorships have been the way that many of our branches expand their reach and visibility. They are becoming much more important and we’re being asked to reach out to new allies on a consistent basis. Many funders today ONLY fund events or actions that combine two or more organizations that cross issues, combine goals, share resources, and intersect in types of members.

The sheer act of meeting together in a consistent and frequent way in the lead-up to plan an event is important in itself. You are creating new relationships that become more critically important as forces seek to divide us. So don’t leave your old peace allies behind…. But put MOST of your energy into connecting and building bridges with NEW, younger, more culturally and economically diverse groups. This may call for some creativity. If you need suggestions and materials, let WILPF-US help!  

Bring an idea, and let the other organization lead. But don’t give up your visibility or your identity. Be the wind beneath their wings. Promote their organization and goals…but without allowing WILPF’s name, logo and information to get sidelined.

Share the concept as soon as it arises and before it is cast in stone. When you are meeting with new allies, suggest a collaboration that involves them from the start. Plan it together, so neither of you owns it. Provide warm bodies, voices, and signs…and invest dollars in the effort if you can.

Reach out to groups that might only peripherally be interested in peace issues, but whose interests in violence prevention, gun control, single-payer healthcare, women’s rights, food insecurity, and civil, labor, and human rights are in alignment with yours. In this way, their members learn about WILPF, and your members learn you can depend on them as allies.  

Looking Farther Ahead & Documenting Your Impact

In 2019 we’ll be asking branches and issue committees to look farther ahead—to plan for the next two years of a project, not the next two months.
 
We’ll be asking you to stretch your collaborations and reach out in new ways. We’ll be requesting that you plan an evaluation process as you plan your event.

And we’ll be hoping you can invigorate more members to be part of the planning and execution, inspire more members of the public to come out and learn something they didn’t know before they attended your event.  

We’ll also be asking you to document carefully who was there, how many people worked on the event, how many people attended, what new partners you gained, and to measure carefully what impact you had in your community.   

Failing to plan is planning to fail.    

So let’s start to work with a long-term plan that takes you, your issues, and WILPF farther into the future.