Tools in CommunityOrganizing

WHAT IS A SWOT ANALYSIS AND WHY SHOULD YOU USE ONE?

SWOT stands for: Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat. A SWOT analysis guides you to identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses (S-W), as well as broader opportunities and threats (O-T). Developing a fuller awareness of the situation helps with both strategic planning and decision-making.The SWOT method was originally developed for business and industry, but it is equally useful in the work of community health and development, education, and even for personal growth.SWOT is not the only assessment technique you can use. Compare it with other assessment tools in the Community Tool Box to determine if this is the right approach for your situation. The strengths of this method are its simplicity and application to a variety of levels of operation

WHEN DO YOU USE SWOT?

A SWOT analysis can offer helpful perspectives at any stage of an effort. You might use it to:• Explore possibilities for new efforts or solutions to problems.• Make decisions about the best path for your initiative. Identifying your opportunities for success in context of threats to success can clarify directions and choices.• Determine where change is possible. If you are at a juncture or turning point, an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses can reveal priorities as well as possibilities.• Adjust and refine plans mid-course. A new opportunity might open wider avenues, while a new threat could close a path that once existed. SWOT also offers a simple way of communicating about your initiative or program and an excellent way to organize information you've gathered from studies or surveys.

WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A SWOT ANALYSIS?

A SWOT analysis focuses on Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

*Remember that the purpose of performing a SWOT is to reveal positive forces that work together and potential problems that need to be recognized and possibly addressed.

*We will discuss the process of creating the analysis below, but first here are a few sample layouts for your SWOT analysis.

HOW DO YOU CREATE A SWOT ANALYSIS?

*The most common users of a SWOT analysis are team members and project managers who are responsible for decision-making and strategic planning.*But don't overlook anyone in the creation stage!*An individual or small group can develop a SWOT

analysis, but it will be more effective if you take advantage of many stakeholders. Each person or group offers a different perspective on the strengths and weaknesses of your program and has different experiences of both.*Likewise, one staff member, or volunteer or

stakeholder may have information about an opportunity or threat that is essential to understanding your position and determining your future.

WHY Conduct SWOT? SWOT analysis; • Helps you focus on your strengths, minimize weaknesses and threats, take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities, and become outstanding in competitions. • Helps you determine whether the objective is attainable; therefore, set achievable goals and objectives for the organization, as well as subsequent steps. • Helps you dedicate to your mission, fulfill the vision, adjust to social context, achieve strategic goals, develop effective action plans, and conduct objective evaluations. • Helps you gather meaningful information from your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), in order to maximize the benefits of your evaluation and advantage.

Appreciative Inquiry

What is Appreciative Inquiry?

*Appreciative Inquiry has been described in a myriad of ways: as a radically affirmative approach to change which completely lets go of problem-based management and in so doing vitally transforms strategic planning, survey methods, culture change, merger integration methods… measurement systems; as a paradigm of conscious evolution geared for the realities of the new century; as the most important advance in action research in the past decade; as offspring and “heir” to Maslow’s vision of a positive social science; and as a methodology that takes the idea of the social construction of reality to its positive extreme - with its emphasis on metaphor and narrative, relational ways of knowing, on language, and on its potential as a source of generative theory.

Appreciative Inquiry is the cooperative, co-evolutionary search for the best in people, their organizations and communities, and the world around them. It involves systematic discovery of what gives “life” to an organization or community when it is most effective, and most capable in economic, ecological, and human terms.

The four key phases of an AI process are:

• Discovery - mobilizing a whole system, multiple stakeholder inquiry into the positive core; • Dream - creating a results-oriented vision based in discovered potential and questions of higher purpose, i.e., “What is the world calling us to become?”• Design - creating possibility propositions of the ideal organization or community, articulating a design capable of drawing upon and magnifying the positive core to realize the newly expressed dream; and• Destiny - strengthening the affirmative capability of the whole system enabling it to build hope and sustain momentum for on- going positive change and high performance.

Thank You