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What is a development plan?
A development plan is a strategic document that sets out your organisation’s vision and aims for the future and the actions you’ll take to achieve them. It acts as a roadmap to support the growth and development of your organisation over a specified period.
Your development plan should also feed into and compliment your other strategic documents, for example your business plan.
Benefits of having a development plan?
A development plan can:
- Help you identify your vision and aims.
- Provide a strategic plan to help achieve your short and longer-term goals.
- Help you plan for your future by identifying your current position and opportunities for improvement.
- Provide a clear direction and purpose for everyone to work towards.
- Help you set out how you’ll attract and retain participants and volunteers.
- Demonstrate to external stakeholders (including funders) that your organisation is well run and plans to grow.
- Help secure your future sustainability.
- Help ensure the efficient and effective use of resources.
- Help you proactively develop plans to mitigate any foreseeable challenges and risks.
- Improve links with local partners.
Creating a development plan?
Creating a development plan may seem like a daunting task but should be seen as an exciting and engaging process that helps to give everyone a clear, shared plan for the future. Help make this process easier by:
- Involving the right people. If you can, create a small working group, involving people with different skills and knowledge to help shape your plan. You may already have a skills audit, which you can use to help select the right people.
- Assigning roles and responsibilities. Once you’ve established your working group, assign people tasks to improve your effectiveness, communication, and collaboration. You could also form a sub-committee who report progress back to the main committee.
- Consulting with your people. An effective development plan will be developed in consultation with others, including your participants, volunteers, and wider stakeholders. This will ensure it represents and has buy-in from everyone.
- Be clear on what you want to achieve and by when. It’s important that your plan is achievable and realistic. Through consultation outline what you want to achieve and by when. Development plans vary in duration from 1 year – 10+years, so it’s important to pick a timescale that’s appropriate for you and what you want to achieve.
What should a development plan cover?
Your development plan should cover all aspects of your operations. It should seek to answers five key questions, including:
The first step in creating a development plan is to be clear on what your organisation’s purpose and vision is. Think about what’s most important to you and your people. Write down your shared values. Having a clear and united understanding of this from the outset will help you identify your future aims and actions as you move through the stages of creating a development plan.
Be sure to find out what your current position is. You can do this by conducting a thorough analysis of your strengths (S) and weaknesses (W), and the opportunities (O) and threats (T) you may face. When creating your SWOT analysis, be sure to consider all aspects of your organisation, including your:
- Participant and membership base (including who you currently reach, who you don’t and who you want to target).
- Workforce (voluntary and paid).
- Training and qualifications.
- Facilities.
- Activities (including those you offer and those you may wish to).
- Finances.
- Marketing and communications.
- Community links.
- Governance structures.
Example…
Strengths (What we do well) · Strong volunteer workforce. · Wide variety of activities offered to participants across varying age groups and abilities. |
Weaknesses (What we could improve) · Limited available finances to support the development of our organisation. · Limited social media following, and promotion of the activities offered. |
Opportunities (Chances to improve our operations - internal and external) · Attract participants, members, and volunteers from a range of different backgrounds. · Create more partnerships with local organisations to raise awareness of our organisation. |
Threats (Things that could impact our offer and delivery (internal and external). · Tenure on our leased facility is expiring in 18 months. · Cost of living crisis (decrease in people’s disposable income). · Increased running costs for the organisation (energy costs and consumables). |
Once you’ve completed the SWOT analysis, discuss the findings and implications with your committee or leadership team. Use this opportunity to identify any challenges to address and priorities to develop. You can use these to create a set of goals and objectives that align with your overall vision and mission.
Once you’ve analysed where you are, focus on where you want to be in the future. Think about the findings of your SWOT analysis and your overall vision to determine some short, medium, and longer term aims. Be sure you build on your strengths, address any weaknesses, capitalise on any opportunities, and be aware of and mitigate against potential threats.
Ensure your aims are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) and are realistic in terms of timescales, cost, and the resources that you have available.
The next step is to plan how you’ll achieve the SMART aims you have set. It’s good to break down aims into smaller, easier to achieve actions which can form the basis of your organisation’s development. Ideally, your action plan will cover your:
- Aims - what you want to achieve.
- Actions – the specific steps that will need to be taken to achieve each aim.
- Timescales – when each action will be achieved (short, medium, or long term).
- Responsibility - the person/people that’ll be responsible for each action.
- Resources – how much it will cost, what people, equipment and time is needed.
- Success measure – how you will track progress and know you’ve succeeded.
Example…
Aims |
Actions |
Timescales |
Responsibility |
Resource |
Success Measures |
Increase the number of female participants under the age of 18 by 20% before the end of next season. |
Run a weekly taster session for 6 weeks, at a local secondary school (within 5-mile radius of our organisation) for females under the age of 18.
|
Short term - 6 weeks. 1 x hour long sessions per week at a local secondary school |
Coach of female sessions. |
· Time commitment of the secretary to make initial contact, maintain relationship with the school, and meet any requirements of partnerships (e.g. insurance and DBS checks). · Time commitment of the female coach to run weekly sessions at the local secondary school. A total of 6 sessions will be delivered. · Expenses for the coach to travel to weekly sessions. The rate of expenses will be £0.40pence per mile. Maximum cost £24 across the 6 weeks (based on 10-mile round trip every week for 6 weeks). |
· Females under the age of 18, engage with the taster sessions and become members of the organisation. · Partnership with the school is successful and there’s the opportunity to explore further partnership working in the future. · Roll out taster sessions to other local schools to further promote our offer and encourage engagement from females under the age of 18 from the local area. |
Undertake research to establish the needs and motivations of females under the age of 18 to help identify any changes required to our current offer. Needs and motivations to be established via an online survey. |
Medium Term - Within next 4 months |
Coach of female sessions. |
· Time commitment of secretary to promote survey to target audience via local secondary schools. · Time commitment of the female coach to undertake research and analyse results. · Cost of using survey software to develop survey and analyse results. · Costs associated with adapting sessions based on research findings. |
· Understand the needs and motivations of females under the age of 18. · Adaptions are made to the current activity offer to cater for the needs and motivations of females under the age of 18. |
|
Increase promotion of activities for females under the age of 18 via social media platforms (Instagram, Facebook and X, formally Twitter) by using current female participants to share their experiences of our organisation. |
Short Term - 6 weeks in duration. At same time as taster sessions running at local secondary school. |
Social media lead. |
· Time commitment of social media manager to increase social media posts and share experiences of current participants. · Time commitment of current female participants to share their experiences.
|
· Increased social media posts across all platforms promoting the organisation's offer for females under the age of 18. · Females under the age of 18 engage with social media activity. · Females under the age of 18 attend sessions at the organisation after engaging with social media posts. |
Once you’ve developed your action plan, be sure to make it available to your participants, members, workforce (both paid and voluntary), sponsors, and community partners. If you’re applying for funding, you may also want to share your plan with funding organisations to demonstrate what you want to achieve and how you will do this.
It’s important to regularly monitor your progress against the aims and actions you have set. This will ensure you continue to move in the right direction and help you recognise and measure what you’ve achieved. Your development plan should be a working document, so it is important to regularly review and monitor it. Not only will this enable you to monitor progress, but also update or make revisions due to unforeseen delays or changes to circumstances e.g. people or available finance.