International NGO expands size and scope

A small non-government organization anticipated a period of global expansion and needed a long-range plan. The executive team intended to expand staff in the near future to several new countries. They needed specific long-range goals to focus on, but had few definite ideas in mind. The staff consisted largely of scientists, who said they had little familiarity with any form of long- range or organizational planning.
The situation and factors at play
This NGO started modestly in the late 1990s with a small staff within a related government department, some international grants, and a passion to increase public health around the world. The staff were primarily experts in their own fields of scientific endeavor. The government was ready to spin off this group of staff and to cut direct government ties. To act on their new mandate and become autonomous from the government, the entire staff embarked on a participatory strategic planning process that would launch the organization. They needed to articulate their new mission, register the NGO as a corporation, secure potential funding, create a public face, and plan for multilateral relationships with organizations in many other nations.
The planning
The participatory strategic planning occurred over three months, with a ToP practitioner leading the 14 staff and leaders over five separate daylong sessions, and the staff gathering additional data between sessions. The facilitated process included an historical scan; a societal trend analysis; a framework-building session to consider potential partners; vision, contradictions, and strategies workshops, with action planning to the strategic objective level. Over the next four years, the ToP practitioner worked with the executive and senior management, spending 50 days on curriculum building, international conferences, operational planning, and several think tanks, all of which were related to implementing the strategic plans.
Impact and results
One strategy was to promote advocacy and social marketing seminars. Within four years, inter- national training programs had been held in Europe and the Middle East with trainees from 20 nations. The trainees were then able to promote and launch government-funded programs in each country, gathering and applying compelling scientific evidence from around the world.
Another objective was to conduct needs assessments for three continents. These assessments were completed and the partner organizations and governments that participated in the assessments became allies in the NGO’s efforts.
The major objective of holding open partnership forums resulted in several forums, of which one of
the largest was in Southeast Asia. Government ministers, officials, and industry owners from seven nations attended for five days, and the president of the host country visited the forum. This partnership forum resulted in the establishment of goals and objectives for each of the seven nations.
As a result of these efforts, hundreds of scientific papers have been written and shared widely to accelerate the health benefits in each nation. Media campaigns were launched in 30 nations, targeting people with authority to change public health policies. As this NGO has steadily grown and opened offices on three continents, positive health impacts have been documented for 250 million people in 65 countries.