Planning and Decision Making in Uncertain Times: Watch Our Online Briefing

Planning for what’s next can be paralyzing as the health and economic crises pose increasingly daunting challenges for nonprofits, foundations, and the people they serve. But organizations and their boards can find ways to get ready for what’s coming by planning for different scenarios, experts from Monitor Institute by Deloitte told an online session held by the Chronicle last week.

The session was a follow-up to the institute’s new report, An Event or an Era, which was based on interviews with more than 75 experts from foundations, nonprofits, and other entities who offered forecasts about what is likely to happen in coming months and years.

Jennifer Holk, a manager at the institute, and Gabriel Kasper, its managing director, explained how to use the approach to plan for the short term and long term.

Scenario planning, Kasper said, is “a structured way of thinking about the future that’s rooted in the recognition that, even in the best of times, we can’t accurately anticipate what’s going to come ahead.” He added: “The goal is to create multiple concepts of how the future might unfold and rehearse responses to them.”

Holk and Kasper advised nonprofit leaders and grant makers doing scenario planning to reckon with five things their research indicates will take place:

• The pandemic will intersect with and compound other trends, which include widening disparities in health and education.
• The need for services will outstrip capacity; nonprofits face real limits about whose needs will be met.
• A sizable number of charities will close; experts estimate that 10 to 40 percent of nonprofits will fold.
• The impact of the crises will fall disproportionately on people of color and other marginalized groups, and inequities will increase.
• Differences in outbreak rates and reopening strategies will cause “varying levels of crises and need across both geography and time”; in other words, people will experience the pandemic differently depending on where they live.

They then identified critical “unknowns” and zeroed in on two: the severity of the health and economic crises and the amount of social cooperation at the national level.

Using these variables, they depicted four scenarios of varying severity and recommended that nonprofits plan for all four possible outcomes.

To do so, Holk and Kasper recommended leaders these steps, among others:

• Tailor the scenarios to your organization, mission, and the people and places it serves
• Test current approaches against each scenario, asking how your organization would adapt in each situation.
• Identify actions you should take now regardless of the outcome.

Watch the full session here, including answers to audience questions on tactics, strategy, communication, fundraising, grant making, and more.