Participation is a key tool in gaining buy-in (“Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn.” —Benjamin Franklin) This is the underpinning of good, participatory classroom management, but it also applies to strategic planning and, frankly, everything we do. We have found wide participation in developing the strategic plan is key to getting the most out of the plan as it gets implemented. First, it is beneficial to hear a wide range of feedback from staff and other key stakeholders to challenge and expand your thinking. As we already mentioned, we do this with country and global office staff through a series of roundtable discussions. Staff have deep knowledge about what is working, how it is working, and what might be able to work better. Their experience is often more relevant and practical than general research or theoretical constructs. This engagement is also important for eventual buy-in for the final plan. We have found that people appreciate their feedback being heard and considered, even if not ultimately the direction that is selected.

We also invite a wide array of our supporters to provide feedback. The invitation helps get everyone into the tent and remain committed long term to our mission. Strategic planning conversations are great ways to engage in an authentic way about our work and the challenges posed in it. They build a shared responsibility in jointly owning the future direction of the organization and encouraging people to invest their time, networks, and financial resources in achieving the plan.

Define who the final decision makers are up front (“Input by the many, decisions by the few.” —Anonymous) A decision-making body should be defined for clarity and transparency. The management team, consisting of all the heads of departments, along with our board of directors, are the final decision makers at Room to Read. It doesn’t really matter as much who the body includes (though a very large group can make decision making more challenging), just that it is defined up front, so that when you inevitably encounter some thorny, controversial issues, everyone is aware who will make the ultimate decision. We select a subcommittee of our board of directors for each strategic plan that helps work closely with management throughout the process to ensure no surprises toward the end when management is seeking final approval from the board. Strategic planning is a great opportunity to engage board members deeply in the vision for how the organization plans to continue to evolve, and to enable you to chart a course together.

Leadership matters (“Great leaders don’t set out to be a leader…they set out to make a difference. It is never about the role—always about the goal.” —Anonymous) The CEO must be fully committed to driving the strategic planning process and executing on the final plan. This commitment is one of the deciding factors in whether this is a make-work exercise or a game-changing, transformational one for the organization. And there must be an equally strong commitment on behalf of the board chair and members to engage in the process. Before undertaking a strategic planning process, the CEO must ensure there is sufficient time and adequate resources for all key executives to participate fully. It is important that this is a collaborative process owned by management so that organizational silos and turf wars are avoided and leadership comes together to jointly lay out the road map for the future.

Get help (“Ask for help, not because you are weak, but because you want to remain strong.” —Les Brown) There is a lot of additional work required in the year a strategic plan is developed. One way to support management is to bring in reinforcements for key staff who will be heavily involved, where necessary. We always engage external consultants for our strategic plans. They are particularly useful in facilitating tough, high-stakes conversations and ensure all perspectives are heard and considered. The CEO, or any one person for that matter, shouldn’t dominate conversations to the point that it squelches honest reflection and rigorous debate. We use consultants to share outside research about alternative approaches and ideas. As unbiased facilitators, they are also the best people to conduct interviews with partners, competitors, and key investors.

Cast your net wide and challenge the status quo (“Nothing wilts faster than laurels that have been rested upon.” —Percy Bysshe Shelley) It is important to be open to a wide range of new ideas and approaches at the beginning of a strategic planning process. This is the best time for the organization to do some blue-sky thinking. Additionally, you must assess the organization’s strengths and limitations to being responsive to your environment. We do this generally in the form of a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats). We seek to understand the current landscape and define how we might need to evolve to maintain our comparative advantage and continue to grow our impact. Once we go through this broad brainstorming process, we narrow it down by selecting what we believe Room to Read is best suited to do. In our last strategic plan, for example, we considered nine different options for scaling our impact before we selected launching our technical assistance arm of the business, Room to Read Accelerator.

Convening our critical friends and advisors group is one way we seek objective and unbiased feedback on how we are doing. We ask them to be brutally honest about where our weaknesses are and where the opportunities exist for even greater impact. This feedback is not always easy to receive, but constructive feedback has the potential for being the most transformational. In our second strategic plan, which centered on deepening the impact of our programs, our advisors questioned the organization’s commitment to girls’ education since they felt we had a more developed literacy approach. This challenge garnered our focus to invest even more attention and resources in the Girls’ Education Program to ensure we became a thought leader in issues around gender equality in education.

Use data to inform decisions (“Trust, but verify.” —Ronald Reagan) It is important to use data to balance the advice and perceptions of your staff and other key stakeholders. We use our management- and country-level dashboards along with our monitoring and evaluation reports to root the conversations in a comprehensive picture of how the organization is doing. A balance of qualitative and quantitative analysis is essential.

Always have a BHAG—Big Hairy Audacious Goal—to rally everyone around (“He who is not courageous enough to take risks will accomplish nothing in life.” —Muhammad Ali) Strategic plans work best if they have a BHAG that motivates and inspires your staff and supporters. In our current plan, our big organizational goal that drives the whole plan is, “By 2020, Room to Read will have invested in the futures of at least 15 million children by developing literacy skills and the habit of reading among primary school children and by supporting girls to complete secondary school with strong life skills.” When we show up in any Room to Read country of operation, the staff there know we are driving toward impacting 15 million children, and they feel accountable for their important role in achieving the goal. Annual planning, resource allocation, and country reviews are rooted in this goal. A BHAG is important for motivating external audiences as well. We regularly reference this number when we solicit funds and report back to our investors or communicate with our chapter network. It helps us create a sense of urgency that everyone needs to work hard and ensure we achieve this goal together.

Make sure you define your “no, not yets” (“The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.” —Michael Porter) When you get right down to it, strategic planning is about trade-offs. Eventually, after considering many possibilities, you must decisively choose what you are going to do and, even more importantly, what you are not going to do. This is often the hardest principle for Room to Read to follow, as we have an ambitious nature. However, we have also realized the strain on the organization of pushing too hard within an inevitably resource-constrained environment. This can result in negative backlash as well. Naming what we will not attempt to accomplish yet (for example, working in preservice teacher training instead of in-service training or providing university support for girls) helps set parameters for us.

Hope for the best and plan for the worst in strategic planning (“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.” —Theodore Roosevelt) Trying to get the balance right of setting ambitious yet achievable plans is the aim of strategic planning. Some goals can be identified as stretch goals, but it is helpful to plan for most of your goals to be achievable, with reasonable effort, during your strategic plan period. Otherwise you risk demotivating instead of motivating your staff and stakeholders. No one wants to be on the losing team, forever clawing its way out of a self-imposed hole of a well-intentioned but overwhelming set of goals. We try to be ambitious yet keenly aware of what is realistic given our human resources, expected budget growth, and comparative strengths so that we can set targets that we are cautiously optimistic we can achieve.

Be specific about how you intend to operationalize the plan (“A goal without a plan is just a wish.” —Antoine de Saint-Exupéry) Clear priorities and implementation plans are essential. Developing and writing the strategic plan requires a disciplined effort. However, operationalizing the plan is where the real work begins. For our last strategic plan, we outlined 12 cross-departmental initiatives the organization would undertake in the next five years and wrote detailed charters for each. Each had a management team champion, project manager, and core team that identified the activities, timeline, and budget required to execute the initiative. The management team then regularly tracked progress on implementation plans and centered each year’s annual plan on progressing the overarching strategic plan. This eye on execution and driving for performance is the difference between just having a plan and genuinely realizing the plan.

Communication and utilization (“A problem well defined is a problem half solved.” —John Dewey) The final deliverables of our strategic planning process are a detailed internal version of the plan, a summary external version, and a strategic plan presentation. Communicating the final strategic plan to all participants is key for building momentum to achieve the goals set in the plan. We ask every new employee joining Room to Read to read the plan. Erin as CEO has provided an overview of the plan and a status update on how we are progressing on the five-year plan during onboarding sessions, when she visits country offices, at the chapter leadership conference, at the country management conference, in board of director meetings, and in meetings with major investors. Effective, repetitive communication about how we are progressing in our global strategic plan is an anchoring tool for every major aspect of our organization.

All this is not to say that plans are completely static. We are no better at predicting the future than anyone else, and situations evolve over the period of five years that always require adjustments. Nevertheless, clearly outlining when you have overachieved, just met, or underperformed in a plan is important for transparency and accountability. A lot is learned from plans that do not go as well as expected. Throughout the strategic plan period, it is important to recognize the small wins in progress and reinforce the efforts going into delivering on the plan. At the end of a plan period, doing a rigorous postmortem review helps set up the organizational assessment for the next strategic plan.

This disciplined and transparent approach to managing has helped Room to Read tackle a wide range of challenges through our different stages of organizational growth; make the right investments for building a sustainable, high-performing organization; and continue to improve our work in delivering educational outcomes for children. With a clear road map, we know we have a much higher chance of successfully reaching our goals. A common vision and execution strategy goes a long way in bringing together the multifaceted aspects of a dynamic social enterprise.

Programs and Operations At Room to Read, our theory of change has guided us to focus on the most important and strategic activities to achieve scale. It defines our core program and outlines how we are pursuing scale and system-level change in education. We have tracked and measured our results in terms of reach and impact. We have never tried to be all things to all people and have kept a narrow and consistent programmatic agenda. This has required us to say no to many opportunities that would have otherwise resulted in program creep. Remaining focused allowed us to keep our eye on the prize of having governments adapt and adopt our approaches as our end game. We have also placed as great a value throughout our organizational history on the “how” of our work, our operations, as the “what” of our work in terms of our programmatic models. Effective and efficient implementation and building the capacity of the governments and communities in which we work to sustain our programs supports us in our pursuit of excellence in execution, which increases our impact.

Communications and Fundraising From the start, we realized we were in the collective movement–building business. Carefully managing our brand, investor, and volunteer experience has been key in growing the global movement that keeps supporters engaged and empowered to join us as social change champions. At Room to Read, we have always embraced the power of storytelling as a key component in our ability to build the momentum of this collective movement, which is instrumental in generating the revenue required to support our growth and impact. We prioritize fundraising and communications, find ways to create a sense of urgency for our mission, and see our investors as true partners in our movement. We don’t want to lose another generation of children to illiteracy or gender inequality. The cost of ignorance is too high for society when children don’t grow up educated and empowered to create solutions for tomorrow.

As one of the early entrepreneurial social enterprises, Room to Read has helped demonstrate that philanthropy and social entrepreneurship are two sides of the same coin. Social enterprises have unique approaches to critical social issues facing the world that need to scale. Philanthropists want to support change that will improve the lives of the neediest. This is not a zero-sum game. We must work together to achieve the best results for the greatest number of people.

Leadership and Culture A strong organizational culture has been one of Room to Read’s best assets in navigating well through the organizational stages of development. An organization’s culture is defined and built right from the top by its leaders. Being a mission-driven organization with enduring core values is a nonprofit’s number one recruitment and retention tool for top talent. We know that people stay at Room to Read when they feel they are thriving in a positive, supportive work environment that provides opportunities for growth and development.

Creating such environments requires entrepreneurial social enterprise leaders to have well-developed leadership skills. Leaders must connect with and inspire a wide array of stakeholders, including staff, community members, governments, corporate partners, and investors. Great communication skills are essential. Resilience is key. There will be many times you will think you have failed, but you must keep trying new things, persevering, and moving forward.

For most social challenges in the world, there is rarely a silver bullet. Instead, it is a matter of consistent hard work that over time produces results. Leaders must be prepared to double down and keep working on solutions and driving for scale against the odds. Only in hindsight, over nearly two decades, have we grown to appreciate what Room to Read has accomplished. In the face of adversity, we choose action every time and keep moving forward. Every organization will go through crisis and tough times. You are not defined by the crisis that strikes your organization. Instead, you are defined by how you respond to it.

One of the most important parts of our organizational culture over the years has been a sense of optimism and fun. We have regularly used the power of pause to have some fun, especially when we have been in our fast-growing phases. Team off-sites and meet-ups have allowed us to get to know the people with whom we work so hard. These strategic pauses have also allowed us a moment to think and reflect as a team. The other ingredient critical in building our organizational culture is optimism. Having an uplifting and optimistic narrative for Room to Read’s future has been a powerful intoxicant, especially in those start-up and transition years when you must overcome so many hurdles.

Social entrepreneurs are best when we lead with values and visions. We make choices each day to inspire people to be better, make better choices for our planet and humanity, and show up fully and participate in creating a better world. All those involved in the social impact movement choose not to let doubt, failure, or fear rule the day. Instead, we choose action, hope, and compassion. We are not waiting for someone else to solve today’s problems. We know that each of us can be part of the solution. If not you, who else? We may act and fail, but we believe that is better than never trying in the first place. We are doers, not talkers. We start simple and build up. We are first movers and early adopters. And we hope the knowledge, experience, and wisdom we build collectively will help improve our global society for all. It will take all of us—social entrepreneurs, civil society, philanthropists, corporations, media, and governments—working together to make the biggest difference. The world needs us. There is an opportunity now to make the world a better place that is an incredible responsibility we all have.

Cory and Erin are profoundly proud to be a part of the social impact movement. Most entrepreneurial social enterprises start with a team that has a deep personal conviction that something is wrong. Then an idea germinates and takes hold about how to solve the problem, and that in turn grows into an organization, and more people join the movement. Room to Read’s story is like many others in this regard. We must hold ourselves accountable for maximizing the potential of our organizations to reach the greatest scale and impact possible.

What is our advice in conclusion, then, for those social entrepreneurs and social change champions who want to learn from Room to Read’s history and experience? In many ways, it can be summed up as follows:

• Be driven by passion, and ensure you always sustain that mission-driven core in yourself, the greater team, and in the fabric of the organization’s enduring values.
• Take risks. While success is the ultimate goal, one must sometimes fail. So, fail fast, fail often, and fail forward, as the ethos of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs prescribes. Large, disruptive change to unjust and inequitable systems is unlikely to come easy or without trial and error. If you don’t fail sometimes, you are not taking enough risks or being innovative enough. Learn from each bump along the road.
• Think short term, and work on the things you can solve now, but have a vision and road map for the long run of how you are building a sustainable institution for scale. Define your end game for seeking broader system-level change at the beginning.
• Persevere one decision at a time, one pivot at a time, one crisis at a time. Build resilience into your team and the ability to adapt continually to the landscape and externalities you are not able to control.

It is not an easy path that entrepreneurial social enterprises choose, but know that you are not traveling the path on your own. Many entrepreneurs across industries feel similar challenges. There is a well-known story that entrepreneur Bradley Smith shared about the psychological toll and internal struggles of entrepreneurship. He said, “It’s like a man riding a lion. People think, ‘This guy’s brave.’ And he’s thinking, ‘How the hell did I get on a lion, and how do I keep from getting eaten?’” Despite the challenges, we have still found working in the social impact space to be the most rewarding aspect of our professional lives because at the end of the day we know we are making a difference working to ensure all children have quality educational opportunities in their local communities so they reach their full potential in life.

The growth and expansion of the global social entrepreneurial movement has had a profound positive impact on the world. In the face of adversity, it has brought new thinking and drawn out people’s desire to see a more just and equitable world for all. You see it changing the thinking in board rooms, in classrooms, in community centers, and in chambers of government. The movement is still young and growing, and the impact is just beginning.

For us, the best way to end is with the words of the students who have inspired us to keep going through the ups and downs and twists and turns in working toward positive change in the world. Students like Charmaine, a sixth-grade student Erin had the pleasure of meeting at a library supported by Room to Read at a rural primary school in Mpumalanga Province in South Africa. Charmaine was an unusually articulate and dynamic girl. She wrote us a poem on our visit to thank us for working in her school, because the library had become her favorite place and unleashed her creativity. All of us social entrepreneurs and the social change champions who support great causes around the world are choosing love, compassion, and optimism. Charmaine’s poem beautifully represents the power of all of us coming together, unleashing the possibility of change.

Love Poem

Love is my religion

I could die for it

Love begins at home where it is not how much we do or how much we have that matters

But how much love we give each other that matters…

The degree of loving is measured with the degree of giving

The giving of love is an education in itself

Love is the foundation from which your decisions about your life should be made

In every living thing, there is the desire for love

If you could love enough, you could be the most powerful person in the world

If you want to be loved, be loveable

At the touch of love, everyone becomes a poet

So, let’s meet each other with a smile

For smiles are the beginning of love