Successful for-profit companies rely on strategic planning to maximize their impact and ensure long-term success. Successful patient advocacy groups must do that as well.
Strategic planning is a multi-step process in which an organization’s leaders define the goals of the organization and the strategies that will be implemented to achieve these goals. Through strategic planning, patient advocacy groups can enhance their effectiveness, foster sustainable growth, and navigate the Canadian healthcare landscape.
Step One: Clarify Your Mission and Vision
The first step in strategic planning is to establish a clear and compelling mission and vision. These should succinctly describe the patient advocacy group’s purpose and the future they imagine for the patient community. Just as successful for-profits align their strategies with a well-defined mission, patient advocacy groups should use this step to guide decision-making and prioritize initiatives that directly contribute to their organizational goals. For example, if you mission is to find a treatment for a disease, your strategies should be focused on funding researchers. If you mission is to help families, your strategies should be focused on figuring out what the families need and finding ways to give them what they need.
Step Two: SWOT Analysis
A SWOT analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats) is a strategic planning tool widely used by successful for-profits. In a SWOT analysis, internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats are identified and analyzed. For example, within a patient advocacy group there may be a lot of hard-working volunteers (strength) but they may not have any volunteers with digital marketing skills (weakness). Outside of this group, there may be an opportunity to partner with a related patient organization, but a widespread decrease in grant approvals may be a significant threat to the group.
Performing a SWOT analysis allows an organization to home in on its strengths, address weaknesses, seize opportunities, and proactively mitigate threats. By understanding internal and external environments, patient advocacy groups can make informed decisions and increase their effectiveness as an organization.
SWOT analysis table using the above examples:
Step Three: Set Long-Term Goals
Strategic planning involves setting long-term goals and establishing smaller, actionable short-term goals to achieve them. Patient advocacy groups can benefit greatly from this process as it gives everyone in the group common objectives and digestible ways to reach them. Importantly, the short-term goals should be specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound (SMART) to ensure that the goals are well-defined, feasible, and able to be evaluated. For example, if a group has a long-term goal of increasing awareness among the public about their disease area, some corresponding SMART goals might be to create eight educational resources within the next four months to put on the group’s website and/or launch a targeted awareness campaign on social media in the next six months.
Step Four: Monitor and Adapt
Successful for-profit organizations continuously monitor their performance, adapt to changing environments, and refine their strategies accordingly. Similarly, patient advocacy groups should regularly monitor and evaluate the success of their projects. This can be done in a number of ways including asking for feedback from patients/caregivers or comparing the budgeted time and money established in step three to actual time and money spent. This leads to continuous improvement and ensures that the strategies implemented remain relevant to the evolving needs of the patient community.
In conclusion, incorporating strategic planning into the core operation of your patient advocacy groups can lead to greater impact and increased sustainability. By defining clear missions, engaging stakeholders, conducting SWOT analyses, setting achievable goals, and remaining adaptive your organizations can better navigate the complex healthcare landscape.
