COVID-19 - NGO ADAPT STRATEGY
How could NGOs adapt their strategy to the current situation with the Coronavirus?
A blog by MindManager is about "How non-government organizations (NGOs) can manage the impacts of COVID-19. This article is broken down into the following sections:
- Taking stock
- Implementing online services
- Closing or postponing activities
- Planning for the future
Taking stock
They describe 2 activities:
1. "Ensure basic administrative capacity (even if you decide to cease operations)."
The first step is ensuring your organization has at least minimal administrative capability throughout the crisis. Even if you decide to postpone or cancel all your activities, you will need some ability to deal with emergencies and urgent inquiries. You may also need to brief the media about your closure and alternative arrangements (if any) for your users, clients or audiences, and to maintain some social media presence.
Ensure you have updated contact details for all staff, volunteers and board members and implement one of the many free or low-cost applications for online meetings, bearing in mind that you may have to provide some basic training. You should also be aware of the security issues involved in using these programs (Gooding, 2020).
2. "Review all activities."
Once you have secured your organization's basic administrative capacity, you should take stock of all your current and planned activities at least to the end of 2020, and then make a decision on how to proceed with each of them. You then need to prioritize the list of activities.
Given the range of policies and issues involved, it's not possible to provide any further advice on the provision of essential services here except to say that any NGOs in this position should work in close consultation with the relevant government and health authorities and follow all relevant laws and regulations (Gooding, 2020). crisis will be less in the future.
Implementing online services
They describe 3 activities:
1. "Develop or review your Working from Home (WFH) policy."
You will also need to take into account the requirements of industrial pay awards, union agreements and staff contracts (Gooding, 2020).
2. "Explore service models."
As well as looking for the feature set best suited to your audience and the wider community, you also need to consider cost and ease of use, as well as security and confidentiality provisions. If there are different price levels, you should look not only at what each offer, but also how easy it is to scale up (or down) (Gooding, 2020).
3. "Develop an implementation strategy."
your organization's staff or volunteers will have to be selected and trained to operate the new service, which may have to be done online. Even if you are not hosting the new service directly, you should integrate it into your website and develop a social media marketing strategy to promote it.
When the service is up and running you should monitor the delivery process and the outcomes. This information will help to inform your decisions about the future direction of the project after the end of the crisis (Gooding, 2020).in the future.
Closing or postponing activities.
They describe 2 activities:
1. "Issues to consider."
While some activities can be provided online, many NGOs will have to pause their activities at least for the duration of the COVID-19 crisis. The image shows the different subjects.
- Budgetary impacts: Small NGOs are particularly vulnerable as, by their nature, they often plan for a break-even result rather than a profit, and they often have only a small amount set aside for contingencies.
All NGOs will have to re-evaluate the budget for each activity and the impacts of either postponing the activity or cancelling it completely. This process will have to take into account all the contractual and other financial obligations (Gooding, 2020).
2. "Developing a strategy to postpone/cancel activities."
The organization now has to develop a strategy to implement the decision it has made about cancellation or postponement. The first step is to inform all stakeholders, starting with the NGO's own staff and volunteers, and fulfilling all the contractual, support and other obligations you identified.
If you are postponing rather than cancelling activities, you will need to establish a process to restart the activity. In effect, this will become the new strategic plan for the delayed project. While ideally it should be based on the original strategic plan, the revised one will have to take into account the changes you have already made and those which you are likely to make in future as a result of COVID-19's impact (Gooding, 2020).
Planning for the future.
They describe 3 activities:
1. "Set up online sessions with staff/volunteers to."
2. "Support Staff and Volunteers."
You can also support your staff and volunteers by encouraging them to undertake online training in areas related to their work activities - and perhaps some that aren't. Maintain team cohesion by setting up virtual social gatherings of staff, board members and volunteers. You could hold online one-on-one debriefing sessions with individual staff members. Above all, provide opportunities for your staff and volunteers to seek assistance if they need it (Gooding, 2020).
3. "Monitor WFH (Working from Home) and online service delivery models used in the crisis." (Gooding, 2020).