Three Days in Bali

July 19, 2013

Hi All,

Busy time in Bali to begin this trip. Three-day off-site meeting. 30 people. No opportunity for an advance design. It was all on the fly. Arrived Sunday afternoon. Met with Nengah and Yati right after that to plan the first 1/2 day. Began the meetings first thing Monday morning (no time for jet-lag recovery) and designed and led the meeting on the fly after that. It worked.

Strategic Planning this year was all about their “budget crisis”. And, it was/is a crisis! Annual budget IDR 6 Billion. Reliable donations IDR 2 Billion. Annual shortfall – IDR 4 Billion. (Worse than I anticipated) So, that was the focus for the entire three days.

I think we got a pretty good grip on the issues and on what has to happen to survive this crisis.

We’ve now got a new Development Director (a notion they’d never hear of before) — Stiti. Everyone else is responsible to pitch in and support her. It took some time but we finally got that notion understood and agreed to. Here is Stiti leading one of the many sessions she handled so well.

We spent a lot of time getting absolutely clear on their “value proposition”. In other words, a clear statement about why it is an absolute great value for a donor to contribute money to Widhya Asih. Their first effort was so-so at best. In a caring way I told them that and challenged them to do their best work. Finally, with another 2-3 hours of work that happened. I challenged them to get to “WOW”. They got to WOW – finally.

Here is Stiti and Her Value Proposition

We spent time to reach agreement that — and understand why — it is much harder to get a new donor than it is to keep an existing donor. (We began that discussion at about 50/50) Whew! We did this with lots of involvement and small group discussions.

Then we spent a lot of time on the “care and feeding of donors”

After that we moved into developing new donors … which they need badly. With a little encouragement and a lot of small group work they identified over 200 possibilities for new donors. Not bad for starters.

Here they are working on that issue

More time was spent on how to present the value proposition to these 200 possibilities. (Only four people in the room had actually ever asked anyone for money before. ) Clearly beginners at the process. We prepared “talking points”. We role played visits. Still more work to do, but we got a good start into the process.

Finally we concluded with individual, publicly presented commitments of exactly what each person is going to do to support Stiti in her new role.

Whew! We got it done, and done well. And we had a lot of fun along the way.

All is well … more to follow.