Building Resilience as an NGO: Five Strategy Principles
Building Resilience as an NGO: Five Strategy Principles
By Jackson Salter, Olav Stavnem, and Charlotte Vangsgaard
In response to growing geopolitical uncertainty, how can NGOs continue to do impactful work and remain financially robust?
Faced with this existential question, many NGOs are considering how to diversify their donor pool and introduce innovative funding mechanisms. Amid these efforts, NGOs should not forget a more fundamental precondition to succeed: building a strong strategy.
Having a plan is not a strategy, to reference leading strategy advisor Roger Martin. Strategy is the integrated set of choices that defines how an organisation will achieve its objectives and create competitive advantage. A strategic plan operationalises strategy into specific actions, timelines, resources, and metrics.
Caught in the frenzy of chasing funds and executing projects, many NGOs see the strategy-building process as a time-intensive luxury, so it gets deprioritised. But without strategy’s anchoring and guiding power, these NGOs are prone to mission drift, scope creep, and other pitfalls which can lead to ineffectiveness and fragility.
To dig into this deeper, we spoke to Fara Ndiaye from Speak up Africa, Shaveta Sharma-Kukreja from Central Square Foundation, and Emma Hakansson from Collective Fashion Justice. These NGOs – despite their diverse histories, missions, and geographic scopes – all prioritise strategy and continue to reap its benefits. Their collective experiences and learnings have been crystallised into five strategy principles that are broadly applicable to building a resilient organisation that can thrive in an uncertain climate.
Speak up Africa (est. 2011) is an African-led, Senegal-based policy and advocacy organisation working with leaders and changemakers in Africa and beyond to solve the continent’s pressing sustainable development challenges.
Central Square Foundation (est. 2012) is dedicated to enhancing the learning outcomes of all school-going children across India through system-led reforms. Their initiatives span innovation and policy to practice and focus on learning impact at scale.
Collective Fashion Justice (est. 2021) works to shift the fashion industry beyond the use of animal-derived materials towards a system coined total ethics fashion which prioritises the well-being of people, animals, and the planet.
The Five NGO Strategy Principles
1. Be the oak tree, not the weathervane
Without a clear strategy, NGOs are prone to becoming weathervanes, blown by the wind in the direction of donor priorities and funding opportunities. While NGOs need funding to exist, indiscriminately taking on projects can turn an organisation into a jack of all trades and master of none. By saying yes to an opportunity that diverts from its core mission, an NGO secures short-term financial security but often at the detriment of long-term credibility and differentiation.
A clear strategy enables an organisation to become an oak tree that stands its ground and sticks to its mission. Strategy provides an anchor point and framework for evaluating opportunities against organisational priorities – giving the confidence to say “no” to initiatives that do not align with core mission and focus areas.
“For an NGO it is easy to allow mission creep based on different donors’ own priorities,” says Sharma-Kukreja from Central Square Foundation. “Having a well-articulated strategy at an organisational level enabled us to stay focused, and we learnt to say no to even high-need areas like middle school and high school which were not part of our strategic focus of cultivating Foundational Literacy and Numeracy (FLN) by the end of grade 3.”
“Intuition can only take you so far. Strategy gives us something to return to and center ourselves around,” adds Hakansson. Collective Fashion Justice made the strategic choice to focus its efforts where they will reverberate most: on the luxury, upper mainstream, and sustainable vanguard brands whose practices influence the rest of the industry.
2. Embrace “collabetition”
NGOs often struggle to position themselves effectively in the competitive funding landscape. Defining and crafting a competitive advantage helps an organisation attract donors, but being too competitive can alienate potential collaborators and allies.
Strategy helps NGOs strike the optimal balance between competition with collaboration. Ideally, collabetition is baked into an NGO’s theory of change.
Central Square Foundation, which leads system-led reforms to improve learning outcomes of all school-going children across India, uses a coalition approach to collaboration. “The devil is in the detail of how we collaborate and who is facilitating that collaboration,” says Sharma-Kukreja.
“It was important for us to work with ReD Associates, who were familiar with our environment, our context, and the donor landscape, to help us identify our comparative advantages and use that to develop a strategy,” adds Ndiaye. “Understanding how to collaborate across different levels is critical to staying relevant.”
3. Don’t chase waves – make meaningful ripples
NGOs often try to ‘chase waves’ by expanding geographically or programmatically. But this often means spreading themselves too thin and making surface-level impact.
Strategy helps organisations prioritise depth over breadth and focus resources on achieving meaningful impact in specific areas. It also helps to break down large challenges into manageable pieces while maintaining the long-term vision – making meaningful ripples.
“I think to make significant positive change in the world, you need a healthy level of delusion,” says Hakansson. “But that’s where the strategy has also helped us reach clarity on how each campaign and sub-campaign feeds into our broader strategic priorities. It gives us a sense of time: change doesn’t happen straight away, but we know we are chipping away at our goals.”
4. Be ready to code-switch
NGOs tend to operate in many different and interconnected worlds, each with their own values, structures, and power dynamics. There are inherent tensions between the world of donors and the worlds of NGOs’ constituents. It can be hard to bridge these, but a strong strategy enables an NGO to know its audiences and be fluent in different spaces.
Ndiaye leads a team that is based in Dakar but “is just as comfortable on a football pitch in Abidjan, at Ministry of Health offices in Ouagadougou or in a board room in Geneva…We know whom to engage and how to engage them.” Deeply embedded in Africa’s sanitation and public health challenges, Speak Up Africa bridges diverse contexts, fostering dialogue and mobilising action to drive impact across the continent.
Similarly, Collective Fashion Justice balances creative empathy for industry leaders and a commitment to changing their priorities. “It’s about being close to where change must come from – the fashion industry – but without losing our teeth in the process,” says Hakansson. “We tone up and down different messages in different contexts, whether we’re communicating with policymakers, industry leaders, or allies from the ecosystem.”
5. Leave room for magic
Without strategy, NGOs often lose their competitive edge and clarity of vision in responding to opportunities, but a great strategy should not be too rigid, either. “The whole process also taught me that you need to leave a little room for magic as well,” says Ndiaye. “A clear strategy, purpose, and roadmap enable us to remain flexible and assess whether new opportunities align with our mission – without being derailed by the unexpected.”
For Sharma-Kukreja, “having a clear direction and alignment while adapting the execution based on on-ground learnings and insights” enabled Central Square Foundation to reach key milestones. A prime example was supporting the Indian Ministry of Education with the design and launch of the national foundational literacy and numeracy (FLN) mission, which aims to achieve universal FLN among children between 3-9 years of age by 2026-27. “This was a heavy audacious goal, to support a country as large and complex as India to do this, and one of my proudest moments with Central Square Foundation so far,” she says.
Conclusion
In principle, a for-profit organisation can continue optimising its strategy forever to generate profit. But what happens when an NGO achieves its mission?
When early childhood education in India is world-class? When the systems driving equitable and sustainable development in Africa are humming? When all animal-derived materials used in fashion have been replaced with next generation materials that genuinely benefit people, animals, and the planet?
“We should just be even more ambitious then!” says Sharma-Kukreja. “Pick the next focus area – solve for middle school! Solve for high school!”
“We haven’t set a closing date, but I admire NGOs that do,” adds Ndiaye. “Having a defined endpoint fosters accountability and ensures that every action is impact-driven. I would love to reach a stage where we can confidently say our work is complete – that would be a true measure of success.”