Overview

As Big Sisters of BC Lower Mainland approached its 65th anniversary, it was ready to commit to bold new actions that were responsive to a rapidly changing environment creating ever more pressures and opportunities for young girls and gender-diverse youth. Big Sisters retained Spur to lead a community-driven strategic planning process that centred the voices of the youth it served, alongside its dedicated volunteer mentors, passionate staff, insightful board of directors and unwavering supporters.

woman in her twenties with long dredlocks talks to younger woman holding ipad

Key opportunities

This project had several interesting considerations and constraints. Here are just a few:

Political volatility

 This project kicked off amidst significant political, social and economic upheaval in BC, Canada and abroad. Big Sisters needed to know what shifting trends were likely to influence their work in the months and years to come. At the time, the outcomes of two imminent elections were difficult to predict, but they were poised to have a significant impact. Big Sisters turned to Spur to outline likely results, possible implications and proactive measures to ensure sustainability of Big Sisters’ programs.

National brand, local priorities

Big Sisters is the only standalone chapter of the Big Brothers-Big Sisters federation that supports girls and gender-diverse youth, only. It benefits from and aligns with a national brand and mandate with shared values and approaches, while customizing its programming to suit the unique population it serves on a hyper local level. The strategic planning process had to both honour this national framework, while finding ways to lean into what makes this Big Sisters particularly unique. 

Diverse interest holders already at capacity

Every non-profit wants to engage its clients, volunteers, staff, board and donors. In this case, that meant designing an engagement process that was also accessible and inviting to youth and volunteer mentors, already giving a great deal of their time to Big Sisters programs.

Coordinated language & campaign alignment

At the time of the strategic planning project, Big Sisters was also designing and preparing to launch a dynamic brand campaign on the power of mentorship, while securing significant investments to expand a promising new program that removed barriers to post-secondary education for its youth participants. The strategic plan had to weave together language and priorities across these initiatives, ensuring alignment across the organization’s communications.

Our approach

We designed an approach where every stage of work built progressively on the last, fostering clarity and momentum for the project team and board of directors. 

Early on, we worked with the Big Sisters team to confirm the key issue areas that were impacting – or likely to impact – their work the most. These formed the focus areas of our sector trends research and included: the current political landscape (local, provincial, national); trends in social services and philanthropy in Canada; emergent issues for girls, gender-diverse youth and mental health; education and accessibility for girls and gender-diverse youth in BC; volunteer recruitment and engagement amidst an ongoing sector-wide shortage; the future of work in the non-profit sector (including AI and technological innovation); and how non-profits like Big Sisters were responding to increased expectations to action Reconciliation, justice, equity, diversity and inclusion. 

Efficient, insightful trends research

After confirming our focus areas, Spur conducted a rapid review of the most relevant and recently published literature on each topic, summarizing key takeaways to inform how Big Sisters could adapt to changing conditions and likely disruptions.

Coordinated, dynamic engagement and reporting

To honour Big Sisters’ commitment to centering the voices of the people it serves, we designed and executed an engagement process that spanned internal interest holders and external participants and supporters. We designed and facilitated a workshop for staff, a planning retreat for the board of directors and leadership team, along with separate. customized workshops for youth participants and volunteer mentors. Each activity explored similar themes and questions within consistent categories, while approaching questions in different ways to respect and leverage each participant group’s unique perspectives and interests. Every workshop was very well attended, creating a rich pool of data to work with. We also designed and executed a survey that generated data from one of the most diverse populations of respondents we have seen in our work. We analyzed all engagement data and created a comprehensive summary report to inform how the project team and strategic planning board committee would prioritize ideas for the future.

Practical tools for implementation

A well-crafted new strategic plan is inspiring, but it must be accompanied by real guidance and know-how to make it come to life. Spur created a custom operational dashboard for Big Sisters that translated its strategic priorities and initiatives into an interactive, editable planning tool. It was designed to guide staff to unpack each initiative with corresponding actions, with clear deadlines, task owners and space to track progress. The dashboard tallied progress across all key areas, creating a simple, central summary of how far the organization will have come in advancing its commitments over time. We then designed and facilitated a hands-on workshop with all staff to guide them through the process of how to create annual plans from their new plan, and how to use the new dashboard to make it all happen.

Captivating content

After the strategic plan was done and dusted, and the staff trained on how to implement it, we rounded out the project with a final deliverable that could communicate Big Sisters’ exciting future with its external audiences and supporters. Partnering with Britney Berrner Creative, Spur helped develop a video that elevated the voices and experiences of an inspiring Little and Big Sister pair, a story that captured Big Sisters’ values, priorities and emergent programming beautifully. The video was created to have versatility and applicability across many contexts for years to come.

Metrics that matter

We were proud to hit the following key performance indicators:

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workshop participants

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diverse survey respondents

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BIPOC respondents (%)

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strategic initiatives

The results

Big Sisters was delighted with their new strategic plan, their operational dashboard, their new video, and the relationships that were strengthened across the organization throughout the process of our collaboration.

screenshot of the big sisters four goals from its strategic plan

Ready to get started?

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