Redesigning the Oak Foundation's Organizational Development Strategy
Introduction
The Oak Foundation dedicates its resources to addressing issues of global social and environmental concern, especially those that have a major impact on the lives of disadvantaged people. With offices in Europe, Africa, India, and North America, the Oak Foundation provides grants to organizations in approximately 40 countries worldwide through its 8 programs: Environment, Housing and Homelessness, International Human Rights, Issues Affecting Women, Learning Disabilities, Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse, Special Interest, Brazil, Oak Foundation Denmark, India, and Zimbabwe.
Oak views Organizational Development as a means to enhance its core business of grantmaking. The Foundation supports its partners in maximizing their skills and capabilities to fulfill their respective missions by accessing and benefiting from quality organizational development programs. This work is led by a cross-program team, supported by program representatives.
The call
The Oak Foundation has been continuously evolving its Organizational Development approach and needed support in updating its non-financial support strategy for beneficiaries. The goal was to ensure it remained aligned with best practices in the field and met the needs of its partners.
Results
As a result of this process, we redesigned the Theory of Change for Oak's organizational development work. In doing so, we were able to bring clarity to the problems it is solving and the impacts it generates at various levels, including the Foundation itself, its beneficiaries, peers in the field of Philanthropy, and Organizational Development Practitioners.
We also reviewed the scope of Oak's work in the area of organizational development, the guiding principles for its non-financial support, and the types of organizational strengthening services offered. All of these elements were carefully redesigned considering the contributions of recently conducted beneficiary perception research, best practices and trends in the field of philanthropy, and the perspectives of relevant internal stakeholders.
The process also included the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess the progress and contribution of its support to organizational development over time, a framework that can be used in annual planning, and a strategic document that consolidates all elements of the new strategy to be used in internal communications.
The process and methodology
The process included:
Documentary analysis focused on understanding the previous strategy and the results of the recently conducted beneficiary perception survey.
Interviews with internal stakeholders to obtain different perspectives on the current and future vision of organizational development work.
Benchmarking with 13 organizations in the philanthropic sector that also provide some type of non-financial support to their beneficiaries, in order to understand trends and best practices that can inspire Oak's strategy in this area.
Two-day in-person workshop at Oak's headquarters in Switzerland with the organizational development team and program managers to work on redesigning the strategy.
Virtual workshops with Oak's organizational development advisory group to evolve the strategy and its key elements.
Recurring meetings with the organizational development team to guide the process and work on refining and detailing the new Theory of Change and supporting strategic documents.