What is Strategic Planning?

Gavin Give-A-Hoot wants to volunteer

Gavin Give-A-Hoot lives with his wife, Gloria, in Tinyville. Tinyville is a small town in the heart of Tennessee on a lake and not so far from the beautiful mountains. More than five thousand people call Tinyville their home and around thirty thousand live in Tinyville County. This beautiful town has everything that any other small town has like churches, a Wal-Mart, small businesses, factories, and farmers.

Gavin and Gloria Give-A-Hoot decided that it is time to give something back to the community. They are searching for opportunities to help in a field of their interests. They start looking through newspapers and searching the web. Gavin cannot believe that only a handful of organizations are publicly known. He has friends who volunteer, too, but not with those organizations that Gloria and Gavin have found. The Give-A-Hoots love arts and culture so they think Tinyville could use some more events in this area.

Gavin is wondering if the Local Arts Council is still operating; he remembers seeing an article about an arts event almost a year ago. Gloria helps him and finds a website from this organization. It has not been updated, but an email address in the contact section is available. Gavin sends an email and after three weeks, he finally gets an answer.

A standard email: “Dear Sir and Madam, Thank you for your interest in the Tinyville Arts Council. We are meeting once a month to talk about new projects like fundraising, art shows, etc.. If you are interested, please contact us.”

Gloria is dialing the number, which was in the footer of the email, and gets the voicemail. Two weeks later Gavin gets a call and talks to an elderly lady who invites him to a meeting the next day. Gavin asks about the agenda of the meeting, to find out there in no agenda.

Does this story sound familiar?

It does not have to be like that.

Stay tuned to see how the Give-A-Hoots change the world of this small volunteer organization.