Turn hunches about trends into good decisions

You likely possess an innate sense of trends that affect your nonprofit, writes Rebecca Post, managing editor of the Fieldstone Alliance. Your gut feeling about economic factors and other conditions can be right on the mark. For example, you may suspect that poverty is increasing in your community because demand is rising at your local food shelf.

However, to best serve your organization you want to evolve your hunches into legitimate market trend awareness that can inform ongoing and future strategy.

The Fieldstone Alliance's last Tools issue focused on how to do a competitor analysis. This issue, also from David La Piana’s latest book, The Nonprofit Strategy Revolution: Real-Time Strategic Planning in a Rapid-Response World, will help you do trend analysis in a timely way. Click here to go to the latest issue of the Alliance's Nonprofit Tools You Can Use.