Redesign of Oak Foundation’s Organizational Development Strategy

Introduction

Oak Foundation commits its resources to address issues of global, social and environmental

concern, particularly those that have a major impact on the lives of the disadvantaged. With offices in Europe, Africa, India and North America, Oak Foundation makes grants to organizations in approximately 40 countries worldwide through its 8 programmes: Environment, Housing & Homelessness, International Human Rights, Issues Affecting Women, Learning Differences, Prevent Child Sexual Abuse, Special Interest, Brazil, Oak Foundation Denmark, India and Zimbabwe.

Oak views organizational development as means of enhancing its core business of grant-making. The Foundation supports its partners to maximize their abilities and capabilities in order to be able to meet their mutual missions; by having access to, and benefit from, quality organizational development programmes. This work is led by a cross-programme team, supported by programme representatives.

The calling

Oak Foundation has been continuously evolving its organizational development approach and needed support on a refresh of their strategy for non-financial support to grantees. The goal was to make sure it stays aligned with best practices in the field and responsive to the needs of partners.

Results

As a result of this process, we redesigned the Theory of Change for Oak’s organizational development work. By doing this we were able to bring clarity to the problems it is solving and the impacts it generates in multiple levels, including the Foundation itself, its grantees, the peers in the Philanthropy Field and the Practitioners of Organizational Development.

We also reviewed the scope of Oak’s work in the organizational development area, guiding principles for their non-financial support and the types of organizational strengthening services offered. All these elements were carefully redesigned considering the inputs from the recently conducted grantee perception survey, the best practices and trends in the philanthropy field and the perspectives of relevant internal stakeholders.

The process also included the development of a monitoring and evaluation framework to assess the evolution and contribution of their organizational development support over time, a framework that can be used in yearly planning and a strategy document consolidating all of the elements of the new strategy to be used in internal communications.

Process and Methodology

The process included:

Document analysis focused on understanding the previous strategy and the results of the recently conducted grantee perception survey
Interviews with internal stakeholders to get different perspectives about the current and future vision of the organizational development work
Benchmarking with 13 organizations in the philanthropic sector that also provide some kind of non-financial support to their grantees in order to understand trends and good practices that could inspire Oak’s strategy in that area
2 day in-person workshop in Oak’s headquarter in Switzerland with the organizational development team and program officers to work on the redesign of the strategy
Virtual workshops with Oak’s organizational development advisory group to evolve the strategy and its main elements
Recurrent meetings with the organizational development team to steer the process and work on the refinement and detailing of the new Theory of Change and auxiliary strategic documents