Conducting a once-a-year grease and oil change

A new year or new financial year or just a quiet time around the office provides a great opportunity for a community group to look ahead and think about the things you're going to fix up and what you're going to struggle on with for another year.

Are you going to write that risk management policy you've been promising? Are you going to upgrade your software? Are you going to bring in new blood for the committee of management? What must you do immediately? What can you put off (but shouldn't)? What should you think more about before acting?

This is the time to get the fundamentals right; to review your operations and plan your repairs.

Review your mission

• Is your mission statement up to date? What's changed since you wrote it?
• Is your mission fully understood? Is it precise enough to be helpful and flexible enough to be forgiving?

Review your plans

• Is your mission expressed in your strategic plan?
• Does your plan need to be modified to meet new contingencies?
• Do you have a strategic plan? A business plan? A technology plan? A risk management plan?

Review your governance

• Is your Committee of Management on the ball? Are they active in fundraising, busy networkers, regular attendees? Do you need to fix your meeting procedures or your recruitment process?
• Are your sub-committees active? Are too few people taking on all the work?
• Is the relationship between the staff and the Committee of Management satisfactory?

Review your assets

• Do you have under-used or over-used assets (e.g. un-used or too much space)?
• Would an upgrade anywhere make economic sense?
• Can you get more out of what you've got?

Review your budget

Compare the figures with last year, to get a general sense of how you're doing, and use the trend to predict how you'll do in the coming year and whether that's good, bad or unsustainable.

Prepare a report for the Committee of Management filling them in on the situation and making recommendations for action (or inaction).

Review your personnel

Hold planning sessions involving volunteers and staff at all levels.

• Is your staff (if any) on top of their game?
• Is the organisation's personnel management adequate? How is morale?
• Is there a need to sche dule further training or staff development?
• Are any of your staff or volunteers likely to leave, with or without warning?
• Do any of them have long service leave/retirement/promotion issues to be sorted out?
• Is your volunteer program under control?
• Can you get more volunteers/more out of your volunteers/more for your volunteers by changing practices?

Review your diary

Work out how long you have to meet your goals for the year. Trace the action plan back from events and put advance warning markers in the diary to give you warning of work peaks and also alert you to when you should start planning your fundraising events - or getting other people involved.

Review your contacts

• Is your membership/media/donor/volunteer list satisfactorily up-to-date - and marked with the date when you last contacted the person?
• Who do you need to remind of your existence by ringing up to say hello? Have you started approaching potential grantmakers to tell them what you do and what you have planned?
• What action do you have planned to build your lists?
• Are your practices geared to elicit and record contact data from every single interaction with every person you come across?

Review your fundraising

Work through the fundraising methods you used last year and work out where you get the most bang for your buck and where you have room for improvement:

• Membership dues. Have you sent out invoices? What are you doing to encourage people to pay early? What are you doing to expand membership? Are there any other potential members out there?

• Grants. What did you apply for? What programs are coming up? Have you formed a list of potential grants you could apply for?

• Special events. How did your events go last year? Did you make money? Did you make enough to justify the time and effort? What can you do to add value and increase the spend at your events?

• Donations. How much did you raise? What can you do to increase the average donation? Do you have online donations and do your donors have the ability to give by direct debit each month? (Go to www.ourcommunity.com.au/receivedonations if you don't.)

• Bequests. Have you told your members and supporters that they can provide for your group in their will? Have you provided them with the wording for those who are keen to do so? If someone has left a bequest, have you publicised it and what difference it will make to the organisation?

• Merchandise sales. Is there something you can sell? How did you go last year? Do you have stock left over and do you have a plan to move it (discount/special membership package/raffle prizes)? What worked and what didn't?

Do a brief progress report for the Fundraising Committee, throwing in five ideas for consideration to get their minds working along the right lines.

Small consumer groups

Even for small consumer groups a grease and oil change isn't a bad idea. It may be as simple as a designated meeting where everyone comes together, perhaps facilitated by an independent consumer with facilitation skills, and talks about the group and how it has gone over the past year.

The risk is that it may deteriorate into a session where everyone just complains about everything and nothing constructive comes out of it.

One of the reasons for choosing a facilitator who has had consumer experiences is that they are most likely to understand the consumer/patient experience of being silenced.

Many of us have lived for years without anyone in a position of authority listening to our suggestions about our experience of services, let alone taking their suggestions seriously. Mary O'Hagan, a retired Mental Health Commissioner in New Zealand and a fellow consumer, famously said in a conference in Melbourne that, "the mental illness industry is the only industry where the customer is always wrong". Similarly, in the respected Understanding & Involvement (U&I) Project in Melbourne in the 1990s, researchers noted that people with consumer experience would not stop complaining until they believed they had been heard. This does not come from a deficit on their part; it comes from the way services are delivered.

As a consequence of this history small consumer groups wishing to conduct a 'Once-a-Year Grease and Oil Change' need to plan carefully.

• Allocate enough time so that everyone who wants to speak gets the chance to do so. Perhaps people who have only been involved in the group for a shorter period of time will have questions that have answers that seem obvious to people who have been around longer.

• Provide regular breaks.

• Food is vital for consumers undertaking these sorts of exercises so a relationship with a local caterer is important -especially if the caterer is a consumer-run one. People who have very limited budgets appreciate opportunities to eat as part of these data collection exercises.

• If a full day is being planned it should be no longer than five hours. This is in recognition of the many restrictions on people's lives including the effects of heavy medication with psychotropic and other drugs.

• Costs should be covered for transport and childcare if the consumer group has any funds at all.

• Ideas to improve are integral. The discussion must not stop with complaints. In the end a list of complaints will not improve the capacity of the group to achieve what it has set out to do.

• Dealing with 'irrelevant' input must also be handled judiciously but without pretending it is relevant. Comments that are useful but not relevant to the task in hand should be collected and at the end of the day distributed to the person/people in the group who may be able to work them through in some way with the person who put them forward.

• There are some techniques for dealing with a planning day such as this with groups of people who may have traditionally been severely disempowered. One is to go around the group and give everyone a set amount of time to offer their opinion where they are listened to intently, their information recorded respectfully and they are not interrupted regardless of whether their input is seen as relevant or not.

• Because many people who have experienced mental health systems end up very wary of what gets written behind their backs by service delivery agencies it is always a good idea for groups undertaking these exercises to use printing white boards or butcher's paper so that everything that is recorded is overt and to also give the speaker a chance to correct the record immediately if he or she feels this is necessary.

• Those given the task of recording should use the exact words of the speaker and not paraphrase whenever possible.

• The draft document should be circulated for comments. Most people won't respond but it is important that everyone be offered the opportunity.

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