Many organizations instead carry out their budgeting process by looking at what they did last year and building from there. This is understandable because there are staff people in place doing those things, and it is comfortable to do what we know even as organizational leaders.

Yet as leaders, we can make a great difference in times of transition and growth by choosing to invest in our strategic priorities. These priorities could come from our strategic plans, from coalition work, or new political or funding realities.

This case study is in the context of one particular organization where I served as an executive, and the same principle and way of thinking is applied to my consulting practice now. While in the organizational leadership at Fahe, I had success in advocating internally and helping the organization invest in its priorities. I would count three successes and, for good measure, I’ll also share about a not quite as successful attempt.

1.        Investing in Policy Advocacy to Win New Resources

I set out to gather support internally at Fahe to develop and implement a more strategic and impactful advocacy and education effort: a state focused strategy that could win Fahe organizations more financial resources for their housing work. I built support among executive team members and the board of directors for how additional staff resources could unlock the power of the network of Fahe member organizations leaders. We could do more to win at the state level with focused staff support.

Those efforts in building internal consensus were successful: in early 2019 was able to move forward in investing in this priority of hiring an additional advocacy staffer and a larger team followed that successfully implemented the advocacy strategy, which you can read about in more detail in the New Resources case study. Just a few years later, in 2023 (Tennessee) and then 2024 (Kentucky), over $30 million was awarded for new housing.

2.        Investing in Operational Improvement: Chief Operating Officer

As a relatively new member of the leadership team, it became clear to me that our CEO was involved in the day-to-day running of the operation in a way that precluded him from focusing his time on high value funder, partner, and advocacy conversations as much as he would like or that served the organization.

When I voiced the question about seeking an operating executive to add to the leadership team, I found agreement; this had been on other leaders’ minds. We agreed to invest in a new COO position. They would provide guidance to the internal workings of the organization and help improve our functioning in key areas like IT, HR, and grant administration.

It turns out it is not so easy to hire a chief operating officer for a group based in Appalachian Kentucky, and we had unsuccessful offers that slowed the attempt. Eventually, a related-entity leader agreed to work on a remote, part-time basis, which was a help and did allow our CEO to concentrate more on those priority items.

The CEO’s additional attention contributed to better relationships with funders and eventually multi-million-dollar investments in the organization. Over a couple of years, the organization eventually realized the vision and made the investment that it had hoped to make earlier in a full-time chief operating officer role.

3.        Investing in Innovation Capacity as a Social Enterprise

As profiled in the Workforce Development case study, I succeeded in encouraging the organization to take on development of a much larger multi-state workforce development project. The experience of having our leadership come together around a new much larger-scale workforce development program made a strong impression on the organization: Fahe created a new innovation accelerator model with staffing to help us identify and seize these opportunities. Even if a bit outside our existing program experience, Fahe decided these opportunities made sense to pursue on behalf of and together with our Appalachian member leaders and communities. Fahe stepped into taking an increasingly can-do approach to new and innovative programmatic activities, investing their budget in the capacity to serve the Appalachian communities in which they work.

4.        Investing in Program Staff instead of Administrative Staff

This final attempt I had less success. Understanding that for leaders with large organizations, having administrative staff to help with calendaring, filing, and personal organization can make sense, it seemed that for an organization with relatively small teams reporting up at the EVP level (think eight to twenty people) our budget would be better served by having more investment program staff figuring out the challenge of how to serve the needs in our communities rather than EVP administrative assistance.

This made sense to me when taken in the context of the challenges to any organization of engaging in new activities, as related by the Example 3 on workforce above. However, the organizational culture and budget was such that the organization had long been able to pay for executive assistants with the grant dollars received. And I understand those colleagues’ perspective, too: it’s nice to have administrative support and help with being organized at some level.

Yet at the end of the day, this is a case study about priorities. This was not a change in priorities that I was able to persuade colleagues on, and so it was only on my team where we made our investments purely in program staff. I know that each member of my team made a difference in the success we were able to have, and we would not have been able to have the success if we had an administrative staffer instead of one of them.

In each of these budget and priority decisions, the organization is making a choice on how it wants to realize its vision and strategic planning. Over time, the investments can yield real results for your organization, just as they did with building Fahe’s advocacy team and the millions in new resources.