Strategic Plan 2007 - 2012
The Strategic Plan 2007-2012 sets out The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund's corporate strategy, detailing our strategic goals, how we propose to achieve them and how we will measure success.
It emerges from a process of organisational change that included strategic planning, consultation, and dialogue with the voluntary sector. The consultative process began with the dissemination to stakeholders of A Consultation Document in 2005, the analysis of responses and the release in July 2006 of the report Our Findings, Our Future. In 2006, as part of this organisational change, the Fund went through a major restructuring.
The Strategic Plan seeks to make the greatest use of our assets, both financial and those arising from our knowledge, experience and unique position as The Diana, Princess of Wales Memorial Fund.
Download the Strategic Plan 2007-2012 here.
Lifespan of the Fund
One of the key recommendations emerging from the consultative process was that the Fund should draw down its capital and not limit spending to its income. It has been decided that the Fund will spend out its existing capital over a period of five to nine years from early 2007. Its operational capacity will then be reduced and it will sometime thereafter cease operating.
This decision is not new - the Fund was never intended to exist in perpetuity and was always seen as having a finite lifespan. However, it does re-focus attention on the importance of identifying the most effective ways, in the time remaining, to ensure that we achieve our goal of creating opportunities for positive change in society and leave a lasting legacy of social change that impacts directly on people's lives.
An objective- and outcome-driven organisation
In order to achieve its aims in a limited time span, the Fund has needed to change the way it works. It is therefore moving from being a criteria-led grant maker to being a pro-active and objective-driven one.
The Fund will focus on three initiatives, which each has a desired outcome and a set of strategic objectives to be achieved over five years. Success will be gauged by the extent to which we are able to meet these strategic objectives and help bring about lasting societal change in specific, clearly defined areas of work.
Initiatives
The Fund's three initiatives are: The Palliative Care Initiative, The Refugee and Asylum Seekers Initiative, and The Partnership Initiative. They reflect the ethos of the Princess's charitable work in supporting the vulnerable and the marginalised and the Fund's commitment to continuing her work by identifying and embracing the cause of disadvantaged people in the UK and overseas.
Under these initiatives, the Fund is committed to spending up to £10 million over the next five years to promote the scale-up of palliative care in sub-Saharan Africa and its integration into government health policies; up to £10 million to raise awareness and highlight the needs and issues of young refugees and asylum seekers and up to £5 million to follow-up and add leverage to our previous investments into penal affairs, mental health and other areas in the UK, and internationally into our programme on landmines and explosive remnants of war.
Some objectives may be realised more quickly than expected or lose relevance owing to changing circumstances and newly emerging priorities. Strategies may be superseded or become invalidated by factors outside the Fund's control, or emerge as new and more appropriate methods to achieve our objectives. The ability to respond to changes in the environment and adopt emergent objectives and strategies underpins the Fund's new ethos of being an agile and flexible organisation.
The adoption of these three initiatives and their strategic objectives means that there will be a shift in the way we make grants.
Evaluation and communications
Our strategy includes a new approach to the evaluation and communication of our work. The Fund will operate evaluation strategies at three levels. We will evaluate the Fund, the initiatives and the projects we support. This will enable us to judge progress against objectives as money is spent, as well as understand the social change that achieving these objectives has created or supported. Our commitment to evaluation will enable us to speak with authority at a campaigning level.
Communications will be one of the key tools used to achieve the objectives of the three initiatives. The synergy between the Fund's grants programmes and our communications is critical to the success of each initiative and hence to ensuring that each leaves a lasting legacy of change.
Supporting the Voluntary Sector
From its inception, the Fund has sought to promote and support the voluntary sector in whatever ways it can. In addition to its grant-making programmes the Fund lets out meeting rooms at its offices in County Hall to other voluntary sector organisations that meet our criteria, free of charge. The Fund will continue to make these facilities available in this way for the foreseeable future.
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