SWOT Analysis
Definition
SWOT is the structured four-quadrant scan of internal Strengths/Weaknesses against external Opportunities/Threats — a 1960s-1970s strategic-planning import from corporate strategy that has been adopted (with mixed success) by campaigns and nonprofits.
Its value is as a 60-minute alignment exercise — get the team to surface what they think the campaign’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are, in the same room, with the same vocabulary — rather than as the document the campaign then ships.
Practitioner critiques (the People Power Manual, the Community Tool Box’s strategic-planning notes) warn against treating SWOT as the campaign’s strategic plan: the framework’s strength (its simplicity) is also its weakness (it cannot distinguish a strength from a structural enabler, a weakness from a strategic gap), and most campaigns need a more precise analytical tool for the strategic plan itself.
Full page: [[swot-analysis]]. [source: swot-analysis] [source: people-power-manual]
FAQ
What is SWOT?
SWOT is the structured four-quadrant scan of internal Strengths/Weaknesses against external Opportunities/Threats — a 1960s-1970s strategic-planning import from corporate strategy that has been adopted (with mixed success) by campaigns and nonprofits. The full-page version of this definition lives on [[swot-analysis]].
What is SWOT’s value?
Its value is as a 60-minute alignment exercise — get the team to surface what they think the campaign’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats are, in the same room, with the same vocabulary — rather than as the document the campaign then ships. The alignment exercise is what converts individual intuition into shared vocabulary.
What are the limits of SWOT?
Practitioner critiques (the People Power Manual, the Community Tool Box’s strategic-planning notes) warn against treating SWOT as the campaign’s strategic plan: the framework’s strength (its simplicity) is also its weakness (it cannot distinguish a strength from a structural enabler, a weakness from a strategic gap), and most campaigns need a more precise analytical tool for the strategic plan itself [source: people-power-manual].
Why is simplicity a weakness?
The simplicity is a weakness because the four-quadrant scan cannot distinguish a strength from a structural enabler, a weakness from a strategic gap, an opportunity from a passing trend, or a threat from a background condition. SWOT sorts what the team knows into four boxes, but the boxes are too coarse to drive strategic decisions on their own.