Internationalization for voluntary organizations

Organisations and SMEs face daily the challenge of becoming more productive and efficient, in order to get more profit from its given resources and achieve their goals. It becomes a continuous process of creating, implementing and evaluating decisions to overcome problems, ensuring the achievement of its objectives. This process is called Strategic Management.

In words of the researchers Emet Gürel and Merba Tat, “strategic management consists of the analysis, decisions, and actions an organisation undertakes in order to create and sustain competitive advantages. The strategic management process is a sequential set of analyses and choices that can increase the likelihood that an organisation will choose ‘good strategy’, that is, that generates competitive advantages”. Every organisation needs to design a long-term strategy at the beginning of its activity, defining its aspirations and identifying possible risks and threats that it should try to avoid during the process.

In order to deal with that, organisations use and external and internal analysis, or the so-called SWOT analysis. SWOT Analysis is a tool that involves four areas into two dimensions. It has four components: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats. Strengths and Weaknesses are Internal factors and attributes of the organization, while Opportunities and Threats are External factors and attributes of the market setting. This can be easily seen in the following graph:

But, what does each component of the SWOT mean? Let’s analyse them:

• Strengths: According to professors J.A. Pearce and R.B. Robinson, a strength is a “resource, skill, or other advantage relative to competitors and the needs of the markets an organization serves or expects to serve. It is a distinctive competence that gives the organization a comparative advantage in the marketplace. Strengths may exist with regard to financial resources, image, market leadership, buyer/supplier relations, and other factors”.

In other words, the strengths of a project, organisation or enterprise are the specific competences and values that have the potential to make a difference in its “market”, giving it different advantages against its competitors and an efficient use of its resources. Obviously, when talking about non-profit organisations, we are not speaking about competition inside a “market”, but the potential to bring something fresh and new to an existing setting: a different approach to a social problem, an innovative method to attach that problem, etc. Also, financial resources can make a huge difference as a strength of your organisation, and therefore a proper use of resources and funds, together with good dissemination efforts, can serve as one of the main strengths for your projects.

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• Weaknesses: This component mainly works as the opposite of Strengths, as it refers to the disadvantages and lack of competency of an organisation or project. It is a situation where the current capacities of an organisation are surpassed by its competitors, giving it a disadvantage against them, and being less efficient and effective than them.

These aspects negatively affect the organizational performance and weakens the organization among its competitors. Consequently, the organization is not able to respond to a possible problem or opportunity and cannot adapt to changes. It is crucial for any organisation to acknowledge and identify its weaknesses as soon as possible, in order to prevent long term issues and difficulties, and to properly forecast the future of its projects. Neither planning nor creating strategies should be done without taking into account current and future weaknesses, as they are as important as strengths (if not more!).

• Opportunities: This component is the first external factor to take into account when analysing your international setting / market setting. An opportunity is nothing but a chance to take advantage of a specific current or future situation, which characteristics are favourable are suitable for an action to take place. This action can be a new project, the creation of an organisation, the development of a new approach to a specific problem, etc.

Looking for opportunities in different countries is the key to internationalisation, as we will see next. Analysing the situation of a country and identifying opportunities and chances for your organisation to be useful is a must before beginning internationalisation projects, and a wrong forecast of it can lead into their failure, as well as threats.

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• Threats: A threat is the risk of a disadvantageous situation to happen and affect negatively your project/organisation, complicating its way to achieving its proposed goals, or even making them impossible to achieve. When talking about internationalisation, the threats for our organisation are going to be highly dependent on each country that we decide to go. This is why both topics, SWOT analysis and countries, are deeply related to each other, as we will see next.

In order to overcome these threats, it is crucial to assure our strengths and prepare our organisation/project for those threats to become realities. Internationalisation often involves working in dangerous and unstable countries, where political, social, demographic, cultural, legal and economic systems can change rapidly and violently, endangering our goals.