Identifying your core processes

Core processes are the handful of processes that makes your organisation run. These processes are critical for reaching your organisation’s objectives and typically include functions such as strategic planning, staff management, marketing, sales, production, customer service, and financial management.

To get more comfortable with this concept, let’s have a look at the typical core processes that exists in a non-profit organisation.

This process involves planning and executing strategies to secure financial support from various sources, such as individual donors, corporate sponsors, grants, and fundraising events. Fundraising is critical for sustaining the organisation and funding our programs and initiatives.

This process involves the management of finances, including budgeting, accounting, and financial reporting. As non-profits, we must maintain transparency and fiscal responsibility to build trust with donors and stakeholders.

The way our organisation hires, manages, reviews, rewards, promotes, retains and fires people. We often rely on volunteers to support our programs and operations, and so, HR could also include volunteer management, which includes recruitment, training, coordination, and recognition of volunteers who contribute their time and skills to our organisation.

Program management encompasses the planning, implementation, and evaluation of our initiatives and services. This process ensures that the organisation is effectively addressing our mission and serving our beneficiaries. Operations management refers to managing the process of how we make the product or provide the service to your beneficiaries.

As non-profits we need to assess and measure the impact of our programs and initiatives. This process involves collecting data, analysing outcomes, and reporting results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our organisation’s work. We need to know what kind of impact we intend to make, how we know if we are making that impact, and what to do with our discoveries about our impact.

Ensuring that we comply with relevant laws and regulations is vital. This process includes managing legal obligations, tax-exempt status, and reporting requirements, as well as addressing any legal issues that may arise.

Engaging with various stakeholders, including donors, beneficiaries, partners, and the community, is crucial. This process includes communication, outreach, and advocacy efforts to build relationships and support for our organisation’s mission.

Identifying your core processes can be intimidating, but we are going to keep it simple and work through it systematically. We will only focus on the handful of core processes that represents the majority of the operations and has to be done the right, best way every time. We’re not trying to systematise your entire organisation, but rather the 20% of the processes that will give you 80% of return.

Systemise the predictable, so you can humanise the exceptional.

Isodore Sharp, CEO of the Four Seasons Hotel

Think of the leaders in your leadership group or a group of senior managers, what are they responsible for? They usually have a unique functions in the organisation that is assigned to them, and each function represents a process in our organisation. This might be a good place to start identifying your core processes.

What are your core processes?

Now that you’ve read through all the different processes as examples, take a moment to think about the six to ten core processes that encompasses the majority of operations in your organisation. In the next activity we will start documenting these processes.

Identifying your core processes

1. Fundraising

2. Financial Management

3. Human Resources (HR) Process

4. Program and Operations Management

5. Impact Measurement and Reporting

6. Compliance and Legal Affairs

7. Stakeholder/ Donor Engagement

Systemise the predictable, so you can humanise the exceptional.Isodore Sharp, CEO of the Four Seasons Hotel

Systemise the predictable, so you can humanise the exceptional.

Isodore Sharp, CEO of the Four Seasons Hotel