Developing Growth Strategy in Hungary
We are a growing organization but face the challenges of not-coordinated growth. Some local groups have the pressure of too many children, while they want to keep the focus on the quality of personal support of their group members. Meanwhile, on the other side of our country, we have no local scout groups, and our scouts struggle with recruiting. So we found out we need a Growth Strategy! Our aim was to think together with our district leaders, new troop leaders, adult scouts, and non-scouts.
We planned a series of programs to think together and spread the word of coordinated growth. Our goal was to find the best ways to support our local groups in the growing challenges; to help our adult volunteers start new scout groups; and to strengthen the network of our volunteers on district and national levels, who can enhance the tailored support to our local groups.
Through the project, we reached 2500 scouts through our programs, and 15000 scouts in our local groups benefited from the new ideas of the newly trained leaders, the inspired adults, or the non-scouts we share ideas with.
We were successful in supporting all three project goals. We had a lot of participants involved in our growth strategy building; also in leadership training, and we also could manage the support of new groups (and the new leaders of the local groups). This year, we managed to have 1380 new members in our movement, which is a bit higher than we predicted. Meanwhile, this project has efficiently supported the quality development of the organization part, and the cooperation of the different teams working on the national level while creating the growth strategy.
We have gained a lot of experience with external partners, which is new for us. We were greatly inspired by their different viewpoints and new aspects about how to run an organization, develop a vision, and keep track of their activities. Their ideas can be really useful for us while we try to expand and reach out to new communities and towns where there are no scouts (yet :) ).