Originally posted by http://www.benhobbis.co.uk as part of their blog in June 2024: https://mebenhobbis.wordpress.com/2024/06/30/step-up-strategising/?preview=true Republished with permission of the author.

Just over a year ago, the founding volunteers of Step Up met in person. The purpose of this was to decide the long term plan of our organisation, to brain dump and plan our first year (of three). It was initially intended to be a one off meeting, until we realised the power of bringing people together in-person. Therefore, it has become an annual part of our calendar.

Yesterday marked our second strategy and team day, but the first one in a hybrid format; something we had to consider growing from 6 to 29.

We started the day with an optional breakfast at Albert’s Schloss, a great, Bavarian themed restaurant, bar and performance venue in centenary square, Birmingham. I was met at the station by Amy, Nikki and Brooke, with Christine and Rachael joining us at the venue. After catching up, great food, fun in the photo booth (and party toilet for some), with a load of laughs, it was time to head to the venue.

We hired out the top foot studio of an office, and made the space our own, putting our pull up banner up, setting up the tech for our remote colleagues and setting up the table in teams. More people joined us in person: Elaine, Adam, Utha and Julija, who we all met for the first time.

We base our strategy as an organisation around the book ‘Traction’ by Gino Wickman. Which has become a library of books and a global company where a number of tools are provided for organisations to help run them effectively. In a nutshell, in order to gain traction in your organisation you must get five other components right first. We very much used this as a tool to help shape our day today.

We started off with sharing the intended outcomes, outputs and overview of the day; followed by introductions in-person and online. And in our first block of the day, we looked back at our year as an organisation looking at our vision, values, mission, finances, impact and every much getting volunteers to contribute towards this. Before the important factor of lunch, we spent some time on our next block all about our volunteers, looking at our ways of working and our views as a volunteer.

We then had a lovely lunch from Dominos and the snacks served well as we entered the deep work session. The deep work session where everyone worked within their teams on individual projects but also had the opportunity to work across teams also. Of the ‘Traction’ wheel, we really honed in on our processes within each team. This three hour session flew by in the midst of all the productivity going on. Our events team finalised the events processes for the year; our content team scheduled social media posts, planned the podcast and reviewed our brand guidelines; our partnerships and programmes team explored the links we have and what we can provide our community through our offer; whilst our strategy and impact team very much worked on ensuring our house was in order planning the behind the scenes of the network.

We then came together and summarised what each team had worked on, to allow for transparency and honesty.

After tidying up, some headed for Birmingham New Street, whilst a group of us went to play duck pin bowling at Roxy Ball Room. We had great fun, despite me losing, and well done to Amy who won. We also had fun in the photo booth there too!

All in all a great day with great people doing great things. If you’re a not-for-profit organisation, a side hustle or a network, I totally recommend getting your team together in-person once a year. I am currently planning an opportunity for multiple organisations to come together, so watch this space!