This is a draft policy that is open for community consultation until 29th February 2014. If you have comments or suggestions for improvements, please make them on the talk page. The board intends to adopt a finalised strategic plan 2014-2019 at its meeting in March 2014.

This page sets out WMUK's strategic plan. The plan covers the period 2014 to 2019, but will be subject to regular review during that time to ensure that it remains relevant.

Introduction

Before reading further, please review the strategic and operational models we are using, as some of the terms used below are intended to have specific meanings.

Strategic level

The purpose of our strategic plan is to guide us in the activities and programmes we undertake to achieve our Misson to help people and organisations create and preserve educational Open Knowledge, and to help provide easy access for all. The plan sets out our high-level Strategic Goals, and the type of impact we aim to achieve with each of those goals (the Aims). This allows us to ensure that our actual range of activities and programmes is directly aligned with our Strategic Goals.

Each Strategic Goal has an associated series of Outcomes which define the specific types of impact that we will be tracking for that Goal. These Outcomes are not measurements in themselves, but rather the 'scales of measurement' against which we can apply specific measures or targets.

To achieve our plan, we will undertake activities and programmes that maximize progress on each of the stated Outcomes, and we will report progress separately against each Outcome. To ensure balance, each of the Outcomes is expected to be covered within each financial year, but of course the relative priorities and extent of progress on each will vary over the course of the year.

The Strategic Plan - at this level - deliberately does not require the charity as a matter of policy to work on any specific programme, as we want the flexibility to be able to start promising new programmes and to expand existing ones as opportunities arise. Likewise, we need the freedom to close down or reduce the scope of failing programmes or those that are not generating sufficient impact. This flexibility will allow us to be not only ambitious but also innovative in the type of programmes that we take on, without fearing that we will be obliged to continue with a programme that turns out not to perform as intended.

The Strategic Plan is intended to be a long-term document to cover the period 2014-2019. It will however be reviewed at least annually, and can be amended should the need arise.

Operational level

The specific activities and programmes currently undertaken by the charity are set out in our Activity Plan. This is an operational document that will be updated in the light of experience at least on an annual basis, and will evolve as programmes are started, developed and dropped.

Measures, metrics and targets

Our Activity Measures Table lists, for each Outcome, not only the activities and programmes that support that Outcome but also the applicable measures and targets. So that we can determine 'distance travelled' most measures are expressed in annual terms, with the cumulative totals being expected to build up over the 5 year term of the plan. These are our 5 year targets.

The Activity Measures Table will be updated as required to match changes to the Activity Plan. Measures, metrics and targets may need to evolve to remain aligned with day to day activities, but we will try to be as consistent as possible to ensure that our 'distance travelled' measures remain meaningful.

By bundling the multiple measures within each Output we can get a series of Outcome Measures which indicate progress on the Outcomes.

Since each Strategic Goal has its own group of Outcomes, we can bundle those Outcome Measures to provide us with a set of Strategic Goal Measures indicating how we are doing against each of the Strategic Goals. Finally, the Strategic Goal Measures taken together tell us about our overall charitable Impact.

Where at all possible the targets we use are SMART, and are measured against Outcomes rather than Outputs. Where direct measurement of Outcome is not currently possible we may reluctantly have to opt for Output measures as proxies for Outcomes, but we will actively work to minimise those.

Some existing limits on our ability to use Outcome measures throughout include:

The costs and difficulties of acquiring reliable direct Outcome information (sometimes, expensive surveys of public opinion would be needed)
The relevant data is not available to us (eg user data held in confidence by the Foundation)
There is a lack of software tools that allow us to extract and analyse the data

We recognise that WMUK’s overall effectiveness and the contribution we make to our overall Mission cannot be measured entirely numerically, and that narratives have an important role to play as well. We are not ideologically wedded to the use of numerical or SMART targets for their own sake, and although we use them extensively we do not shy away from using narrative measures where they are more appropriate.

Resources we have used

In developing our strategy we have drawn on a variety of Wikimedia and external sources in addition to our own experiences and ambitions. Some of those we have found useful are: