Strategic Planning – Evaluating our Festival de la Familia

Although we have had a very successful Festival de la Familia this year, we decided to do a thorough review because were detecting complaints from parents. We discovered that the festival gives parents from the lower grades a different experience than parents from middle school and high school. Our Festival de la Familia is a whole day festival primarily carried out by parents and students with the support from teachers. Each class has a stand where they sell food and organize games for children. The food and the game prices are all donated by the parents. It starts at 9 am and goes until 5 pm. Through the day groups can sing and play instruments, we have a pet show, and in the afternoon, people can sign up to compete in different sports. We charge a minimal amount for every activity. All funds that are raised this day go to support a school project that directly helps students.

During the review process, we did not follow the Strengths, Weaknesses. Opportunities and Threat Analysis (SWOT). We reviewed the positives and the negatives of the event among different groups, the leadership team, faculty, parents, and students. We asked more general perspectives from all the groups and possible solutions to any difficulties they identified. We collected all the information and placed it into a shared document. We have yet to sit down and review all the gathered information and find possible changes that could be implemented in the future.

I see that this process we did to evaluate our Festival de la Familia is standard for our school. We could improve in being more specific in identifying in the first place the opportunities and threats among the different groups. We also did not summarize each opportunity and threat to our festival. And, we did not identify possible outcomes and what could go wrong. We could go more in-depth with each group and use their knowledge and ideas to find solutions.

William R. King (1978) suggests that strategic planning requires attention to the organizational mission (as cited in Atha, 2018). I believe we did follow this principle as we mentioned the overall mission of the festival before and during the discussion and planning.

This review process is an example of how we generally work with strategic planning throughout the school. It shows how we can improve all strategic plans we make in the future.

 

Reference

Atha, D. (2018). Week 4 Post 4.5.  Course Learning Notes. Retrieved from https://create.twu.ca/ldrs501/week-4-post-4-5/