A SWOT analysis identifies an organization's strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. It is a tool for assessing the current situation and informing strategic planning and decision-making. While originally developed for businesses, SWOT analysis can also be useful for community organizations. To conduct a SWOT analysis, an individual or small group identifies internal strengths and weaknesses as well as external opportunities and threats through stakeholder input. This helps focus on strengths, minimize weaknesses and threats, and take advantage of opportunities.

1. Tools in
Community
Organizing

2. WHAT IS A SWOT ANALYSIS AND WHY SHOULD YOU USE ONE?
SWOT stands for: Strength, Weakness, Opportunity, Threat. A SWOT analysis
guides you to identify your organization’s strengths and weaknesses (S-W), as
well as broader opportunities and threats (O-T). Developing a fuller awareness
of the situation helps with both strategic planning and decision-making.
The SWOT method was originally developed for business and industry, but it
is equally useful in the work of community health and development,
education, and even for personal growth.
SWOT is not the only assessment technique you can use. Compare it with
other assessment tools in the Community Tool Box to determine if this is the
right approach for your situation. The strengths of this method are its
simplicity and application to a variety of levels of operation

3. WHEN DO YOU USE SWOT?
A SWOT analysis can offer helpful perspectives at any stage of an effort. You
might use it to:
• Explore possibilities for new efforts or solutions to problems.
• Make decisions about the best path for your initiative. Identifying your
opportunities for success in context of threats to success can clarify directions
and choices.
• Determine where change is possible. If you are at a juncture or turning point,
an inventory of your strengths and weaknesses can reveal priorities as well as
possibilities.
• Adjust and refine plans mid-course. A new opportunity might open wider
avenues, while a new threat could close a path that once existed.
SWOT also offers a simple way of communicating about your initiative or
program and an excellent way to organize information you've gathered from
studies or surveys.

4. WHAT ARE THE ELEMENTS OF A SWOT ANALYSIS?
A SWOT analysis focuses on Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and
Threats.
*Remember that the purpose of performing a SWOT is to reveal positive
forces that work together and potential problems that need to be
recognized and possibly addressed.
*We will discuss the process of creating the analysis below, but first here
are a few sample layouts for your SWOT analysis.

5. HOW DO YOU CREATE A SWOT ANALYSIS?
*The most common users of a SWOT analysis are team members and
project managers who are responsible for decision-making and
strategic planning.
*But don't overlook anyone in the creation stage!
*An individual or small group can develop a SWOT analysis, but it
will be more effective if you take advantage of many stakeholders.
Each person or group offers a different perspective on the strengths
and weaknesses of your program and has different experiences of
both.
*Likewise, one staff member, or volunteer or stakeholder may have
information about an opportunity or threat that is essential to
understanding your position and determining your future.

6. WHY Conduct SWOT?
SWOT analysis;
• Helps you focus on your strengths, minimize weaknesses and threats,
take the greatest possible advantage of opportunities, and become
outstanding in competitions.
• Helps you determine whether the objective is attainable; therefore,
set achievable goals and objectives for the organization, as well as
subsequent steps.
• Helps you dedicate to your mission, fulfill the vision, adjust to social
context, achieve strategic goals, develop effective action plans, and
conduct objective evaluations.
• Helps you gather meaningful information from your strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities, and threats), in order to maximize the
benefits of your evaluation and advantage.

7. Appreciative
Inquiry

8. What is Appreciative Inquiry?
*Appreciative Inquiry has been described in a myriad of ways: as a radically
affirmative approach to change which completely lets go of problem-based
management and in so doing vitally transforms strategic planning, survey
methods, culture change, merger integration methods… measurement
systems; as a paradigm of conscious evolution geared for the realities of the
new century; as the most important advance in action research in the past
decade; as offspring and “heir” to Maslow’s vision of a positive social
science; and as a methodology that takes the idea of the social construction
of reality to its positive extreme - with its emphasis on metaphor and
narrative, relational ways of knowing, on language, and on its potential as a
source of generative theory.

9. Appreciative Inquiry is the cooperative, co-evolutionary
search for the best in people, their organizations and
communities, and the world around them. It involves
systematic discovery of what gives “life” to an organization
or community when it is most effective, and most capable in
economic, ecological, and human terms.

10. The four key phases of an AI process are:
• Discovery - mobilizing a whole system, multiple stakeholder inquiry
into the positive core;
• Dream - creating a results-oriented vision based in discovered
potential and questions of higher purpose, i.e., “What is the world
calling us to become?”
• Design - creating possibility propositions of the ideal organization or
community, articulating a design capable of drawing upon and
magnifying the positive core to realize the newly expressed dream; and
• Destiny - strengthening the affirmative capability of the whole system
enabling it to build hope and sustain momentum for on- going positive
change and high performance.