How To Do A SWOT Analysis For Your Club

I have a terrible attention span, which is a weakness of mine and could lead to me not getting through enough work. However, because I'm aware of it, I deliberately structure my workday around my goldfish-like attention span. I use the Pomodoro Technique, working in 25-minute bursts before switching to something else. Because of this, I am still super effective with getting my work done, much more so than if I tried to focus on only one task for hours at a time.

This is a great example of how understanding your strengths and weaknesses can lead to greater success. Knowing your strengths and weaknesses helps you adapt your approach to overcome specific challenges. The SWOT analysis is a great tool for helping you identify your strengths and weaknesses and adjust your approach for maximum success.

So, with that in mind, today, we are going to talk about what a SWOT analysis is, how to run one for your club, and how it can benefit your club. 

Most of you probably already know what a SWOT analysis is, but consider this a little refresher if you do and a little lesson if you don't. I personally had to have an extensive refresher on what SWOT analyses are and how they work while I was at university, as apparently bunking off HSC business studies to go smoke in the bathrooms wasn't an effective learning strategy. 

 

 

What Is A SWOT Analysis?

A SWOT analysis is a simple, straightforward way to determine how your club is doing and what internal and external factors will make or break its long-term success. SWOT stands for Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats. Basically, all you need to do is write down all the factors that are impacting your club’s day-to-day operations and then divide them up into one of the four categories. 

 

 

The idea is to categorise all factors that affect your club into one of four groups: internal strengths, internal weaknesses, external strengths, and external weaknesses. This tool helps you quickly and visually understand what’s impacting your club, your weaknesses and strengths, and how to capitalise on them.

For example, I very quickly did a SWOT analysis on Member Jungle as a demonstration. Please note that you would want to include a lot more factors than I have here; this is just so you get the gist of how it works. 

 

 

As you can see, just a brief look reveals our strengths, weaknesses, and limitations. Essentially, we have a great product made by great people that people need. We have room to grow and expand our offerings. However, as we don’t offer 24 hour phone support, we need to ensure our system works as well as possible so there are limited problems people need support with. The affordability of our product is also important since many people have less money to spend due to the high cost of living.

It’s also worth considering how different factors will be interpreted differently based on different customers. For example, the fact that Member Jungle is Australian may be a strength for customers based in Australia, New Zealand, and the Asia Pacific Region, as we are all in fairly similar time zones. However, the fact that we are in Australia may be a weakness for customers in America or Europe who are in vastly different time zones. 

So, if your membership base is diverse by location or age, it may be worth conducting a SWOT analysis for all of your different subgroups.

For example, if you are weighing up which social platform to focus your marketing efforts on, Facebook would be strong for an older demographic but not as well suited for a younger one.

Again, this is an extremely quick version of a SWOT analysis. Normally, you’d want to go into much greater detail. Still, hopefully, this can help you see how breaking down all the factors that affect your club can be really beneficial in helping you clearly see how you’re progressing and where you need to develop.  

Also, if you want to download a blank copy of the above SWOT template so you can edit it online or print it out and write on it, you can get that here. 

 

How Does A SWOT Analysis Help Your Club?

SWOT analysis offers a structured framework for evaluating your club's internal strengths and weaknesses and external opportunities and threats. By examining these factors, you can gain valuable insights that will help you with planning, allowing you to capitalise on your club’s strengths, address areas for improvement, and proactively respond to environmental changes.

This process promotes self-awareness within the club, fostering a realistic understanding of its capabilities and challenges. Additionally, SWOT analysis encourages collaboration and communication among stakeholders, ensuring diverse perspectives are considered, and a shared vision for the club's future is developed. Through this, clubs can make informed decisions, improve their problem-solving abilities, and ultimately gain a competitive edge in the market.

It is best practice to conduct a SWOT analysis on your club regularly, at least once a year, or even once a quarter if you are feeling ambitious, to ensure that you understand your club's strengths, weaknesses, and capabilities.

Doing so will allow you to stay informed about what's happening at your club and make smarter, more informed decisions, ultimately increasing your club's chance of success.

How To Run A SWOT Analysis For Your Club

Running a SWOT analysis for your club is really straightforward and can easily be done in 15 minutes at your next committee meeting. So, let’s look at what the steps of running a successful SWOT analysis are. 

1. Gather Your Team

Gather a team of people who will help you conduct your SWOT analysis. These people will likely just be your committee members, but consider adding a few normal members for a varied perspective. 

2. Define Your Objective

Clearly set an objective for what you hope to learn from your analysis. Are you assessing the club's overall health, evaluating a specific program, or exploring new opportunities or some combination of the above? Make sure you know before you start. 

3. Brainstorm

Once you have established your objective and assembled your team, it's time to hold a brainstorming session to identify all the factors influencing your club. Begin by listing all the factors you can think of and then transfer them into your SWOT quadrant diagram, categorising each factor as a strength, weakness, opportunity, or threat.

Unrelated, but once at school, a friend of mine couldn’t remember the term brainstorm and called it mind thunder, and I have never been able to think of it the same way again. 

4. Analysis 

Once you’ve done your mind thunder, you should have a fully filled-out SWOT analysis diagram with all your factors in their correct category. Now, it's time to make a thorough list and prioritise the most important factors in each category. Then, think about how these factors all fit together. For example, having a strong financial position could help you make the most of opportunities. 

After doing your SWOT analysis, come up with plans to use your strengths, work on your weaknesses, grab opportunities, and handle threats. Your plans should include specific goals, timelines, and who's responsible for what.

5. Plan Next SWOT

As mentioned before, a SWOT analysis is not a one-time task; it should be revisited regularly. Once your SWOT analysis is completed and tasks are assigned, make sure to schedule another one for the next quarter or year, or however often you prefer, so that it doesn't get forgotten.

Alternatives To SWOT

While SWOT analysis is a great tool that you should definitely implement, there are also some alternative ones that you can try out. Each of these tools is designed to yield slightly different results and test slightly different aspects of your club.

There is the SWT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, and Trends, which is great at examining wider trends in your industry rather than just factors that are currently impacting your club. 

The McKinsley 7S Framework: This looks at seven key internal factors of your club: Strategy, Structure, Systems, Shared Values, Style, Staff and Skills. This is designed to be a deep dive into your club’s internal structure. 

There are basically an endless number of these different techniques and styles to break down your club’s factors to help it grow, some simpler and others much more detailed. But running a SWOT analysis and maybe a SWT and/or McKinsley 7s is probably more than enough for the vast majority of clubs. 

Where To Next?

Well, you now have the tools to run your own SWOT analysis on your club, which will help ensure its success for many years to come.  

Speaking of strengths, weaknesses and opportunities, one challenge many clubs face is struggling to get members to volunteer for committee roles. If this is a challenge you face then check out 5 Simple Ways To Get More Members Involved In Your Club’s Committee.

One opportunity to look out for is the growing ability of AI to help you create amazing content for your clubs, emails, blogs and events. For more information on this, see How To Use AI To Generate Content For Your Club’s Website.