What is an Environmental Scan?

An environmental scan is a snapshot of the context within which your organisation operates. It may include:
• An analysis of your competitors and their strengths and weaknesses;
• An analysis of what others think of your organisation, its strengths and weaknesses and what they perceive as your opportunities for growth;
• An internal analysis geared to determining the biggest issues your organisation faces (these big issues generally relate to new opportunities, competitive challenges and sector-level challenges);
• An analysis of key external trends, which may be broken into an examination of trends affecting your constituents or audiences, and trends affecting your current or future funding.

An environmental scan can be a valuable tool in gaining perspective on your organisation and its place within the larger community. How are you positioned in relation to competing organisations? How do funders view you? What do those who should be benefitting from your work think of your effectiveness? What external factors will affect your ability to do your work?

The challenge with an environmental scan is that it is not predictive: it captures the environment within which you operate today, perceptions as they are today, trends as they are today. While you may be able to make some good guesses about the direction in which things are headed, it is important that organisations continually scan their environments, keeping an eye on competitors, how your organisation is perceived, the challenges you face and the larger trends affecting your work. As these factors change, your strategic plan may also need to be adjusted.

Two other challenges with environmental scans are:
• Small organisations may not have the time or resources to conduct an environmental scan. The key is to determine what is “enough”—what essential information do you need in order to make good decisions about how you will move forward?
• Organisations often out-source this step to an outside consultant. While an outside consultant may bring an outsider’s viewpoint to this assessment, they may also miss key information or indicators that would be better seen by someone with an insider’s knowledge. For this reason, it is suggested that organisations undertake this work on their own or working side by side with their consultant.

Despite these issues, an environmental scan may be useful to you and your organisation. Factors to consider:
• Who do you need to hear from? Rather than trying to survey everyone connected to your organisation, would a more targeted set of conversations be more valuable to you?
• Who on your team already has insight and knowledge about the context within which you operate? How can you make use of the insight your team already has? Can you involve these team members in conducting or contributing to the environmental scan?