NEW YORK NURSE: October/November 2007

A road map to the future

Board adopts 3-year Strategic Plan

by Nancy Webber

After nearly a year of work involving a broad range of association members and staff, this fall the NYSNA Board of Directors adopted a Strategic Plan that will guide its activities over the next three years. The plan was presented to the membership at a forum held during the annual Convention.

The process began in November 2006 at a leadership retreat attended by both staff and member leaders from the Board of Directors, the Delegate Assembly, the Congress of Bargaining Unit Leaders, and various advisory councils and committees. At a daylong session, the group hammered out four major goals for the association:

Being the public voice for all nurses in New York State.
Educating, engaging, and mobilizing members and developing leaders.
Growing the organization.
Engaging in effective political action.

Four task forces were formed to further explore how the association can achieve these strategic goals. The task forces, which also included both staff and members, met twice during 2007 to prepare reports for the Board’s Strategic Planning Committee. The committee reviewed and approved the task forces’ recommendations at a meeting in August 2007 and the Board of Directors accepted the entire report in September.

“The recommendations are wide-ranging and ambitious,” said Linda O’Brien, newly installed NYSNA president and chair of the Strategic Planning Committee. “One of the Board’s top priorities will be to develop a realistic timeline and budget for these activities.”

The activities proposed by the four task forces range from a simple continuation of NYSNA’s current efforts to new initiatives that will demand considerable investment of time and funding.

Being the public voice for all nurses in New York State

This mandate clearly requires that NYSNA’s communication efforts must extend beyond information designed for its members. The association’s voice must carry to registered nurses who are not members and to the public at large.
Specific recommendations include:

Developing and delivering a clear, consistent message that captures NYSNA’s essential purpose and mission;
Branding NYSNA with use of the new logo, a tagline, and other means;
Building name recognition by promoting the NYSNA chief executive officer as the consistent face and voice of the organization; and
Using “the Nurses Association” rather than “NYSNA” as the organization’s public label and identity.

Educating, engaging, and mobilizing members and developing leaders

Achieving this goal is a top priority, as everything else the association hopes to accomplish depends on this. Specific recommendations:

Adopting a multi-dimensional, comprehensive, and integrated strategy of membership education and leadership development; and
Measuring and tracking work in this area in a reliable, systematic, and regular way.

Growing the organization

The target is a 10% annual growth in membership, which involves several strategies:

Working more effectively with schools of nursing;
Creating new affiliation agreements for organizations and individuals;
Developing and implementing a plan that targets nurses who, for one reason or another, cannot be represented for collective bargaining;
Supporting efforts to organize nurses for the purpose of collective bargaining; and
Basing organizing and growth strategies on reliable information about nurses who are not NYSNA members.

Engaging in effective political action

NYSNA must be the “go to” player on legislation and regulations concerning health care and nursing. State policy makers should consistently consult NYSNA before making decisions in these areas. Recommended actions:

Working to achieve more and better internal coordination of NYSNA political and legislative programs;
Increasing involvement of NYSNA members in grassroots political and legislative activities;
Reviewing the legislative and political coalitions to which NYSNA belongs to determine how to get the maximum results; and
Greatly increasing contributions to the NYSNA Political Action Committee.

Watch for regular updates on Strategic Plan initiatives and programs in future issues of New York Nurse.