Strategic Planning for Membership Growth in Nonprofit Community Sport

Community sport organizations (CSOs) are membership-based nonprofit associations that offer accessible and affordable pathways for sport participation. As such, CSOs are fundamental to the sport delivery system, particularly in terms of introducing participants to sport skill acquisitions and providing continued opportunities to participate in recreational and competitive sport programming. In order to fulfill their mandates, CSOs must secure and deploy the appropriate resources, including financial, human, and equipment. This task may not be easily accomplished as CSOs, like other grassroots organizations, operate in increasingly complex and dynamic environments, and must address challenges such as the rising cost of infrastructure, difficulty recruiting and retaining skilled volunteers, changing stakeholder needs, and increased competition for funding. Another major challenge which CSOs are wrestling is how to best serve their communities in light of a general trend towards sport participation stagnancy or decline in Canada and other countries (Canadian Heritage, 2013; Eime et al., 2015; The Aspen Institute, 2018. Leaders of community sport organizations (CSOs) may use strategic planning, as a component of a broader management approach, to navigate these challenging environmental conditions, allocate resources, and establish a plan of action to fulfill their mandates. Strategic planning often results in a formal strategic plan, which can be used by organizational leaders to achieve change within the organization in order to enhance its alignment with its environment. This dissertation draws on Pettigrew’s (1987, 2012) framework for examining strategic change which offers insight into how strategic planning can be used to help organizations achieve their mandates. Pettigrew (1987, 2012) suggests that three central elements influence a strategy and its performance: content (the subject of the strategy itself), context (pre-existing conditions and forces within an organization’s operating environment), and process (the management of activities, actions, and methods that influence how a strategy is formulated and implemented). If all three of these elements are addressed, then an organization can achieve strategic change (i.e., changes undertaken within an organization to enhance alignment with its environment). Guided by an interpretivist approach, the purpose of this dissertation research is to examine the use of organizational strategy by CSO leaders to g