Federated Farmers: Strategic refresh shapes our future

Graham Smith, Chief executive

Six months ago, Federated Farmers established a team of staff to begin thinking about what we needed to focus on during the next three years.

The team spent a lot of time talking to Federated Farmers members, staff and officials around the country.

With an external organisation, they also engaged with a range of key stakeholders (including senior government officials, politicians, food companies and industry organisations) about how we are perceived, what we need to focus on and achieve in the future.

Some important feedback was received, including:

* Federated Farmers is viewed as a really important primary sector organisation, strengths being our national grass-roots network combined with the ability to engage with key bureaucrats, industry and senior politicians

* There are big issues facing the primary sector now and into the future.

Most key stakeholders want Federated Farmers to take an even stronger role in helping to identify, shape industry thinking and solve many of these issues, as we are one of the few pan primary sector organisations.

As a result of this feedback and the work undertaken by the strategic refresh team, our key strategies can be summarised as:

* Stronger pan sector strategic role, particularly on some of the big issues (environment: water and climate change, health and safety, science and innovation). Initial responses within Federated Farmers include establishing a national water team and strengthening our policy team, so we also continue to respond to important immediate issues that arise.

* Understand, engage and communicate more effectively with our members:

Our initial response is to put more resources into our field officers and enable them to focus on finding and keeping members.

We are also reviewing our communication strategies:

* Develop a stronger nationally networked, sustainable organisation (to help implement the first two strategies). We have already worked with provincial presidents to commence recruiting a provincial engagement manager, appointed a chief information officer to lead a significant improvement of our IT capabilities and a human resource manager to help improve how we work together.

In essence, much of what we are doing is strengthening our capabilities.

In doing so, we are conscious of living within our financial means; that does not have to increase membership fees beyond the annual rate of inflation.

A number a other initiatives will be announced in the months ahead to enable us to serve our members more effectively.