General information

Programme overview

This document details the objectives, structure and delivery of the programme. Please read it before the introductory session on 14 October.

Why this programme

Most existing guidance for think tanks is aimed at organisations with established communications teams, finance officers and funded strategies. This programme is designed for organisations where one person may handle fundraising, budgeting and much of the research, and where the main constraints are time, financial resources and organisational scale rather than ambition.

It adapts the content of OTT’s flagship School for Thinktankers, held annually and in person, to organisations that are small, newly established, or both. The central question is what good practice looks like for organisations of this size and what specific decisions they must make.

Objectives

• Clarify strategy: articulate where your organisation creates value, and how it balances research, communications and advocacy.
• Strengthen the essentials: build working knowledge of governance, financial management and fundraising at the scale of a small organisation.
• Anticipate risks and opportunities: prepare for what could knock a small organisation off course, or open new doors, in its first years: visibility, integrity, finances and the political context.
• Support decisions about scale: judge whether and how to grow — in size, footprint, influence or partnerships — rather than assume that growth is the goal.
• Build a peer cohort: learn from think tanks in other countries at similar stages of development, as much as from the facilitators.

Our approach

The programme draws on OTT’s Build a think tank guide, the School for Thinktankers, and over fifteen years of advisory work with think tanks in Europe, Africa, Asia and Latin America. Three principles shape how it is taught:

• Decisions, not best practice: each session ends with something you have decided, drafted or crossed off.
• Prioritisation is a critical skill: with limited resources, deciding what to exclude often matters more than adding activities. Sessions 2, 3 and 4 focus on refining your plans by removing less essential elements.
• Peers before trainers: live sessions are facilitated discussions. You will present your organisation’s situation and comment on others’.

Structure

The programme is fully online and has three components:

• Self-paced content: each session has a module on this course page with a short video, a recorded presentation, two or three readings and relevant templates. Plan around 45 minutes before each live session.
• Live sessions: six seminar-style sessions on Zoom: an introduction, four two-hour content sessions and a closing session. Each includes a short framing input from the facilitator, structured discussion, small-group work and peer feedback.
• Tasks and quizzes: a short quiz after each module and one task per session applied to your own organisation.

The total time investment is about twelve hours across seven weeks, with one week free in the middle of the programme.

Preparing for each session

• Work through the module on the course page before the session, and take the quiz when you finish it.
• Bring real documents: every session asks you to work on your actual budget, list of board members, workplan or website.
• Attend the live sessions: the value of the cohort depends on participants being present and engaged.

Course page

This page holds the session videos, slide decks, readings, templates and recordings. It is organised in modules, one per session, and stays available after the programme ends.

Google Classroom

Google Classroom carries announcements, forums, session reminders, deadlines, tasks and quizzes. You submit your session tasks there and receive comments on them. Notifications come from Classroom, so keep them switched on.

Tasks, quizzes and evaluation

There is no competitive grading. The objective is for each participant to complete four substantive pieces of work on their own organisation, so that both OTT and your organisation can see progress and change.

What	When	Time	Purpose
Entry evaluation	Before 14 October	15 min	Baseline: organisational profile, self-rated confidence across the four content areas, and what you want from the programme
Module quiz	After each module, before the next session	10 min	Five questions on the self-paced content. Auto-marked.
Session task	Within a week of each session	45–60 min	Applied to your own organisation. Feedback from the facilitator in Google Classroom.
Exit evaluation	After 25 November	20 min	The same confidence scale as the entry evaluation, plus what your organisation changed or decided, and what was missing

The four session tasks

Each task starts from what you already have. Where a document exists (a strategy, a board, a budget), review it against the session and recommend how to adapt it. Where it does not, draft a first version.

• Positioning note: one page on where your organisation creates value compared with others in its policy space and what it offers that they do not; your two or three priority policy questions; and which functions it delivers.
• Board and roles map: your current board or governing group against six skill areas, with two named gaps and what you will do about them.
• Budget pair: recommendations for your organisational budget and one real project budget (internal version), using the templates provided.
• Risks and opportunities: for visibility, integrity, finances and the political context, one risk and one opportunity you can already see, and what you will do about each.

Together, these four documents closely resemble an organisational plan, which is what the closing session is built around.

Certificate

A certificate of participation will be issued to participants who attend at least four of the six live sessions, submit at least three of the four session tasks, and complete both evaluations.

Contact

For queries requiring a response from OTT, use Google Classroom or email Camila Ulloa at culloa@onthinktanks.org.