Our Approach to Strategic Plan Development

Overview - A new or updated strategic plan can offer your organization an opportunity to align conversations, solicit stakeholder feedback, and update partnerships with current needs and future directions. This can be especially important during uncertain times and periods of rapid change in terms of policy and funding. A well developed strategic plan can enhance internal operations, and help stakeholders better understand your work and how you contribute to their success. The plan acts as raw materials which can support engagement, fundraising, communications and strategic messaging.

Outcomes

• Create a collaboration space that allows space for all voices to be heard across geographic locations, departments, organizations and roles.
• The process we facilitate can foster and create connections across the participating team members.
• The work reviews and aligns current activities with the organization’s / groups emerging mission 
• A SWOT (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) analysis can surface challenges, and uncover new opportunities based on reframing how the team sees its capabilities
• You will clarify your mission, vision, and values
• You will develop shared opportunities amongst the participants 
• Shared priorities emerge from this strategic planning process
• During uncertain times, we find that practical strategies for adaptiveness and resilience naturally arise out of these strategic conversations.
• Actionable next steps and accountability structures emerge from these conversations.
• We support your organization to have the raw materials necessary to develop a strategic plan that is co-owned and created by the participants.

Plan

We accomplish these outcomes with the following broad process. We’re able to tune this process to your organizations specific needs and situation, but this gives you an idea of how we structure the work. Time estimates are for a well focused strategic plan update, more involved plans can be developed for organizations that need more assistance.

1. Stakeholder input phase, we conduct a short qualitative survey to gather stakeholder input. 
2. In-person strategic retreat 
3. Strategic plan drafting and iteration 

Stakeholder Input phase 

Goal: Ground the strategic process in inclusive input and context.

We support the organization in gathering input, ensuring the retreat proceeds with care and consideration to perspectives and views that might not be present in the room. We usually start with a survey that engages the team in sharing their strategic priorities and concerns. This content is used with our host and team lead to set conversation priorities and plans for the retreat. This stakeholder involvement can go beyond the retreat invitees to attempt to get broader input from stakeholders who may not be able to travel to, or participate in, the retreat as well.

As part of this process we can identify those that should be brought into the planning process as co-owners / creators of the strategic plan at the end of the process. We like to build a group that is composed of leadership, key staff, and key external stakeholders to the strategic plan. We recommend a group of fewer than 20 participants. Invitations should emphasize the limited time commitment and the long-term impact that participants can have on your organization's direction.

In-Person Strategic Retreat

Goal: Align team on the strategic priorities, clarify vision and values, and begin to translate insights into actionable goals.

The retreat begins with a discussion of the role that strategic planning will have among your group. Then we engage in an exploration of Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats (SWOT). This raw-material in conjunction with a discussion of mission, vision, values and high-level goals provides the raw materials for team alignment. Subsequent conversations talk about ways forward and the identification of implementation activities and next steps for the organization to live up to its ambitions. 

We support the team to have important conversations while we capture key insights to feed back to the strategic plan drafting team. These kinds of conversations are a great way to build relationships that can help make strategic initiatives work well. The in-person retreat materials and captured conversations will be fed back to the written strategic plan team.

Strategic Plan Drafting and Iteration

Goal: Develop a written strategic plan reflecting workshop outcomes and stakeholder input.

We can provide a strategic planning template and boilerplate language, content sections and examples to guide the drafting process. Our role is to support the structure, coherence and alignment with findings - while you lead with content and the voice.

To ensure the plan reflects your organization’s identity and priorities, we believe it is essential that you commit to the strategic plan being written by your leadership team. Plans are much more impactful when they are owned by the team and told in your own unique voice. We are here to support the process, organize information from discussions, collaborate and give feedback. We are not strategic plan ghostwriters.

Our support includes: 

• Boilerplate documentation with the plan structures and content sections clarified
• Up to three revision cycles with feedback integration (6 hours)