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Strategic planning shouldn’t be a top-down exercise.
Most nonprofits approach strategic planning the same way: a small group of senior leaders and board members make the calls, and then the plan gets shared out. Shared Power Strategic Planning™ flips that completely on its head, putting the people and communities you serve at the center of decisionmaking, and in this episode of Changemaker Conversations, Lindsay and I walk through exactly how it works, step by step, using a real client example.
That client is an organization that came to us just after a new CEO had started. They had a wide and complex stakeholder landscape: patients, families, clinicians, researchers, partner organizations, industry partners, and limited resources to work with, plus a lot of vexing questions their board and staff couldn’t seem to work through. Sound familiar? Their situation is more common than you might think, and it’s exactly the kind of challenge the Shared Power Strategic Planning™ process is built for.
Here’s how we moved through all eight steps with them, and how they’d apply for you, whether you’re DIYing your plan, working with us as your facilitator, or partnering with us on every aspect of your planning process (all options we offer).
The Three Phases (and Eight Steps) of Shared Power Strategic Planning™
Before we get into each step, it helps to understand the big picture. The Shared Power Strategic Planning™ process moves through three phases: People, Strategy, and Progress. People drive strategy. Strategy drives measurable results. Then we learn, adjust, and keep hearing from people. It’s a cycle, not a one-time event.
Within those three phases are eight steps. They apply whether you’re DIY-ing your plan, working with a facilitator, or partnering with a full-service consultant. Skip one, and you risk building a plan that isn’t truly tuned in to the needs of the people and communities you serve.
Step 1: Prepare
Before any planning happens, we do a readiness and culture check. This isn’t about scheduling the retreat. It’s about asking: Is the organization actually ready for this?
We start by issuing a kickoff questionnaire to the CEO or executive director and the full board. They go through a series of questions designed as much for their own reflection as for ours. What we’re looking for: Is there genuine appetite for stakeholder engagement? Is the board willing to be involved without taking over? Is the organization open to actually changing things, or are they just going through the motions?
With our example client, the questionnaires surfaced three major tensions: a high percentage of restricted revenue that was limiting mission impact, real disagreement about whether to expand into adjacent disease spaces, and unresolved questions about the organization’s role relative to smaller single-disease organizations. Knowing those fault lines early meant we could design the process to address them directly rather than stumble into them mid-retreat.
Step 2: Engage
This is where shared power really starts to come to life. Most organizations fire off a survey, maybe do a few stakeholder interviews, and call it a day. What’s missing is intentionality about who gets engaged, when, how, and what it would take for each group to participate meaningfully.
We use a tool called the Stakeholder Engagement Roadmap to map this out before we ask anyone a single question. The four main groups in any planning process are staff, board, the people and communities the organization serves, and other external stakeholders — donors, funders, partners, community members. In our rare disease client’s case, that also included clinicians, researchers, and industry partners.
For each group, we think through: Do we need to provide childcare or transportation? Do we need identity-aligned facilitators? Do we need to offer anonymous feedback methods or account for language and ability differences? Are there minors involved?
With the example client, many patients were non-verbal, many were minors, and their families were consumed by caregiving. Asking them to carve time out of their schedules for an interview wasn’t realistic. So instead, we went to them, showing up at their annual conference with short, focused research sessions scheduled during a time when families already had support arranged for their loved ones. We came to them. That’s what shared power engagement actually looks like in practice.
Step 3: Research
The Shared Power Strategic Planning™ process is anchored by three assessments.
The organization assessment provides an honest snapshot of current state: programs, revenue mix, staff structure, financial performance. This is not visioning. This is saying: here’s where we’re starting from. Let’s all be clear.
The ecosystem assessment looks at peer and aspirational organizations. We review websites, 990s, and annual reports to understand how the organization compares, where it might differentiate, and what it can learn. Paired with the organization assessment, this is where comparisons become meaningful — like benchmarking your restricted revenue percentage against peers in your sub-sector.
The stakeholder assessment is typically the most revealing. This is surveys and interviews with the various stakeholder groups, aimed at understanding what they most need from the organization over the next several years.
With our rare disease client, we got hundreds of survey responses and conducted about two dozen one-on-one interviews at their annual conference with patients and families, leading researchers, and clinicians. Three key insights rose to the top: their restricted revenue picture was lagging behind comparators, stakeholders were open to expansion into adjacent disease spaces but with important nuances, and there was genuine desire from patients, families, and smaller organizations for this organization to step into a lead convener role.
Those three insights became the spine of everything that followed.
A note on AI here: Lindsay and I have been thinking a lot about how AI is changing this phase of the work. Tools like Claude, ChatGPT, and others can meaningfully accelerate the sifting and synthesis of large bodies of research, pulling out themes, tensions, and strategic questions from survey data and documents. That’s a real advantage, especially for organizations DIY-ing their plan. But AI doesn’t replace context, nuance, or judgment. Use it to accelerate the sifting. Bring your human brain to what it surfaces.
Step 4: Retreat
Two days. And no, we’re not spending six hours wordsmithing the mission statement.
Day one focuses on mission, vision, and values, not because we’re trying to get the language perfect, but because these are the compass for every decision in day two. The point is alignment on the big ideas: What are we working toward? What does that mean for our day-to-day work? What values guide how we get there? The wordsmithing can happen later.
Day two is where the real strategic thinking happens. We start with a massive brainstorm: every question the group can think of that they might need to answer over the next three to five years. With our rare disease client, that brainstorm produced more than 285 questions. From there, we work as facilitators to group those questions into themed clusters and then evaluate potential plan pillars using the Eisenhower Matrix, assessing both the potential impact of each pillar and the lift required to pursue it.
Almost all eleven potential pillars this client generated scored high on impact. The real differentiator was lift. Some things were too heavy and had prerequisites that needed to come first. Others turned out to be day-to-day work that didn’t deserve a place on the change agenda. When we started framing the pillars as the transformation agenda: what does this organization need to fundamentally shift over the next three years? Four pillars rose clearly to the top.
One common pitfall: the tendency to put everything in, especially existing work. Everyone wants to see their work acknowledged. But a strategic plan is a change agenda, not an inventory of everything you do. The path to a plan is deciding what needs to transform most, and then figuring out how the day-to-day fits around it.
Step 5: Set OKRs
Pillars are aspirational. They’re the headline. OKRs (Objectives and Key Results) are how you move from inspirational to operational.
Objectives are what you want to achieve under each pillar: qualitative, directional, and somewhat inspirational. Key results are how you’ll measure progress: specific, measurable, and time-bound. We typically aim for three to four objectives per pillar and one to five key results per objective, spread across the full life of the plan. Not everything happens in year one, and that front-loading instinct is one of the most common traps we see.
Ownership matters here too. Each pillar has a pillar owner who secures team commitment and coordinates across the work. Each objective has an objective owner who leads the work and builds quarterly activity plans. Key result owners track specific measures. These roles allow the plan to stay accountable and visible across the whole organization.
Critically: this is staff-led work. Staff will implement the plan. They should own drafting the OKRs. The board might review at a high level, but the ownership belongs with the people doing the work.
We use a shared OKR dashboard (typically a collaborative Google Sheet) so that progress is transparent and everyone can see how their work connects to the bigger picture.
Step 6: Listening Sessions
This step is often skipped entirely in traditional strategic planning. It’s also one of the most powerful.
After the retreat and after the OKRs have started to take shape, we pause to go back to stakeholders, especially the people and communities the organization serves, and share what we’re thinking. Did we actually hear you? Are we missing anything? We’re not voting. We’re listening.
We typically recommend at least three sessions: one with full staff, one with the full board, and one with program or service participants and key external stakeholders. The more distinct subgroups you have, the more sessions the better.
With our rare disease client, this step changed the plan in a significant way. We had drafted a vision statement oriented around a world without a specific rare disease. That language landed wrong with patients, families, and clinicians, some of whom heard it as implying that people living with these diseases shouldn’t exist. It touched on real ethical questions around genetics and eugenics. It was a thematic enough response across listening sessions that we took it very seriously.
We revised the vision to focus on a world free from the burdens of these diseases. We also reframed “advancing policy” as “mobilizing advocacy,” because the organization can control its advocacy efforts, not whether policy actually changes. Several pillars were refined for clarity. By the end of those sessions, we weren’t guessing anymore. The plan was meaningfully shaped by the people it was built to serve.
Steps 7 & 8: Finalize and Implement
By the time you reach finalization, the heavy lifting is done. You have a mission, vision, and values that have been tested with stakeholders. You have OKRs. You have quarterly activity plans taking shape.
Finalization is really about packaging and distributing this work. We typically develop two plan documents: an internal plan that serves as an operational roadmap for staff and board, with full OKR detail, and an external plan, a communication tool for funders, donors, and partners that goes as far as pillars and makes the case for why the organization is focused where it’s focused.
Board approval follows, and it should not be a surprise. If the board has been genuinely involved throughout the process (on the strategic planning committee, in listening sessions, reviewing the questionnaire results) a yes vote is the expected outcome.
Implementation is where strategic plans most often go to die, so we’re intentional about building the infrastructure for it. Staff develop quarterly activity plans that level up to their OKRs. Regular strategic plan check-ins keep pillar and objective owners in conversation with each other. The OKR dashboard gets updated on a regular cadence. And critically, stakeholders, especially the people and communities the organization serves, hear back from you. Here’s what we heard from you. Here’s what we’re doing as a result. Here’s how it’s going. That feedback loop is what turns a strategic plan into a living, breathing commitment.
Is a Facilitator or Consulting Firm Right for You?
Full-service strategic planning, where a firm like ours leads the process from research through rollout is a meaningful investment, typically best suited for organizations approaching $10 million in revenue or with specific grant funding earmarked for strategic planning. It’s not the right fit for everyone, and it doesn’t need to be.
For smaller organizations, we also offer Facilitation-Only options and the Nonprofit Strategic Planning Toolbox, which was built for exactly this. It guides you through all eight steps with our 70+ page guidebook, 17 tools and templates, and Strately™ AI (in the Pro version) to help with synthesis and OKR building. It’s the same Shared Power Strategic Planning™ process, built for organizations ready to lead it themselves.
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From the Podcast
This post was inspired by Changemaker Conversations, our podcast for nonprofit leaders navigating change, uncertainty and strategy.
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About the Authors
Alyssa Conrardy
Alyssa is the Co-Founder of Prosper Strategies and a national expert in nonprofit strategy, stakeholder engagement, and the Shared Power Strategy™ approach. She leads nonprofits through complex strategic planning and crisis response efforts with a focus on alignment, equity and impact.
Connect with Alyssa: linkedin.com/in/alyssaconrardy
Lindsay Mullen
Lindsay is the Co-Founder of Prosper Strategies and a seasoned advisor to nonprofits navigating change, culture, and strategic decision-making. She brings deep expertise in board engagement, communications, and the Nonprofit Strategy System.
Connect with Lindsay: linkedin.com/in/lindsaymmullen
About Prosper Strategies
Alyssa Conrardy and Lindsay Mullen are the co-founders of Prosper Strategies, a strategic consulting firm that helps nonprofits align mission, strategy and culture through the Nonprofit Strategy System and Shared Power Strategy™ philosophy.
About Changemaker Conversations
Changemaker Conversations is a podcast for nonprofit leaders who are ready to build smarter, more strategic organizations with less friction and more joy.
Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and visit ChangemakerConversations.com for show notes and additional resources.
