In strategic planning, the process is just as important as the product.
Yes, at the end of the day, you need to produce a clear, concise plan that keeps your staff and board focused on the right things. But it’s actually the process of planning, not the plan itself, where true transformation typically takes place.
And here’s the thing: not all strategic planning processes are created equal. In a typical strategic planning process, you might:
- Hire a facilitator
- Have them conduct some research
- Gather your board and staff to discuss and deliberate about priorities
- Draft a plan
- Debate about its finer points until it is approved by the board
- Start trying to execute on your plan while balancing all the other day-to-day demands of running your nonprofit organization
And then a couple years later, you’ll evaluate everything you didn’t get done, everything that has changed and caused you to stall or struggle, and you’ll start again. Rinse and repeat.
There are a couple key problems with “typical” strategic planning processes like this one. First, they leave out your nonprofit’s most important stakeholders: the constituents who use your programs and services. Second, they fail to acknowledge the dynamic nature of managing a nonprofit organization in today’s fast-paced world, where priorities are bound to shift at a moment’s notice (remember those 2020 strategic plans anyone?)
Those problems are the reason we handle strategic planning a little differently at Prosper Strategies. We’ve designed a very different three-step strategic planning process based on The Nonprofit Impact SystemTM, and it works so much better than the “typical” process that we want to share it not just with our clients, but with our whole community. So today, let’s dive into the three-step strategic planning process every nonprofit needs, and discuss how it is different from strategic planning processes you might be used to.
Strategic Planning Process Step 1: People
As the Shared Power philosophy reminds us, the foundation of any successful strategy is people. You can’t build an effective, equitable strategic plan in a closed room with only staff and board members at the table. You must deeply involve your stakeholders in the process, especially the constituents who use your programs and services. That’s why the first key step in the strategic planning process should involve thoughtfully engaging your nonprofit’s stakeholders and then conducting research with them at the center. To make this happen:
First, identify your stakeholders. List all the individuals and groups who have a stake in your organization’s success. This might include your program and service participants (constituents), board, staff, donors, funders, community partners, government officials and more.
Then, design robust opportunities for stakeholder engagement. There are many different ways to engage your stakeholders in strategic planning, from interviews and surveys at the onset of the process, to the formation of stakeholder strategic planning committees that stay engaged throughout the entire process (and even following the adoption of your plan). Assess the availability and interest of your various stakeholder groups, and ask them how they want to be involved. Then, design your process accordingly for each group. In an ideal world, you should aim to do more than simply survey or interview your stakeholders at the onset of the process. Whenever you can, aim for ongoing engagement and create feedback loops to keep your stakeholders involved in shaping your organization.
If you need help identifying your stakeholders and designing opportunities for engagement, check out our Stakeholder Audit and Engagement Worksheets.
Next, establish the following groups to be involved in strategic planning:
- A staff strategic planning committee made up of leadership staff and key representatives from across your departments who will foster the strategic planning process
- A board strategic planning committee made up of board members who will be intimately involved in strategic planning and champion the strategic plan to the rest of the board
- A stakeholder strategic planning committee made up of an intenetional selection of your nonprofit’s stakeholders (prioritizing program/service participants) who will be tapped for input and ideas throughout the strategic planning process
Finally, now that you’ve thoughtfully designed opportunities to engage the people who will have a voice in your strategic planning process, you can conduct the foundational research that will guide your plan’s priorities. We recommend conducting the following three assessments:
Organization Assessment
In this assessment, examine internal structures, processes, financials and performance to identify strengths and areas for improvement. Then, align everyone in the groups above around a common understanding of where your organization stands today.
Ecosystem Assessment
In this assessment, look at the external environment, including other organizations in your area (physical area or mission area), sub-sector trends, and factors that impact your nonprofit’s work. Then, help the groups above understand your nonprofit’s position within the broader landscape.
Stakeholder Assessment
In this assessment, you’ll have your first formal opportunity to gather insights from stakeholders such as donors, constituents, and partners. You can do this through surveys, interviews, listening sessions, focus groups, or some combination of those approaches. Using those tools, ask your stakeholders questions that will help you understand their needs, perceptions of your organization today, and perspectives on what you should prioritize going forward.
After these three assessments are conducted, we recommend sharing key insights with the key groups you identified who will be involved in strategic planning. This ensures that everyone goes into step two, strategy, with a shared understanding of where your nonprofit is today, and what you might need to consider as you plan for the future.
Strategic Planning Process Step 2: Strategy
With a strong foundation of engaged stakeholders aligned around a common set of key insights, the next step is the actual development of your strategic plan. Unfortunately, this is where many strategic planning processes start. That’s a mistake, because the setup in step one is critical to the development of an effective strategy that is grounded in what your stakeholders really want and need from your organization. The bulk of the work in step two typically takes place during a strategic planning retreat with your planning teams (staff, board and stakeholders) where you will collaboratively develop some or all of the following elements:
Mission, Vision, and Values
Your mission, vision, and values are the guideposts for your nonprofit’s work. They should stand the test of time, and will not need to be redone every strategic planning cycle. That said, you should confirm that they still hold true every time you go through strategic planning, and ensure everyone involved in the planning process is keeping them top of mind. If your organization is going through a period of great change, you may want to do more than just revisit these elements and instead overhaul them in more depth.
Strategic Pillars aka Strategic Priorities
Strategic pillars are the priorities or key areas of focus that will drive your organization’s efforts and resources over the timeframe of your strategic plan. These priorities should be aligned with the mission, vision, and values and address the most critical needs and opportunities, as identified by your constituents and other stakeholders in step one.
To help identify strategic priorities, we recommend a variety of exercises and tools for our clients, the most important being the Eisenhower Matrix.
Objectives and Key Results
While pillars define key areas of focus for your plan, objectives and key results establish the most important things you’ll do to pursue those pillars and advance your mission over the next three years, and define how you’ll measure your progress. Objectives are qualitative, while key results are quantitative and can be measured.
Strategic Plannign Process Step 3: Progress
The final step in an ideal strategic planning process is all about setting your nonprofit up to make meaningful, measured progress on its strategic plan. This should include:
Further Refinement to Your Plan Based on Stakeholder Input
After you shape your pillars, objectives and key results during your planning retreat, it’s time to go back and seek additional input from your stakeholders, especially constituents who weren’t able to be involved in the retreat itself. You will likely find that some refinement is needed before you finalize your plan.
Developing a Strategic Plan Dashboard
A long, written plan is not an actionable tool for day-to-day work. That’s why we suggest creating a dashboard to accompany your strategic plan that lays out your pillars, objectives and key results, and assigns owners to track each item. The dashboard should also lay out quarterly or annual activity plans that add an additional layer of detail, describing the specific steps that will be taken over a shorter timeframe to see each objective or key result through.
Establishing a Meeting Cadence
Don’t just set it and forget it. Schedule regular meetings (monthly or quarterly) where the owners of each pillar in your strategic plan meet with the owners of associated objectives and key results to discuss progress and make adjustments. This is where a strategic plan can become a living, breathing document, not something that gathers dust or becomes obsolete as soon as circumstances change.
Creating Feedback Loops
Perhaps the most important part of step three is creating feedback loops through which your constituents and other stakeholders can continue to give you input on how your organization is doing. This can happen through regular surveys or interviews, town hall meetings, or a variety of other venues that fit into the ways you’re already engaging the people and communities you serve. Then, because you’ll already have other progress elements in place that give your plan flexibility (like your dashboard and meeting cadence), you can quickly make adjustments to your plan on the fly based on what you learn from your stakeholders along the way.
Strategic planning doesn’t have to be hard.
It just has to be engaging, intentional, and focused on producing a plan that can flex with your organization’s changing needs. Next time you are entering into strategic planning, model your process after the one we’ve described here as much as you possibly can. You’ll be amazed at the difference it makes.
