Strategic planning series: Part 1
Strategic planning creates the structure organizations need to move forward with purpose. Done right, it clarifies priorities, guides decision-making, and helps you stay accountable to your vision. When equity shapes both the process and the plan, strategic planning becomes even more impactful, aligning your work with community needs, strengthening relationships, and building capacity.
Because strategic planning is one of the core ways we support organizations, we’ve seen what makes the difference between a plan that sits on a shelf and one that drives meaningful change. In this ongoing blog series, we’ll explore what effective, equity-centered strategic planning can make possible for your organization. This first post covers the purpose and benefits of strategic planning: what it is, when you should do it, and why it matters. In later posts, we’ll dive into the how, explain our approach, and reflect on what we’ve learned.
A strategic plan is an organizing document that enables an organization (or group) to work toward a collective future by ensuring its activities stay aligned with its purpose. In a volatile political and economic environment, outside pressures can threaten an organization’s integrity by creating unnecessary trade-offs between stability and values alignment, or between short-term effectiveness and long-term success. Purpose-driven organizations (including nonprofits and public agencies, as well as many values-conscious businesses and community groups) need strategic planning to navigate these pressures and guide ethical decision-making in a complex world.
Through the strategic planning process, people build a shared understanding of the root causes of the problems their organization seeks to address, and of how different forces can come together to create meaningful change. Together, participants create a roadmap showing how to get from good ideas to effective outcomes. They also set clear expectations and identify the resources, tactics, and other tools needed to stay effective – even (or especially) when new obstacles or opportunities arise.
Strategic planning can address some of the challenges that prevent organizations from realizing their visions for positive impact. Here are a few key problems we see organizations face, and how strategic planning can help.
Solution: An effective plan provides clear direction and touchpoints to guide decision-making and action.
In a new organization, people may have a general idea of what they want to accomplish, but not of how to make it happen. They may end up trying things at random or acting on inaccurate assumptions, which wastes time and energy and damages relationships. They may try throwing money at a problem without understanding its root causes, leading to frustration when the investment doesn’t produce results.
Without a planning process, they don’t know what they don’t know about why their work isn’t having the impact they expected. A good strategic plan eliminates the guesswork by defining exactly what the organization aims to accomplish and how it will get there.
Solution: A thoughtful planning process surfaces new possibilities and helps the organization update its understanding of itself, its community, and its work - so it can navigate the present and future effectively.
Strategic planning is an opportunity to take stock of an organization’s work and context. Without it, the tendency can be to keep doing things “the way they’ve always been done,” whether or not the approach is still effective. In addition to wasting time and resources, doing things the same old way without examination often leads to unfair practices and unequal outcomes.
In a rapidly changing social and economic context, inevitable changes in an organization’s staff and community mean that habits and structures that worked when the organization was founded will not work forever. A strategic planning process can get an organization out of its rut and discover more effective, inclusive ways of operating.
Solution: A participatory strategic planning process makes key issues transparent across the organization, ensuring the plan is realistic and strengthening cohesion, relationships, and performance.
Front-line staff and organizational leaders have very different jobs, requiring different perspectives and skills. Both are essential for effective planning. Without meaningful input from all levels of staff, well-intentioned leaders can easily create a plan that reflects their own lenses and biases. If they’re not intimately familiar with staff’s day-to-day realities, the plan may not be realistic.
Sometimes leaders make a good-faith effort to include non-leadership staff in planning, but the staff are too siloed to see the organization as a whole. As a result, they can’t bring their full capacity and creativity to addressing organizational problems. In a participatory strategic planning process, staff across all levels learn from each other’s perspectives and develop a shared, holistic understanding to inform the organization’s path forward.
Strategic plans are not all created equal! In the next post, we’ll explore how an equity-focused approach can produce a more effective plan while building capacity and strengthening internal and external relationships.
And if you’d like to dive deeper, consider joining our new strategic planning cohort program! With expert guidance from our consultants and a collaborative learning community, you'll design a strategic planning process tailored to your organization — and leave ready to put it into action.
