Approachable Strategic Planning
As we race through the third quarter of the year, it’s time to start thinking about next year’s priorities (I can hear your laughter as I type this). In a perfect world, you would be referencing your organization’s current strategic plan and tracking progress, with thoughts of building on this in the year to come. However, in the real world, you may not be following your strategic plan (where is that thing?), or (gasp), you don’t even have one!
I will take some deep breaths and regroup and tell you why your organization needs to have a strategic plan - or, at the very least, “a” plan with clear and agreed-upon goals and objectives. First, I will say - I get it! I started a small grassroots organization years ago and had little budget for anything other than personnel and supplies. But I did know that we would need clear goals and objectives to guide intentional, desired growth. I have a background in research methodology and statistics, and so of course, created a logic model! And this did serve its purpose each year, but I also quickly realized that I needed a strategic plan to inform this logic model, or we would just continue doing the same thing each and every year. Or worse, base our programming on what was a priority at that moment without considering the future. I learned some tough lessons and probably wasted a lot of time and energy before completing a strategic planning process.
It is with that experience and understanding of the needs of small nonprofit organizations that Richard and I created a “Lite” version of our comprehensive strategic planning process [for use with larger and mature nonprofits]. Instead of a six-month process, we focus on the “big questions” facing your organization, and help generate a focused plan for the short term (18-24 months usually), which will guide the next steps of organizational growth. Learn more on our strategic planning page.
As an example, we recently completed this ‘strategic planning lite’ process with an emergent nonprofit organization in Denver. Over the course of a few months, we worked alongside the organization’s founders to identify and develop the mission, vision, and core values, and identify the next steps to take to strengthen and develop the organization over the next 18-months. Why such a short period of time? As unpaid founders who work full-time jobs in addition to establishing this nonprofit, they were not sure what the next steps for the organization would/should be. They have a great vision for the future, but were unsure about what actions they should take to support organizational growth and work toward that vision. Together, we identified those steps and developed an implementation plan that will serve as their roadmap.
There is no ‘one size fits all’ approach to strategic planning. There are some great tools that we recommend that you can use to create or modify a strategic plan. To access these, please see our earlier August blog for two great book suggestions.