Strategic Planning 101

Who participates in strategic planning? A Strategic Plan is hardly strategic if you haven’t engaged the people who need to feel some ownership for its success and will carry out its goals (e.g., board, staff, faculty, clergy…). Your Strategic Plan can feel out of touch if you haven’t asked the communities or audiences you serve (e.g., students, patients, clients, visitors, borrowers, campers, funders, congregants, regulators…) about their needs and requirements and responded through the plan’s goals. All these constituents are “stakeholders” who interact with your organization in varied ways.

Start with a strong Steering Committee. First map out your universe of stakeholders and then create a Steering Committee that represents this diversity. Aim for seven to nine people who can guide the entire process—mix long-time and newer board members with both administrative and program staff. Pay attention to age, gender, and different perspectives to ensure you’re hearing varied viewpoints.

Consider including an outside voice too. A respected funder or community leader can ask the tough questions that challenge your assumptions and later help build support for implementation. The key is making sure every stakeholder group sees someone at the table who represents their interests.

Then cast a wider net for input. Beyond your Steering Committee, effective strategic planning requires solid research. You’ll need to gather data from credible sources and engage stakeholders through interviews, surveys, focus groups, environmental scans, and roundtable discussions.

The real skill lies in ensuring you hear from a balanced range of voices, ask the right questions, and surface the full spectrum of challenges and opportunities your organization faces.

How does data drive vision? Before you can chart where you’re going, you need to understand where you stand. Your Steering Committee should start by identifying the key questions your Strategic Plan needs to answer: Who do you serve? How effectively are you delivering programs and services? What resources do you have available? What’s changing in your external environment that could help or hinder your work?

Gather data from multiple sources. Use interviews, surveys, focus groups, and roundtable conversations to hear directly from stakeholders. But don’t stop there—dive into demographic research, review relevant literature, and take a close look at similar organizations. What programs and services are they offering? How are they structured financially and organizationally?

As you sift through all this information, patterns will emerge. You’ll start to see recurring themes, along with clear challenges and opportunities that your Strategic Plan should address.

Use a SWOT to make sense of it all. A SWOT analysis—examining your Strengths and Weaknesses (internal factors) alongside Opportunities and Threats (external factors)—provides a practical framework for organizing your findings. Aim for five to ten items in each quadrant.

This simple grid becomes the foundation for your strategy: build on strengths, address weaknesses, capitalize on opportunities, and mitigate threats. Use your SWOT during the research phase to summarize your data collection; then return to it at the end as a checklist to ensure your final plan accurately responds to what you discovered.

How is a vision formulated? Visioning is a weighty task since your vision statement becomes the headline for your entire Strategic Plan. If “mission” is the reason you are in business, think of “vision” as the impact you wish to have on the people that you serve or the issues you addrss.

The real art of visioning lies in finding common ground among diverse voices—board members and staff, administrators and frontline providers. This collaborative approach ensures buy-in across your organization.

When formulating your vision, draw on everything you’ve learned from your research phase. Picture a compelling future for both your nonprofit and the communities you serve—one that your Strategic Plan will be designed to achieve.

Here’s a practical tip: Don’t start by wordsmithing as a group. It’s notoriously difficult to get agreement on specific language when everyone’s editing together. Instead, focus first on identifying the big ideas that will drive your work during the strategic planning period. Use facilitated discussions or exercises to build consensus around these core concepts. Show several examples of vision statements you think are exemplary and ask the group to comment on their strengths. Then delegate the actual writing to a small, representative team.

Once you have a draft, bring it back to your Steering Committee for endorsement. When they approve it, take a moment to celebrate—you’ve accomplished something significant that will align everyone’s efforts moving forward.

Strategic planning is an essential practice for nonprofits looking to remain relevant and effective. It’s how organizations step back to examine their programs and services, respond to changing community needs, and chart a clear path forward—all while staying true to their mission.

This seven-part series offers a practical "how-to" guide for leading your own strategic planning process, or helps you understand what to expect when working with a management consulting firm like Plan A.

Goals and objectives are the building blocks of strategic planning. Your vision can and should be bold—but translating that vision into actionable direction is where strategic planning gets tricky. How do you create goals that are ambitious enough to inspire but realistic enough to achieve? And how many is too many?

Start with the big picture. Goals are high-level statements of expected outcomes, the impacts you aim to achieve through your vision.

Here’s an example: if your vision as a municipal public library is to dramatically improve access to informational and educational resources in an under-resourced community, a goal may be to increase community literacy rates to enable all community members to thrive.

Goals work in two directions. They should reach up to support your vision while filtering down to inform your objectives—the actual work that will make your plan happen.

Objectives bring goals down to earth. Objectives are specific, practical, and tactical strategies or initiatives with measurable outcomes that can be assigned to departments, teams, or individuals within defined timeframes and budgets.

For each major goal, commit to a focused set of objectives. Make sure each objective includes these essential elements:

1. Rationale (reason why this objective is important)
2. Desired outcomes (must be measurable)
3. Implementation steps (task-by-task breakdown)
4. Timeline (for both implementation and results)
5. Financial implications (costs and funding sources)
6. Evaluation criteria (including current baseline data)
7. Responsible party (for both implementation and measurement)

When objectives include all these components, they become true building blocks—concrete enough to guide daily decisions while flexible enough to adapt as you learn.

Returning to our example: For a municipal library with a goal to increase community literacy rates, an objective might be an initiative with partner schools to provide afterschool and weekend reading support for elementary school students and parents. A second objective might be an initiative to provide evening classes for English language learners.

Strategic planning is an essential practice for nonprofits looking to remain relevant and effective. It’s how organizations step back to examine their programs and services, respond to changing community needs, and chart a clear path forward—all while staying true to their mission.

This seven-part series offers a practical "how-to" guide for leading your own strategic planning process, or helps you understand what to expect when working with a management consulting firm like Plan A.

What does it take to implement a Strategic Plan? Creating a Strategic Plan is only half the challenge —successful implementation requires buy-in, clear accountability, and adequate resources.

Build momentum throughout the process. Don’t wait until your plan is finished to start building support. Keep stakeholders engaged with regular updates as you reach key milestones—when you approve your vision statement, agree on major goals, or finalize objectives. By the time you present the completed plan, its direction should feel familiar, not surprising.

Create two complementary documents. Your board needs to formally endorse the Strategic Plan, but their focus should be on the big picture—the vision, goals, and key objectives. Meanwhile, your staff needs something more detailed: a set of “tactical” workplans that break down each objective into step-by-step actions, year by year.

This dual approach ensures board-level oversight while giving staff the granular roadmap they need to execute. Make sure implementation responsibilities are distributed across your organization, so everyone has skin in the game.

Align your financial reality with your strategic ambitions. Before finalizing your plan, honestly assess the resources you’ll need and identify realistic funding sources (e.g., operating budget, surplus funds, board gifts, grants, and other revenue streams). Your Strategic Plan should integrate seamlessly with your annual operating budget and include specific fundraising goals.

This financial alignment ensures your board, executive team, and development staff all understand not just what you’re trying to achieve, but what it will take to get there.

Strategic planning is an essential practice for nonprofits looking to remain relevant and effective. It’s how organizations step back to examine their programs and services, respond to changing community needs, and chart a clear path forward — all while staying true to their mission.

This seven-part series offers a practical "how-to" guide for leading your own strategic planning process, or helps you understand what to expect when working with a management consulting firm like Plan A.

Plans are made to be changed! The best Strategic Plans are living documents, not rigid blueprints carved in stone. They’re designed to evolve as your organization learns and grows.

Think of your plan as having constants and variables. Your vision and major goals are the constants—they represent your North Star throughout the planning period and implementation and they shouldn’t change without serious consideration. These elements keep you focused on where you’re heading as an organization.

But your specific objectives and tactics? These are your variables, and they can change as circumstances shift. Opportunities will emerge, challenges will arise, and you’ll learn things that require course corrections. Your vision and goals become your decision-making filter; they help you know when to say "yes" to new opportunities and when to stay focused during tough times.

Life happens to nonprofits. Consider how any of these common scenarios might affect your plan: a key leader departing, board composition shifting, funding changes (up or down), programs succeeding beyond expectations or failing to launch, unexpected bequests, new legislation, fresh staff perspectives, merger possibilities, political shifts, or economic changes.

Your Strategic Plan should be flexible enough to accommodate these realities without losing sight of your ultimate vision.

Build in regular check-ins. Keep your Steering Committee active with periodic review meetings or designate your senior management team or a board-staff committee to monitor progress, provide helpful support, and recommend adjustments. The key is creating a formal process for plan maintenance, not just hoping it will happen organically.

Remember, a plan that never changes is probably a plan that’s not being used.