How to Implement a Strategic Plan

“Planning is bringing the future into the present so that you can do something about it now.” 

-Alan Lakein

I’ll be honest: when I was first introduced to the term “strategic planning,” I thought it was just another trendy business buzzword without any real, concrete applications… A term on the same level of meaninglessness as other buzzword bingo hits like “synergistic flow” and “hyperconnectivity.” However, I must admit that my first impressions were completely incorrect. This semester, I have had the good fortune of learning that strategic planning is much more than just another hyped up trend in business jargon. Instead, it is a thorough and comprehensive process that allows organizations to identify and respond to critical issues through action-oriented planning.

While the basic ideas behind the strategic planning process are relatively well established across the board, different organizations do employ slightly varied conceptualizations of the specific planning steps. For example, Forbes utilizes a five-step strategic planning process, whereas the Jossey-Bass Handbook proposes a more detailed, ten-step version. I personally prefer a sort of hybrid strategic planning model, based on both Brody’s (2005) work and the United Way of Dane County’s process. This approach breaks the strategic planning process down into eight concrete steps, as described below:

1. Come to a consensus around the need to implement a strategic planning process. This step entails organizing around a shared conviction that a strategic plan is necessary for your organization. Strategic planning is an intensive process, so it’s important to ensure that all relevant stakeholders agree that the benefits of a strategic plan outweigh the time cost. Without organizational buy-in, a strategic plan will not be optimally effective.
2. Form a strategic planning group. Strategic planning groups should be as inclusive as possible, preferably with representatives from all levels of the organization, as well as board members, funders, and other important stakeholders.
3. Clarify organizational missions and vision statements. In order to avoid mission drift, it is important for the strategic planning group to come to a strong consensus around organizational mission identification and vision statements.
4. Assess the external and internal environments to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (a.k.a., SWOTs). In assessing the external environment, it’s important to consider social, economic, political, and technological influences that could impact the organization. Internal assessments should look at organizational capacities related to staff, finances, technology, structure, and information access. Finally, a SWOT analysis includes assessments of both internal conditions and external trends that have the potential to shape the organization’s future.
5. Identify the strategic issues facing the organizations. Strategic issues are high stake developments (internal or external) that the organization can exert influence over. Through collaborative discussions, the planning group can identify strategic issues and prioritize them through a probability and impact analysis.
6. Prepare action plans containing goals, implementation activities, and names of those accountable for follow-through. An action plan must be created to address each critical issue. Action plan goals should be measurable, attainable, and mapped to a timeline. In order to promote accountability, individual roles and responsibilities should be explicitly agreed upon, as well.
7. Implement the plan. The beauty of strategic plans is that they are designed to be flexible; organizations can modify strategic plans as needed based on circumstantial changes.
8. Evaluate the plan, reassessing strategies on a regular basis. Based on feedback measures, evaluate whether or not the plan is helping the organization reach its fullest potential. If it is not, the planning team must modify the plan to address any shortcomings.

References:

Brody, R. (2005). Strategic planning (Ch. 2), in Effectively Managing Human Service Organizations, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 20-38.

Bryson, J. M. (2010). Strategic planning and the strategy change cycle (Ch. 9), in The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 204-230.

Strategic Planning Process: United Way of Dane County (n.d.)

If Robert Burns Knew about Strategic Planning: What We Know Now that He Didn't Then

The famous Robert Burns quote says “the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry,” and while it’s true that rigid planning often fails to cope with the unexpected, good strategic planing can actually lead an organization successfully through the challenges of its time.

So what is strategic planning? It is an essential process in guiding organizations to achieve their mission by identifying strengths and weaknesses, strategic issues for the organization, and plans for acting on and evaluating progress on these issues. This planning helps to clarify the mission and identifies fundamental issues. If effectively implemented with the aid of organizational leaders, the process can candidly confront critical issues, and create detailed roadmaps for success (Bryson).

Most resources list ten steps to this process. It has been adapted for all kinds of environments like entrepreneurs and foundations, and the order of the steps often changes to meet the needs of the group. Here’s my version, synthesized from Bryson and United Way:

1. Align Stakeholders: Begin conversations with relevant stakeholders and agree on a strategic planning process. There are a lot of different versions; pick one that will suit your organization best.
2. Mission, Internal Assessment, External Assessment: Take stock of your current environment and goals. Start with the internal. What is the mission of your organization? How do your operations function? What are the organizational mandates you must work within? Then, think about the external environment in which your organization exists. Be careful at this stage to simply describe what is, we’re not critiquing yet!
3. (Vision: Taking into account the information you outlined in step one, identify the long-term vision for the organization. Where do you hope to be in five, ten, twenty years? If you are a brand new organization it’s often overwhelming to think about long term goals so early in the process, skip it for now and come back when you have more organizational capacity to consider the vision.)
4. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats or SWOTS: In this stage we begin to critique the information that we’ve gathered. Strengths and weaknesses assess internal pros and cons of the organization, while opportunities and threats highlight the external pressures that may require change from your organization.
5. Strategic Issues: From your SWOTS, identify issues that are urgent and are likely to have a large impact on your organization. These are strategic issues, defined as: “Internal or external development[s] which could impact the organization’s performance, to which the organization must respond in an orderly fashion and over which the organization may reasonably expect to exert some influence” (United Way p. 3). Draft statements of strategic issues that include a definition, list of factors that make it fundamental, and outcomes that would result from different scenarios involving the issue.
6. Formulate Strategies and Plans: What do you need to do and how will you do it?
7. Do it:  Development an effective implementation process and get formal approval for the plan. Then get to work.
8. Evaluate!!! The successful strategic plan requires regular reassessment of the organization’s success at addressing the strategic issues you’ve worked hard to identify.

And when that’s all done, start thinking about what will happen when the current strategic plan comes to an end (Tregoe). Strategic planning is an ongoing process that needs to be revisited frequently to keep programming relevant within its environment (Bryson). While Burns was a skeptic in 1785 when he coined a popular proverb about planning, I think he might have whistled a different tune if he knew about  the strategic planning process today. 

References:

Bryson, John M. 2010. “Strategic Planning and the Strategy Change Cycle” in The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Renz, David O, ed. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA. 

Tregoe, Benjamin. 1983. “The Challenges of Strategic Management.” In Top Management Strategy. Benjamin B. Tregoe and John W. Zimmerman. New York: Simon and Schuster.

United Way of Dane County. No date. “Strategic Planning Process.”

Vision to Strategy to Plan to Action.

Nonprofits are the purview of dreamers.  They attract people with goals of, if not changing the world, at least working to change a part of a problem that others might see as intractable or impossible.  Therefore, nonprofits frequently have lofty (and vague) missions such as “[uniting and focusing] the community to create measurable results in changing people’s lives and strengthening our community.”

Which is something that anyone can get on board with.  What is less clear is how that is actually attained.  Enter: strategic planning.   Without strategic planning the above mission is a set of nice words that form a sentence.  With strategic planning it is a raison d’etre for that particular, chosen completely at random, organization.

Above is a basic model of strategic planning.  As the reader reads the process from left to right the first benefit of strategic planning should appear: Lofty goals can be translated into concrete actions. By turning a vision into a strategy into a set of concrete plans the work of the nonprofit can be less a stab in the dark in the general direction of a problem but rather tied to the underlying motivations of the organization into a work process that can produce the measurable results that our example mission statement holds in so much regard.

Of course, this doesn’t happen because I made a fancy diagram in MS Publisher that says so.  It happens because within that diagram are implicit actions that are taken during the strategic planning process.  These actions bring resources to the table that could potentially go underutilized.  This brings us to the second benefit of strategic planning: Stakeholder engagement.

In order to collect the inputs needed for the strategic planning process (listed on the far left) nonprofit leaders will need to engage not just their own staff but everyone that touches the organization.  This can potentially lead the organization to tap previously unacknowledged potential within the stakeholder crowd who have been underutilized up to this point. Stakeholder engagement also doesn’t end at the input collection stage.  Instead, to the extent possible stakeholders ought to be integrated into the entire planning process.  Ongoing stakeholder engagement not only provides planners with an ongoing stream of needed information but also ensures that information is diffused regularly straight back to stakeholders.  Finally, if stakeholders are involved in planning for the future it is more likely that they will buy-in to the plan during implementation making the overarching changes possible. 

The next benefit is that strategic planning allows a nonprofit to understand its role in a broader dynamic environment.  The second bubble – SWOTS – refers to ‘strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.” The last two are environmental concerns and a byproduct of knowing them will permit a nonprofit to also know who they are themselves.  For example, a nonprofit that works in affordable housing exists in a complicated, detail orientated environment full of clients with a myriad of needs and a complex policy structure.  Strategic planning will allow this nonprofit to take a step back and see the broader picture.  In the process they can anticipate threats as well as locate new opportunities that be unnoticed in the day to day operations.    

The final benefit is that evaluation is embedded throughout.  The process hinges on integrating evaluation throughout the organization and the planning process.  This reduces the possibility of mission creep and ensures that the focus that strategic planning can force a nonprofit and its stakeholders to gain will continue into the future.

---

A Word on Sources:

I have condensed the ideas of a number of authors for this blogpost.  Because of the nature of the format I found it difficult to do direct citations.  However, I would strongly suggest that interested readers move onto these sources to learn more:

Renz, David O, ed. 2010. The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Ch. 8 & 9 Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.

United Way of Dane County. Strategic Planning Process

The Best Laid Plans...: Creating a Strategic Plan So Your Organization Doesn't Go Awry

There may be no more frustrating feeling in the world than that of having just completed a project, only to find out you did it wrong. You can’t help but circle back to conversations you had with co-workers, classmates, or your boss to try to pick out that one moment you missed when they told you what they were looking for. It’s infuriating. And when it happens on a large scale, it can be disastrous. On an organizational level, especially with nonprofits, creating a strategic plan can be a first-line of defense to shield yourself from ruinous miscommunications and a staff unclear of where you’re trying to go and how they’re supposed to get there.

A strategic plan is, simply put, a document put together by an organization to communicate overall goals and a clear path for how to get there. While it seems so simple, it’s actually fairly complicated. It’s a long, involved, cyclical process. But in the end, it’s worth the effort.

When you’re looking to start out on a strategic plan, it’s important to keep in mind:

1. It all starts with who is in the room. Think carefully about who needs to be there -- staff? funders? community leaders? Getting buy-in from these stakeholders can be crucial to a smooth and ultimately successful process. 

2. List out the basics you think you know. If your organization is beholden to any mandates, either formal ones like legislation or less formal requirements, write them down! Do the same with your mission and core organizational values. It can be easy for disagreements to pop up or you to forget something when you’re thinking big picture.

3. Assess where you are. The strategic planning world calls these SWOTs: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats.

Some of these will be external: what is the political environment like? Are there trends in the communities you serve you need to be aware of? Is there a new technology or service that could help or harm your work? Your Board may be a good resource if you’re looking for an outside perspective.

Others are internal: which of your processes are efficient? Do you have some core competencies that are particularly well-functioning? Are you missing some skill-set that would be helpful? 

4. Figure out your issues. When you know your SWOTs, you’ll probably find you’re already looking at them as strategic issues. A weakness may be found because you see a change on the horizon. A strength might be discovered because of shifts in your client base. Identify how your SWOTs will likely play out with changes you see on the horizon, and what could happen if you don’t deal with these potentialities.

5. Strategic plans require strategies. Once you know what issues you’re facing, your stakeholders should be itching to talk about how to fix them. But just having a plan to manage these issues isn't enough. You need to make sure you can implement it. It’s absolutely crucial at this point that everyone involved agrees on who is responsible for which actions, who is paying for what, exactly what your timeline is for every action and program change, and how people will be held accountable. Without a clear, agreed-upon vision for how you move forward, your strategic plan will crumble. 

6. It’s a loop!. When your plan has been implemented, it’s time to look at the outcomes. Are they everything you hoped for? Great. Now, more likely, are there things you thought would turn out differently? Probably. It’s time to sit down and start the process over. You should have a new assessment of where you are, and by default new issues you’re facing.

There is no magic process that creates the perfect strategic plan. Sometimes you’ll get stuck on a step. Sometimes (though rarely) your team might agree on everything. It’s an ever-evolving process, and you should be prepared to treat it that way. But at the end of the day, your team will know where they want to go, and how they’re going to try to get there.

Sources:

Balanced Scorecard Institute. "Strategic Planning Basics." n.d. Web, accessed at: http://balancedscorecard.org/Resources/Strategic-Planning-Basics

Renz, David O, ed. 2010. The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco, CA.

Setting the Stage for an Effective Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is a process of identifying where an organization is headed, how it will get there, and how to evaluate what the organization achieves at the end of the process. Strategic plans take time, money, and buy in from your staff, board, and other stakeholders. This process, however, is worth it according to Mathew Siegel at Forbes who explains a strategic plan will “keep things on track with clearly articulated objectives and performance metrics.” Without a strategic plan your organization has no road map to get to where it hopes to be in 1, 5, or 10 years. When strategic plans are done right they lay out manageable steps for the success you plan to achieve and ways to measure that success.

Although the strategic planning process looks differently for each organization that undertakes it there are overarching ideas all organizations should explore. An example of strategic planning processes and details on each step can be found in the Jossey-Bass Handbook.

Often organizations dive into a strategic plan several steps in, immediately examining issues they hope to tackle without doing the background work of the strategic plan. This setup stage is crucial and this blog will focus on the importance of the first three steps to strategic planning.

Step one: Examine your mission. How does your mission inform your strategic planning process? Your strategic planning process should be a tool to further (or if needed evaluate) your organization’s mission. According to Greg Satell on Forbes “great businesses [and nonprofits] are built by passion. Strategies come and go, but the mission of enterprise is fundamental to directing action.” Without a strong mission and understanding of this mission your strategic plan will have no guiding principle.

Step two: Once you understand your organization’s mission and how it will inform your strategic plan you should examine your internal environment. This can include looking at the strengths and weaknesses of your organization. You can assess aspects like the financial, human, and structural side of your organization.

Step three: In addition to understanding your internal environment you need to understand your external environment.  According to Josey-Bass it is crucial to emphasize external trends and forces (230).  Without this understanding your planning process may be derailed by political and environmental forces you did not consider. This is commonly referred to as an exercise in understanding the opportunities and threats that exist for your organization.

Once you have laid the groundwork for your strategic plan or as Jossey-Bass describes “a clear statement that focuses solely on identifying and linking the existing or needed competencies and distinctive competencies to the nonprofit organization’s mission and goals” (240) you can dive into the core of your strategic plan and begin to tackle issues, strategies, and plans. When you dive in you’ll be prepared knowing what your strengths are and what potential obstacles you may face.

How to Create an Effective Strategic Plan

Strategic planning can be defined as the process of addressing change.¹ An effective strategic plan provides a road map for an organization, directing key stakeholders towards a shared vision while identifying challenges to overcome along the way.¹ A strategic plan motivates organizations to be innovative both when facing challenges and when evaluating high performing programs. It pushes stakeholders to collaborate around critical issues in the organization, and to be aware of the organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats.¹ By using the framework below, an organization can develop an effective strategic plan to confront and overcome critical issues that may arise.

Identify key stakeholders

The first step in strategic planning involves identifying who should be involved in the process. These key decision makers must agree upon the structure of the overall planning process and key steps in accomplishing the organization’s strategic planning goals.²

Clarify mission and values

An organization’s mission defines its reason for existence. Without a mission, an organization has no foundation and stakeholders can easily lose focus on what they originally aimed to accomplish. Clarifying an organization’s mission reminds stakeholders of the purpose of the organization, and can help eliminate unnecessary conflict around what the organization aims to accomplish.²

Develop long-range vision

For established organizations, it is important for stakeholders to define a long-term vision. This is difficult for brand new organizations because the future of the organization is often unclear. For mature and autonomous organizations, it is important to determine which direction the organization hopes to move towards in the future.³

Assess internal and external environments

In order to assess the environment surrounding the organization, stakeholders must consider the organization’s strengths (S), weaknesses (W), opportunities (O), and threats (T), called a SWOT analysis. In doing so, organization can gain insight into upcoming challenges and prepare for future opportunities.²

Define strategic issue(s)

After assessing the environment, stakeholders must decide which issue(s) they intend to resolve through strategic planning. Identifying these strategic issues draws attention to the areas within the organization of greatest concern. These issues can develop internally or externally, and must a) impact the organization’s performance, b) require a response from the organization, and c) have the ability to change through the efforts of the organization.³

Develop a strategy and implement the plan

Next, key decision makers must decide how they want to address the strategic issue(s) they have identified. This often involves identifying barriers to success, along with brainstorming alternate solutions to resolve the stated strategic issue(s). After brainstorming a variety of proposals, stakeholders collaborate to determine which proposal has the greatest chance of success in their organization. After developing a strategy to overcome the identified issues, the organization must put the plan into action!²

Evaluate

In the last step of the strategic planning process, stakeholders must evaluate the implementation of the strategic plan and assess whether goals are being met. Though evaluation is listed as the last step in the process, stakeholders should be sure to evaluate the strategic plan throughout the process, to ensure organizational goals are being met along the way.²

---

1 Brody, R. (2005). Strategic planning (Ch. 2), in Effectively Managing Human Service Organizations, Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 20-38. ^↩2 Bryson, J. M. (2010). Strategic planning and the strategy change cycle (Ch.9). In D. O. Renz (3rd ed.), The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management, San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 230-261. ^↩3 United Way of Dane County. Strategic Planning Process.^↩

The Secret to Leading Successful Nonprofit Agencies: Strategic Planning

The Secret to Leading Successful Nonprofit Agencies: Strategic Planning

As nonprofit managers who are trying to answer utterly complex questions, I know most of you must be thinking: Who has time to plan for the future? Where would I even start?

Obviously these are valid questions that many nonprofits have a hard time answering.

So let me break strategic planning down into 7 manageable steps.  

But first let me explain why you should even care about strategic planning. Strategic planning attempts to answer the questions: What are we going to do? And, more importantly, how are we going to get there? In order to be a successful nonprofit, you have to create a plan, and also implement it.

Easier said than done.

If done correctly, strategic planning can create a positive impact on any nonprofit agency. Strategic planning helps nonprofits uncover new possibilities, creates a space that fosters innovation, and aids organizations anticipate challenges so that they can address them in a proactive manner. It almost sounds too good to be true, but the framework described below can provide you with an indispensable tool to tackle to the toughest, most complex issues that your nonprofits are facing (Herman, 2010).

1) Who’s Who: You first have to figure out whom you want to include in the strategic planning process. Creating a space at the table for all relevant stakeholders is key for your ability to truly understand all perspectives and potential problems. It also creates buy in and distributes power as it gives every stakeholder a voice in the process (Herman, 2010). 

2) Create an exciting vision for your organization: This is your chance to reevaluate your mission and the values of your organization.  Reorienting stakeholders to the purpose and passion behind an agency can create fresh energy and revitalize an organization. The vision you create will guide the rest of the strategic plan (Cameron, 1991).

3) Complete an environmental scan: Make sure you consider a problem from all angles. This includes assessing the external opportunities and threats such as the social, economic, and political environment of your organization’s community. A complete scan also includes evaluating the internal strengths and weaknesses of your agency. Understanding how staff, funding, structure, and information positively or negatively impact your agency is essential. (United Way).

4) Prioritize strategic issues: At this point you will have created a lengthy list of challenges affecting your agency’s mission, values, service delivery, clients, or funding. You are now tasked with prioritizing the probability and impact of each issue so that you can narrow the scope of the strategic plan. It is important to write these issues down so that everyone is on the same page and is speaking a common language (L. Howard, personal communication, 02/03/15).

5) Create a strategic plan to address major issues: It’s time to get creative. Create plans, understand barriers, and figure out how to overcome identified barriers. Make the process manageable by breaking the plan up into short-term and long-term goals (Herman, 2010).

6) Choose the winning plan: Vote all inferior plans off of the island! Choose the best plan to address identified issues and create measurable and attainable objectives. Start small by creating action steps, eventually form a timeline, and then figure out what resources will be required to implement your plan (Herman, 2010). In this way, everyone will know when a step in the plan is achieved. Being able to visualize these efforts can empower employees because they will be able to see that progress is being made.

7) Evaluate, evaluate, evaluate: Be open to CHANGE. Social environments change quickly so you will need to be fluid and adapt your strategic plan accordingly. If a program is not working, this is your chance to make it more effective (Herman, 2010).

It is my hope that these 7 manageable steps will encourage managers to use strategic planning as a catalyst for solving complex and challenging issues.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

References

Cameron, K. (1991). Developing Management Skills. Harper-Collins: New York, Chpt 10.

Herman, R. (2010).  The Jossey-Bass Handbook of Nonprofit Leadership and Management (3^rd ed).  San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass.

United Way of Dane County. Strategic Planning Process.