“Vision without action is merely a dream. Action without vision just passes the time. Vision with action can change the world.”
— Joel A. Barker
Strategic Planning
The status quo is not an option. Nonprofit leaders need a guiding strategy and a roadmap to anticipate change, focus resources, and advance their mission. Our collaborative strategic planning process helps your team understand where you are, envision where you want to go, build on your unique strengths, address critical challenges, seize opportunities, and make clear, shared choices about the priorities and goals that will have the greatest impact.
Our clients’ strategic plans articulate a comprehensive set of coordinated strategies that work together to advance your priorities and goals, along with meaningful indicators for measuring progress and success.
Drawing on principles of community organizing, we build relationships, surface diverse perspectives and lived expertise, identify shared interests, navigate differences, and cultivate the collective ownership needed to move your organization from strategy to action.
Our clients’ plans are adaptable and developed through meaningful engagement with the people who shape, and are shaped by, the work: community members, clients, staff, board members, government partners, policymakers, funders, and other key constituents.
Our strategic planning processes are grounded in antiracism, intersectionality, and equitable practices. We incorporate principles of change management throughout the planning process to build alignment, readiness, and ownership for successful implementation. Along the way, we cultivate champions who can carry the strategy forward, helping ensure that your strategic plan becomes a living tool for decision-making across your organization.
With alignment on a clear strategic direction and goals, your organization is equipped to allocate resources effectively, seize opportunities, skillfully navigate obstacles, and adapt proactively to an evolving environment.
Services we often pair with our strategic planning include conducting organizational assessments, designing a theory of change, conducting scenario planning, developing a strategic fund-development plan, supporting change management, and providing strategic advising for nonprofit and foundation leaders.
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We use many tools and processes for strategic planning, including landscape analysis, organizational assessment, SWOT analysis, competitive advantage analysis, program evaluation, visioning, mission, vision, and values and DEIBA principles development, theory of change, strategy development, scenario planning (see our blog on Scenario Planning), board and staff retreat facilitation, partnership development, strategy screen and decision matrix design, implementation planning and performance dashboards.
We also often integrate strategic fund-development planning, business model development (see our blog on business model development), negotiation strategy and training (see our blog on nonprofit negotiations), coalition building, and strategic partnership development into strategic planning projects.
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Elements of our strategic planning processes include:
Clarifying your organization’s mission, vision, values, and theory of change, which ground its identity and pull the organization forward, guiding all subsequent decisions.
Deepening engagement among staff, board members, volunteers, partners, program participants, donors, and other stakeholders while building a shared understanding of who the organization is and where it is going.
Anticipating upcoming challenges by examining your organization’s internal strengths and weaknesses, scanning its external environment, preparing for possible future scenarios, and identifying and troubleshooting obstacles.
Creating a plan for action including a strategic framework with priorities, goals, and strategies, and a decision matrix to guide your day-to-day decisions.
Providing a fundraising and marketing document to use with funders and other constituents that articulate your organization’s aspirations and needs for support.
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Our strategic planning services build your organization’s capacity to focus resources on what is most important and proactively adapt to change. In the strategic planning process, we work with you to anticipate, plan, and create your organization's future. Together, we identify core capabilities the organization should build to strengthen leaders' abilities to seize opportunities, overcome obstacles, and respond to a changing environment.
Together we create an intentional roadmap for your organization’s future by clarifying who you are, identifying your essential priorities, and aligning your board, staff, and the communities you serve.