Find strategic planning processes as exciting as a root canal?
Do you think strategic planning = lots of long, boring meetings, followed by a big, bound report that rots on a shelf? All while the organization goes about doing the same thing over and over, but still hopes for different outcomes?!
Not on our watch!
At Grace Social Sector Consulting, we make sure strategic planning is engaging, equitable, participatory, wholistic, and dare we say FUN.
Yes, fun.
Not on our watch!
At Grace Social Sector Consulting, we make sure strategic planning is engaging, equitable, participatory, wholistic, and dare we say FUN.
Yes, fun.
Gain focus and alignment
- Consider equity and inclusion at each step of the process
- Replace analysis paralysis with getting to heart of what you can realistically do
- Brainstorm in ways that include everyone’s contributions
- Obtain a realistic, actionable synthesis of all group input (even if you generate, say, 50 big-picture, big-dream ideas)
- Achieve agreement at levels beyond what stakeholders thought was possible
- Identify—with crystal-clear clarity—your most realistic, mission-aligned priorities
- Produce an immediately actionable plan, with criteria for what success looks like
- Generate an easy-to-follow, written-in-plain-English road map to your organization’s most vibrant future
- Know, with confidence, that your fresh and flexible strategy guides all your mission-driven work
- Access tools to evaluate challenges and opportunities as they emerge and evolve
- Actually enjoy the process!
Build an actionable roadmap
- Invest wisely in a wholistic planning process that moves the dial on what matters most
- Establish a clear plan that everyone can get behind
- Gain clarity and agreement on where your organization is headed
- Know how to start realizing your most important goals
- Develop a plan that respects your time, and generates aspirational—yet achievable—results
- Ensure you prioritize, synthesize, and implement key ideas from our meetings
- Achieve bigger goals--without arguing, lobbying, and turf wars
- Start doing more of what your organization does best—and stop what you don’t
- Evaluate new priorities as they evolve, smartly decide which to pursue, and what to ignore
It's time to envision your organization's next 3-5 years, if...
- You are a relatively new executive director and you are ready to lead your organization to design its future direction.
- You're unsure whether your board and staff agree on your future direction and where to focus your energy
- You've completed everything in your last strategic plan
- You’ve done diversity, equity, and inclusion work—but it hasn’t yet been integrated into an organization-wide strategy
- It’s been a long while since you did any strategic planning
- Your organization has never done any strategic planning
- You're uncertain whether governance and staff structures, roles, and responsibilities align with organizational needs as you’ve grown and evolved
- Your organization has expanded or weathered a major change (we’re looking at you, COVID!)—and you need to determine a fresh direction
Productively engage your whole organization
- You’re ready to invest energy and funds into a process that engages your whole organization
- You know the greatest value of strategic planning lies in uncovering and questioning previously untested assumptions
- You’re ready to be intentional about your future
The strategic plan itself looks phenomenal. These are seriously some of the best working sessions I’ve seen a board go through, with high level strategic goals that can be divvied up into action steps defined by board/staff. That is everything a strategic plan should be. So many get lost in the weeds.
- Bridgette, Board member, human service nonprofit
Strategic planning that works
Step 1: KICK OFF. Gather details and orient key stakeholders who’ll collaborate on the planning process.
Step 2: DISCOVER. Deep dive into your current state via interviews, candid (and facilitated) conversations, meetings, and focus groups; run surveys to collect input; determine strategic questions to tackle. Consider how to equitably support the participation of all stakeholders in providing their perspectives.
Step 3: EXPLORE: Review insights from discovery with key stakeholders; explore the wider landscape and environment you work within; identify trends that could impact your future; brainstorm options and criteria for future decision-making; consider equity implications; identify 3-5 top priorities, integrating equity throughout; determine what each piece means for your future.
Step 4: DECIDE
Refine, agree on, and translate goals into a 1- to 2-page plan—a document that:
• Is written in plain English
• Delineates your next 3 to 5 years
• Shows how you’ll define success.
Determine how you’ll measure success over time
Review and update your mission, vision, and values (a crucial step to focus on at the end, because doing so generates better results)
Place key components in a 1- to 2-page plan
- Step 5: PLAN, + ACT.
And don’t worry: When it comes to implementation planning, we’ll take things one year at a time, so you’re not concerned about what might happen in, say, 3 years.
Map to-do’s for up to your first year, so you know exactly who will do what—and when
Throughout our time together, I’ll ensure everyone stays focused—including any new team members who join.
Customized tools for decision making
This easy-to-use tool helps you to deliberately address new opportunities and challenges that you could not anticipate during the planning process. And makes decisions oh-so-much easier, like: How aligned is [this new idea] to our mission? Are our solutions as equitable as they need to be? Do we really have the capacity to do _____? Will X further our equity journey?
Strategic planning FAQs
Q: I’ve suffered through strategic planning processes before...a lot of brainstorming, but not a lot of prioritizing. We ended up with an overwhelming laundry list of things to do. But we had no clear way forward. How will it be different this time if I collaborate with you?
A: At Grace Social Sector Consulting, we make sure strategic planning is engaging, equitable, participatory, and dare I say FUN. There’s time and space for brainstorming AND prioritizing. If your group comes up with more than 5 strategic priorities, we'll narrow the focus to no more than 5 big goals.
Q: At my last organization, the strategic plan was so long and complicated that no one could wade through it or use it. Pointless! I want to avoid that. Will I if I hire you?
A: Yes indeed. Here’s why: Grace Social Sector Consulting believes in creating plans that marry aspirations with the real world (i.e. reasonable and doable). You’ll finish our process with a 1- to 2-page strategic plan that:
Q: My organization has a ton of stakeholders. I am not sure how to effectively involve them in the planning process, without it feeling like we have too many voices and opinions to sort out. How do you handle this?
A: When we team up, you’ll choose your ad hoc strategic planning committee—a small group of up to 5 people to guide the process. This small, manageable group will decide who’s interviewed, who’s in a focus group, and who’s surveyed.
Then we’ll involve your key leaders in the planning process, via a series of guided conversations that consider both the right brain and the left brain. Grace Social Sector Consulting will kick off these planning sessions with summaries of the key themes that emerged from interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Each online session will consist of fast-paced, 2- to 3-hour online conversations that each build on previous sessions and/or a longer in-person retreat.
Through these facilitated conversations, your group will easily identify key priorities + success criteria, and more clearly envision your future. And we’ll get buy-in from key constituents by building in rounds of feedback and input.
Q: What will happen after Year 1?
A: We at Grace Social Sector Consulting know that life changes too fast to invest too much time in trying to create an implementation plan that’s longer than one year. As part of our work together, you’ll agree on how and when to review your Year-1 implementation plan, and how and when to create your Year-2 and Year-3 plans.
Q: Our last strategic planning session included an in-person retreat. Can this be done remotely instead to make it easier for more people to participate without travel?
A: Absolutely. Using a combination of video conferencing and digital collaborative tools, your group will enjoy a series of focused 90-minute to 3-hour conversations. Each session builds on previous sessions. By experiencing the process in manageable pieces with time to digest in between, your group will more easily identify key priorities + success criteria, and more clearly envision your future. Remote options can also save your organization money, and make the process more accessible and manageable for volunteers and staff.
A: At Grace Social Sector Consulting, we make sure strategic planning is engaging, equitable, participatory, and dare I say FUN. There’s time and space for brainstorming AND prioritizing. If your group comes up with more than 5 strategic priorities, we'll narrow the focus to no more than 5 big goals.
Q: At my last organization, the strategic plan was so long and complicated that no one could wade through it or use it. Pointless! I want to avoid that. Will I if I hire you?
A: Yes indeed. Here’s why: Grace Social Sector Consulting believes in creating plans that marry aspirations with the real world (i.e. reasonable and doable). You’ll finish our process with a 1- to 2-page strategic plan that:
- identifies your top, high-level goals
- establishes success indicators
- generates a detailed, first-year implementation plan with accountability and timelines
Q: My organization has a ton of stakeholders. I am not sure how to effectively involve them in the planning process, without it feeling like we have too many voices and opinions to sort out. How do you handle this?
A: When we team up, you’ll choose your ad hoc strategic planning committee—a small group of up to 5 people to guide the process. This small, manageable group will decide who’s interviewed, who’s in a focus group, and who’s surveyed.
Then we’ll involve your key leaders in the planning process, via a series of guided conversations that consider both the right brain and the left brain. Grace Social Sector Consulting will kick off these planning sessions with summaries of the key themes that emerged from interviews, focus groups, and surveys. Each online session will consist of fast-paced, 2- to 3-hour online conversations that each build on previous sessions and/or a longer in-person retreat.
Through these facilitated conversations, your group will easily identify key priorities + success criteria, and more clearly envision your future. And we’ll get buy-in from key constituents by building in rounds of feedback and input.
Q: What will happen after Year 1?
A: We at Grace Social Sector Consulting know that life changes too fast to invest too much time in trying to create an implementation plan that’s longer than one year. As part of our work together, you’ll agree on how and when to review your Year-1 implementation plan, and how and when to create your Year-2 and Year-3 plans.
Q: Our last strategic planning session included an in-person retreat. Can this be done remotely instead to make it easier for more people to participate without travel?
A: Absolutely. Using a combination of video conferencing and digital collaborative tools, your group will enjoy a series of focused 90-minute to 3-hour conversations. Each session builds on previous sessions. By experiencing the process in manageable pieces with time to digest in between, your group will more easily identify key priorities + success criteria, and more clearly envision your future. Remote options can also save your organization money, and make the process more accessible and manageable for volunteers and staff.
Or maybe strategic planning ISN'T right for you right now
You may also want to explore social impact evaluation design: a Grace Social Sector Consulting service via which you learn to demonstrate your impact to potential supporters by building an evaluation system for your organization.
Or perhaps you don’t have the capacity to commit to a full planning process right now. Yet you want to get a better sense of where you are, your key stakeholders’ concerns, as well as your strengths and areas for growth. We call this an organizational assessment—a Grace Social Sector Consulting service that will generate that clarity.
Learn more anytime, by listening to our Mission: Impact podcast
Or perhaps you don’t have the capacity to commit to a full planning process right now. Yet you want to get a better sense of where you are, your key stakeholders’ concerns, as well as your strengths and areas for growth. We call this an organizational assessment—a Grace Social Sector Consulting service that will generate that clarity.
Learn more anytime, by listening to our Mission: Impact podcast