One of the things that we love to do at Onside Partners is facilitate strategic planning processes with social sector organizations. When we’re embarking on a project, though, staff and board members often share their strategic planning horror stories: processes that drag on with no resolution or end in sight; resources spent on a plan that sits deep in a shared drive never to be seen again; shiny deliverables made up of jargon and frameworks with little meaning or value; opaque decisionmaking that fosters resentment.
Why do we love helping organizations with something that can be so frustrating and seemingly pointless? There is nothing like the feeling of working alongside an organization for several months and helping them get clear on how they achieve equitable outcomes or sketch out the path to taking their work to the next level or improve their decisionmaking to be more inclusive and transparent. When done well, strategic planning can help organizations be more effective and tackle longstanding challenges that get in the way of organizations truly thriving.
So what is strategic planning exactly? To us at Onside Partners, it’s:
- A series of discussions and decisions about who you are as an organization, what you want to accomplish, and how you’re going to get there
- A chance for staff and board to take stock and align on where you’re headed as an organization
- An opportunity for a tune-up: to make sure your work is actually consistent with your vision and mission, and to identify small or big changes to how your organization operates that would enable you to do your best work
- A process of articulating a common framework for setting priorities, assessing progress, and communicating about your work
This all culminates in a short, user-friendly reference document called a strategic plan that will guide your work in the coming years.
This post is the first in a regular series where we’ll reflect on strategic planning as a practice, discuss common challenges that arise in strategic planning and how we help our clients overcome them, and introduce you to some of our favorite partners in the work. We’d love to hear from you if what we share sparks a thought or question about your own work or organization’s situation.
What has strategic planning meant for your organization?