Strategic Planning Without the Stress: 6 Ways to Streamline

Nonprofit leaders, midlevel managers, and frontline staff sometimes view strategic planning as one more task heaped onto near-impossible workloads. After all, developing a strategic plan — by analyzing your organization’s current position, setting new long-term goals, and drawing a road map to achieve them — can be time-consuming.

“I think everyone has had terrible strategic-planning experiences,” says Preeta Nayak, partner and head of leadership and community services at the San Francisco office of the Bridgespan Group, a nonprofit and philanthropic advisory firm. “I empathize with any apprehension people feel.”

Those negative associations, she says, often stem from the fear that an organization’s employees will be dragged through a long process that doesn’t yield worthwhile results. Nayak urges nonprofit leaders who have had poor experiences with strategic planning to be explicit with new advisers about what went wrong to avoid these pitfalls.

The current environment for nonprofits — with a combative administration, a volatile economy, and hesitant donors — could add to anxiety about strategic planning. “There is a lot of uncertainty, and uncertainty will continue,” Nayak says, so data gathered in the past may not be an accurate bellwether.

Eric Wilkerson, head of the consulting firm WICO Strategies, acknowledges how hard it is to wrap your mind around planning when the world feels like it’s crashing down around you, but that mindset can set up organizations for failure. He urges clients to develop optimism, build adaptability into their plan, and generate multiple scenarios that consider economic and political turbulence.

The Chronicle spoke to consultants and nonprofit leaders about how to streamline strategic planning. Here are their tips.

Consider a shorter horizon, and opt for a stabilization plan if facing existential threats.

LeeAnn Stivers, the executive director of 501 Commons, a Seattle-based nonprofit that advises other charities, believes that many of them now need “stabilization and growth plans,” rather than strategic plans. Sharp downturns in federal funding and corporate giving to nonprofits in the first half of the year, combined with other uncertainties, she says, have made planning for three- to five-year time frames unrealistic, even for 501 Commons itself. Strategic plans, she says, are more likely to assume steady conditions, pursue long-term visions and invest time in rethinking missions and values.

Stabilization plans, in contrast, can address immediate challenges and are focused on ensuring organizational survival and figuring out what near-term actions are needed.

Consider writing a ‘mini plan.’

Wilkerson urges CEOs considering strategic planning to take a day off and go to a neutral location — a one-day, one-person retreat. Write down two or three high-level priorities for the organization and a few sentences about how you arrived at those decisions, he advises. After sharing those priorities with the board and some key staff, he says, use them for a year or two while thinking about what a larger strategic plan and planning process would look like.

Strategic planning doesn’t need to be complicated, says Wilkerson. “Every institution has, or should have, a very simple, bold vision.”

Outline your most important decisions.

Nayak’s first request of leaders seeking strategic-planning assistance is to outline important decisions they face. Saying you want to develop a strategic plan, she says, is like saying, “I want to write a novel.”

“Pick the one or two questions you really need to focus on,” she says, “and the one or two areas where analysis and deeper dives are really important.” Likewise, she says, figure out where stakeholder engagement is necessary. “You have to be strategic about strategic planning,” she adds.

Sometimes the key questions can’t be answered immediately but can be baked into the new strategic plan. For Town Hall Seattle, a nonprofit event venue, the strategic plan it finished in March was a long-awaited opportunity to focus on its future, says its executive director, Kate Nagle-Caraluzzo.

The pandemic and a series of leadership transitions had left the group reeling. “The strategic plan was the first time in five years that we got to think strategically about our future,” she says. “It finally felt like we were getting out of survival mode and into deep-thinking mode.”

The strategic plan, she says, is focused on such important questions as, “How do we drive revenue? How do we drive audience numbers? How do we maintain and retain our audience and our patrons?”

Now the organization has a road map and new ways to think about its identity.

Try to use existing meetings for strategic planning.

Some organizations want to complete strategic planning in a three- to six-month time frame. They have urgent questions or want to move past planning and on to action.

Other organizations believe compressing strategic planning too much will add stress and make the process less thoughtful. At the Cara Collective, a Chicago-based anti-poverty nonprofit whose core program is job training, leaders decided to take a full year. “It’s important for us not to skip steps or skimp on engagement,” says Lauren Feldman, the organization’s chief operating officer, “because we know that that’ll come back to bite us in terms of building cohesion.”

When a new round of strategic planning is announced, many staff members dread the potential time commitment. “Everyone is looking at, ‘Where’s the time going to come from?’” says Feldman. “‘I’m already busy, how am I going to make the time for this?’” To get around that, she expects to use existing meetings, such as quarterly staff meetings, to gather strategic-planning feedback.

Similarly, Town Hall Seattle used meetings already on the calendar of an existing board executive committee to do much of the strategic planning. Two staff members joined the executive committee to serve as staff liaisons. A survey and monthly staff-member huddles also help gather input, says Nagle-Caraluzzo.

Don’t let disagreements slow down your process.

When facing an organization’s hardest questions, disagreements are likely to surface, says Nayak. The temptation for leaders is to kick the can down the road by gathering more information or having more discussions.

But at some point, leaders need to be decisive. “You can be respectful and thoughtful about the variety of opinions you have and still make progress,” she says.

Leaders can make it clear they have studied data and listened to opinions but have a strong justification for choosing the path they have, consultants say. “In strategy work, the goal is not to please anyone — at all,” says Wilkerson. “And I’d pay attention to that. The goal is to move a mission forward closer to the vision.”

Make sure your strategic plan doesn’t sit on a shelf.

No matter how much organizations need to lighten the burden of strategic planning, it is essential to map out how the plan will be converted to action and how progress will be measured. Ideally, an organization’s annual budgeting process should overlap meaningfully with strategic planning to make sure resources are allocated to key priorities.

When 501 Commons works with nonprofits on strategic planning, Stivers says nine times out of 10, the groups don’t want to invest in corresponding implementation plans. Such plans, she says, help operationalize visions, document goals and objectives, and plot tactical moves. Dashboards or tracking mechanisms can measure if a plan’s objectives are being reached. Implementation plans move strategic plans out of executives’ offices and down to department heads, she says, where the plans can mold operations.

Wilkerson says he declines strategic-planning work that doesn’t include an accountability component. “It is heartbreaking when nonprofit leaders are set up for failure,” says Wilkerson, “when they pay a strategic-planning partner and they walk away without a corresponding actionable work or business plan.”