The Benevolent Edge

From Chapter One: WHAT STRATEGIC PLANNING CAN DO FOR YOU
You run a not-for profit (NFP), a church, a charity or a school. You know your field. No one can run a foodbank, school, youth organization or church as well as you. No one knows better than you about the challenge that brings. Sometimes it seems you are a magician by the ways you make things happen. So...why bother with strategic planning? Especially if you’re getting the job done! Strategic planning is something business people do, isn’t it? That’s why they got MBA’s and chase the big money. Your game is making a difference for people.

Guess what...you need strategic planning. The importance of your work, meager resources and big challenges make strategic planning at least as important to you as a business. But, isn’t strategic planning a little complex for somebody like you...you never learned that science in school. Never fear, by the time you are done with this book you will want strategic planning and know how to do it!

Often not-for-profits do a better job of preparing a strategic plan than businesses. I’ve seen this many times. This is because the type of people who work for not-for–profits generally are very dedicated to success of their organizations with little personal reward other than success accomplishing the group’s purpose. The science of strategic planning is not hard. Dedicated people like those who work for and guide not-for-profits are very capable of grasping the concepts of strategic planning and generating powerful plans quickly.

What is strategic planning?
It is a process for thinking about what you do leading to a roadmap for the future. Through the process of strategic planning you can clarify what you do, who you do it for and what is unique about your organization. Understanding these things you will be able to map out a course to do your job better making your life easier and the people you serve happier. You will probably be surprised and discover several things about your organization that are fundamentally different than you imagined.

From Chapter 3: GETTING STARTED

Steps in the planning process
The chapters in this book follow the sequence needed to complete a comprehensive strategic plan and set a strategic management system in place to implement it. The following describes the basic steps in this strategic planning process. These steps form the outline for the content of this book.

Getting Started
Assemble a core planning team to begin and lead the process. Agree on what you hope to get out of your planning work. Build a plan for your planning. Decide whether you go it alone or need to hire a consultant.

Define your Mission
Come to clear understanding of why your group exists. What does it do? Define the purpose of your organization in concise terms. Identify your primary customer: who do you really serve? Who pays to keep you in business? Understand what is special about your group and what differentiates you from others trying to serve the same people. Understand why people would choose your group for service.

Create a Vision
What your group wants to be. Reach consensus on a dream for the organization’s future. Look to a date far enough ahead to allow progress beyond any limits you have today. If over years you are very successful, what will people say about your group in the future? In your dreams, what do you hope to accomplish?

Establish Consensus on Values
Define the basic beliefs that bind your group. Come to a consensus understanding of what your organization’s basic beliefs are that serve as the foundation for strategic decisions. When the going gets tough and decisions are at hand that could reshape the character, reputation or energy of your group, where you will draw the line?

Define Goals to provide tangible long term targets
Set measurable long-term targets describing what your group wants to do. Describe by a few measures what you want to do long-term. Define measures that will help your organization carry out its mission and reach its vision. Come to consensus on tangible measures of what you want to get done. This is quantifying your dreams.

Build Strategies to live your mission, reach your vision and attain your goals
Define the few high level steps necessary to reach your goals. These statements of strategy align with elements of your mission and have a long term character. Strategy statements define how you will accomplish your mission as measured by your goals.

Build an Implementation Plan within an effective Strategic Management System
Recognize the processes, structure, people and measurements needed for success. These are the details describing how you will carry out your strategy statements. For each strategy define the processes needed for getting strategy done. For each process define the organizational structure to fit the process and find the people to fill the organization. Define measures that will tell you whether you are on track or not.

Outline Performance Reports to measure strategic progress
Using the key measures identified in your goals, setup a means to track and make periodic checks of progress against mileposts. The reports need to clearly help you determine whether you are on track for success or require modification to your strategy or implementation system. The reports need to have some component that gives people deep in the organization awareness of progress.

At the outset and periodically thereafter define Tactics and Objectives
Define specific actions that should be taken to accomplish steady progress toward goals. As each strategy has a goal for the long term, each strategy and goal should have tactics and objectives for the short term. Tactics describe near term actions with measurable outcomes that will be important to reaching your long term goals as you carry out a strategy. Building a good set of objectives annually is a good way to drive long term progress. Usually objectives will be translatable to the lowest levels of your organization to get everyone on the same page for efficient work. Each individual can align their personal objectives to the organization’s objectives.