Strategic Planning: Starting With the End in Sight

It is through the strategic planning process that the board, in collaboration with the staff, sets the organization’s vision. Without this setting and resetting of the organization’s vision, the organization often finds that it has drifted from its mission, wasted the valuable resources entrusted to it, and failed to meet the real needs of its constituents.  

So where to begin? With strategic planning, the end is a great place to start. How does your organization define success? What does success look like? Knowing the definition of success for your organization is essential to writing an effective strategic plan.

 I am a big fan of a 2004 article by Stanford researchers Colby, Stone, and Carttar called “Zeroing in On Impact.” In this article, Colby, Stone, and Carttar discuss two concepts: intended impact and theory of change.

Intended impact and theory of change provide a bridge between a nonprofit’s mission and its programmatic activities. Intended impact is a statement or series of statements about what the organization is trying to achieve and will hold itself accountable for within some manageable period of time.  “Zeroing In On Impact” Colby, Stone & Carttar, Stanford Social Innovation Review (2004).

Using this framework, I recommend your board create an intended impact statement that specifies quantifiable outcomes it can realistically achieve within a set time frame (i.e. five years). This process is best accomplished with the assistance of a competent consultant who will facilitate the process. Properly engaging in this process will require your board to prioritize some desired outcomes over others. To be sure, prioritizing and reaching consensus about desired outcomes are not easy tasks. However, if you’re doing this, your board is engaging in the most important board-level work of the planning process.

While trying to create your organization’s intended impact statement, you’ll explore questions such as:

  1. Who are our intended beneficiaries?
  2. What are their primary needs?
  3. What benefits do our programs/services create?
  4. Do the benefits match the needs?
  5. What work won’t we do in the coming year(s)?
  6. If we could create just three measurable changes in our outcomes over the next five years, what would those be?
  7. What work will we take off our plates in order to be more effective?

Once the desired outcomes are prioritized, the staff can more easily prioritize activities and programs based on the degree to which each can contribute to the organization’s desired ends. However, without a set of prioritized outcomes to guide it, an organization can spend a great deal of time, energy, and money on good ideas and well-designed programs and not significantly impact its targeted constituency.

With a well-conceived intended impact statement in place, a strong staff can often engage in critical thinking and planning about theory of change in order to make recommendations back to the board. This involves the staff considering the strategies it has been utilizing to achieve the desired outcomes and whether there might not be more effective ones. The staff is often in the best position to analyze how the organization’s programs might be changed or adjusted in order to more effectively get from resources to impact.

If an organization begins its strategic planning at the end–by defining the most important outcomes it seeks to achieve–it will then truly be able to be strategic with its precious resources, using them to serve its intended beneficiaries in ways that will yield the greatest impact for them and the organization.

 

January 4, 2010