Starting a Charity? Reduce Strategic Plan to a Placemat

One technique that you might find helpful is to reduce your organization’s strategic plan to a placemat-sized document and have it at every board member’s place at the board meeting table.

The first reason you want to do this is that it helps each board member take a new look at the strategic plan your organization developed and then put on the shelf. First, you find out that it’s way out of date. Second you discover that there are many objectives that you have achieved. Third, you find out that there are some critical things that have been forgotten or not achieved. And, fourth, you will recall some of the discussions you had back then that led to various aspects of the strategic plan, and you automatically begin to compare them to the current board’s discussion of similar topics. These are all helpful discoveries from the staff’s point of view.

The second reason you want to reduce your strategic plan to a placemat is to have this representation present and highly visible at every board meeting, so board members have immediately available this view of the strategic decisions they made at some point in the past. This is one more way to keep them from feeling comfortable with discussions that dissolve into micro-managing and helps them to keep focused on strategic issues.

Here is a brief outline of the kinds of things that can be put on a placemat-sized plan:
1. Where we came from: activities, values, vision, mission
2. The context we found ourselves in when this plan was created
3. The major directions we set back then, plus the goals and objectives for each strategic direction
4. The resources we said we would need to achieve those directions
5. Operational and tactical plans laid to achieve the objectives, if any were set forth
6. The overall accomplishments of the organization since the creation of that plan

If you’d like some help on getting your board involved in strategic planning, I’ve found a few websites I think will be helpful to your process. The first is an article adapted from the Field Guide for Nonprofit Strategic Planning and Facilitation that gives a perspective you can share directly with board members.

Secondly, we sometimes use what’s called a “SWOT” analysis. This looks at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats that face your organization. I found an interesting representation of a SWOT analysis and its use and thought you might find it interesting, too.

Here’s a book you can buy from Amazon.com that will get you into strategic planning:
Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations: A Practical Guide and Workbook by Michael Allison and Jude Kaye. They discuss questions like "What Does a "Strategy" Look Like?..." and use key phrases like: proposed growth strategy, detailed annual operating plan, annual operational plan, Strength Weakness.

We will deal more with strategic planning in future posts.