Nonprofit Strategic Planning
Is Your Strategic Plan Helping You Make Better Decisions?
Strategic Planning
Today’s nonprofit leaders face increasing complexity: changing community needs, funding uncertainty, workforce challenges, and rising expectations. A strategic plan should do more than outline goals. It should help your board and staff make confident decisions, align resources with priorities, and focus on what matters most.
At Heightened Development, we facilitate strategic planning processes that build clarity, engage stakeholders, and create practical roadmaps for greater mission impact.
We believe the process is just as important as the final plan. It helps board and staff leaders align around the strategies that will have the greatest impact, given your organization’s goals, capacity, and current environment.
Are Any of the Things Below True for Your Nonprofit?
- We have competing priorities and need clarity on where to focus.
- We need to grow or change, but are not sure what the right priorities are to do that.
- We need to understand external perceptions, benchmark best practices, or assess how we fit into our community.
- Funding and community focus are shifting, and we need to determine the right strategy for long-term impact.
While there are many great reasons to go through strategic planning, the ones above are great reasons that are often typical for leaders right now. Heightened Development can be your nonprofit strategic planning consultant, helping you get these answers and build a roadmap that reflects what we find together.
Strategy and Planning Are Not the Same Thing...
and Organizations Need Both
Nonprofits often spend more time planning than strategizing. While planning keeps organizations running, strategy is what drives real impact. The difference comes down to making intentional choices about where to focus, what to prioritize, and what to let go.
You are often planning every day with your team and board. You map out action steps and timelines. That is planning. Strategy, however, is making intentional choices about what you will prioritize. What you will say “yes” to, and what you will say “no” to. Sometimes organizations get to the end of a planning process, and they have a set of goals they hope to accomplish. However, the goals do not really link to an overarching strategy. If you don’t have a strategy that connects your goals, your process has not really aligned your leadership around a clear focus. This creates overwhelm. The result is your team running around with too many tasks, without being sure they are the right tasks. In fact, sometimes you end up with a whole set of competing goals and tasks.
Heightened Development is committed to a process that ensures your goals are connected by a clear strategy. Read more about this here.
A Tool that Links Your Strategy with Daily Decisions
Borrowing from the research of LaPiana, Heightened Development partners with leaders during all strategic planning processes to create a strategy screen. A strategy screen is a set of simple “yes” or “no” questions that you will use daily to determine whether or not a new opportunity, focus, or even the way they are spending their time aligns with their chosen strategy. This helps you stay laser-focused!
Why Strategic Planning Often Falls Short
A good strategic plan helps you assess if you are impacting your mission in a way that moves the needle toward your vision statement. It should be designed so staff and board leaders feel equipped in how to move forward. Long range strategy is why most organizations contact Heightened Development, but often a call or assessment process shows that other operational planning is needed as much, if not more. Heightened Development is able to support a range of planning needs.
For example, if strong governance processes are lacking, programs are not able to provide consistent services because of funding constraints, or the work culture does not reflect the organization’s values, these problems need addressing before truly looking long range.
Heightened Development is able to walk beside you, building the project team with the right skills for your organization needs at this juncture. This may mean traditional strategic planning, partnering deeply with the board of directors to build out effective governance structures, working on moving organizational culture or processes in a particular direction, or supporting staff as they create detailed processes to be more efficient and impactful in the future. Ultimately, all types of planning help you gain clarity on your long range goals and ensure you have the right culture and capacity to reach them!
Please call to discuss your planning needs.
Our Approach
Instead of jumping straight into goals and objectives, we begin by helping organizations answer a more fundamental question: Who are we called to become, and how will we know what deserves our time, energy, and resources?
While we have a set of steps we typically utilize to create the best possible results, we will work with a small team of leaders within your organization and tailor the process to your needs. We’ve worked with a variety of organizations- from those with only volunteer leadership to large educational institutions. We are able to adapt to your needs.
Our process always starts with lots of listening, reading, and data gathering to create a comprehensive assessment of where you are now. This becomes the data that your leadership uses to clarify your identity, create your strategy screen, and set your long-range goals. We will work with you to define what stakeholders to engage in the process, and to design an assessment and leadership retreat that results in excitement and alignment around your future.
Below is an outline of the basic steps you might expect in a Heightened Development strategic planning process.
1. Understanding Your Current Reality
We listen to the right voices in your organization and community, and you help us decide who those are. Through listening and review of your existing data and organization documents, we are able to start building your assessment.
2. Clarifying Organizational Identity
We create a draft, comprehensive identity statement for leadership to hone and adjust. It includes your mission, vision, values, the unique role your organization plays, and the current environment in which you work.
3. Building a Strategy Screen
We partner with you to build a practical decision-making framework that helps leaders evaluate future opportunities.
4. Identifying Strategic Priorities
We facilitate a leadership retreat that ends with alignment around a focused set of priorities that guide decisions rather than create longer to-do lists.
5. Preparing for Implementation
We partner with you in the final writing to ensure that goals are clear and realistic, have measurable outcomes, and to build out operational and action plans that make your key steps in the next 12-18 months clear.
Strategic Planning Services
Organization Assessment
Needs Assessment
Stakeholder Engagement
Scenario Planning
Strategic Plan Creation
Operational/Action Plan
Implementation Coaching
Leadership Strategic Planning Retreat Facilitation
Strategic Planning Facilitation
What a Successful Strategic Planning Process Looks Like
Strategic planning is not an answer for all things in your organization. In fact, if you are struggling with leadership development and retention, governance, organizational culture, etc., Heightened Development has other services that may be of more benefit.
Strategic planning is, however, an investment of time and resources. You should have a guarantee of measurable success at the end. For a Heightened Development strategic planning process, you can expect outcomes such as:
- Greater clarity about where you are headed.
- Stronger board and staff alignment.
- A better understanding of budgetary decisions that will be important for strategic plan alignment.
- Capacity and strategy-aligned decision-making.
- Increased confidence in organizational priorities.
- Clear measures of success.
- A practical roadmap for implementation.
- Clarification of board and staff roles within the strategic goals.
- A beautiful, forward-facing strategic plan that is easy to share with stakeholders.
Frequently Asked Questions
How long does a strategic planning process typically take?
Three to six months is typical, with most taking between four and five months. The length depends on things like how quickly the organization is prepared to set meeting dates and get started, how extensive stakeholder engagement will be, and whether or not operational and implementation planning are part of the process.
Who should participate in a strategic planning process?
The more deeply the board, staff and community stakeholders are engaged in the process, the better! Because a board of directors is charged with setting the strategic direction of an organization, they should commission the process, be engaged throughout, and ultimately set the final plan goals. Because staff are typically more aware of daily operations and may be wrestling with strategic questions from a different vantage point, at a minimum, staff leadership should be heavily involved in the process. We typically suggest engaging the full staff team early, and having staff leadership, or in small organizations the full staff team, participate in the final board retreat where goals are selected.
You will need a small group (three to seven is ideal) of board and staff members to help shepherd the process. We refer to this as your strategic planning workgroup.
Do you facilitate board retreats?
Yes! We facilitate engaging retreats and always structure retreats with the end objective in mind, making sure you meet the objectives of your engagement.
One to two retreats are always a part of a full strategic planning process. On a case-by-case basis, we are able to facilitate stand alone retreats.
What if we already have a strategic plan, but it is no longer working for us?
Schedule a free consultation with us, and we’d love to explore the best approach. Depending upon your needs, why your plan isn’t working, and how much data and community input you’ve already collected, we may be able to do an abbreviated process that creates a plan that is more actionable and better able to align your leadership.
How much does strategic planning cost?
Every strategic planning process is different, and costs vary based on the scope of what is included, how much travel is involved, etc. Costs typically start at around $12,000, but most processes are slightly more than this. We are happy to hear more about your budget and see if we are able to meet your needs.
Can you conduct stakeholder interviews?
Yes, this is a key part of a strategic planning process, and we work with you to determine what stakeholders you’d like to engage. It is important to think about the type of data you need and the key questions you are asking during your process, as this will help you define the individuals or groups who will provide the most helpful information.
In nearly all processes, we also include a general community survey. These allow broad perception data to be collected about your organization.
Do you help with implementation?
If an organization requests implementation support, we are ready. This is something we always recommend, because a plan is much more helpful when staff feel fully clear and empowered with what to do after it is approved.
Do you help with resource development plans?
Funding has been even more unstable in the last few years, and organization leaders contact us for help. While we are not a fundraising focused organization, we have deep experience with fundraising, planning and processes. For organizations new to cultivating relationships with individuals and corporations, we are equipped to coach you through the creation of your first private resource development plan.
Do you work virtually?
Yes. We believe that a blend of virtual and in-person is optimal for engaging leaders. While strategic planning retreats should be in-person, things such as workgroup meetings and even stakeholder engagement is often easier for both parties when done virtually. We will design the process and format based on your needs.
Can you conduct a needs assessment?
Sometimes. Heightened Development partners with others to complete the needs assessment. We focus on collecting new data and allow other researchers to pull existing data from multiple databases. If you need a comprehensive needs assessment, it may be that another firm is a better fit. However, if you have a small budget and want a needs assessment added as part of your strategic planning process, we can often support this need.
