The KindTru approach
Strategic planning, sized for organizations like yours
Strategic planning is usually described as the process by which an organization produces a three-year or five-year plan. I understand why, since that is the most visible part. Still, I have come to think the description puts the emphasis in the wrong place, and I suspect it explains a great many plans sitting in a great many drawers. The real work of strategy is making choices, and a plan earns its keep to the extent that it records those choices and helps you act on them.
How I see it
What I think planning is really for
Understood as choosing rather than producing, planning becomes less a document and more a practice: looking honestly, deciding, putting resources behind the decisions, and adapting as you learn. The document is one artifact made along the way, and I have come to think it is not the point. That matters most for a small organization, I suspect. If the plan is the point, a thin planning season produces a thin plan and the whole effort feels wasted. If the choosing is the point, then even a short afternoon leaves you better off, because the choices got made and everyone knows what they are.
Aspiration is the enjoyable part, and I say that with affection, because I enjoy it too. A room full of people who care about the same mission can produce a stirring five-year vision in ninety minutes, and it will feel like real progress. In my experience the difficulty arrives later, when that vision meets a budget that cannot carry it, or a board member who quietly disagreed in the room and said nothing. So I would ask the plainer questions first. Where are we strong? Where is the strain? And one I have watched change the temperature of a room: what does the board think the staff thinks?
One more thing seems to matter for an organization your size. The question “what does the community need?” has an answer that never really changes (more than any one organization can provide), so I have found it more useful to ask “what can we deliver excellently, given who we actually are?” That one has an answer, and the answer is a strategy.
As for how a good process moves, I think of it in eight movements: Prepare, Listen, See, Make Meaning, Choose, Build, Execute, and then Learn and Adapt. Choose is the one most processes skip, and skipping it is why so many plans feel unreal to the people asked to carry them.
Community surrounds all eight. The people you serve are not a consultation step to be finished early and ticked off. Their voice belongs wherever a choice is being made about work that affects them.
What kind of planning?
The five planning modes
If there is one thing on this page I would plant a flag on, it is this: the most expensive mistake in our field is running the wrong kind of planning process. A five-year visioning retreat is exactly right for one organization and genuinely hard on another, and the difference is usually the season the organization is in rather than its size or its budget. I have found it helps to name five seasons. None of them is better than another.
Mode A
Stabilize
A season for steadying, when something load-bearing is asking for attention before the big directional questions can get a fair hearing.
Mode B
Focus
More good work than the organization can sustain, where what is needed is a choosing conversation more than a planning document.
Mode C
Build
Solid ground, where the question is how to strengthen so the organization can keep its promises at the size it wants to be.
Mode D
Navigate
A shifting landscape, where the organization may be steady but planning has to watch as carefully as it commits.
Mode E
Transform
The deep questions, about what this organization is for and what shape it should take next.
The standard
What I look for in a healthy process
Across the planning rooms I have sat in, the processes that changed anything seemed to share the same properties. I hold our own materials to this list, and you are welcome to hold me to it. Fifteen is more than any one process will carry perfectly, so I offer it as something to review against rather than a bar to clear.
- Reality
- (the process started from where the organization actually is, rather than where it hoped to be)
- Community
- (the people served had a real voice, not a courtesy hearing)
- Purpose
- (the work was tied back to why the organization exists)
- Choice
- (real options were weighed, and something was declined)
- Focus
- (a short list survived, rather than everything surviving)
- Feasibility
- (the plan fits the hours, the money, and the people actually available)
- Interdependence
- (the choices were tested against one another rather than decided in isolation)
- Ownership
- (board and staff both hold the plan, and each knows which parts are theirs)
- Measurement
- (a few honest signs of progress were named in advance)
- Learning
- (there is a rhythm for noticing what the work is teaching)
- Adaptability
- (the plan can bend when the ground moves, without being abandoned)
- Governance
- (the board's role in the plan is written down and practiced)
- Integration
- (the budget and the annual calendar reflect the same choices the plan does)
- Communication
- (someone who was not in the room can read the plan and understand it)
- Action
- (the first steps have owners and dates, and they start soon)
Where to start
Planning tends to go better when everyone starts from the same picture, which is what we built the KindTru assessment to give you: 18 categories, drawn from the questions boards and staff actually disagree about, answered confidentially, and returned as a report your leadership can read in an evening. From there, the Planning Room turns your own results into a retreat your team can run, with an agenda, a script you can speak from, choosing exercises, and a plan on a page.
The guide
The KindTru Guide to Strategic Planning for Community-Based Nonprofits
Everything on this page at more length, along with the parts that would not fit: how each season tends to go, the tensions that surface along the way, and how to size all of it for an afternoon rather than a season. I wrote it so that an organization could run a good process without me. It is free, and I will treat your email address with respect.
Keep reading
Reading for the road
Shorter pieces for the questions that tend to come up partway through, once a process is already underway.
- From Surviving to a Five-Year Horizon
Someone asks where the organization wants to be in five years, and the room goes quiet. Not empty quiet. Out-of-practice quiet. On rebuilding a muscle that survival seasons take away.
- A Strategic Plan Is Not an Action Plan
In a cabinet near you sits a handsome strategic plan that has been consulted twice since the retreat. Most small organizations need the other document first, and it fits on a page.
- You're Doing Well. Now What?
We assume the hardest organizational choices belong to struggling nonprofits. I've watched the opposite: strength brings the questions with no deadlines, no forcing functions, and no obvious answers.
- Before You Add a Second Program
Growth is the sector's default compliment, and expansion ideas arrive dressed in mission language. Six questions to ask while the new program is still an idea, including the one about stopping.
- When to Say No to a Grant
The funding opportunity is almost your mission. The room is talking itself into it. A few questions worth asking before yes, and some thoughts on declining money graciously.
- The Building Question
A bequest, a below-market offer, a landlord ready to sell: suddenly owning a building is possible, and the dream arrives with a shadow. Questions to sit with before your organization becomes a property owner.
- Turning Assessment Results into a Productive Board Conversation
The report is a starting point. The real insight arrives when board and staff look at the same data together and ask what it means for us. A 90-minute format any chair can run.
- How to Find Out Who Funds Organizations Like Yours (Without Paying for a Database)
Foundation research can feel like a members-only room. Yet every private foundation lists its grants in a public filing, and two free tools will read those lists for you. A method any nonprofit can run in an afternoon.
Whatever you use, and whether or not any of it is ours, I hope the planning goes well. I hope it leaves your organization steadier than it found you, and a little clearer about what you are choosing.