Stabilize
A season for steadying, when something load-bearing is asking for attention before the big directional questions can get a fair hearing.
Sixty to ninety days
The KindTru approach
Strategic planning, sized for organizations like yours
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 came to see it that way
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.
How I see it
What I think planning is really for
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.
Read the whole piece
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 can we deliver excellently, given who we actually are?
How a good process moves
Eight movements, with the community around all of them
Choose is the one most processes skip, and skipping it is why so many plans feel unreal to the people asked to carry them.
- Prepare
- Listen
- See
- Make Meaning
- Choosethe one most skip
- Build
- Execute
- Learn and Adapt
Community surrounds all eight
What kind of planning?
The kinds of planning
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 give those seasons names. None of them is better than another.
StabilizeSixty to ninety days
A season for steadying, when something load-bearing is asking for attention before the big directional questions can get a fair hearing.
FocusOne honest sort
More good work than the organization can sustain, where what is needed is a choosing conversation more than a planning document.
BuildTwo or three strengthening goals, reviewed quarterly
Solid ground, where the question is how to strengthen so the organization can keep its promises at the size it wants to be.
NavigateTwo or three ways the next couple of years could go
A shifting landscape, where the organization may be steady but planning has to watch as carefully as it commits.
TransformUnhurried and board-owned
The deep questions, about what this organization is for and what shape it should take next.
Find yours: take the free Planning CheckFive minutes, no account.
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.
- Reality
- Community
- Purpose
- Choice
- Focus
- Feasibility
- Interdependence
- Ownership
- Measurement
- Learning
- Adaptability
- Governance
- Integration
- Communication
- Action
What each one means
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
Start from the same picture, then decide, then keep it going
01 · Understand
Where you stand
- A confidential survey of your board and staff
- A report your leadership can read in an evening
02 · Act
Where you are going
- One hour of the board on one decision
- An Action Plan that records it, with owners and dates
- A half-day retreat built from your own results
- The Planning Room's guides and tools
03 · Thrive
Keeping it going
- Check-ins at 30, 60 and 90 days
- Board Development through the year
Read it in full
Planning tends to go better when everyone starts from the same picture, and that is what I built the KindTru assessment to give you: the key categories of organizational health, answered confidentially by the people who know the organization from the inside, and returned as a report your leadership can read in an evening. From there, the Facilitation Kit helps your board spend one hour on one decision, and the Action Plan keeps a record of what it decided, with owners and dates. When the decision is about direction, the Strategic Planning Kit turns your own results into a half-day retreat your team can run (an agenda, a script you can speak from, choosing exercises and a plan on a page), and the Planning Room holds the guides and tools for every kind of planning. Check-ins and Board Development help you keep it going through the year. All of it comes with the same one-time $299.
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.
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.