| Page 3 The board and executive director should work together in developing the
strategic planning process and provide guidance and input to the plan. The board
can be particularly effective in providing and analyzing information about the
external environment, current trends in social policy, or new financial
opportunities. Because strategic planning takes time and effort, several
sessions will need to be scheduled to complete all the strategic planning steps,
including gathering information, discussing current and proposed programs and
services, projecting the financial resources that would be needed to implement
various programs, prioritizing programs, and finalizing the plan. The board must
formally approve the final plan, be committed to it, and support its
implementation.
Steps of the Strategic Planning Process
Now, let look more closely at the steps of the Strategic Planning Process. A
strategic plan includes five levels:
- Mission
- Vision
- Goals
- Strategies
- Objectives (Annual plans of action).
Now let’s talk about the main steps of the strategic planning process in more
detail.
Step 1 - Gathering and Analyzing Information
The first step is Gathering and Analyzing Information. This step consists of
three components: an external assessment, a market or constituent assessment and
an internal assessment.
External Assessment
The purpose of the external assessment is to identify and assess changes and
trends in the world around the nonprofit likely to have a significant impact on
it over the next 5-10 years. We look at political, economic, technological,
social, lifestyle, demographic, competitive, regulatory and broad philanthropic
trends. We then determine which changes are opportunities for us (for example,
opportunities to grow) and which could be threats to us in some way (trends that
can keep us from being successful). Finally we identify implications for
selected changes and trends -- ways the nonprofit might respond to the
opportunities and threats we identify. At this early stage of the planning
process, saying that something is an implication does not require the nonprofit
to adopt that course of action. The external assessment is sometimes referred to
as the "environmental scan."
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