The Alliance for Nonprofit Management is a professional association of people and organizations devoted to improving the management of nonprofits. On the organization’s website is an excellent overview of strategic planning.
It’s common for those in community development organizations to proclaim, “We need a strategic plan.”
Unfortunately, far too many organizations go about the process all wrong.
According to the alliance, successful strategic planning:
- Leads to action
- Builds a shared vision that is values based
- Is an inclusive, participatory process in which board and staff take on a shared ownership
- Accepts accountability to the community
- Is externally focused and sensitive to the organization’s environment
- Is based on quality data
- Requires an openness to questioning the status quo
Is a key part of effective management
John Bryson’s book “Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations” tells us:
“Strategic planning is a management tool, period. As with any management tool, it is used for one purpose only: to help an organization do a better job — to focus its energy, to ensure that members of the organization are working toward the same goals, to assess and adjust the organization’s direction in response to a changing environment.”
“In short, strategic planning is a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does and why it does it, with a focus on the future.”
When it was published more than 15 years ago, Bryson’s book introduced a new strategic planning model. It has since become one of the standard references in the field.
The alliance notes that the process, when done correctly, is strategic because “it involves preparing the best way to respond to the circumstances of the organization’s environment, whether or not its circumstances are known in advance; nonprofits often must respond to dynamic and even hostile environments.”
“Being strategic, then, means being clear about the organization’s objectives, being aware of the organization’s resources and incorporating both into being consciously responsive to a dynamic environment.”
You would be amazed at how many leaders of community development organizations never ask themselves these questions:
- What are our objectives?
- What resources do we have to reach those objectives?
- Are we able to respond to change?
“The process is disciplined in that it calls for a certain order and pattern to keep it focused and productive,” according to the strategic planning section on the Alliance for Nonprofit Management website. “The process raises a sequence of questions that helps planners examine experience, test assumptions, gather and incorporate information about the present and anticipate the environment in which the organization will be working in the future.”
“Finally, the process is about fundamental decisions and actions because choices must be made in order to answer the sequence of questions mentioned above.”
“The plan is ultimately no more, and no less, than a set of decisions about what to do, why to do it and how to do it.”
“Because it is impossible to do everything that needs to be done in this world, strategic planning implies that some organizational decisions and actions are more important than others — and that much of the strategy lies in making the tough decisions about what is most important to achieving organizational success.”
If you think your community development organization is going about strategic planning all wrong, you should check out what the Alliance for Nonprofit Management has to say and buy a copy of Bryson’s book.
— Rex Nelson
Posted by Rex Nelson 
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