Strategic planning really can be effective. It can produce useful results that help your organization grow and thrive. Strategic planning can even be fun!

This short course is meant as your introduction to strategic planning. This stage of strategic planning is your plan for planning. This stage sets the scene for a successful, engaging strategic planning process.

A stakeholder is anyone who has influence on or is influenced by your organization. This can be divided into two main categories - internal and external stakeholders.

The Power vs Interest Grid presents a great opportunity to interact with your team and work together to analyze your stakeholders, think about how they should be involved in your strategic planning process, and consider how they might affect your strategies.

When deciding who to include in our stakeholder evaluation process, we have to start by acknowledging a very real constraint: our time, energy, and resources are strictly limited. We cannot realistically survey everyone, nor should we try to. Instead, our goal is to be highly intentional and focus our capacity where it will yield the most useful insights for our strategic planning.

Most of us have heard of, if not participated in a SWOT analysis before. It is a relatively straightforward exercise that can produce some really powerful, and useful results. For me, the most important part is keeping up the distinction between the categories.

This course is all about identity. Just as individuals have identities that go far deeper than surface-level demographics, our organizations possess deep, complex identities of their own. An organization's identity is shaped by its shared history, community impact, operational style, and values.

Causal Mapping—sometimes called Strategy Mapping—is an engaging, highly collaborative process designed to shape your organization’s future. In a relatively short amount of time, this method helps your team brainstorm comprehensively, organize complex ideas, and chart a clear 3–5 year strategic direction.

Causal Mapping—sometimes called Strategy Mapping—is an engaging, highly collaborative process designed to shape your organization’s future. In a relatively short amount of time, this method helps your team brainstorm comprehensively, organize complex ideas, and chart a clear 3–5 year strategic direction.

You’re almost there! You’ve done a lot of work to this point, and now it’s about putting it all together into something actionable. Therefore, your next step is to create an action plan with timelines, roles, responsibilities, and measurables.

I have found after working with many nonprofits and churches, that a standard action plan on its own is not enough to keep organizations focused on their strategies and tracking their progress. They need something simpler that is reviewed and revised at least every quarter.