Strategy for Organizations: Relevant, Actionable, and Flexible Planning
Written by Amy Merritt Campbell
This post is the second in our series on strategy for programs, organizations, and communities. In our first post, we explored what it looks like to apply strategic thinking at the program level—clarifying goals, aligning activities, and measuring what matters. Now, we’re zooming out to the organizational level: What is strategy, really? And how do you build a plan that helps your whole organization stay focused, aligned, and adaptive?
Why Strategic Planning?
Strategy is how your organization aligns what’s happening inside—your people, processes, and programs—with what’s happening outside—your community’s needs and opportunities. A strong strategic plan connects your organization’s internal operations to the external realities of your community. It helps you clarify what you’re aiming to achieve, what’s feasible to do, and how you’ll stay focused and adaptable over time.
It helps you ask:
What’s going on around us?
What are we uniquely positioned to do in response?
How do we make sure our time, money, and energy are going toward the right things?
A strategic plan helps you move from reacting to everything to focusing on what matters most, so you can fulfill your mission more effectively.
The Three Phases of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning doesn’t have to be complicated. But it does have to be intentional. At Elevate, a good strategic planning process typically unfolds in three phases: Landscape Scan, Identify Priorities, and Plan for Implementation. Here’s a streamlined approach we use with clients of all sizes:
Phase 1: Landscape Scan
The goal of this phase is to understand the broader context your organization is working within, and how you’re doing internally.
You might:
Gather community data related to the population you serve
Benchmark against peer organizations
Review internal documents like budgets, program reports, or evaluations
Gather input from key stakeholders—staff, board, funders, and clients
Synthesizing this information into key findings, sharing these with your planning team, and making sense of them together not only sets the foundation for a highly relevant plan—it also builds a shared understanding within your organization of the internal and external realities you’re operating under.
Phase 2: Identify Priorities
The goal of Phase 2 is to make meaning from your scan and focus on what matters most in the next few years. This phase often includes facilitated sessions with a mix of board and staff leaders to reflect on:
What did we learn from Phase 1?
What do we want to accomplish in the next 2–3 years?
What’s feasible given our time, staffing, and funding?
How will we know if we’re successful?
When it comes to setting priorities, less is more. The best strategic plans focus on a handful of clear, compelling priorities and some initial strategies for making progress.
Phase 3: Plan for Implementation
Phase 3 is about turning your priorities into action. Keep it lean. You should be able to capture your plan in under five pages. Include:
Each priority or goal
The strategies you’ll use to pursue those
Success metrics and how you’ll track them
A clear implementation plan for the first 12–18 months
You don’t have to outline three years of action steps in detail—in fact, we recommend not doing that, as they’ll inevitably change. Instead, focus on building a strong process to regularly review, reflect, and adapt.
It’s important to note that, throughout all of these phases, you’ll be grappling with big questions. Who do we want to be in the world? How do we make sure our team/staff/board/stakeholders are on board with the direction we’re charting? What’s feasible for us to take on, given the current set of contexts that we’re operating within? Making space to reflect, process, and learn is critical, and working with someone external to your organization can offer a neutral, objective space to process these big questions (and feelings) that come up.
Managing Implementation
We all know about the strategic plans that take tons of hours (and dollars!) to create, but that eventually end up untouched or irrelevant. Focusing on building a flexible framework (as we outline above) helps ensure your strategy stays relevant and feasible, but how you manage implementation matters, too. Here are a few ways to keep your strategy alive and actionable:
Create scorecards and dashboards to track progress toward key metrics. These do not have to be fancy. The goal here is to make it clear what’s on track and what’s not.
Get clear on responsibility. Make sure you know who is responsible for managing the implementation of each strategy. They may need additional input, approval, or support, but clear accountability and responsibility ensure things get done.
Set regular check-ins, and stick to them. Bi-monthly or quarterly meetings help you stay aligned, remove roadblocks, and course-correct.
Plan to revisit your plan. Schedule an annual review of your plan with agreed-upon criteria to determine if adjustments are needed.
The key is flexibility and discipline. Make it easy to adapt when the world shifts—but set a high bar for changing course too frequently.
FAQs
Here are a few of the questions that we get asked the most. None of these responses are one-size-fits-all; every organization is different, and your approach and process should be tailored to your specific needs. However, these are general guidelines for some of the most common questions that come up.
How long should our strategic plan cover?
We typically recommend 2–3 years. That’s long enough to make meaningful progress—but short enough to stay responsive to change. You can still set a long-term vision (“North Star”) and revisit priorities annually.
What’s the role of board and staff?
Form a Task Force of about 10 leaders from both board and staff. They’ll guide the process. Bring in other voices—especially staff and community members—at key points for input and validation.
How much community engagement do we need?
At a minimum, engage your board, staff, and people you serve. More is better—but it depends on your goals, timeline, and budget.
How much should we budget?
We recommend around 1% of your operating budget for strategic planning. More if you want deep engagement and data; less if you scale those elements down.
Want Help With Your Strategic Plan?
We’d love to support you. We’ve guided nonprofits, foundations, and government partners through thoughtful, right-sized planning processes that align people, priorities, and purpose.
