What is a Strategic Plan and Why Do I Need One?

You have probably heard some nerd talking about a strategic plan and how important it is for your business or social enterprise, and you just simply rolled your eyes and moved on — you are doing well with your little operation, and you have the odd client walk through your doors every now and then. You have convinced yourself that you simply need to do a little more advertising and maybe boost a post or two on Facebook and everything will fall into place. Oh, good old word of mouth is working as well, so the big guns can sweat about strategic planning, but not a small fish like you, right? Wrong. A strategic plan is probably as essential for your venture as was that first brilliant idea that spurred you to create what you have today.

If your venture is a social enterprise or a non-profit organization, there is a very good chance that you got this far on passion — you launched out because you wanted to do good in the world and so far, you have been doing the best you can. You have come up with a system of operation that seems to work for now, but every time you read a book on business or entrepreneurship, you cannot seem to fight the thought that maybe there are a few things you could be doing differently. The truth is that founders of non-profit ventures need to consider themselves (social) entrepreneurs and adopt similar corporate practices as those that apply in the world of business. It is not enough to have a good idea, social sector leaders need to operate more formally with the same expectations and demands of a business in order to reap the same rewards.

So what has strategic planning got to do with this? In simple terms, just as much as a great outline helps a writer get the most out of an essay — you can start without one, but you’ll likely realize halfway through that you should have taken the time to get it right. Strategic planning saves you time in the long run and gives you guidance through the journey. A strategic plan helps you develop roots before launching branches — it challenges you to invest in the underlying framework of what you are seeking to achieve with your venture and the processes required to achieve those objectives.

There is a very good chance that you already have a strategy, and it might not even be documented anywhere. Perhaps you hatched a plan to support students in under-resourced schools with additional tutoring by university students who are seeking volunteer opportunities — that simple plan addresses two needs at once and it seems to be working. Maybe you decided to deploy your artistic knowledge into a two-pronged approach of commissioning art projects and organizing trainings — two streams of income for one knowledge base. Or perhaps your approach is to seek donations of food parcels from families on your street to support the operations of various orphanages in your city, with some time set apart for volunteering at those orphanages. These are all solid plans which form the beginnings of a strategy, but a strategy is always focused on the long term, not the day-to-day operational issues. It has been defined by one scholar as “an organized pattern of behaviour toward an end”.

A strategic plan is a framework that defines a strategy and points the way to implementing it. In their 2005 book, Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations, Michael Allison and Jude Kaye define strategic planning as a “systematic process through which an organization agrees on — and builds commitment among key stakeholders to — priorities that are essential to its mission and are responsive to the environment”. Another author, John Bryson defines it as “a disciplined effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization…is, what it does, and why it exists”. In essence, a strategic plan is super important because it aligns everyone in the organization around a common purpose and a defined pathway.

Some organizations only develop their first strategic plan after a few years of operation, while some others develop a strategic plan before commencing operations. In either case, you must always start with the vision of the organization, and then project some potential ways of getting there. From that point, you can frame a mission statement and then outline a few key strategic questions/issues that need to be addressed in your work. Your strategic plan will then point the way forward. For leaders of organizations, John Bryson’s advice in his 2004 book, Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations is poignant. He said: “strategic thinking, acting and learning are more important than any particular approach to strategic planning”.

So how is your organization doing? Do you have a strategic plan in place? Are you thinking of creating one? Let us help you get it right.

Originally published at http://thinktank.one.