Impact Collaborative helps organizations develop and implement strategic and operating plans. Increasingly, funders and boards are recognizing the importance of creating a strategic plan through a consensual process involving multiple stakeholders. Major organizational decisions then follow from that plan.

To help organizations develop their plans, we use a comprehensive planning process. Generally we work with a strategic planning committee comprised of board members, the executive director and one or two representatives from other key constituencies. We begin by meeting with the strategic planning committee to understand the goals and desired outcomes of strategic plan development. We then develop a work plan that outlines the steps of the process.

The first phase of strategic planning is generally a discovery phase. Depending on the scope of the project and the project budget, we use a variety of data collection methods to collect information about the organization as it is now. These methods include the use of organizational assessment tools, interviews with key stakeholders and focus groups with key constituents. We translate the data collected by each method into a short report for the strategic planning committee and also use it to design the next phase of the work.

Once these data are collected, we develop a design for one or more organizational retreats that are usually attended by representatives of key stakeholder groups. The retreat design builds upon the data collected during the discovery process. During a retreat, we use a variety of exercises and interactive formats to achieve consensus about the organization's:

• mission
• core values
• vision
• long term goals
• short term goals.

Following a retreat, we meet with an implementation committee to turn the outcomes of the retreat into a format that contains specific action items that will lead to organizational change. We generally develop:

• a long term strategic plan
• a one-year operating plan containing action steps, metrics for success and a timetable for accomplishing these steps
• a monitoring process that assigns responsibility and accountability for the accomplishment of the plan.

Too often organizations create plans that languish on a shelf and are never used. Impact Collaborative's strategic planning process builds in safeguards to decrease the likelihood that this will occur.

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