Strategic Planning Guide & Other Resources

On-line toolkits, how-to guides and articles abound about how to navigate strategic planning, organizational development, and other services to help your organization thrive. Here are a few helpful resources.

Strategic Planning: A How to Guide

Strategic planning seems like a simple straight-forward task,
but can easily turn into a marathon. Based on our work
with nonprofit and foundation clients, here’s a short
Strategic Planning Guide to get help you started.

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork

Review past strategic plans, other key documents.
Determine stakeholders for a Strategic Planning Work Group (SPWG).
With your work group, clarify key questions: goals for strategic plan, audience, end product, work plan and timeline.

Step 2: Conduct Interviews

Conduct phone/video or in-person interviews with 10-20 key stakeholders.
Develop questions: what your organization is doing well, improvements needed, what your organization should focus on in the next 3-5 years.
Conduct 60 minute interviews to collect input.
Analyze interview responses, organize into major themes for strategic planning retreat.

Step 3: Host a Strategic Planning Retreat

Organize a retreat with board members, leadership, and staff. You can hold the retreat off-site (away from your office) and over 1-2 days.
Help participants brainstorm mission, vision, strategic plan goals and actions steps. Guided questions with answers by post-it notes is a great way to collect lots of data from many participants. Include icebreakers, interactive activities, breaks, and food, to keep participants engaged.
Analyze key findings in a post-retreat summary report.

Step 4: Document the Strategic Plan

The final strategic plan should identify your mission, vision and values, with clear goals and action steps to get there.
Identify specific staff or departments who’s responsible for each action.
Hold weekly meetings for your SPWG (over 3-6 months) to finalize mission, vision, goals, and actions, circulate draft plan for input, and finalize your strategic plan.
Share your final strategic plan with your Board, donors, staff and supporters, and celebrate your hard work!
See sample strategic plan Schonfield Consulting produced for Community Health Trust here.

Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust Strategic Plan

Schonfield Consulting led Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust's strategic planning process.

See the finished product here.

"Anne is a pleasure to work with and guides you through the difficult strategic planning process with thoughtfulness, passion, and a great work ethic!”

DeAndre James, CEO, Pajaro Valley Community Health Trust

Questions?

For a free consultation and to get started on your strategic plan, contact us here.

Other Resources

See these resources for more about strategic planning, logic models and other tools:

How to develop a Logic Model (from Compass)
Evaluation Toolkit (from Pell Institute)
Theory of Change Toolkit (Annie E Casey Foundation)
Impact evaluation guidelines (Better Evaluation)
Evaluation expert database (EvalCommunity)
Fundraising/Giving Trends in 2020 (Blackbaud Institute)

Strategic Planning Guide & Other Resources

On-line toolkits, how-to guides and articles abound about how to navigate strategic planning, organizational development, and other services to help your organization thrive. Here are a few helpful resources.

Strategic Planning: A How to Guide

Step 1: Lay the Groundwork

Step 2: Conduct Interviews

Step 3: Host a Strategic Planning Retreat

Step 4: Document the Strategic Plan

Questions?

Other Resources

"Anne is the quintessential consultant — she listens well, asks good questions, is easy to work with, and a great "thought partner." She is the person you want on your team if you want to get s**t done and not waste time. I will work with Anne anytime."

“Anne and her team bring a wealth of experience in process design, community investment best practices, and clarity of objectives and program metrics. I would definitely recommend Schonfield Consulting for their rigor and drive to achieve results.”

“Anne and her team played an integral role in designing and implementing Well Being Trust's grant making. Anne is extremely efficient and good at moving things forward. I value Anne’s input tremendously and appreciate her warm and positive manner.”

“Anne and Amy did a marvelous job with our strategic plan -- sensitive to the needs of staff, leadership and Board; focused and efficient; encouraging and relentless. Hidden Villa made an excellent choice to work with Schonfield Consulting.”

“Anne is brilliant at strategic planning. She worked with the NRDC India team to chart our vision and plan for two plans spanning 10 years. She guided a tough task to successful completion by keeping us on target. I highly recommend Anne!”

"Anne is a pleasure to work with and guides you through the difficult strategic planning process with thoughtfulness, passion, and a great work ethic!”

"The ABPAS business plan that Schonfield Consulting helped us develop clearly explains our mission to investors and donors. The research Eva did was comprehensive and well-presented. The services provided by Anne and Eva can definitely help propel many other agencies like ours.”

"We needed someone who was independent, highly focused and knowledgable about capturing data from nonprofits. The final report was excellent. Thanks for taking on Fresno!"

"Anne is a valued colleague and I highly recommend her to anyone needing a top notch consultant... The quality of her work is excellent and her ability to turn it around quickly was very impressive."

"Thank you for carrying us through this process. The end result is pretty dramatic, thanks to your careful eye, your methodical work, and your creative suggestions. You’re a superstar!"

"From her insights into fundraising, to her pointed questions on strategy and her well-organized agendas -- Anne's support has been invaluable. Anne has great energy and is an important member of the TAHMO team."

"Anne has done excellent consultancy work. Her research and review of grant materials produced high quality outputs—she asked tough questions and delivered on time. I would highly recommend Anne."

"That was a great event. Thanks so much for a fantastic facilitation – you know your job and you do it very well! I'm already looking forward to next year’s meeting."

"Working with Anne was extremely excellent! We were very happy with the board retreat and initial strategic planning. The summary report from the retreat is great and goes a long ways to setting a future agenda for CCS."

"Thanks for the excellent job on the case studies. I presented your work at the convening and it garnered a lot of attention. I’m excited to see how things move forward!"

"It was a pleasure working with Schonfield Consulting on our health program evaluation. Anne was super thoughtful and organized, and helped us translate lots of data into a very useful product for our Board."

“Anne provides us with excellent fundraising advice. She put a lot of time and thinking into an excellent fundraising retreat with Board and staff. We did some darn good work and had a good time doing it!”