Strategic planning often feels abstract or overly complex, especially for small or grassroots organizations working with limited resources. Yet when it’s done well, it helps to bring focus, alignment, and clear direction to the entire team. In the following, you and your team can find practical advice on the strategic planning process and on developing a strategic plan as a document.

What is a strategic plan?

A strategic plan is:

• a compass that helps your nonprofit organization navigate between its current state and its long-term ambitions.
• a guide for how you will achieve the impact you defined based on the problem, gap, or need that originally brought your organization to life.
• a tool to help you build the organizational and operational conditions needed to reach your goals.
• a space to create a shared language and common foundations within your broader team, including leadership, staff, volunteers, members, and others.
• a communication material, that can be shared (in part or in full) with supporters, partners, and other stakeholders.

When should you start?

Whether your organization is new or has been active for years, if there is commitment or even majority support from the broader team, it’s worth starting the strategic planning as soon as possible. It’s not always an obvious investment, and it can feel like it goes against daily operations and the need for immediate action. However, in my view, having a strategic plan, and practicing strategic management, and strategic thinking helps avoid ad hoc decisions, constant firefighting, and the exhausting way of working that comes with these.

Strategic planning takes shape through guided discussions and exercises. These can be facilitated by team members in turns, but there are advantages to working with an external facilitator too. From the first meeting to a finalized written strategy, the process can take several months, even up to half a year. It depends on the organization and the team, but generally it’s better not to stretch it beyond 6 months, as it can lead to a loss of focus and motivation among team members. 

A strategic plan usually covers a period of 3, 4, or 5 years – this is called a strategic cycle. It sets the organization’s priorities and goals for that time. The exact length should be decided by the team, but in recent years, it is recommended to plan for shorter periods as the environment is changing more rapidly and unpredictably than ever before.

How does the process look like?

0. As a first step, I recommend drawing a roadmap for the process. Create common ground with everyone involved on a few basic things: what you want to achieve, within what time period, and how should the final outcome or product look like. At this early stage, it’s also worth gathering and reviewing any existing strategic documents (e.g. vision, mission, goals, values). If these feel outdated, you can plan to revise or rewrite them during the process. If they are still relevant, you can build on them and make smaller updates so they better reflect your current and near-future reality.

1.Every strategic planning process starts with defining, re-defining, and analyzing the societal, environmental, or community-related problem that the organization wants to address. You can substitute “problem” with “gap” or “need” – in practice, many organizations use these interchangeably. It’s important to distinguish between the actual problem and its symptoms. At the same time, be aware that most social or environmental challenges are complex and broad, so instead of trying to address the whole issue, focus on a specific part that you can realistically understand and that you can potentially impact.   

2. This important groundwork is followed by analyzing your environment and assessing the current situation – in other words, gaining a better understanding of both the external world and your internal organizational reality. There is almost always reliable data related to your cause and the identified problems, so it’s worth relying on it as much as possible. If the field or the specific problem is new or not well researched, you can also generate your own data through your own or partner-led research. If resources are limited, simpler data collection methods can also work, for example by involving members of your primary target group.

3. After this, you can move on to setting strategic goals. It’s important to note that strategic goals are different from your usual organizational goals. The most significant difference is that they directly respond to the current state of the problem and the internal and external context in which the organization operates. Another key aspect is that they are time-bound: they apply to the duration of the strategic cycle. Thirdly, they are more concrete or they are paired with objectives for more specificity. At this stage, it’s also important to make explicit strategic choices – what will you focus on, and what will you deliberately not do.

4. Once strategic goals are set, I recommend introducing a logic model. This helps you define the outputs, outcomes and the longer-term impact of your work. Moreover, it makes your assumptions explicit about how change will happen. If you look for a logic model or a theory of change, you can find plenty of templates on the internet, or you can just as well use this one from my resource library.

5. As a next step, you will have to map and analyze your stakeholders, meaning all the people, organizations, and institutions you affect or could affect through your work, as well as those who influence your organization. Based on this, you can also define how you want to engage different stakeholders – who you want to inform, involve, or collaborate with.  

6. Finally, define how the strategy will be implemented, monitored, and adapted over time. This includes setting simple indicators, defining responsibilities, and creating regular strategic team check-ins, as well as moments for reflection with each and everyone involved in the strategic planning process. A strategy works best if it is treated as a living document – something you actively use and adjust based on the changing context around you.  

Who should be involved?

Since both the planning process and the final document define how the organization sees the future and its own role in it, all decision-makers within the organization should be participating. This will mean governing leaders (such as board members or trustees) as well as paid staff, depending on the organization’s structure, size, culture, and internal dynamics. 

A successful and effective strategy cannot be created without involving both groups (meaning leadership and staff):

1. A strategy is more likely to be followed if the people responsible for implementation feel ownership of it.  
2. On the other hand, real legitimacy to implement a strategy comes from the organization’s governing leaders too (assuming they are not just a formal body).  

Ideally, both the creation and the implementation of the strategy are based on cooperation between staff and leadership. The planning process is also a great opportunity to build a shared language within the organization: the foundations created here can help avoid many future disagreements within the team and prevent mistakes and dead ends for the organization. This does not mean that everyone (staff, leaders, volunteers, etc.) will agree on everything, but the strategic planning process and the plan itself:

• will set out agreement on the most important strategic questions and dilemmas.  
• will make everyone involved understand what they agree on and what they do not.  

It should be evident from the above, but it is important to state: one person alone cannot create a strategy, no matter how good their intentions or expertise are.

How should a strategic plan look like?

The template you can find in the resource library here consists of two distinct parts, which in reality are not sharply separated within an organization. The first is the core (or impact) strategy, and the second is the set of so-called functional strategies, which ensure the organizational conditions needed to achieve our strategic goals and the desired impact. These are the fields of people, finances, fundraising, communication, and measurement and evaluation.  

There are many different formats to a strategic plan as a document, and you can find various templates online. The most important thing is that the broader organizational team is satisfied with the final content and its structure. At the same time, it’s important to keep in mind that the document is not only for internal use, and may also be read by partners, supporters, or experts. That’s why careful and consistent formatting is recommended: the final document will be most useful if the language is simple and clear, the structure is easy to follow, and the content is as concise as possible.

As the strategic plan (or parts of it) may be accessible beyond the internal team, it’s worth treating certain information as confidential and leaving it out of the final document. For example, it is not recommended to include a full SWOT analysis, stakeholder map, or full PESTEL analysis in the finalized strategy. Annual action plans, project plans, budgets, and cash-flow plans – although they are largely based on the strategy – should also not be part of the strategic plan, as these are designed for shorter time periods than the strategic cycle.

How to make strategy happen?

Once the strategic plan is completed, the work does not end; in fact, a significant part of it begins at this point. From here on, the task is to put the strategy into practice and to find and use the tools that ensure successful implementation. Depending on the organization’s structure and internal dynamics, responsibility for implementation lies with staff members, the executive director or director, and to some extent, the governing leaders.

At the same time, a strategic plan is not set in stone: real-life developments often require us to rethink it or pivot from the initial goals. Depending on how complex these changes are and how much they affect the organization, they should be handled at different levels: the organization’s vision, mission, and values change very rarely, and (ideally) not during one strategic cycle. Strategic goals, however, may need to be adjusted after proper reflection, if the environment changes.  

The biggest changes will most likely happen in annual action plans, project plans and in operational planning. To keep the strategy up to date and to track implementation, it is recommended to have strategic themed meetings with the broader team every 4 to 6 months.