Strategic Planning
A Strategic Plan Can Still Guide Your Work Even In Uncertain Times
Partnering with Stamey Street to create or update your strategic plan can reaffirm the alignment between your mission, vision, and values given today’s political landscape.
Here are three questions to determine how you move forward:
Is your last strategic plan more than 5 years old?
Did you just finish a strategic plan but need to shift because the landscape around your work has suddenly shifted?
Do your internal systems support your strategic planning goals?
Strategic planning requires adaptive leadership. Now, more than ever.
Adaptive leadership, an approach created by Ronald Heifetz and Marty Linsky is the practice of engaging leaders to navigate tough challenges. It consists of three parts: responding to large-scale change, building on past experiences, and prioritizing trying new ways of doing things. Like any planning process, strategic planning accounts for some uncertainty, particularly when a new president takes office during your plan’s timespan. But shifts in what is possible, opportunities, and resources will require leaders to be flexible in how they work.
An implementation plan matters for sustainability. Plans and proceses go together.
Some nonprofits approach strategic planning to drive toward a specific outcome. Others are looking for big, sweeping shifts in their areas of focus. Both strategies are appropriate given the nonprofit's needs and resources at the time planning starts. Without the engagement, buy-in, and commitment of those responsible for implementation, strategic planning can be a drain and a distraction for any organization. This is why Stamey Street approaches strategic planning by centering existing equity commitments with adjustments for today’s landscape. Additionally, our approach values the participation of your members, staff, partners, and funders to ensure the final strategic plan reflects shared knowledge, experience, and enthusiasm for your work.
Stamey Street’s approach to strategic planning includes the following:
Uses equity as an organizational practice
Recognizes that shorter timeframes work best in uncertain times
Reviews current systems to ensure they support new or updated goals
Tests the viability of proposed new initiatives
Questions the likelihood of success and sustainability of programs and activities
Offers a clear implementation plan
The political landscape is likely to continue to shift, which makes longer-term strategic planning difficult. No one knows what hard decisions will be needed in the coming weeks and months. Give yourself grace to shift as needed. We live in a time where open communication and agility will be useful tools in navigating the path ahead.
At Stamey Street, we start each strategic planning engagement with a discovery process to learn what our clients value. We also include a systems review to ensure that executive leaders have the appropriate systems in place to support their strategic planning goals.
We believe plans and processes go together.
At the end of the strategic planning process, you’ll finish the engagement with:
A reaffirmation of your mission, vision, and values based on where you are today
A shared sense of why equity matters in your day-to-day work
Feedback and input from your community of allies, partners and funders
A written plan for implementation, with bite-sized, attainable goals
Ready for new clarity in your everyday work?
What do you do if you finished a strategic plan in the past 18 months?
You may be thinking, “ We just finished this strategic plan, and now the world has changed.”
To answer the question “What do I do with my new strategic plan?” requires reflecting on two things: what you believe and what drives what you do.
Maybe your newly adopted strategic plan only needs a refresh or update.
Today’s challenges will force nonprofits to clarify their values, develop new strategies, and learn new ways of operating. Stamey Street can help you refresh and update your newly adopted strategic plan. Our team will always center equity in our approach.
At Stamey Street, a strategic plan refresh includes a review and updated recommendations in three primary areas.
Organizational priorities and funding sources
Allocations of staff time
Timelines for new and existing projects
If an update is what you think you need, check out this blog post about the importance of updating a newly adopted strategic plan.
Get started with a 30 minute call to explore about how to best approach updating your newly adopted strategic plan.
“We are grateful to Dr. Joanna Shoffner Scott of Stamey Street Consulting Group for understanding our needs and working with us to create tools that we hope helps shape a workplace that works for everyone.”
— J.P., a Stamey Street client
An equity-centered strategic plan includes
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Pre-planning process with a pre-selected group to guide the process
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Clear timelines and established project management process
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Partner feedback via surveys, interviews, or focus groups
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Analysis of the policy, funder, and social landscape
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Written plan with a profesionally designed summary
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Systems review to support implementation
FAQs
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Great question. Clients have several options when putting together a strategic planning engagement. If it has been at least five years since your last strategic plan, then you're putting together a new one for where you are today. You can expect to spend at least $50,000 for a six to eight-month planning process. That fee includes the following:
Biweekly meetings
Project tracking and management
Staff and partner feedback
2-day planning retreat
Landscape analysis
Written plan with supporting documents
Implementation plan
Review of internal systems
This fee can increase depending on the data collection method chosen for the staff and partner feedback. For example, surveys are a lower-cost method compared to individual interviews or focus groups. In-person focus groups warrant a higher price because they are the most labor-intensive of the data collection methods Stamey Street offers.
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Refreshing your strategic plan involves reviewing and updating your priorities and timelines based on the current reality in your community, state, or nationally. For example, a project that was important in Spring 2024 may not be as important today. Or, the funding for that project may no longer exist. For some nonprofit leaders, keeping the doors open and avoiding staff layoffs may be the most important thing. Your initial strategic plan likely factored in some uncertainty, but not to the extent you are currently experiencing in 2025. Our team would review your plan and work with your team to reassess priorities, tactics, and strategies. You can expect to spend from $15,000 to $18,000 for a three-month planning process.
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Our process is to meet at least 2 times a month. We do this to keep the project moving and to meet timelines for our team and the client. We schedule project meetings at the beginning of the engagement. There is always flexibility in scheduling. We recognize that everyone is working with limited time. We’ll always check in before scheduled meetings. If we agree that a meeting is not needed, then we cancel. It’s always easier to cancel a meeting than to schedule one at the last minute.
How to start a strategic planning engagement
At Stamey Street, we start each strategic planning engagement with a discovery process to learn what our clients value. We also include a systems review to ensure that executive leaders ave the appropriate systems in place to support their strategic planning goals.