top of page

Strategic Planning

Plan boldly for your future

Love it or hate it, strategic planning is critical for any team, business or organization to focus their work and measure success. And, it's the primary reason our clients contact us.


Whether you're hashing out the high level mission, vision and values of your organization, building a five-year strategic framework or developing a tightly scoped action plan, Halton Strategic can support the whole process from initial information gathering to engagements to drafting of plan to decision making. Our strong leadership skills are paired with our belief in consensus building. Our finely tuned political acumen is refined by the values derived by IAP2's effective public engagement training. We can help you:

  • Clarify your vision, mission, values and strategic directions

  • Facilitate board or team retreats or  planning sessions

  • Design and facilitate public engagement sessions

  • Draft strategic frameworks and growth, business or education plans based on engagement data

  • Present draft plans to governance bodies

  • Support implementation of strategic plans

You can expect:

  • Help identifying and prioritizing your issues

  • Help identifying the best engagement path forward (should you speak with just your board and staff or are there other stakeholders you might speak to?)

  • Clear agendas

  • Facilitation with consideration for the humans and the relationships in the room

  • Questions that focus your barriers and priority solutions

  • Notation that captures the heart of the conversation

  • Facilitation that both gives space for the unexpected conversations, while keeping an eye on time

  • Reports that synthesize the decisions and discussion

  • Honest advice and clear recommendations, when requested

Get our FREE Strategic Planning Tool

With guiding questions to support a robust strategic planning process, this FREE question guide will help shape your plan, no matter your budget!

Thanks for submitting!

Business Meeting

A Robust Strategic Planning Process

A fulsome strategic planning process takes time! While some think of strategic planning as the equivalent of a half day board retreat, we encourage you to consider key questions in each of the stages in the process of building a robust organizational plan or framework.

Stage 1: Planning to Plan

Stage 2: Gathering Information

Stage 3: Gathering People

Stage 4: Analysis of the Engagement Data

Stage 5: Drafting a Plan

Stage 6: Approval of the Plan

Stage 7: Implementing the Plan

Stage 8: Measuring Success

Types of Strategic Products

There are many different forms of strategic documents and their final formats may be a simple two-page summary slide deck for internal use only, or a multi-page professionally-designed document including contextual information, messages from leaders, etc. Their final formats are often influenced by the question: Who is our audience? What  information do we need to effectively implement this? There are also many different timelines these products might cover which are determined by how far into the future you want to consider.

Here are some of the products we can help you develop.

Strategic framework

This is a high level summary document approved by the governance board or partner group. It may be developed with or without input from stakeholders and staff. It outlines the organization's vision, mission, values, as well as top 2-3 priorities and corresponding goals. Often included are high level success measures or outcomes.

Strategic plan

These tend to be shorter term and include an extra layer of action-focused detail giving more specificity and direction to each general area outlined within the framework. These may take more time and incorporate more people. The term, however, is often used synonymously with a framework.

Sector specific plan

Schools have Education Plans, corporations have Business Plans, libraries have Plans of Service. These sector specific plans often include the elements in a strategic framework, but have added sections required by funders or government authorities. For public service sectors, generally some public engagement is required.

Action plan

These plans are often developed by staff after an organizational plan has been approved by governance board or senior team. They outline the tactical path forward over a fairly short period of time for a specific area or objective of the organization and include more specific success metrics called Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). They may include: Communications Plan, Growth Plan, Fund Development Plan.

Business Meeting with Facilitator Facilitating

The value we bring to the strategic planning table

Build rapport quickly

Care and connection is at the heart of what drives us in this work. These values braided with our natural curiosity, build trust and rapport quickly.

Active listening and helpful summarizing

We believe in the wisdom of the group! So with ears finely tuned by our experience as leaders & writers, we listen for fresh ideas and shared perspectives.

Flexible, adaptive and creative processes

We never like doing the same thing twice! We continually adapt and customize our work to meet your aims and participants' / audiences' needs.

Accurate recording with expert analysis

Our experience as writers, researchers, and interviewers have honed our strong writing and summarizing skills that shape our strategic plans and reports coming out of our facilitated sessions.

A focus on next steps

We're always looking forward and we think you should too! While SWOT and PESTLE analysis is important to every facilitation or plan, it's just the start. We end every session with clear next steps.

Proven techniques to create safe space

Hearing the wisdom of the group is achieved when everyone feels safe. When planning our sessions, we use techniques and create environments where everyone can participate if they choose.

bottom of page