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
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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 stakeholder 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
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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!
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.
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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.