Clear Impact Blog

By: Christian Ragland
February 24th, 2023

Strategic Planning, alternatively referred to as “Vision-Based Community Impact Planning,” is a systematic approach to planning for the future, adapting to changes, and making a community impact vision come to life. Strategic planning in the social and public sectors greatly benefits from the use of specialized strategic planning software. When choosing the appropriate system, organizations and partnerships can better anticipate and adapt to social, economic, political, and organizational changes. In this article, we will discuss a simple 4-step approach to strategic planning that can help any organization reach its community impact goals. We’ll also explore how software can support this process.

In this article, learn a simple 4-step approach to strategic planning to reach your community impact goals. You’ll also learn how software can support this process.

Table of Contents:

1. Creating a Vision
2. Building Organizational Adaptive Capacity
   1. External Focus
   2. Network Connections
   3. Inquisitiveness
   4. Innovation
3. Focusing Points of Interaction Between the Future of your Community and your Organization’s Role
4. Year-Round Monitoring of Progress and Results
5. Summary of the 4-Step Strategic Planning Process
6. Helpful Links

You must know where you want to go before you can determine how to get there. That’s why the first step in Strategic Planning is to create a vision for the future you are trying to create.

Step One: Creating a Vision

Before planning for the future, you need to know what kind of future you’d like to create for your community. The first step is to get as specific as possible about your vision and how you plan to measure it. In other words, you should determine the quality of life conditions you’d like to see (Results) and develop a few measures to quantify your achievement of those conditions (Indicators). 

Results are things like:

• “We want babies in our community to be born healthy.”
• “We want a clean environment.”
• “We want safe neighborhoods.”

Indicators are things like:

• “% of low birthweight babies”
• “% of days with good air quality”
• “crime rate”

Here is a list of sample questions you could ask yourself during the first phase of strategic planning:

•  What are the quality of life conditions we want for the children, adults, and families in our community?
•  What would these conditions look like if we could see them?
• What is our Vision?
•  How can we measure the achievement of our Vision?

Next, you must determine what tools you need to measure and track your community Indicators properly. For most projects, you need more than Excel to keep track of your plan. These tools are labor intensive, and you won’t be able to quickly collect and display your results for collaboration with your community and partners. 

It’s essential to make sure you have a powerful, intuitive, and accessible tool that is shared across your network before you move on to phase two. Clear Impact Suite is one option available to you.

You can learn more about creating effective Results here and selecting Indicators here.

Organizational Adaptive Capacity is your ability to respond to and instigate change. In this section, you’ll learn about four steps you can take to gauge your Organizational Adaptive Capacity.

Step Two: Building Organizational Adaptive Capacity

Once you’ve selected the Results and Indicators that create your future vision, it’s time to prepare for the ideal outcome and consider how you will adapt to unforeseen circumstances. Your Organizational Adaptive Capacity (OAC) is your ability to respond to and instigate change.

Assessing your OAC will involve understanding:

• The current conditions in your environment that have implications for your work.
• What you need to have in place to ensure the following functions of your organization are healthy enough for you to create the kind of community you dream of:
  • Organizational Leadership/Board Governance
  • Staff Resources
  • Resource Development
  • Program Initiatives
  • Marketing & Communications
  • Backroom Infrastructure 
  • And all others!

The strategic planning software you use will play a significant role in your ability to adapt, but you should also consider factors like personnel, leadership, funding, and community connections.

Here are four steps you can take to gauge your Organizational Adaptive Capacity based on ideas from “Making Change: How to Build Adaptive Capacity” by Carl Sussman:

1. External Focus

Healthy and strong partnerships are essential to the success of any strategic plan. Communicate with your partners and get on the same page regarding your Vision. Ask what each party can provide for you and how you can support them. Additionally, this is a time to forge new relationships and search for new resources. 

You should also work on aligning your partnership’s measurement systems during this time. Consider whether you and your partners have agreed on terminology, measurement frameworks, and data management systems. Operating on different systems will undoubtedly cause friction in the long term, and you need to ensure that you can share data reliably and consistently. 

This is where Unified Data Management comes in. Unified Data Management consists of three practices that can enhance a partnership’s alignment and accelerate its progress toward measurable results. You can learn more about Unified Data Management here. 

2. Network Connections

You should treat community members as co-producers of your vision rather than treating them simply as service recipients. 

Here’s a quick checklist you can use to ensure that you and your community members are prepared to start working on your Vision:

1. Does your community agree with your vision? – Is there anything your community would want to change about your vision, and if so, how feasible is it?
2. Who are your community leaders, and what role do they play in your action plan? – Find the strengths of individuals and groups and make sure your plan emphasizes these strengths. 
3. How are you supporting these community leaders in this capacity? – Do they have tools to support their participation in your collective mission? 

3. Inquisitiveness

Learning organizations always maintain a strong emphasis on continual evaluation and improvement. Results-Based Accountability’s Turn the Curve Thinking process is a simple process that can help you evaluate your progress and make appropriate changes based on performance or impact data. This process enables you to analyze factors influencing the “story” behind your data. 

When practicing continual evaluation, it is essential to dig deep as you look at the data to identify root causes that underlie conditions in your community and organization.

Here is a list of questions to ask yourself to gauge your organization’s inquisitiveness:

• Does your organization have a culture that values the process of self-evaluation?
• Are you a learning organization? Why or why not?
• Do you have a strong focus on outcomes and results?
• Do you learn from (and value) both your successes and failures?

4. Innovation

New ideas don’t always work. That’s why it is vital to meet failure with inquisitiveness rather than punishment. If you want your team to feel comfortable trying new things, you must ensure they can do so without fear of the data. Recognizing the reasons for poorly performing metrics and making data-based changes is as important as rewarding success. 

Diversity is another important factor in a team’s ability to be innovative. Ask yourself: does your leadership team encourage diversity of thought and people? If yes, consider how well you foster collaboration between team members when facing new challenges. Collaboration and diversity often lead to new ideas and can result in better responses when an unexpected challenge arrives. 

You can learn more about the positive impacts of diversity, equity, and inclusion on an organization in DEI Made Measurable.

Summary of Phase Two

Here’s a quick checklist summarizing what you should think about during phase two of Strategic Planning:

• Are you and your partners aligned with a common vision?
• What could you do to strengthen your existing partnerships and forge new ones?
• Do you treat your community members co-producers of your vision or simply as service-recipients?
• Do you commit staff time and financial resources to thoughtful experimentation?  
• Do you reward both successes and learn from failures?
• What do you do to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion?
• When faced with new challenges, do you encourage staff to collaborate with others and stretch their thinking?
• How do you seed the organizational environment with new ideas and influences?

Step three is all about finding what your organization can really do to make a difference.

Step Three: Focusing Points of Interaction Between the Future of the Community and Your Organization’s Role

Now that you’ve established your vision and evaluated your Organizational Adaptive Capacity, you can begin answering the question, “what can we do?” 

Analyzing the contributing and limiting factors influencing your data is one approach to finding your role in creating better outcomes. Then, you can determine which factors you, your partners, and your community members are best positioned to address. 

Contributing Factors: What is already working- things you want to encourage or strengthen to achieve your goal.

Contributing factors explain why your data might be trending positively. If your data is trending in the wrong direction, contributing factors explain why the data isn’t as bad as it could’ve been (i.e., the data could’ve been worse if we hadn’t done X). Contributing factors focus on the positives or what’s going well. Why start here? People often focus on fixing the negatives and forget about maximizing the positives. In many cases, replicating positive factors creates a positive feedback loop of greater impact.

Limiting Factors: What isn’t working- things you want to change to achieve your goal.

Limiting factors are the negative factors holding your data trendline back. If your data is trending in the right direction, limiting factors prevent the data from improving at an increased level of acceleration. When considering limiting factors, it’s prudent to disaggregate your data. Often, you will be able to figure out what’s holding the data back once you disaggregate by race or other systemic factors.

Continuing Innovation

A great way to make a more significant impact, even with limited resources, is to tap back into the innovation we discussed earlier. Try to find low-cost or no-cost creative solutions. This is easier for a team with a culture of innovation, diversity, and continual improvement. 

Phase Three also involves developing clear action plans for progress. Here are some questions you should ask yourself when developing your strategies and action plans:

• Who are the partners with a role in achieving your vision?
• What works to do better, including no-cost and low-cost ideas?
• What do you propose to do over the next 12-36 months?

You can learn more about how to engage in all of the above suggestions in our Results-Based Accountability Guide resource library.

The final step of Strategic Planning is to monitor your progress and engage in continual evaluation of your plan.

Step Four: Year-Round Monitoring of Progress and Results

You must stay vigilant by measuring and tracking the performance of your organization and the impact of your shared strategies. 

Results-Based Accountability asks three simple questions to help you design performance measures:

• How much did we do?
• How well did we do it?
• Is anyone better off?

You can learn more about creating effective Performance Measures here. 

The framework can also help you design community Indicators to measure how conditions of community wellbeing change over time.

You must also be able to easily share data with your partners, stakeholders, and the public if you want to make a collective impact on shared strategies.

Software systems can help you engage in continual measurement and facilitate data sharing. 

Here are three things to consider when selecting an appropriate data management system for your needs:

• Data Management Functionality: To implement a Strategic Plan, you need a data system that allows you to engage in the six essential data management tasks. When researching systems, try to find one that allows you to collect, organize, dissagregate, evaluate, plan, and share your data. You can learn how Clear Impact Suite supports these functions here.  
• Data Security: You never want sensitive data susceptible to privacy breaches. Ask about the security features of your system before you commit. 
• Ease of Use: Some systems require an in-house data expert. If that’s outside your budget, ensure the system has low training requirements and start-up costs. 

Clear Impact Suite offers all these features and more for partnerships who want to track their strategic planning. You can learn more about the system here.

Summary of the 4-Step Strategic Planning Process

• Phase 1: Focusing on your Community’s Future 
  • Creating your vision
• Phase 2: Focusing on the Organization and the Environment
  • What do you need to have in place to ensure every function of your organization is healthy enough for you to create the kind of community you dream of?
• Phase 3: Points of Interaction between the Future of the Community and your Organization’s Role 
  • What can you do over the next 12-36 months to effect your vision?
• Phase 4: Year Round Monitoring of Progress and Results 
  • Accountability to ensure things get done.

Helpful Links:

• Need help designing, implementing, and tracking your Strategic Plan? Contact us for a consultation.
• See how Clear Impact Suite works in a private customized demo.
• Learn more about creating effective Performance Measures here. 
• Learn more about the positive impacts of diversity, equity, and inclusion on an organization in DEI Made Measurable.
• Learn more about Results-Based Accountability’s Turn the Curve Thinking process.
• Learn more about how to engage in all of this article’s suggestions in our Results-Based Accountability Guide resource library.