From Our Brains to Yours
Strategic Planning: Vernacular and Value
We’re hitting 2010 running, facilitating strategic planning sessions with quite a few of our clients, so have been revisiting the vernacular as well as questions about the value of these time- and effort-intensive undertakings.
First, the vernacular. Longtime readers will recognize this hobbyhorse: tools aren’t strategies, and neither are plans. You need all three to get the job done. (See some of our past musings on the topic here, here, here, and here). We think about it this way:
- Strategies are the big picture, or the general orientation. Is your organization going to make change by being the friendliest, most accessible organization on your issues, or are you going to be the strident flank? Are you going to build a base of advocates who will take action in even the most effort-intensive ways, or is it big numbers on online petitions that are most important to your success?
- Plans are the detailed sets of activities and timelines that follow from strategies. Protests might make sense if you’re the strident flank, less so if you’re the sober bipartisan element in your movement. In the typical parlance, once you’ve decided your strategy is to drive somewhere, the plan is your roadmap detailing what roads (highways or side streets?) you’ll take, where you’ll stop for gas, and how long you expect the journey to take. It’s in the planning that details about your goals should be considered. For example, to deliver on a grasstops strategy, how many prominent leaders do you need on board, from where, to do what?
- Tools and tactics are the task lists in the plan. To fully wear out the metaphor: If the strategy is to drive there, the plan is the turn-by-turn directions, the tactics are the kind of car, the type of gas, and the choice of driver. If your strategy is high-level grassroots mobilization, and your plan is to generate as many personal contacts to targeted members of congress as possible; including in-person meetings, phone calls, personal letters, asking questions at in-district events, and calling in to local radio shows the congressperson is scheduled to appear on. Your tactical question would be: Is email, direct mail, phonebanking, online advertising, a combination of all of the above and/or something else altogether the best way to get your activists to do one or more of those things?
In a comment on last week’s Three Things, PR pro Margot Friedman asked, “Why do so many organizations have strategic plans that are sitting on a shelf? Why are so many organizations operating (often successfully) without a strategic plan?“ Two good questions that get to the heart of the value of a strategic planning process. If your strategic plan is sitting on a shelf with no bearing on your day-to-day activities, you didn’t do it right. We’ve worked with many organizations who’ve presented us with past strategic communications or advocacy plans that are, to be blunt, neither strategic nor plans. They didn’t lay out the organizational approach to communications or advocacy, so they couldn’t detail a path to deliver on that approach, which meant they wound up either as vague descriptions of aspirations and restatements of the mission, or a hodgepodge of tactics and metrics. We wholeheartedly feel that the time and energy that went into those documents could have been better spent.
However, strategic plans that articulate an approach and the rationale behind it, the steps required to deliver on that approach within a given timeframe, and tools and tactics to achieve those steps can and should guide day-to-day organizational decision making, day-to-day-activities, and even better hiring through better job descriptions (what do you need a new member of the team to be capable of? It’s all right there in your plan!). Strategic plans needn’t be long, wordy documents. How they’re bound is irrelevant. Ditto for fonts and bolding and bullet point styles. The value is in the clear articulation of focused thinking and decision-making regarding how your organization can make a mission-driven difference through communications or advocacy.