Strategy + Planning to Ensure Your Chorus Will Thrive

If nonprofits want to remain relevant and viable, they must function at the edge of the present and the future.  They must not only adapt to their environments but also shape these environments to create productive change.  Strategies must be fast moving, flexible, and continuously experimental.” This piece of wisdom from Ruth McCambridge, editor-in-chief of Nonprofit Quarterly, captures one of the paradoxes of the concept strategic planning.

Planning—resulting in a written roadmap—is by its nature fixed in time.  You create the plan and then you work the plan. Whereas, strategy, is about thinking and acting in a way that is attuned to the nonprofit’s ever-shifting environment so as to quickly adjust and shift to align with that environment in a way that is true to the organization’s values and strengths.

In this session you’ll discover how to tap into both sides of that strategy + planning equation for the good of your chorus and organization.  You’ll learn a bit about the various approaches to doing strategic planning.  But mostly, we’ll zero in on a powerful process that you can use with your key stakeholders to build a shared understanding of:

1. Where we are
2. Where we want to be
3. How we want to get there

Furthermore, you’ll learn to do this process in a way that yields a clear roadmap and helps you and other stakeholders become adept at thinking and acting strategically to ensure successful execution of the roadmap.