Human-Centered Strategic Planning for Nonprofits & Organizations
Human-centered approaches develop a stakeholder-led strategic plan for your future.
We don’t like traditional strategic planning processes. They are slow to create, drain bandwidth, and quickly become outdated. Time and time again, we’ve seen promising planning fall prey to heavy processes that don’t prioritize progress or the human experience doing the actual work. Trust us, if your team is miserable in the planning process, good luck getting them to implement anything after you publish the plan.
Instead, we design for flexible planning processes that embrace human-centered design, adaptive, and lean principles—all while focused on HOW people will do the strategic work. We know that teams need the clarity to respond, adapt, and change to meet strategic planning priorities. And as priorities change (because they always do), the plan needs to be designed to change with them.
How You Know It’s Time for Strategic Planning
There have been leadership transitions with new priorities or fresh perspective.
Rapid growth often comes with expanding teams, markets, or offerings that create operational complexity.
Shifting market conditions, emerging competitors, technological change, or market disruption demand a proactive response.
Culture or performance challenges, including low engagement, misalignment, or conflict can limit effectiveness.
Launching new products, services, or community initiatives requires alignment across stakeholders.
Our Strategic Planning Process
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1. Discovery
We take the time to get to know you, your people, and your context, including taking stock of your org’s currency state and future aspirations. Using a combination of organizational and qualitative stakeholder research, we surface your bright spots, opportunity areas, and healthy tensions. This will help clarify the things you keep, what you let go, and where you should focus your planning efforts, unlocking need-based insights and generating buy-in along the way.
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2. Vision
Building on the discovery insights, we’ll work together to imagine what can be true—both aspirationally and pragmatically—in the course ahead. Using our expert and empathy-driven facilitation skills, we'll guide your team through generative design activities that allow them to 'touch and shape' the content, culminating in a collaboratively built set of strategic pillars and priorities.
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3. Planning
We help you get organized and develop habits that make strategy stick. This is achieved by providing a range of implementation structures to respond to what you most need, both for technical implementation and the behaviors, skills, and habits required to sustain and be accountable for the plan’s success.
Timelines for Strategic Planning
Our strategic planning for nonprofits and purpose-driven organizations comes in three flexible models depending on your timeline and needs.
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In this most robust strategic plan offering, we work closely with you to guide implementation and run experiments to take your big plans and bring them to life. We pair all technical aspects and adaptive ways of working to move your organization forward over 6-9 months.
We work with an internal team, the board of directors, and multiple stakeholders to craft a vision for the future (usually 3–5 years ahead). We bring human-centered design research practices into our strategic planning phases of work.
Operationally, we would support the leadership of the organization to track goals and streamline priorities across the organization. We call this adaptive implementation planning.
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In this model, we work closely with you to develop, evolve, and finalize a Strategic Plan that includes: a Strategic Vision Statement, an Insights Report, Strategic Priorities and Objectives, and Impact Metrics. Your team then takes it from there.
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Short on time and need to get to a vision quickly? This Strategic Planning model capitalizes on shorter “bursts” of work with a small core team to get you from Discovering to Implementing in a shorter time frame.
“This was by far the most successful strategic planning the organization has had in the past 20 years. We were able to identify manageable goals that we have been able to execute with board, staff and members. Our facilitator created a tailor-made process that was essential to Tenants & Neighbors moving forward.”
— Katie Goldstein, Executive Director of Tenants & Neighbors
Companies with strategic written business plans grow 30% faster than those without, and they are also more likely to secure funding.
See The Group Forward In Action
