4 Local Government Strategic Planning Examples

Working on a strategic plan for your local government? Whether you’re just starting to develop a set of goals or already looking to implement and execute on initiatives, you've come to the right place. We know that taking your ideas and turning them into real benefits for your community requires a lot of effort.

If there's anything we've learned from working with local governments, it's that you'll do whatever it takes to help your community grow and thrive. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to balance the needs of all your community stakeholders with the realities of time and financial constraints. That’s why we’ve created this comprehensive guide to government planning—to provide both practical guidance and inspiration that will set you on the right path. Keep reading to find out about:

• The necessary components for a solid government strategic plan
• How to align city-wide departmental activities with your strategic plan
• How four real local governments handle strategic planning and execution
• Tips to help you succeed in the planning process

We’ll also explain why our strategy reporting software, ClearPoint, is a valuable tool for strategy planning and execution, and what makes it a great fit for governments in particular. Let’s dive in!

Local Government Planning: Essential Elements

All successful organizations plan—and sometimes get paralyzed by over-planning. Your city likely has a lot of plans (urban planning, capital improvements, infrastructure, community health, and other areas) on top of department plans. Sometimes it is tough to see how it will all fit together.

A government strategic plan is a city’s overall, long-term vision for the future. It’s a blueprint of the city’s goals, planned projects to achieve those goals, and metrics to determine success.

Strategic plans chart the course for a city over a three- to five-year period, at the end of which the plans should be reevaluated and refreshed. Once a plan is developed, it is rolled out to city departments to execute their individual responsibilities.

Municipal leaders (the city council, mayor, city manager, etc.) drive the process of creating a local government strategic plan, starting with gathering input from key staff members and citizens. The strategy and budget offices also take an active role in the planning process.

5 Essential Components Of A Government Strategic Plan

The point of a strategic plan is to get everyone rowing in the same direction, and that requires having a shared vision and common goals. Those essentials will be impossible to establish without open communication and buy-in.

So, before you even think about developing the components in the list below, make sure everyone is on board with your strategy efforts. Include your staff, managers and directors, city council, and citizens from the start, and engage them as much as possible to ensure your plan focuses on the right initiatives. Once you’ve done that, you’re ready to delve into the five main elements of government planning.

Keep in mind that organizations might call these components by different names—and that’s just fine. Figure out what terminology works best for your organization and go with it. Calling something a “goal” or a “strategic priority” doesn’t matter as long as the meaning behind it is there.

1. Core Mission

Your city’s mission statement is the foundation of the plan; it shows what you do for the city, community, and citizens. This is a step that some people don’t take seriously—but this is the main building block that will keep you focused from this point forward.

We recommend that you look around at other municipalities you respect or admire and find some things you really like from them. Then take those components and some of your own, and come together with your staff and/or citizens to see if any or all of those components echo what they want to see.

Finally, with all of this information in mind, you can finalize your core mission, which should be a mix of some things your municipality is now and some things you want to become in the future. Everything else in your city’s strategic plan will need to tie back to this, so be sure it isn’t too specific, and try to keep it concise.

2. Vision Statement

Your vision statement builds on the mission by stating what you are hoping to achieve in the future in order to reach your mission—so this is where you can start getting a little more specific.

Try to take a similar approach to crafting the vision statement as you did for the core mission. Look at other vision statements you’ve seen and reach out to your staff and citizens. Determine where you want to be in 3-5 years (these should be the more practical goals) and also where you want to be 10-20 years in the future (these should be more audacious goals). This is where things can get exciting and fun. Some citizens will propose some far-fetched ideas—say, they’ll want to host the Olympics! That may not actually happen, but it’s neat to have your citizens thinking this way.

3. Strategic Priorities

Certain goals should be focused on above all others. During this step, pick five or six priorities that, if accomplished, will guarantee that you execute your strategy. (These can be called “strategic priorities,” “goals,” or “objectives.”) You’ll want to have only 5-7 strategic priorities which will allow you to focus on achieving your core mission statement and vision. The following are often considered strategic priorities for municipalities:

• Economy
• Neighborhood livability
• Health & safety
• Transportation
• Culture & entertainment
• Efficient and high performing government

Again, you’ll want to step back and be sure to involve both your citizens and your staff at every level of this process. Be sure to think about what things are really going to help you achieve this vision.

While your city is unique in many ways, it has many similarities to other municipalities due to size or proximity. Reaching out to other cities about how they track their data or perform similar strategic tasks is a great way to get ideas. A neighboring city may have an excellent suggestion on how to set targets for your levels of performance in your strategic plan. To get started, consider the following:

• Join a municipal planning network. We highly suggest finding an organization to help you connect to regional or like-minded municipalities. Begin your search at Engaging Local Government Leaders (ELGL) or through your state-level ICMA organization. If a network of those municipalities doesn’t already exist, consider starting your own! There’s a good chance your next-door neighbors would enjoy and benefit from it.

• Share measure data with other municipalities through benchmarking or through a measures library. This is a great way to learn what others are measuring and how you stack up against them. You can also join these efforts by creating a library of your own measures for others to benchmark against. If you’re uncertain of where to begin in creating this library, this list of municipal planning measures should get you going in the right direction. At ClearPoint, we have more than 20 municipalities sharing over 250 measures they are tracking in their strategic plans. What better way to have up-to-date information at your fingertips!

4. A Rollout Plan

Everyone—from employees to citizens—needs to understand how they fit into the city’s strategic plan. If you’ve involved your staff and citizens in steps 1-3, this fourth step is so much easier.

First, understand that people need to be able to explain your strategic plan back to you in very simple terms to ensure its effectiveness. A really good example of this comes from a STAT meeting I recently sat in on. I saw that someone from the fire department—who wasn’t the fire chief—was presenting. He was third or fourth in command. He explained how the department fit within the strategic plan of the city in very simple terms, demonstrating a strong knowledge of the subject.

Unsure how to communicate your strategic plan? Get ideas from these city and state government strategic plan examples.

Altogether, this process should be extremely transparent. Consider weight loss for a moment: If one of your goals is to lose 20 pounds, it’s a great idea to tell some people about that plan, so they can keep you honest. The same is true for a city strategic plan. You should be able to put it out there and express where you want to go and what you want to do—this acts as an additional motivator and a source of accountability.

Make sure you're sharing your strategic plan externally as well as internally. Citizens, city council members, and elected officials all want to know how you’re actually doing with your strategic plan. A publicly available dashboard is one of the best ways to answer their questions!

A dashboard allows you to display your municipal plan metrics and provides explanations of what you’re doing to improve in areas that need it.

Note that this is very different from an open data platform that provides online access to raw data. While an open data platform may appear to be the “most transparent” way to share data at first look, it is actually very inconvenient for your citizens. They aren’t interested in parsing through hundreds of pages of raw data—they just want an organized, simplified view of whether or not you’re reaching your goals and how you’re working to achieve them. A dashboard meets this requirement straight on.

Learn more about why you should create a dashboard—and what you should include—in this article. You can also reference the excellent community dashboard the City of Fort Collins, Colorado has created.

5. Measures/Measure Owners

You’ll need to establish numerical goals to know if you are on track to reach your goals. To do this, it’s important to select the right key performance indicators (KPIs) that will inform your priorities and goals directly.

The KPI selection process is a very important one—but in the first year or so, you may not have the right ones. For example, if you notice that your KPIs are all green, but your goals and priorities aren’t improving, you may need to go back to the drawing board with your KPIs. You could have the wrong measures, or the targets may not be aggressive enough.

Typically, when you set priorities, you’ll set them for the municipality as a whole. Some organizations will take the additional step of setting up a scorecard for each department right off the bat, and others will expand into departmental scorecards after some experience at the city level. The department's unique priorities should be represented, but be sure that there are elements that tie back to the city level to ensure clear alignment.

Make sure you have a good way to track your data and hold your teammates accountable.

Having a local government strategic plan is one thing—but tracking the data that goes into that plan is another thing entirely. Tracking your data effectively allows you to better report on your strategic process. Unfortunately, many organizations end up in the never-ending cycle of manually adding data. This is not only extremely inefficient and tedious, but manually adding data is also prone to human error and mistakes. In order to cut out these issues, consider the following:

• Make sure every goal, measure, and project has an owner. On top of that, it’s critical to create a reporting calendar for all owners to follow. This ensures everyone is held accountable and knows when to have their information submitted. Using software can help with this, as you can assign responsibility to measure and project owners, have a place where these owners can update and document their reports, send out meeting reminders, and more.

• Load data automatically whenever possible. It’s inevitable that you’ll need to pull in data from a number of different places—automating this process is the most effective way to get most of your data into one place. Software like ClearPoint should be very helpful here assuming your software has data loading capabilities. This capability ensures your owners and leadership don’t waste their time adding data but instead can focus on analyzing and managing the results of your strategy.

Is your strategic plan not producing the results you expected? Uncover 8 things missing from your city's strategic plan here

Linking Government Strategic Plans & Work Plans

For strategic planning to work, the strategies of all departments must be aligned with the top-level mission and direction. This requires creating direct links between your city’s overall strategic goals and your departments’ work plans.

A work plan is a department’s operational plan (sometimes referred to as a department business plan). Generally speaking, it’s more tactical and operational in nature than the high-level government strategic plan. The work plan typically covers only 1-2 years of the strategic plan, and is linked to the budget directly, so it can be more concrete and restrictive than the strategic plan.

Ideally, city divisions and departments would have formal strategic plans in place, but most operate off their work plans and the planning process around them. A good work plan outlines each department’s responsibilities in relation to the strategic plan, including:

• Department mission statement
• Goals and measures
• Mandatory initiatives (e.g. legal requirements)
• Projects and initiatives to improve performance
• Budget and resource allocations
• Core competencies and developments in human resources within the department

Depending on the size of a city’s division, it might be necessary to break down a work plan by department, service area, or program. If “sub-work plans” are created, they must roll up to the department’s larger work plan, which will then roll up to the overarching government strategic plan. It’s a cascading effect and all plans should link to each other.

It’s important for the work plan to align with the city-wide strategic plan. For example, if the city has a larger goal to develop transit infrastructure that supports population growth, the Public Works division will have more granular goals and metrics. It might have goals around traffic speed during rush hour and metrics related to road maintenance.

This city-wide alignment may sound difficult, but it’s certainly not impossible. By learning about each part of the process, you’ll be better equipped to institute good governance at every level.

How Should Government Strategic Plans and Work Plans Be Linked?

Work plans and strategic plans should inform one another, but do not have to be the same.

In other words, don’t fall into the trap of focusing on operational and tactical items during the government strategic planning process. Your strategic plan should include items that are top-level, forward-looking priorities. Operational initiatives and goals should be reserved for department work plans.

Let’s say a city wants to address a rise in criminal activity. The city’s strategic plan and the police force’s work plan may both have a goal around lowering the crime rate, but the work plan will include hard targets and details, while the strategic plan will have a broader goal to improve community safety.

Having both a strategic plan and work plans will help you create alignment across the city, as well as within departments. This also helps you gain buy-in from employees because they can see how their role and department connects to the larger, long-term vision.

A last word of advice is to be methodical with the government strategic planning process. Don’t try to create work plans and strategic plans at the same time as it will cause an overload of change management issues. Choose one to focus on first and you’ll be more successful. Most organizations build a strategic plan and then ask departments to align their key activities to this plan.

Manage Your Government’s Strategic Plan With ClearPoint Strategy Software

The wide array of responsibilities shouldered by local governments makes it a challenge to coordinate efforts across a city. To overcome those challenges and achieve your short- and long-term goals, it’s imperative that you take advantage of strategy software tools like ClearPoint.

ClearPoint simplifies nearly everything associated with strategy planning and execution. That simplicity is what makes it possible for government organizations like yours to stick with it—and keep your eye on the prize—throughout the duration of the lengthy strategy execution process.

Important elements of strategy planning and execution that ClearPoint supports include:

• Strategic alignment. In ClearPoint you can make a high-level strategic plan as well as department-level work plans, and align division, department, and team activities with your municipal goals. (This is known as “cascading” your strategy.) You can even create reports that clearly show the relationship linkages.

• Strategy buy-in. Give access to top-level or department-level plans to anyone in your organization, so they can see where they fit into the bigger picture of what you’re trying to achieve.

• Reporting. Creating regular strategy reports is a necessity for tracking progress. ClearPoint automates the bulk of that reporting process, even sending out reminders to individuals to make updates. (No need to manually collect data or create new reports each quarter—the software handles it!) You can also take advantage of our attractive report templates, which are fully customizable to match your specific reporting requirements. Make your reports as granular and detailed as you’d like!

• Accountability. In ClearPoint, you can define owners of projects and measures to promote accountability for reaching goals internally. You can also create public-facing dashboards to reinforce your awareness of the community’s needs and allow citizens to stay up to date with progress.

With the support of ClearPoint, some ambitious local governments have managed their strategic planning processes so successfully that they’ve won awards (see one of those stories in Chapter 3). If you’re serious about making your community vision a reality, there’s no better tool than ClearPoint to help you do it!

See ClearPoint Strategy in action! Click here to watch a quick DEMO on the software

4 Government Strategic Plan Examples

Cities have started to adopt the same strategic planning process as the private sector over the last few years. With tightened budgets, it’s critical that city governments can accomplish as much as possible with fewer resources. Here are four government strategic plan examples you can learn from:

Germantown, TN

What’s special about the City of Germantown’s strategic planning process is its corporate-style approach. This Tennessee city views citizens as customers and city services as “goods” provided to their customers, which keeps the focus on citizen priorities. For example, instead of saying, “We need a new park,” the city takes the attitude of, “The citizens need a place to connect, exercise, and enjoy the outdoors.” Using outcomes as a starting point, Germantown creates its priorities and shapes its strategy.

City leaders did an excellent job organizing citizen focus groups as part of the “Germantown Forward 2030” vision plan. They formed an internal, 30-person steering committee (consisting of staff from across departments) to gather citizen input, assembled a citizen task force, and made sure planning stayed on track.

Their dedication to strategy execution paid off. Not only did it benefit the citizens of Germantown, but the municipality won an Excellence Award from the esteemed Tennessee Center for Performance Excellence in 2017. In 2019, the city of Germantown also won the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award, an honor reserved for U.S. organizations that demonstrate unceasing drive for “radical innovation, thoughtful leadership, and administrative improvement.”

Continue Reading: City of Germantown: Building, Implementing, and Executing a Strategic Plan

Fort Collins, CO

The City of Fort Collins, Colorado, provides a great example of how to perfect the strategic planning process for your government over time. The city started with a large number of measures that were reviewed by an equally large group of staff. It then refined the planning process until only the most important key metrics were reviewed by the right stakeholders. From there, the focus shifted toward examining the key outcomes, strategic objectives, and initiatives that drove progress on the key metrics. City leaders went through several iterations to get the plan just right, realizing the process was an evolution.

One particularly successful tactic Fort Collins used was to incorporate their departments into the planning process. Core strategic planning team members met regularly with department heads to get feedback and make adjustments to the plan, ensuring it worked for everyone involved. The result? The city has strong buy-in across the organization and everyone understands how their departments contribute to Fort Collins’ long-term goals. This high-touch, personal approach of involving every department in the process was integral to Fort Collins’ success.

If you’re working through your own local government strategic planning process, here’s an inside look at how Fort Collins put together their internal team:

First, they put together a steering committee for the strategy that included the:

• Chief finance officer
• Director of financial planning and analysis
• Director of budgeting
• Performance excellence manager
• City manager
• Deputy city manager
• City manager’s intern

This steering committee then decided on seven focus areas for the city to include in their strategic plan. They selected a chairperson for each of their focus areas and then integrated a cross-sectional self-nomination process to fill each focus area team. For example, anyone in the municipality could nominate themselves to serve on the team for the focus area titled “Safe Community.” This is a unique approach, as other municipalities may only take individuals who serve in police or fire departments. Letting anyone participate ensures that the groups are focused and experienced but also helps individuals from other departments get a sense of what is going on across the municipality.

When budgeting is linked to strategy, the budgeting process runs much more smoothly. The individuals in Fort Collins create their municipal budgets every other year, on even years, and structure their reporting calendar therein. At the end of non-budgeting years, those involved send out a citizen survey and set up events to gather feedback from the community. This information is brought back to the steering committee and the chairs of the focus areas, who disseminate the feedback throughout the organization.

They also hold city council elections on odd years and host a city council retreat directly following the elections. This retreat is used as a time to discuss issues facing the municipality and how resources in the next budgeting cycle may be allocated. This information is passed along to the steering committee. Then at the beginning of the budgeting year, the steering committee presents the strategic plan to the council, who then approves the plan so the city can budget accordingly.

Continue Reading: Achieving the Fort Collins Vision Through Effective Performance Review

Fort Lauderdale, FL

To activate its ambitious, community-driven vision plan, the City of Fort Lauderdale, Florida has embarked on a sweeping new program of strategy management. In the process, the city has embraced performance measurement with equal parts discipline, dedication, and passion.

One of the biggest takeaways from Fort Lauderdale is how the city prioritized gathering citizen input. The vision plan, two and a half years in the making, was systematically developed through extensive community outreach: interviews, open houses, telephone town halls, and a social website. In total, the city collected 1,562 ideas from highly invested neighbors. The outreach efforts and feedback helped create a very citizen-centric vision plan. Fort Lauderdale is now confident that its priorities are based on what’s important to its citizens.

Fort Lauderdale tackled the issues and challenges of getting citizen input and engagement head-on with three innovative ideas:

1. They did a great job marketing and branding their strategic plan outside the organization so it became recognizable in the community.
2. Over the course of several months, Fort Lauderdale held several “telephone town halls.” The mayor, the city manager, and various other municipal leaders were on a conference line, and anyone who wished to do so could call in, participate, listen to others, and ask any questions they had. That way people with busy schedules (who doesn’t have one of those?) could still be active in the community while they, for example, made dinner.
3. The city also created a city council meeting “in a box.” Interested citizens could sign up to host a community meeting and would be sent a box filled with detailed questions to ask and information to disseminate. Meetings could be held anywhere—a park, someone’s home, a church, a school—and the meeting host would capture information from the attendees and then ship it back to the municipal offices. Using this method, Fort Lauderdale gained 40,000 touch points with citizens. (In a city of just over 260,000, that is an incredible amount!) The ideas—which ranged from hosting the Olympics to creating more park space—gave the leadership an idea of what the community was interested in. Furthermore, those involved took more pride and ownership in the projects because they felt involved and knew their voices were being heard.

Continue Reading: From Vision To Action: Fort Lauderdale’s Strategy Management Journey

Durham, NC

The City of Durham, North Carolina, engaged in two rounds of their performance management execution program. The first focused on developing a strategic plan that emphasized data-driven decision-making and advanced the city’s goal of transparent, civic-minded government. Durham’s fervent attention to performance measurement and monitoring helped the city align its spending and activities with strategic priorities. This alignment helped them partner in unprecedented ways with Durham County.

Yet, there was no central ownership or organized way to hold users accountable for keeping strategic performance data up to date, necessitating another round of performance management execution. For this second phase, Durham was very deliberate about assigning roles and responsibilities. The city also formed an Office of Performance and Innovation to spearhead the strategic planning process and help employees understand why performance is so important to the government’s success.

Continue Reading: City of Durham: Strategy Refresh & Organization Buy-In

8 Strategic Planning Tips For Government Organizations

Based on our experience as strategy management experts and our work with local governments, here are some strategic planning tips that will help you make the most of your efforts.

1. Involve your stakeholders in your local government strategic plan

This could be your staff and/or your citizens. If you go through the whole process without their input and then your staff or citizens don’t agree, you’ve created a headache for yourself. Being open and inclusive during the strategic planning process for your government is vital to its success.

2. Be bold, but realistic

Feel free to set aggressive goals, but keep a realistic mindset. Again, if one of your citizens suggests hosting the Olympics in ten years, you should be thrilled with their enthusiasm—but still aware that this may not be something that will actually happen.

3. Don’t be afraid of your weaknesses

Sometimes organizations are tempted to create comfortable strategic plans, so they don’t fall short of their goals—but this is a mistake. Great strategic plans have a mix of things the municipality does really well and things it doesn’t do well. This is also important, so your citizens can see you have a good perspective on what is going well and what isn’t going well within the community.

4. Don’t neglect your strengths

On the other side of the coin, you should be sure to include several things that your organization does well in your strategic plan! Even if your municipality excels in a particular area already, there’s always room for improvement.

5. Don’t go in alone; seek out help when needed

One of the great things about the municipal space is that most cities will share a lot of information. If you see a municipality with a really great local government strategic plan, don’t be afraid to reach out to them and learn from what they’re doing. Putting yourself on an island will only hurt your municipality.

6. Keep your focus on the long term

There will be times that are both difficult and frustrating when you’re leading and implementing something this large. But once you get things up and running, it will pay off—so just keep going!

As part of that focus, don’t be afraid to make changes to your planning process when you need to. If something isn’t working, adjust it and keep going. (Remember how Fort Collins executed multiple iterations of its process.) Don’t abandon your strategy—focus on changing it for the better.

7. Avoid scope creep

Don’t lose sight of your long-term goals by letting your strategic plan slide into operational tasks. Scope creep can infect the strategic plan for your department or entire organization—you might notice that you’re tracking certain measures just because it’s easy or someone has asked you to...but with no tie to strategy. Avoid the creep by periodically reviewing your strategic plan to be sure the right goals are in place and all the projects you’re undertaking and measures you’re tracking directly align to those goals.

8. Don’t let your local government strategic plan sit on a shelf

Once you’ve created your strategic plan, you can’t leave it alone to gather dust. Set expectations for what information needs to be updated, and how often you will report on your progress, in addition to getting that all-important buy-in and making sure everyone understands why strategic planning in government organizations is so important.

Keep In Mind... The Most Important Thing Is to Just Get Started!

Remember, you don’t have to be a master at strategic planning, and the process will never be entirely perfect. Even cities that win awards for their strategic management weren’t always winning awards. They were simply consistent in their processes and were flexible to adapt and learn.

Remember, too, to communicate with your citizens, internal organization, and peer organizations. Share your successes and your failures. Most citizens won’t fault their local government for putting forth an honest effort to be better than they currently are.

If you're ready to improve execution on your plan, our team would love to help! With ClearPoint, you can better organize your plan, ensure your KPIs and initiatives align, and improve communication. On top of all that, you can find the data you need when you need it, and share it all through reports and dashboards.

Reach out to us to schedule a demo—we’d be happy to show you around.

Book your FREE 1-on-1 DEMO with ClearPoint Strategy

FAQ:

Can local government levy taxes?

Yes, local governments can levy taxes. Local governments typically have the authority to impose various types of taxes, such as property taxes, sales taxes, and income taxes, to generate revenue for public services and infrastructure projects. The specific types of taxes and the extent of this authority can vary based on state laws and local regulations.

Are local government salaries public information?

Yes, local government salaries are generally public information. Salaries of public employees, including those working for local governments, are typically considered public records. This transparency ensures accountability and allows citizens to see how public funds are being spent. Information about salaries can usually be accessed through public records requests or published reports.

Why is local government important?

Local government is important because:

- Proximity to Citizens: Local governments are closest to the people and can address community-specific needs and concerns more effectively.
- Public Services: They provide essential public services such as police, fire protection, public health, education, and infrastructure maintenance.
- Community Development: Local governments play a crucial role in zoning, land use planning, and economic development to enhance community growth and sustainability.
- Civic Engagement: They offer opportunities for citizen participation in government through public meetings, consultations, and local elections.
Regulation and Enforcement: Local governments enforce local laws and ordinances, ensuring community safety and quality of life.

Can local government use eminent domain?

Yes, local governments can use eminent domain. Eminent domain is the power to seize private property for public use, with compensation to the property owner. Local governments may exercise this authority for various public projects, such as building roads, schools, or parks. The use of eminent domain is subject to legal requirements and must serve a legitimate public purpose.

How does local government work?

Local government works through a structured system that typically includes:

- Elected Officials: Local government is often led by elected officials, such as mayors, city council members, and county commissioners, who make policy decisions and represent the interests of the community.
- Departments and Agencies: Various departments and agencies handle specific functions such as public safety, health, education, and public works.
- Public Services: Local governments provide essential services like law enforcement, fire protection, sanitation, and public transportation.
- Regulation and Enforcement: They regulate land use, building codes, and local ordinances to maintain community standards.
- Budget and Finance: Local governments create and manage budgets, levying taxes and allocating funds to different services and projects.
- Public Participation: Citizens can participate in local government through public meetings, hearings, and elections, influencing decisions and policies that affect their community.