How To Outline Your Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is a description of where you want your organization to be in the future and how you’re going to get there. It gives an organization a sense of direction and gets everyone headed that way. American organizations, both nonprofit and for-profit, often look three to five years out in their strategic plan.

To create a usable strategic plan template, you need a solid working outline. Below are the three most important parts of that outline and four steps to integrate the plan once it’s complete.

A 3-Part Strategic Plan Outline

1. Create a vivid description of what your “final destination” is.

To create an overall vision, some organizations start by holding a brainstorming session in which they “imagine a world” where:

• Their organization is dominating the industry.
• They’ve tripled in size.
• They’ve introduced a number of new products.
• The general population they cater to relies on their solution to a particular problem.

Once you’ve gathered your ideas from a brainstorming session like this, consolidate those ideas into a one- or two-sentence vision statement or purpose statement.

2. Determine the steps you’ll take to achieve your vision.

To achieve your vision, break it down into goals, often called “objectives.” Objectives can often be divided into logical groups.

For example, if you’re a municipality, your objectives could be divided into key program areas like safety, transportation, and public works. If you’re a nonprofit or for-profit business, your objectives might be grouped into the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives or the perspectives for whichever strategic planning model you’ve selected. Ideally, your goals link together so that, collectively, they contribute to your vision.

The City of Bartlett, Tennessee, uses this structure. Its plan, Bartlett Vision 2030, is an overall agenda available online, with each piece of the plan owned by one of its 11 departments. Each department has several objectives and measures that link to one of five focus areas: Economic Vitality, Growth & Infrastructure, Vibrant Workforce, Health & Public Safety, and Community Engagement. The city built the entirely new plan in only 13 months, with input from directors, the board of Aldermen and public survey data.

3. Determine how you’ll achieve your goals or objectives.

3A. For-Profit Organizations

Many for-profit strategic plan examples focus next on their measures or key performance indicators, which show an organization whether it is meeting its goals. If your organization sets measures, you’ll also set targets for those measures that help express levels of performance (see how to set KPI targets).

3B. Nonprofits & Municipal Organizations

Organizations that feel less ownership of the target itself, like nonprofits and municipalities, focus next on linking activities or “projects” to their objectives. For example, a municipality or school may not want to set a target for school attendance, park visitors, or for how many people will go to the library in a particular time period. But they will want to talk about all the activities they need to do to improve their city, like:

• Investing in new pieces of software.
• Investing in infrastructure.
• Redesigning certain processes.
• Doing any of these things more efficiently or effectively.

These activities, linked to your strategic objectives, can help you meet your overall strategic plan.

Implementing Your Strategic Plan, Step-By-Step

1. Get buy-in from across your organization regarding the details of your strategic plan.

Decide which person (or department) is accountable for these goals. That person (or those people) should write anywhere from three sentences to three paragraphs describing what each objective means, why it’s important, and how you’re going to accomplish it. You can then spread this throughout your organization.

Naming that owner matters more than it may seem. In our research on how cities turn strategic plans into results, across over 20,000 strategic plans built on ClearPoint, initiatives with a named owner were completed 2.5 times as often as those without one, 21.5% versus 8.7%. Naming an owner only works if that owner posts updates, so make updating part of the job.

2. If you’re taking the measure-centric approach, build out the details of each measure.

This may include:

• Who owns the measure.
• The source of the data.
• The formula.
• How you will gather the data.
• The target, broken down over time.

If you are just getting started, keep it simple. A standard KPI template records a measure description that says why you created the measure, a measure owner for accountability, and a measure formula so people know where to find the data and can compare it over time. Add a target and an actual. Once you have more history, you can add the data source and a red, yellow and green status for each measure.

Austin Resource Recovery, a department within the City of Austin, standardized its measures this way. Each of its nine divisions named a designated representative who made sure new measures were added in accordance with the standardized approach. Users could view everything, but they could only edit the measures they were required to update. Calculations happened in ClearPoint, so staff entered raw data and the software did the math.

3. If you’re taking a project-centric approach, put some “meat on the bones” of your strategic plan outline.

This may include:

• Who’s responsible for each project.
• Details regarding your business plans.
• Details regarding your budgets.
• Details regarding timelines or key milestones along the way.

4. Make sure there’s consistency across the entire strategic plan.

One person in the strategy or finance office may be in charge of this. That person reads the whole strategic plan outline, makes sure each section has the same level of detail, and then communicates the plan going forward.

Get leadership buy-in first

Creating an inspiring strategic plan is great, but there are a lot of nice strategic plan outlines out there that were created and now sit on a shelf.

Your strategic plan template has to be something that the leadership team fully understands and takes ownership of. Buy-in can take a great deal of time, even 2-3 times longer than if you’d tried to do it without buy-in. Don’t underestimate its importance. Once you have the leadership on board, your strategic plan will be something everyone can understand and execute on regularly.