Strategic Planning:
Creating a Bold Vision of a Better Future . . .
and Designing Strategies for Achieving it.

Click here for example of a strategic plan resulting from our technical support.

Our approach to strategic planning is all about engaging leaders and staff in creating opportunities for expanding access, improving services and generating new resources. It is about creating a bold vision and a set of goals and strategies for moving it forward. It is about getting into action, in a public way, on an exciting agenda that will attract new partners and generate new resources.

In our work we find that most organizations have assets and achievements that provide a great jumping-off point for strategic planning. Examples include:

  • Great people, committed to their clients and to improvements in the impacts they are able to have in their communities.
  • Successful projects that have provided valuable leadership experience, community networks and models for possible replication.
  • Relationships with client groups and human services agencies that form a basis for partnerships addressing a broader range of client needs across the entire service area.
  • New technology capacity (computers, phone systems, e-mail, Internet access, web sites . . . ) that provide an infrastructure for launching a wide range of service delivery innovations, collaborative partnerships, expert networks and community education initiatives going forward.

We are supporting strategic planning efforts on local, regional and statewide levels.

We design and facilitate processes in which a program's leadership and staff develop a three- to five-year strategic plan and launch effective actions to make it happen. In these processes, we form and coach planning teams in pursuit of three broad goals:

1. A bold vision. Develop a vivid description of the operations and outcomes of the program that captures the program's vision and mission and positions it as an exciting program offering a high return on the investments made by its funders and partners.

2. Strategic initiatives. Identify high-payoff improvements in the program's delivery system, using as a point of departure the exciting vision and mission that has been described. Examples of planning topics that the planning team could choose to develop in a legal services context include the following:

  • How can we increase participation of private attorneys in the delivery of legal services and better utilize our program's PAI investment to yield the best possible return for clients?
  • How can we continue to expand public awareness and support of the program's mission and services?
  • How can we deploy our technology resources to link advocates together into a fully integrated delivery system throughout the service area?
  • How can we use technology to make legal information and pro se resources more accessible to clients and to the third-party advocates who serve them?
  • How can we leverage the potential of phone intake and advice systems as a point of access for clients and as an information system for monitoring and responding to client needs throughout the service area?

3. Action. Get commitments from key players in the program to take responsibility for leadership and implementation of the key strategic initiatives in the plan. Mount a campaign to bring in more resources to meet a higher proportion of the legal needs of clients in the program's service area. Marshall the program's demonstrated capacity for raising funds and developing new "business lines" to bring the program to a new level of performance on mission.

 

 

 
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