Hello, and welcome to our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series. I'm Jami Yazdani. In today's session, we'll talk about strategies for rescuing your strategic plan. So why might your strategic plan need rescuing? So the plan you spent so much time money, effort on that plan, maybe three or four years ago, that seemed so great now feels really outdated or irrelevant. So maybe your plan's goals no longer reflect the reality of your community's needs. Or you simply don't have the time or resources to tackle those objectives that sounded so doable just a few years ago. So if your plan or elements of it just don't work for your organization, what do we do now? Do we throw it out the window and start over with a new plan? That that's definitely an option. Or do we sort of let the plan float away, hoping no one notices until we can develop a new plan? So in many cases, I don't think we need to start over or abandon our existing plan. So I've got three strategies to share if you do want to rescue or salvage your existing plan until you can do a whole other strategic planning process. Okay, so the first strategy is to assess your plan and acknowledge the shifts or changes that have caused the plan to feel outdated or no longer relevant. So we can start by reviewing our plan's goals, and documenting any progress we have made. And so for each of our strategic goals and objectives, what if anything, have we been able to accomplish? So for example, if we have a four year strategic planning goal of supporting employee development through retention and training initiatives, we could document that, you know, we offered a training in February, let's say on a new system. Maybe we haven't really done much with the retention element of this goal. But we did form a retention committee that may be met twice in early 2020, before the pandemic started. For a goal where there isn't much progress to report on, you know, perhaps we had planned on delivering programs and services to a new user group. But that didn't happen. We still want to document that. And so our purpose here is to honestly assess our progress or lack of progress on each of our plan's goals and objectives. As we assess our progress, we also want to acknowledge any shifts that have impacted our plan. And so we want to consider what has changed since we drafted the plan. Now shifts could be changes and user needs, funding, staffing, resource availability, regulations, or trends. It could also be changes in our external environment or our community. Specifically, we want to understand why a particular goal or objective is no longer relevant or is less important to us. And we also want to know what is more relevant. So what, what else, is more relevant for our organization? Now, once we understand these shifts, we want to document them as well. And so perhaps those staffing shortages, shortages that were caused by the pandemic, meant that we needed to shift our planned focus on retention to a focus on recruitment and onboarding. So we had formed that retention committee, but given staffing shortages, we've made a shift. Or maybe we weren't able to develop programming for a new group of users because our key user group had really urgent needs brought on by the pandemic. So what we are trying to do here is to understand and be transparent about the shifts and changes in our environment that have impacted our plan.

So next, we can use our existing plan and what we have learned about our progress and shifts and changes to confirm our strategic priorities. While our our exact plan, as originally written, might not be completely relevant, or achievable, it likely still points toward what our strategic priorities may be. And so for example, while we might not be able to support employee development through retention efforts, we probably still really care about employee development and training. And so those are priorities for us. And we might have shifted resources away from supporting a new user group, but delivering programs and services to our community is still really critical and a priority for us. And so our purpose here is to use our existing plan, and our understanding of what we have and have an accomplished, to help us determine our current priorities. And so for example, we may come away from this assessment understanding that employee development through training, including training that supports recruitment and onboarding, is a priority for us right now. And delivering programs and services to our key user group is also a top priority. So a review of our plan progress and those shifts and changes could get us to these two new priorities. We may even ask our staff and community what our priorities should be over the next period. And so their answer might be something that we weren't even worried about when we wrote that initial plan. So maybe what comes out of asking our staff and community about our priorities is that we need to modernize our online platforms, maybe to better facilitate donations and volunteer management and scheduling of the programs and services that we do offer.

Again, our purpose here is to come away with two or three priorities based on our assessment of our existing plan, our understanding of plan progress, what has shifted and changed in our environment, and ideally, feedback that we get. So we've got a few priorities now. Now, what do we do? And so what we can do is we can take our priorities and use them to develop a short term plan. And so shorter-term would likely mean planning for the remainder of that initial strategic planning timeline. So if you are three years into a four year plan, you would be planning for that remaining year. But it could also be until,you know, you're going to begin your next strategic planning process or have a new strategic plan, or perhaps until your organization is no longer in a period of transition. But we want to focus on taking those priorities and turning them into a shorter-term implementation plan. And so we can take our priorities and develop an implementation plan. So we can ask ourselves, What actions do we want to take over the next year, or the remainder of our planning timeline, to support these three priorities? So for example, we may decide to offer training to support our employee development priority. And maybe we're going to expand a key program to support that main user group. And we're going to implement a new donation platform to modernize our systems. In developing your implementation plan and actions, I would really encourage you to think about progress, not perfection. So what is actually reasonable to accomplish to further a priority given the time and resources you have? So are there small steps that you can take to move these priorities forward? So perhaps all we can do to support employee development is survey staff about training needs. And we're not going to be able to expand programming, but we can continue to deliver and really focus on a key program to our key user group. And maybe we actually aren't even in a position to end plummet a new donation platform, but we can investigate platforms maybe and get quotes. Again small steps, but they still represent progress toward furthering our priorities. And what I've found when doing this work with clients is that by distilling things down to a few priorities, narrowing that timeline to a shorter timeframe, and asking our teams to think about smaller actions, we usually end up with lots of things we can do to support a priority. And all of these smaller actions can add up to real progress toward our priorities, and more engagement among staff and board members. Folks ends up being able to better see their role in supporting the plan in the smaller, targeted actions. Great. So those are a few quick and simple strategies for rescuing your strategic plan. So you want to assess your plans progress and acknowledge those shifts and changes. Use what you learn to confirm your strategic priorities, and then create a short term plan based on those priorities. Now, before I take questions, if you want more information on strategic planning, you can download our Impactful Strategic Planning Guide. Our free guide to strategic planning that results in actionable implementable goals is available at yazdaniconsulting.com/resources. If you need more hands on support leading planning, visit our planning solutions page at yazdaniconsulting.com/planning to learn about our services. Great. So I'm happy to take any questions that you have about rescuing your strategic plan. Feel free to add them in the comments. And I'm seeing a comment agreeing with progress not perfection. And I do think that really is what

rescuing or salvaging a strategic plan is about. And so I'll give folks a few moments to add questions. If I'm not able to answer your question live, I'm happy to respond later in the comments. And you can find all of the ways to contact me at yazdaniconsulting.com/contact. Please reach out to me if you'd like to talk about planning. Okay, so a question is, "You talk about documenting progress and shifts? But are those updates we should share with our community? Or is this an internal exercise?" So I absolutely think you should share what is going on with your plan with your community. Now, ideally, progress updates, or even lack of progress updates, would have been part of your approach, your initial approach for communicating about your plan, but you absolutely can communicate about it now. And I think folks really worry that if we communicate kind of a lack of progress or changes, it's somehow kind of highlighting our failures or a defeat. But I think most of us would rather have some control over the message that we're sending about our plan. And anyone looking at your plan, including staff and donors, probably can tell that you haven't made progress on on some things. And so why not explain it really clearly in a way that talks about why you have pivoted, and what you are going to do about it now? So another question is, "You mentioned engaging your community and confirming the strategic priorities. How do you recommend doing that, and explaining why we want their input?" So again, I'm a fan of transparency here. So you can say, you know, things have shifted, we're drafting a one year or shorter-term plan that's going to take us through until our next planning cycle. So we want your feedback on what our priorities should be. And there are a lot of ways you can get that feedback, through surveys, forums, interviews. With a recent client, we interviewed key stakeholders and showed them the goals from the existing plan and just asked them whether they thought they were still relevant. And we also asked what the priorities should be for the rest of the planning cycle. And we got a lot of really great feedback from those stakeholders that was very useful in helping that organization determine what their priorities are. We came up with about three priorities, and then they were able to use those to create an actionable, achievable plan for the next year that will take them through until their next planning cycle. Well, great, so feel free to comment, or reach out with any additional questions that you have. And thank you for participating in our Impactful Projects and Planning Microtraining Series. You can visit yazdaniconsulting.com/ipp to view all of the sessions in this series and learn about upcoming training. So thank you again. Enjoy the rest of your day.