A strategic planning template
In this blog, we are going to explore what a completed strategic plan looks like. We’ll cover each of the major components and explore what information is included in each. The following blog can be used as a template for developing your strategic plan.
Let’s jump straight in.
The major parts or components of a strategic plan include the following (different documents may use slightly different wording or language, however, generally, most strategic plan documents will include these components):
Vision
Mission
Values
Strategic priorities
Actions
Indicators of performance
Governance
Reporting
Vision
A vision statement is a concise statement about what the ideal future state looks like, and the desired long-term results of your organisation’s efforts. A vision statement should reveal, at the highest levels, what an organisation hopes to be and achieve in the long term.
Mission
A mission statement is a short statement that describes the purpose of your organisation. It should answer the question: “Why do we exist?”
Values
Your values state the central “musts” and “must nots” of your organization - the vital principles that need to guide leaders and employees in their day-to-day and long-range decision-making. Values are the fundamental beliefs an organisation holds about why it exists and how they want to operate in support of those beliefs. The more those values are made explicit, the more likely it is that those values will be put into action.
With vision, mission and values statements in hand, an organisation knows what it is doing, why it is doing it, and what it hopes to achieve. The next components of a strategic plan discuss how to get the job done.
Priorities
All good strategic plans have priorities (goals or objectives), actions and indicators of performance (metrics or measures of success).
The long-range objectives of the organisation represent what will be focused on in order to make the vision a reality. These objectives typically have time horizons of several years or more. They are general, umbrella methods you intend to use to reach your vision.
Actions
These are the overall means you will employ in order to achieve your strategic priorities and thus, your vision. Each strategic priority will have one or more actions associated with it.
Indicators of performance
Indicators or performance describe the outputs or products or way of measuring completion that will be delivered as a result of the delivery of the actions.
They should answer questions like: How will we know if we’re succeeding? How will we track our performance and progress?
This is a snapshot of the strategic plan that Beacon Strategies delivered for StandBy - a postvention program dedicated to assisting people and communities bereaved or impacted by suicide. You can see that the language used is a little different, but they have on the left their priority areas (which they call ‘Objective statement’, then their actions (or priorities) in the middle and then their success measures on the right.
Source: StandBy: Support After Suicide, Strategic Plan. Retrieved from: https://standbysupport.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Standby-StrategicPlan-email.pdf.
This is an example of how an organisation might articulate and visually describe one of its strategic priorities, the actions it is going to take related to that strategic priority and how they will measure success (their indicators of performance).
Governance
When we say governance we’re talking about an ongoing mechanism to monitor and track progress against the organisation’s priorities and actions. A good governance process will answer questions like, who is responsible for what actions? And what timeframes apply to each action? A good governance process explains how priorities and actions will be accomplished - it moves the strategy to operations and is generally executed by teams or individuals.
Reporting
Organisations should be reporting on their entire strategy frequently and regularly (or breaking down the strategy into pieces and reporting on those pieces, again, at regular intervals). You need to build a reporting process that enables visibility of the progress being achieved against the strategic plan to organisational leaders and, broadly, across the organisation itself.
Sometimes these two components (governance and reporting) are part of the external facing strategic plan document, so the publicly available version that your partners and funders and community can access. Otherwise, they are likely contained within an internal document.
You’ve now got the foundational knowledge around what a strategic plan is, why you would develop a strategic plan and now you’ve got the template for a strategic plan, but you might be missing one part… the strategic planning process.
In our next blog, we are going to explore the strategic planning process we use here at Beacon Strategies and walk through our 6-step approach. Read about our comprehensive strategic planning process here.
