Strategic Planning and Financial Vibrancy

In essence, strategic planning involves maximizing your agency’s various strengths and capacities toward an agreed-upon goal by articulating the steps and timelines it will take to reach that goal.  It is a means of maximizing the return on your agency’s human, financial and other resources.

Strategic planning is a way of integrating all of the other paths to financial vibrancy in a way that is unique to your agency:  this builds synergy.

In contrast to the ongoing and program-focused nature of day-to-day agency management, strategic planning is a “big picture” process that reflects on the future direction of the agency as a whole and DRIVES – as well as integrates - efforts in all other paths (e.g., financial management).

Success Stories | Lessons Learned

Food For Thought

Research on financial vibrancy shows that in financially vibrant organizations the understanding of who “everyone” was got much bigger.  Financially vibrant organizations think about planning not just with themselves (i.e., the standard group of inside players), but with a host of other players.  In other words, they are able to think in very broad terms about who their stakeholders are. 

One of the things this means is: if you work with the same stakeholders all the time, you likely have access to the usual pots of resources. It is only when you discover how to find common ground with new partners – i.e., new stakeholders – that you are likely to uncover unusual (and new) sources of revenue.

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Notes from the Field

“Sharing our feeling of successfully achieving goals set the previous year is a great boost for Board and staff and volunteers.  We developed a blueprint 20 years ago for the direction of the Agency as our vision.  It was in the form of a schematic.  We always take a look at it as a benchmark of how far we have come and congratulate ourselves on our achievements.”

Niagara West Employment & Learning Resource Centres, Beamsville

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Recommended Resources

From the Free Management Library, an on-line service which provides free and easy-to-access resources regarding the leadership and management for the non-profit sector.  This document is a well-written guide to strategic planning for non-profits that has a very detailed section on SWOT analysis.

visit Free Management Library
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