Strategic Planning for Communities and Organizations

Practicing planners spend much of their time on comprehensive, area, and sector-specific plans. These are typically large and long-range planning efforts, with planning processes spanning years and the resulting plans looking decades into the future. But there is another type of plan that represents a critically important but potentially overlooked tool in the planner's toolbox: the strategic plan.

Short-term strategic planning is a cost-effective, implementation-oriented planning approach. Adapted from the corporate world, strategic planning can help communities and organizations think about and act on immediate opportunities — such as identifying projects for community-based implementation, or examining the structure of a planning department. These lighter, quicker, cheaper planning efforts can, when the circumstances are right, be relatively inexpensive, fast, deeply engaging, and highly effective.

This PAS Report addresses the what, why, when, and how of strategic planning. Its purpose is to identify what strategic planning is, explain its applications for both community planning and organizational planning, and highlight its benefits; explore the equity considerations of strategic planning efforts; and help practitioners understand how to conduct successful strategic planning processes. It aims to provide guidance to practicing, emerging, and student planners who want to undertake this planning approach.

The report explores strategic planning for both community change — the traditional community-facing plans that lead to direct change in the community — and organizational change, the internal process by which public and private agencies determine their mission, organizational structure, and operational strategies.

What Is Strategic Planning?

This PAS Report offers the following definition for strategic planning:

Strategic planning is any short-term process designed to take advantage of strategic opportunities that results in a plan for concrete actions or programs.

The actual steps, timeline, budget, stakeholders, and process will vary in different settings, but the emphasis on short-term, strategic, and concrete actions or programs never varies.

Because of these key characteristics, strategic plans can be appropriate for many applications, as demonstrated in this report. For community applications, strategic planning can help identify opportunities and actions for rapid implementation. Strategic plans can both set the stage for a comprehensive planning process and help implement an adopted comprehensive plan. Strategic plans can also be used to address planning gaps for a sector or area in which change is needed but no guiding document exists. In all its roles, a strategic plan is a catalyst.

For organizational applications, the strategic planning approach can likewise be used to help identify opportunities and actions for rapid implementation, and it is often employed to examine organizational mission or structure. Many organizations undertake a strategic plan during periods of organizational change, as it allows a quick assessment that takes advantage of an opportunity or challenge.

The Strategic Planning Process

There are many different ways to approach strategic planning in the urban and regional planning context. All approaches, however, incorporate the following simple seven-step framework, discussed in Chapter 2 of this report.

1. Determine the right time. The first step is determining whether the time is ripe for a project. Is there political support, community interest, resources, and the necessary opportunities? Two key factors are whether the issue being examined will resonate with the affected community and whether there are internal and external champions who will step up to lead and cheerlead to ensure implementation.
2. Define project focus. The second step is to identify what the strategic plan will address. Usually, the focus is on a narrowly defined topic of community or organizational change, though it may be more broadly focused on thinking about opportunities or taking the first step towards a major paradigm shift.
3. Engage stakeholders. Stakeholder engagement can be as narrow, for a technical project, as talking to the stakeholders engaged in the project, but more often it entails a community engagement process. This is one of the most important factors for success — not just for its critical role in maintaining pluralistic democracy, sharing information, and upholding community values, but because stakeholders who participate during the planning process are the most likely people to become champions during implementation. Interactive online tools, such as surveys and wiki tools, can be helpful in expanding community engagement.
4. Identify trends and opportunities. This step is the core of a strategic planning process. There is a wide variety of methodologies for this analysis, including the identification of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in a SWOT analysis or the identification of strengths, opportunities, aspirations, and results in a SOAR analysis. Other methodologies include surveys, scenario planning, charrettes, and external panels, all described in the report.
5. Determine objectives and metrics. The fifth step, which builds on opportunities that have been identified, is to identify the measurable objectives and metrics that come out of the process. This is key for tracking and evaluating plan implementation progress and success.
6. Identify actions. The purpose of strategic planning is creating an action- and implementation-focused plan. Strategic thinking ends at thinking about trends and opportunities, while a strategic plan moves onto what is next. Tactical urbanism, tactical popups, and tactical art installations are part of a long list of lighter, quicker, cheaper approaches that allow interventions to be demonstrated and evaluated, engage users, and provide an opportunity for people to experience outcomes.
7. Implement the plan. Finally, the point of any plan — especially a strategic plan — is to actually spark change. The idea of a plan sitting on a shelf gathering dust is anathema to good planning. That is especially true of strategic planning, which is, by definition, implementation focused. Tracking and evaluating what works and what needs to be adjusted in an iterative feedback loop will improve the positive impacts of the plan.

The report also offers a glossary of strategic planning-related terms and a collection of resources on strategic planning processes, tools, and techniques.

Centering Equity in Strategic Planning

All public-sector planning processes must address equity considerations to truly serve the community. Likewise, justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion should be core considerations in undertaking a strategic planning effort, as discussed in Chapter 3 of this report. Some planning topics focus directly on equity, but other strategic planning efforts can center equity concerns by questioning initial assumptions, conducting an equity assessment that considers multiple aspects of equity, and welcoming a diversity of stakeholders to the table.

Because strategic plans are typically not mandated by statutes in the way that comprehensive and some other plans are, they can provide the flexibility to allow a greater focus on equity than is sometimes possible in mandated processes. This can allow communities to address all aspects of justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion, especially issues of privilege in how decisions are made. There are five aspects of equity that planners should consider when considering whether a plan or strategy promotes equity: distributional equity, or who gets society's goods and burdens; structural or institutional equity, which addresses past inequities, power imbalances, and institutional racism; procedural equity, or who is at the table in making decisions; intergenerational equity, which considers the effects of decisions on future generations; and cultural equity, which requires serving all cultures, not just the dominant one.

A strategic plan that is focused on a specific issue can sometimes be especially effective at empowering stakeholders, allowing them to provide input in a short, clearly defined process targeted to achieve immediate, actual change. Generally, the rapid pace of strategic plans and the lower time demands for stakeholder participation make it easier to engage diverse stakeholders and let them immediately see and touch the outcomes of their participation.

The report discusses how the project topic and planning context will shape stakeholder analysis and identification. It is important to identify which stakeholders will be easier and which will be more difficult to engage in the process. Groups such as low-income households, those suffering from historic discrimination, undocumented workers, single heads of households, those with disabilities, and others face multiple barriers to participation. Engaging potential stakeholders in helping define other stakeholders and identifying how to reduce barriers and friction to their participation will make this process far more effective. Recommended practices include taking engagement efforts to where those populations are and identifying trusted community members and leaders to coordinate the outreach, along with other approaches discussed further in the report.

Strategic Planning for Community Change

Communities typically initiate strategic plans to advance planning goals and enact community change. This can include identifying community visions, goals, principles, priorities, objectives and metrics, strategies, policies, and actions. In all cases, a strategic plan is focused on identifying and acting on a strategic opportunity.

Chapter 4 of the report discusses key elements for community strategic plans for a community. All strategic plans should reflect the community's values and vision and identify strategic opportunities, which as noted throughout the report is the core that sets strategic planning apart from master or comprehensive planning processes. Strategic plans should also include measurable objectives and create an action agenda. It is important that the plan has community buy-in to succeed. And a successful strategic plan is one that leads to implementation and advances the community's core values and visions.

Strategic planning for community change can serve a wide variety of needs, settings, and opportunities. The planning process itself can be agile and flexible as the situation requires. The report offers a collection of case study examples demonstrating some of the most common contexts for community strategic planning, including blue-sky exploration, a sector-specific or technical-issue focus, and major plan kickoff or implementation.

Strategic Planning for Organizational Change

In addition to communities, government agencies and departments, nonprofit organizations, and social enterprises (for-profit businesses with strong social missions) can also make use of this approach to explore their mission, structure, effectiveness, and specific organizational challenges and opportunities.

Chapter 5 of the report shares some key considerations for this context. Organizational strategic planning should identify or refine the organizational mission and purpose and ensure that organizational structure reflects the mission. The plan should identify strategic opportunities to advance the mission and create a clear, achievable action agenda. As with community strategic planning, the process must build support, if not consensus. Finally, a successful organizational strategic plan leads to implementation that advances the mission.

For organizations, strategic planning is most often used in a targeted manner to improve effectiveness and efficiency. As such, the most common contexts for organizational strategic planning address mission definition and organizational structure. The report provides a range of case study examples of strategic plans from local government and nonprofit organizations.

Advancing Planning Practice

With roots going back at least six decades, strategic planning is not new. Today, however, its relevance and utility is stronger than ever. Strategic planning can provide a cost-effective way to define a community's or organization's vision, mission, and values and build an action agenda that can be implemented incrementally, with a feedback loop to allow real-time corrections.

Today's environment of disruption and change creates a need for a planning process that is nimble, agile, and adaptive, one that moves at a pace to address rapidly changing circumstances and help communities grasp their unique opportunities. Strategic planning, because of its short timelines, flexibility, and the ease with which strategic plans can be revised, can respond quickly and remain relevant to changing conditions. But to effectively use this valuable tool, planning practitioners must be conversant with the what, why, when, and how of strategic planning.

A well-executed strategic planning process can be enormously rewarding. These rewards include lowering planning costs, increasing the opportunity for more inclusive community engagement and advancing equity, building momentum, overcoming resistance to planning, identifying new paradigms and vision, and creating an action-oriented implementation plan. For planners, strategic planning can help rebuild community trust, develop deeper collaborations and a collaborative can-do community, and be fun and fulfilling. As this PAS Report demonstrates, strategic planning is a key tool in the planner's toolbox to help create more equitable, resilient, and livable communities for all.