A fundraiser with a strategic plan is a happy fundraiser. With strong organizational planning and a powerful vision in hand, you have the tools to truly inspire donors to join you in your work.
Strategic planning can be a challenging and sometimes messy process, but what holds it all together is a shared vision. A picture of the world as you want it to be.
A vision is a grounding force. It’s the thing that unites everyone and ensures that all your efforts are moving the organization in the same direction.
So here’s the great part. You don’t have to create a vision and then hope your stakeholders will buy into it. Instead, you can ask them to create the vision with you. At the very beginning. Before planning even begins.
Invite your organization’s closest friends to a visioning salon. Ask them to join you in defining the future.
Here’s how:
Schedule two or three visioning salons at the start of a strategic planning process. Keep the environment friendly and informal. Hold the salons in private homes if you can. Offer them in different neighborhoods and at different times of day to make it easy for people to attend.
Aim to get about 15 people at each session. Invite people who know the organization well. This isn’t a time for basic education about what you do. This is the time for people who already love you to think carefully and strategically about what you might do going forward.
You can facilitate the sessions yourself or hire a facilitator. Either way, you need to have an agenda and strike a careful balance between following the agenda and allowing for free-flow conversation and creativity.
The agenda should essentially be a series of questions like:
The Need and Purpose
- What do you see as the need for our work in the community?
- How are we uniquely positioned to address that need?
- What challenges do we see in the external environment within the next five years?
Values:
- What are the assumptions on which we base our work?
- What do we care about?
Delivery of service:
- What are the most important services that we should continue to provide, change, or begin to offer in the next five years?
- Should we expand our services in terms of number of people served or should we deepen the level of service we give to individuals and families?
- Will we be serving the same people in five years as we are currently serving? What will be different? What will be the same?
Vision:
- How will the world be different because of our work?
- How will the world be improved if we are successful in achieving our mission?
Don’t try to drive the conversation in any one direction and don’t try to make decisions. This is basically high-level brainstorming, so people should not be corrected and ideas should not be shut down.
Take copious notes on flip charts or a whiteboard, identify areas of consensus and disagreement, ask different questions if they arise, repeat back to the group what you’re hearing to make sure it’s clear.
Most importantly, keep it interesting and fun.
A visioning salon will give you important data about what your stakeholders care about, it will allow stakeholders to “own” the strategic plan before it’s even written, and I promise you, it will generate beautiful and inspiring ideas for your organization’s future.
