Why Invest in Strategy?

Things move fast, budgets are tight, and it might be hard to justify spending time on analysis. Doing first then thinking later sometimes works, right?

While “Ready, Fire, Aim” is sometimes unavoidable, consistently and effectively using resources to best effect demands smart analysis that drives decision-making and enables actionable measurement.

In our view, “smart analysis that drives decision-making and enables actionable measurement” is strategy, and it’s ultimately indispensable. In our most successful work with clients , we’ve had a convergence around the vernacular and value of strategy, planning and implementation and been able to help smart people do smart, actionable thinking. Here’s what we’ve learned over the years:

• Strategies are the big picture.  Is your organization going to make change by being the friendliest, most accessible organization on your issues, or are you going to be the strident flank?  Are you going to build a base of advocates who will take action in even the most effort-intensive ways, or is it big numbers on online petitions that are most important to your success? Will you raise more money over the next six months by better cultivating your current donors, or do you need to start with an expanded approach to donor acquisition?

• Plans are the detailed sets of activities and timelines that follow from strategies.  Protests might make sense if you’re the strident flank, less so if you’re the sober bipartisan element in your movement.  Once you’ve decided your strategy is to drive somewhere, the plan is your roadmap detailing what roads (highways or side streets?) you’ll take, where you’ll stop for gas, and how long you expect the journey to take.  It’s in the planning that details about your goals should be considered.  For example, to deliver on a grasstops strategy, how many prominent leaders do you need on board, from where, to do what? To build a successful friends-asking-friends fundraising strategy, who are the first 10 people who will ask, and the next 10? How will you prepare them to make successful asks? How will you communicate their success to their peers?

• Tools and tactics are the task lists in the plan. To fully wear out the metaphor:  If the strategy is to drive there, the plan is the turn-by-turn directions, the tactics are the kind of car, the type of gas, and the choice of driver.   If your strategy is high-level grassroots mobilization, and your plan is to generate as many personal contacts to targeted members of congress as possible; including in-person meetings, phone calls, personal letters, asking questions at in-district events, and calling in to local radio shows the congressperson is scheduled to appear on.  Your tactical question would be:  Is email, direct mail, phonebanking, online advertising, a combination of all of the above and/or something else altogether the best way to get your activists to do one or more of those things?

In a comment on a Three Things from early last year about defining goals, someone asked, “Why do so many organizations have strategic plans that are sitting on a shelf? Why are so many organizations operating (often successfully) without a strategic plan?“  Two good questions that get to the heart of the value of a strategic planning process.  If your strategic plan is sitting on a shelf with no bearing on your day-to-day activities, you didn’t do it right. We’ve worked with many organizations who’ve presented us with past strategic communications or advocacy plans that are, to be blunt, neither strategic nor plans.  They didn’t lay out the organizational approach to communications or advocacy, so they couldn’t detail a path to deliver on that approach, which meant they wound up either as vague descriptions of aspirations and restatements of the mission, or a hodgepodge of tactics and metrics.  We wholeheartedly agree that the time and energy that went into those documents could have been better spent.

However, strategic plans that articulate an approach and the rationale behind it, the steps required to deliver on that approach within a given timeframe, and tools and tactics to achieve those steps, and they ways they’ll be measured (some thoughts on measurement here: http://www.englin.net/three-things-measure-more-than-inputs), can and should guide organizational decision making, day-to-day-activities, and even better hiring through better job descriptions (what do you need a new member of the team to be capable of?  It’s all right there in your plan!).

Strategic plans needn’t be long, wordy documents.  How they’re bound is irrelevant.  Ditto for fonts and bolding and bullet point styles.  The value is in the clear articulation of focused thinking and decision-making regarding how your organization can make a mission-driven difference through communications or advocacy.

Do you have a strategy? Awhile back we wrote a three-question diagnostic: Do you have a strategy? Check it out – we’d love to know where it leads you.

ALSO IN OUR BRAINS THIS MONTH:

Very smart thinking from our friends at Groundwire about the middle of the “engagement pyramid”:

“A healthy middle of the pyramid is critically important for the long-term health and impact of your organization. But too often, we find that organizations are seriously under-investing in the organizing work that’s required for a healthy middle. In many organizations, organizing budgets have declined as online budgets have grown, but the opposite should be happening — organizing budgets should be growing to take advantage of the opportunities provided by the big lists we’ve gotten so good at building.”

Read the whole thing here: http://groundwire.org/blog/engagment-pyramid-middle

ONE LAST THING – PRESENTATION ON STRATEGY TODAY IN DC

If you’re in the DC area today, Shayna would love to see you at Salsa Lab’s Third Thursday meeting where she’ll be presenting, along with Ellie Klerlein of the National Council of La Raza, on Defensive Organizing: Galvaning Your Base. Details are here: goo.gl/99E1L

Shayna outlined her thinking on the topic in last week’s Three Things column: http://www.englin.net/defensivestrategy/

If you’re not in DC but are interested in the topic, you’ll have another chance to participate late next month when Shayna and Ellie will repeat the conversation in a webinar. Check www.englin.net in a few weeks for details.