Strategic Fund Development: Building Profitable Relationships That Last, Third Edition

Evaluating Your Strategic Planning Process

Effective organizations regularly evaluate management and governance functions, including the process of strategic planning. Debrief when the planning process ends and use the evaluation results to improve the design of your next strategic planning process.

If you established a planning committee, it can lead this assessment. Certainly, each board committee (e.g., fund development, governance) uses the strategic plan and can assess performance in their respective spheres of work.

Conduct formal and informal conversations with constituencies that participated in the planning process. You could even conduct focus groups and surveys to help evaluate the planning process.

Consider the following issues as you evaluate the effectiveness of your planning process.

• Which constituencies were involved in what components of the planning process? How many, how often, and to what extent? What might you change in the next planning process?
• Was the market research—both internal and external—sufficient to help you ask the right questions and make the best decisions? What would you do differently in the next planning process?
• Were all parts of the organization—all functions and systems—involved in the planning process? How well did the process reach throughout the system?
• How did you use questioning and conversation during the process? Do you still do this? Did you ask the really cage-rattling questions? If so, what were the results? How involved were ...