Services
Strategic Planning, Systems Change & Collective Impact Design using Finding Your North Star™
Strategic planning is one of the most important efforts successful nonprofit leaders will ever undertake. Yet facilitating this critical process can give even the most seasoned and capable leader pause.
Where and when should the strategic planning process begin? How do you develop goals that are both impactful and realistically sustainable, given the ever-shifting non-profit landscape? Most importantly, how do you ensure your efforts result in a living action plan — not in a dust-collector that sits on the shelf?
At Civitas Strategies, we use our proprietary strategic planning process called Finding Your North Star™, which was developed by our President and CEO, Gary Romano, over his 25+ years of experience helping non-profit leadership teams establish, strategize, and implement the actions needed to realize their short- and long-term goals. Our process is grounded in five key components designed to move planning teams from understanding their organization’s ecosystem to preparing to navigate emergent strategy to monitoring and refining the plan to ensure progress:
Principles of Design
Goal-Setting
Metrics of Success
Strategy Design
Action Planning
We customize the process for your needs and objectives and can facilitate all aspects of the work with your team, either on- or offsite, including designing and facilitating planning sessions, guiding the development of your action plan, and helping your team to accessibly document your efforts throughout. We can also provide the resources, guidance, and coaching your team needs to self-execute the process. Additionally, we offer landscape assessments to help you better understand your ecosystem and can provide advisement in administering an internal evaluation. Most importantly, we bring independent perspective and wisdom to bear in the crafting of highly effective strategy.
Our approach to strategic planning is creating systems change and designing collective impact initiatives. Our ability to engage community and leaders, provide a simple, but not simplistic approach to planning, and easy to follow action plans continue to pay dividends for communities and states across the nation including: New York City, the state of Florida, Miami-Dade county, and Atlanta.
Our strategic partner, Nielsen Training & Consulting, LLC, uses a proven system for Board development, Board Champions™, which can be fully integrated into our Finding Your North Star™ strategic planning process to simultaneously build the Board infrastructure to realize the new strategic plan.
Here are four examples of our planning work:
The University of Florida’s Lastinger Center for Learning is an international education innovation hub with a portfolio of over $28 million in projects. After creating their successful 2015–18 strategic plan, we were re-engaged to develop their most recent plan which is building of their years of service to accelerate growth.
The YMCA of Metro North is a growing, regional agency supporting a variety of families and children. We were engaged to craft their current strategic plan to have impact on a number of diverse communities north of Boston and build the organization’s sustainability into the future.
The Hunts Point Alliance for Children engaged us to create a collective impact initiative and plan to improve the lives of Bronx children and families. The plan was the result of the engagement of community members from grassroots to grasstops.
Take Stock in Children is one of the largest college readiness and success organizations in the nation. In 2015 they engaged us to train their team on our collective impact approach for use in a four year federally funded grant project in two Florida Counties. Seeing the effectiveness of the approach, Take Stock incorporated it into their efforts across Florida and included it in a self-published collection of innovations resulting from their federal grant.
The cost of each planning project varies significantly, depending on the level of need and availability of client staff support to leverage the investment in our team. To find out more, contact us for a quote.