Our strategy services

In a nutshell, strategy identifies the value your organisation will provide in the medium to long term, the high-level direction you’ve decided to pursue, and the big-ticket items you’re going to focus on.

At Ensemble Strategy, we think it’s important to differentiate between a strategic plan and other plans, such as annual plans and business plans. Timeframe is a key indicator here. In our opinion, strategic planning needs to have a medium to long term horizon to ensure a big picture approach. If you’re planning for the next week, month, quarter or even year, it’s tricky to think expansively and move beyond the status quo. A genuinely strategic strategy looks at least three years out and some strategies are even twenty or thirty years long.

Not-for-profit organisations are trying to change the world for the better. This is much easier said than done. It turns out that changing the world comes with a lot of complexity and a lot of baggage.

That’s not to say that for-profit strategy is a walk in the park. Corporations are navigating shareholder expectations, supply chain challenges, workforce attrition, digital developments and more. They need to be savvy - or very lucky - when it comes to political, economic, legal, technological and environmental forces. Not-for-profit strategic planning wrestles with these same areas. And then some.

For example, imagine you are a not-for-profit committed to reducing inequity. This could relate to gender, race, culture, sexuality, socioeconomic status, disability, housing, geography and more. Regardless, your not-for-profit strategic planning process needs to consider intersectionality and power structures, as well as the role of individual agency and systemic change. The very nature of your work is complex and there’s the rapidly evolving external environment to take into consideration too. Any systems level change will take a long time – we’re generally talking years, decades and generations to achieve the outcomes sought.

Other elements also complicate not-for-profit strategic planning. For example, funding is often tied to specific projects rather than core operations, including digital systems and capability. It can be hard to attract and retain staff when you can’t pay the same salaries as in the private sector. Increasingly, not-for-profits are competing with other charities and the private sector, such as in health and aged care. This can result in a lack of collaboration due to fighting for influence, voice, workforce and funding. Speaking of funding, many for-purpose organisations rely on government which can pose challenges in effectively engaging across the different parties.

Then there’s the people involved. The vast majority of not-for-profits have volunteer boards, who are not financially remunerated for their contribution and often have other commitments. This generates unique challenges in how best to engage directors with consideration to their capacity and capability. For boards, staff and other stakeholders, it’s vital to incorporate both lived experience and passion into any not-for-profit strategic planning process. But this can often be a double-edged sword. While lived experience and passion can be incredibly inspiring and drive meaningful action, it can also narrow people’s thinking and make it difficult to be strategic.

All of these factors make not-for-profit strategic planning a particularly interesting kettle of fish.

At Ensemble Strategy, we use why, when, where, what and how as our key strategic planning components. For us, these are the building blocks of great not-for-profit strategic planning. Every strategy we develop uses these areas as a template of sorts.

Component #1: The why

When it comes to strategy, we agree with Simon Sinek - it all starts with why. In not-for-profit strategic planning, this is about digging into questions like why are we here? Why does our organisation exist? Why does our organisation have a unique role to play and what is that role? In not-for-profit strategic planning, the why is often listed under the sub-headings of vision and purpose (or, for religious organisations, mission).

Alongside conversations about your not-for-profit’s why, it can be helpful to also consider the who. This is about exploring who your organisation exists to serve, help and benefit. This is vitally important in not-for-profit strategic planning as it ensure putting beneficiaries are at the centre. If you’re interested, take a look at our blog about beneficiary-first strategic planning here.

Component #2: The when

In thinking about the when, we have identified a couple of sub-components. The first, which we mentioned above, is the duration of your strategy. Ask yourself is this a three, four or five year plan? Or do we want to look further into the future, perhaps a decade or two? What are the pros and cons of these different horizons? Which one will work for us at this point in time?

The other way we think about the when is as a high-level narrative. This is generally one or two sentences that summarise your strategic direction over the agreed timeframe. A couple of simple examples are “we have a growth agenda for the next five years” or “over the duration of this strategy, we are applying a defend lens to X and an extend lens to Y.”

Component #3: The where

Hopefully the where is pretty self-explanatory; it’s about discussing the geographic remit of your organisation into the future. This can be local, regional, state or territory-based, national, international, global and everywhere in between. Key here is understanding whether your geographic footprint will stay the same, increase or decrease, as well as the opportunities presented by digital delivery given this transcends traditional boundaries.

Component #4: The what

Having now covered off on the first three components, it’s time to move to the what. At Ensemble Strategy, we define the what as the central priorities in a strategic plan. To put it another way, the what relates to the handful of key strategic pillars or goals. In our experience, a handful generally boils down to three or four. Questions to consider here include what are our critical priorities for the years ahead? What will we focus on for the greatest impact? What are the three or four game-changing areas for our organisation and beneficiaries?

Component #5: The how

Last but by no means least is the how. As with the where, we see this as having two main sub-components. The first is how you will deliver on your central priorities, which is normally through a series of sub-priorities with accompanying actions. A note here that these actions should remain fairly high-level so beware getting too specific and granular. Ask yourself what do we need to do to progress our strategic pillars? What key actions, service lines and business functions need to change significantly? Which ones do we anticipate will largely stay the same?

The other element of the how relates to ways of working, values and culture. This is about unpacking what attitudes and behaviours will bring out the best in your team and board. It’s also about what attitudes and behaviours will enable you to deliver on the strategy. For example, perhaps your organisation has been fairly risk averse and now sees the need to be more entrepreneurial and innovative. Culture really does eat strategy for breakfast – if you’re interested, you can read more about the importance of culture in our blog here.

In our experience, these five strategic planning components are essential when developing a robust not-for-profit strategy. Depending on the organisation and project, we sometimes weave in other elements such as beliefs, assumptions, enablers, key principles (or philosophies) and concepts. That’s because we adapt the components for each of our clients to ensure we are getting them what they need. We really encourage you to do the same so, once you’ve found a strategy template you like, feel free to tweak it to work for you.

At regular intervals, someone pronounces that strategic planning is unnecessary or even dead. We couldn’t disagree more so we’ve outlined why strategy matters below.

It brings you back to need

When done every few years, not-for-profit strategic planning helps reinvestigate if the need is still there for what you’re doing and the way you’re doing it. The world is changing rapidly; to name a handful of fast moving areas, consider recent developments in housing, public health and technology. That’s why for-purpose organisations must frequently examine and align to the needs of today and tomorrow.

It gets everyone on the same page

It’s easy to underestimate the power of being on the same page. When it comes to not-for-profit strategic planning, this is about ensuring everyone in your team knows the answers to questions like why do we exist and who for? What’s our role in making the world a better place? What are the shared beliefs we hold and behaviours we expect from one another? Shared understanding is the foundation for collective action.

It guides good decisions

When done well, a strategic plan is an effective tool for decision-making. A strategy helps you focus on the right things by defining what you do and what you don’t do. To put it another way, a good strategy aids you in saying both yes and no. It’s vital to make the best possible choices given all organisations have limited resources… with some significantly more limited than others! After all, if we had unlimited resources, we could do it all. But that’s simply not the case.

It lifts your gaze beyond today

As we spoke about earlier in this article, strategic planning adopts a medium to long term lens. This provides an opportunity to dig into significant opportunities for change and evolution, as well ascertain which areas and activities to continue. When you’re wrapped up in daily to do lists and business-as-usual work, it’s hard to identify and explore transformative ideas. Strategic planning presents a window to step out of the BAU and look ahead.

A one page strategy (also referred to as a strategy-on-a-page) is all in the name. As you’d expect, it’s a high-level summary of a full strategic plan, which has been distilled into a single page. When we’re creating one page strategies at Ensemble, we generally aim to include the why, when, where, what and a little bit of the how.

As with many documents, having a visually appealing short-form version of your strategic plan is a good idea. It can act as a quick refresher for your board, team and volunteers to remind them of the key ideas in your strategic plan. A one page strategy is also likely to be a powerful and more accessible resource for beneficiaries, community members and other external stakeholders.

Your strategic plan needs to guide, tie into and be responsive to your operations. (More on how we approach strategy implementation and operations here.) Key here is that your strategy feeds into your reporting frameworks, budgets, annual plans, business plans, board meetings, recruitment and more. There needs to be strong integration to enable effective implementation.

An organisational strategy should inform your annual plan for at least the first couple of years. Then, a review and update is generally required to ensure your strategic plan reflects your operational and contextual reality. A word of warning here – lots of people jump to developing a business plan rather than a strategic plan. As we noted above, how can you take a long term view? How can you lift above the here and now? How can you go beyond planning at the departmental level for the coming months to reflect on your organisation and sector in the long-term? These are critical questions to ask in not-for-profit strategic planning.

We’re also amazed by the number of organisations who finalise their budget prior to developing their strategy. This means the allocation of funds has been pre-determined, which dictates resourcing and therefore action. If this is the order of things, your strategy becomes borderline redundant.

It’s non-debatable that boards are the custodians of strategy. Where the debate comes in is whether the board helps form the strategic plan or whether they simply approve it. At Ensemble Strategy, we strongly believe in the executive and board coming together to jointly undertake not-for-profit strategic planning. When done well, there are so many benefits of this joint approach including building trust, leveraging different skills and experiences, confirming what’s possible, and getting leadership on the same page.

While some organisations have incredibly innovative and forward-looking executives, beware implementers leading strategy development. Understandably, it can be hard to be creative and bold when you are the one who has to deliver! Boards have a vital role to play here. Given they are more removed from operations, they are generally better placed to take a long term view and push for (or at least be open to) significant changes. The executive also have a vital role to play. As they are more hands on, they know the daily operational reality. This means they can advise about what’s practical and realistic.

As we mentioned earlier in this article, great strategies create common understanding. With a new not-for-profit strategic plan in place, your board should understand what they are governing and how they can apply their networks, skills and knowledge to support strategy implementation. Your executive should be able to plan in greater detail, make effective and timely decisions, and lead the team. And finally, staff and volunteers should be able to clearly understand how their role contributes to the bigger picture.

There are pros and cons of engaging a strategy consultant to help you with strategic planning. Your experience working with an external strategy facilitator or consultant will also vary wildly depending on which firm or individual you go with. We’ve outlined some of the key points to consider below.

Pros

• Enable everyone in your board and team to participate fully, rather than someone needing to be the facilitator

• Bring in ideas from other sectors and organisations

• Alleviate internal capacity challenges

• Independent third party facilitation may elicit new or different perspectives from internal and external stakeholders

Cons

• Will incur a cost

• Some consultants don’t understand your sector and won’t understand your organisation

• Risk of losing internal ownership of the strategy