All about strategic planning

This week, the class (@phillyhistory) is looking at strategic planning and how institutions prepare for change. In preparation for that conversation, we read the TCC Group’s Ten Keys to Successful Strategic Planning for Nonprofit and Foundation Leaders. This reading proved to be very useful and helped elucidate the difference between strategic plan and mission statement (which naively, I often used interchangeably).

What is a strategic plan?

The reading defined a strategic plan as,

”...a tool that provides guidance in fulfilling a mission with maximum efficiency and impact. If it is to be effective and useful, it should articulate specific goals and describe the action steps and resources needed to accomplish them. As a rule, most strategic plans should be reviewed and revamped every three to five years.”

A few common themes stood out to me including explicitness, collaboration, and honesty. Not only should a strategic plan express an institution's vision for the future, but it should also explicitly layout the steps needed to achieve those goals. This is not a “wish list, report card, or marketing tool” as the reading pointed out, but “what a strategic plan can do is shed light on an organization’s unique strengths and relevant weaknesses, enabling it to pinpoint new opportunities or the causes of current or projected problems.”

Perhaps these ideas should come as no surprise considering the nature of our work, but I wanted to see whether different organizations shared these values. For reference, I looked at the strategic plans of Temple University Libraries and the National Constitution Center.

Comparing the Plans

Upon reading the respective plans, I immediately noticed that Temple used more abstract language while the National Constitution Center (NCC) laid out more specific goals. For example, the NCC mentioned their “Educating America” initiative which will “restore constitutional education at the center of American life and elevate civic discourse…” They included concrete steps to achieve their broader vision like creating a podcast as well as an interactive constitution.

Image from Visit Philadelphia.

Just because the NCC defined very specific goals does not necessarily make it a better plan than Temple Libraries. Shouldn’t the NCC already have had these goals? Perhaps it's a good thing that they explicitly expressed these ideas, but I don’t find anything new or groundbreaking.

Temple on the other hand lacked tangible goals but expressed general functions and core values including diversity, accessibility, accountability, and stewardship. They discussed increasing student productivity and stated,

”The libraries will support a diverse environment for the exploration of new modes of scholarship, engaging all fields of academic endeavor as a multi-disciplinary contact zone and intellectual workshop, connecting students, clinicians and scholars with collections, tools, librarians, and technical experts.”

Rendering of Temple's future library.

But how would they execute such a plan? Perhaps Temple delegates those concrete plans to the various departments. I also noticed their plan did not include future dates. They last updated the plan in 2017, but where do they want to be three years from now?

I’m curious to know what you think. Should the NCC explicitly state that they want to “elevate civic discourse” or is that too obvious? Should Temple have more concrete takeaways? If so, what would be some examples? Let me know what you think about the two plans!

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