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Strategic Planning - Strategic planning will help you create a bold vision for the future, strengthen new partnerships, forge creative and innovative linkages between stakeholders, and ultimately better address the needs of older adults in your community. A community-wide strategic planning process will benefit from the wisdom of a diverse array of participants and ensure greater likelihood of success.
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Inclusion & Diversity - Including older adults and caregivers is crucial to growing and sustaining successful community partnerships. It is especially important to seek participation from traditionally excluded groups such as those defined by race and ethnicity, low income, lack of English language proficiency, and sexual orientation. While many factors can challenge a partnership’s efforts to embrace diversity and build productive relationships, receiving input from a broad array of community members helps to ensure equality in decision making and leads to long term care and supportive services that are more responsive to a community’s diverse needs.
Fiscal Strategies - Developing a fiscal strategy is an important and challenging part of improving the system of long term care and supportive services for older adults in your community. The array of funding options requires that community partnerships be strategic in their aims. This area of the Resource Center reviews relevant funding sources and provides resources to help you make the most of them.
Communications - Have you ever thought about how many times a day someone tries to influence you to think a certain way, to buy a certain product, to support a cause or to change your behavior? These days there are so many ways to reach you—from cell phones and Palm Pilots to instant messaging, cable TV and customized publications—that a reasonable reaction is to simply tune everything out. It’s a world of sound and fury.
Evaluation - While the success of a community partnership may seem self-evident, a systematic evaluation holds members to a higher standard, revealing more than what we see with the naked eye. This section offers an introduction to evaluation. It covers the basic principles of evaluation design and implementation, as well as some topics likely to be important for community partnerships working to improve long term care and supportive services.
Partnership Evolution - A partnership generally consists of multiple organizations and individuals working together under a common vision. Who will be in the partnership varies from community to community, yet the purpose is universal: to create a mutually beneficial and well-defined relationship to sustain results that are not possible alone.
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> Strategic Planning > Priorities & Planning

Priorities & Planning

After strategic information has been gathered about the community’s long term care and supportive services system—including the needs and preferences of older adults—it is time to analyze the information, set priorities, develop strategies and create the plan. Priority and Planning Graphic

First, take into account the internal and external factors influencing the partnership’s efforts. Keep in mind that priorities should be aligned with the interests and goals of the partners, and that an honest assessment of partnership and community strengths and weaknesses will help ensure an ambitious, yet realistic plan.

Then, consider anticipated changes in the community’s political, economic and regulatory environment. Studying these factors can help determine the likelihood of success of selected strategies.

Balancing and aligning internal and external factors is crucial to prioritizing the improvements you envision for the community’s long term care and supportive services system.

Once priorities have been set, you will want to develop strategies that will lead to desired improvements. This involves creating multiple potential strategies, comparing them, and then choosing the best ones.

To transform these strategies to action, develop implementation plans that spell out steps, timelines, roles, resources and connections between plan components. Finally, you will want to communicate your plan to stakeholders such as older adults, the general public, policy makers and service providers.

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Topics

Assessing Internal and External Factors
Many forces influence strategic-plan development that can either aid or hinder achieving the community’s vision. An honest assessment of both the partnership and community’s strengths and weaknesses will help ensure the plan is bothambitious and realistic.

Developing Strategies
The goal of sound strategic planning is to achieve the partnership’s vision of long term care and supportive services for older adults. Successful strategic planning addresses critical issues and develops sustainable strategies that will produce meaningful results. An effective process includes developing multiple strategies, comparing them, and then choosing the best ones.

Detailing Implementation Plans
Implementation plans are the roadmaps that lead from strategies to actions. These plans, which include budgets and workplans, specify everything from tasks and timetables to responsibilities, resources, data collection and reporting processes guide the partnership now and in the future.

Communicating Your Strategic Plan
Effectively communicating a strategic plan to the partnership and the community is critical to successful implementation. This section covers internal and external audiences and contains helpful tips to communicate your message.
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