CPOA - Strategic Planning : Getting Started

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.

Information Gathering

Priorities & Planning

Measuring Impact

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.

A Communications Exercise Using the Ladder of Inference

Tell-Sell: Methods of Group Decision-Making

One-Day Meeting

The Ladder of Inference: Improving Partnership Communications

Establishing Partnership Ground Rules

PRINTER FRIENDLY PAGE | GLOSSARY | REFERENCE | CONTRIBUTORS

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Getting Started

Before you can create a community-driven strategic plan, you will need to lay the groundwork for how the plan will be developed. This will include agreeing on ground rules, creating a mission statement, getting community buy-in, determining a governance structure, defining roles and responsibilities, and developing internal communications.

The Getting Started section of this Web site offers information, tools, and readings to help your partnership set up structures, processes, and agreements necessary to develop a good strategic plan. Keep in mind, as you implement the strategic plan and begin operations, that some of your governance structures, processes, and agreements may change once, or multiple times.

We have suggested a plan for a one-day meeting to cover many of the important aspects of governance. You may download and alter this document to meet your community’s needs.

Here are some questions to consider before embarking on the strategic planning process:

Is your organization the right group to lead the strategic planning effort?
Have you thought about the mission of the partnership?
Who should be included in the process?
Do you and your organization have the time and energy to embark on a strategic planning process?
Does your partnership include the right combination of players to effect change within the larger system?

While these can be intimidating questions, do not be discouraged. People at the local level have the power to make the system better. And while you can’t wish the larger system away by stating unrealistic goals, you shouldn’t treat it as a given that can’t be changed. With proper preparation, team work and determination, you can — and will — make a difference.

Topics

Establishing Ground Rules
A partnership that has a broad membership base brings together people from varied backgrounds who may or may not have worked together before. One of the first tasks in a group planning process is to agree on how to work together.

Developing Mission Statements
Your partnership’s mission statement needs to clearly explain to others why your partnership exists and what it plans to accomplish. It should inspire action. This section includes an exercise designed to help your partnership collect ideas and suggestions for a mission statement. It is intended to encourage full group participation in the process.

Building Ownership and Commitment
Open and equitable rules for decision-making are at the core of good governance. Alongside formal governance structures, develop definitions for roles and responsibilities of participants, including how much autonomy individuals and committees have. Good governance structures and processes can increase involvement and organizational effectiveness, helping to create a caring and fair partnership that values its members’ participation.

Improving Internal Communications
Communities sometimes struggle to find a meaningful way to capture diverse thinking—and the ensuing strategic plan reflects that obstacle. How individuals communicate and react to others has profound effects on how well they work together; this section strives to help partnerships make the most of internal communication.

We encourage the reproduction of this material and ask that you credit Community Partnerships for Older Adults Community Partnerships for Older Adults is a national program of The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation within the University of Southern Maine
© 2007 Community Partnerships for Older Adults