Strategic Planning Tips

For those of you who have, or will conduct strategic planning sessions on an ongoing basis with your leadership teams, this entry is for you. I made an installment in my own continuing education yesterday by attending a seminar on strategic planning. I wanted to hone my own skills and learn a new promising approach to an old concept.

ASAE never disappoints its members. The presentation gave me an entirely new approach to consider. Including:

1) The strategic radar screen - where to place strategic issues that come out of scanning the industry for issues that either effect your members' profession (or the industry). 

2) Asking for insight (not feedback) from members-at-large along the way, as to not plan in a vacuum. Insight asks for answers to questions like "Why is there a lack of readership to our communications?" or "Why are members not interested in our legislative activities?" Ask these  questions before and during the process. Feedback, on the other hand, asks member to evaluate something you have already decided to do.

3) The importance of putting staff and elected leaders at the same table (and place them strategically next to each other) with placards and assigned seating.

4) Always ask a committee chair to make presentations along with their staff counterpart.

5) Measure everything - even if the measurement is "excitement and momentum", or better-yet, as specific as "the # of large brokers and brokerage companies who have re engaged in the association". Same goes for any other industry!

6) Top way to build consensus with members and the Board? Communicate, communicate, communicate! Isn't that the key to any successful initiative?

Jim Dalton puts it this way: "Members don't join the association so that they can solve the association's problems. Members join the association expecting that the association will help solve THEIR problems."

Good luck, good planning, and then great execution!

Strategic Planning Tips