Going Public with a New Strategy

Social change organizations often spend many months — if not years — developing strategic plans.

They hire strategy consultants, convene special board subcommittees, and invest considerable time building roadmaps that will guide their work into the future.

Quite often, however, they fail to stick the landing.

That’s because they don’t take the same level of care in explaining their new strategy to donors, grantees, partners, and communities as they do in creating the strategy itself.

The result? Powerful strategies end up buried in filing cabinets or Dropbox purgatory, never reaching their full potential.

We hate to see a good strategy underachieve. So we’ve been developing a process for helping organizations communicate about their strategic plans in ways that resonate with and actively involve your most important audiences.

Here’s some of what we’ve learned through our work:

Internal audiences come first — The ultimate success of your strategic plan hinges on your ability to ensure everyone on your team — your professional staff, board members, and key volunteers — understands your strategy and can clearly articulate what it means. This is a difficult task at many organizations since staff and board aren’t always in alignment. It’s critically important, therefore, to invest time up front and properly train your internal audiences before you go public.

Create personas — While your internal audience comes first, it’s also important to take time to fully understand your external audiences. Identify what they care about, how your new strategy will impact them, and how to address their questions and concerns. If you have the bandwidth, take time to create personas for each key audience. Then, make sure your team understands who you’re communicating with, how to best reach them, and what messages you’ll need to develop about your new strategy.

Meet your audiences where they are — When it comes time to unveil your strategy publicly, take deliberate steps to connect with your key audiences in ways that align with their preferences and in language that speaks to their concerns and questions. The Boston Foundation accomplished that with the announcement of its new strategy earlier this week. In addition to its formal announcement, it created FAQs segmented for grantees and donors and developed fact sheets in multiple languages to communicate with key audiences in its community.

Avoid making it only about you — It’s natural to want to communicate about your strategic plan. But you’re more likely to gain traction and gain donors and partners if you communicate about it in ways that engage others in the work. In working with the Greater Washington Community Foundation to roll out its plan, we took deliberate steps to make sure the word “Together” was front and center throughout the messaging — and to show how achieving its strategy would benefit the community, not the foundation itself.

Build a drumbeat — Once you unveil your new strategy publicly, don’t stop talking about it. Turn it into an ongoing storytelling campaign that includes opportunities to engage with audiences across multiple channels and in multiple venues.

Remember, communications is central to the success of any strategy — and it deserves careful consideration as you go public with your new roadmap.

Make sure you devote the time and resources necessary to ensure your strategy takes hold.