Here is a framework to help charities, nonprofit organisations and social enterprises to write their strategic plans. It focuses on ‘writing’ the plan rather than the strategic planning process which consists of workshops, conversations, strategic exercises and desktop research.
There is no correct format for a strategic plan. This framework sets out my thoughts on strategic plans and my preferred method of writing them. These insights stem from decades of working with such plans.
You must choose a format that works for you and your organisation. Some organisations will pick the bits that enable them to write a concise plan of under 10 pages, whereas larger and more complex organisations might choose to respond to all the prompts, and write a more comprehensive plan of 20 pages.
Treat this article like a menu and use whatever parts of this framework make sense to you. Adapt or discard the remainder. This framework is detailed so that it can offer you an array of choices.