What is community or strategic planning? 

Planning involves making connections among ideas and people, setting in motion joint learning, coordinating among interests and stakeholders, building social, intellectual and political capital and finding new ways to work on the most challenging tasks. The process is forward looking and examines internal and external factors that can impact your community or organization. Planning helps create a step-by-step guide for how you’re going to get where you want your community or organization to be.  Without a plan you’ll likely get caught up in crisis management activities instead of creating long term solutions.

Why does my community need a plan? 

Planning creates a unified vision for the community or organization. A shared vision that is communicated clearly and consistently encourages ownership of the plan and helps articule a stakeholders’ role in achieving the community or organization's shared vision. Quality community engagement as part of your planning process directly increases your plan's impact. If community members believe they have a stake in the future of their community and have received the invitation to help create it, they become more engaged to achieve it. Setting goals and choosing metrics to track progress towards your priorities means you always have meaningful data (and direction) to reference leading to faster, more efficient decision-making. 

What are the components of a plan? 

A plan utilizes a number of inputs (data).  This may include existing conditions, industry scans, trends, and projections. Planning processes utilize public engagement to help inform the plan, analyze data generated, make decisions, and implement strategies. Public engagement can come from a number of methods including public meetings (forums), stakeholder group meetings, key person interviews, focus groups, surveys, charrettes, etc. A strengths, weakness, opportunity and threats (SWOT) assessment is often conducted. Alternatively, opportunities and constraints (geographic, environmental, infrastructure, facilities, economic, housing, policies) may be explored in addition to other tools like cost benefit analysis. Plans contain visions that are less interested in forecasting the future and more focused on creating it by allowing the group to dream about what might be. Plans, and in particular those where an organization is the client, have a mission statement that describes what the group is going to do and why it's going to do it. This statement is concise and outcome-oriented. The ‘plan’ portion of the document includes goals, objectives, and strategies. A goal characterizes a desired future state. Objectives specify how much of what will be accomplished by when, whereas strategies describe how or who is going to get things done. The strategies should take into account existing barriers and resources and fit within the overall vision, mission, and objectives of the initiative.  

How much does it cost? 

Costs depend on the scale and scope of the process needed to achieve the goals of the client community or organization. The more staff capacity and time allocated to a project, the greater the cost of the planning effort.

How long does it take? 

The timeline on a project is dependent on the process agreed upon by the client organization or community and CEDIK facilitators.   

How do I get started? 

To get started contact CEDIK to discuss your project. CEDIK will provide a free consultation to determine the desired scale, scope and anticipated outcomes of the planning process with the client organization or community. CEDIK will provide an outline of the process, anticipated deliverables and final cost estimate. After the client reviews we can revisit the quote if updates or revisions are needed. Once an agreement is reached a contract is established, setting the timeline in motion. Contact Shane Barton to get started.