You’ve just passed the gavel to that board chair you’ve been dreaming of—a fresh injection of vision, energy, and promising connections to every important industry in your community. What will you do with this opportunity? It’s time for a fresh strategic plan. 

But before you sign the check, know this: “60-90% of strategic plans never fully launch,” according to Harvard Business Review. This is a sobering figure for those who hope that maybe this next plan will get it right. The odds are low, because according to a recent survey by Cascade, only 10% of organizations accomplish more than two-thirds of their strategy objectives. So, is there something wrong with strategic planning? 

After decades of helping chambers of commerce and economic development organizations, NCDS has witnessed first-hand why even the best-conceived strategic plans can fail to see the light of day. 

Strategic Planning: Neither Strategy nor Planning

In practice, strategic planning rarely delivers on its name. It combines strategy and planning in a way that does deliver value—but its implementation is difficult at best, and impossible at worst. 

Our perspective is that your organization has four distinct pillars that each require careful, independent consideration: your vision, mission, strategy, and plan. Vision and mission are your “true north,” giving you and your team a constant navigational aid. Strategy and plan are two very specific and important “things” that strategic planning often waters down as it attempts to combine them: 

• Strategy: how you’ll pursue your mission, consciously prioritizing which objectives should be pursued over a myriad of others. Your organization cannot do everything. 
• Plan: the step-by-step tactics, or how you deploy dollars, staff, volunteers, and other resources in pursuit of the strategy. Plans may change while strategy stays the same.

Your organization likely has a strategic plan in place, so it’s worth asking: does it clearly account for mission and vision, and does it clearly define the strategy and plan? 

The Two Types of Strategic Plans 

We still support and believe in the importance of strategic planning and the consultants who perform it. In fact, your organization needs at least a version of one and your board will make sure of it! Yet, when you go looking for help, you may feel stuck with only two choices:

1. Big-Name Consultants (Think “Data & Trends”)

Over several months, a big-name consultancy will travel onsite a few times, conduct some important conversations, and return to their offices to draw up your community’s ideal future. They do so by leveraging off-the-shelf data on macroeconomics, demographics, industry trends, market trends, location quotients, comparable markets, and to a limited extent, your community’s business climate and conditions. 

• Pros: recommendations can be very insightful based on their data and long-established frameworks and cast an ideal end state for your community.  And your leaders will be impressed by polished reports and presentations.
• Cons: recommendations are often too general and/or too expensive to act on, and do not account for your community’s unique dynamics. These often nail the “what” but leave out an achievable “how.” And they rarely provide a realistic budget or timeline of what it will take to implement them.

These consultancies will typically charge $100,000 at a minimum, and up to $250,000+ for a professional, data-driven report of around 150 pages.

2. Independent Consultants (Think “Intuition & Engagement”)

Over a few weeks or maybe even an all-day retreat, an independent consultant (often a former Chamber/EDO professional) will facilitate focus groups, roundtables, and/or sticky-note sessions to generate a vision or invigorate your organization with process improvement and Key Performance Indicators. They do so with a mix of legitimate, though limited, engagement mixed with tried and true “best practices” that your peers in other communities are doing.

• Pros: input from community leaders is valuable and contributes to a sharper focus on how to achieve organizational goals; enthusiasm and engagement spikes.
• Cons: tends to focus inward on the organization, detailing operations-focused improvements to either one-size-fits all plans or the familiar membership, finance, communications, and events objectives.

These independent consultants typically charge $10,000+, commensurate to their reputation, and produce a modest, professional strategic plan. 

Both options generate new enthusiasm, and both tend to fizzle out, as Cascade and Harvard Business Review predict. Big-name consultants focus too much on data without acknowledging the unique dynamics you must actually navigate to implement a plan. Independent consultants tend to repackage organization-focused strategies with little input and buy-in from the community.

It's rare that either approach alone would help you bridge the gap between organization and community.

The Alternative: A Way Forward that Connects Your Organization to Your Community

Even the best data and new ideas will struggle to navigate the challenges of economic development that exist behind closed doors. True strategic planning must do the hard work of carefully, confidentially, and objectively exploring your community, leadership, stakeholders, and unique dynamics. Most of all, it must use the insights discovered to say, “this is what we will do next, this is who will do it, this is why, and this is how.”

NCDS recently launched an affordable, highly effective product to achieve this end. For some, it can replace strategic planning altogether; for others, it connects the theoretical ideas in your strategic plan with the realities of your community to help prioritize and execute. 

It’s called the Roadmap to Relevance & Revenue and it has been designed to identify two or three community priorities that you should pursue, with practical recommendations and timelines for achieving them. You’ll also get our fundraising expertise to secure whatever new resources may be needed for implementation. It’s affordable, user-friendly for you and your staff, and volunteer leaders and stakeholders love it. We do a limited number each year, and it only takes eight weeks to complete it

In the last few months, we’ve created a handful of Roadmaps in the Southeast and Midwest. If you’d like to learn more and hear about the excitement in those communities, get a free consultation today. 

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