Strategy begins by setting goals, and then mapping out the best way to get you to those goals. Without a strong understanding of where you are Point A and a clear and, dare we say, realistic vision for where you want to go, you cannot figure out how to get there — which will have you driving in metaphoric marketing circles, not ever really going anywhere.
Rather than investing in one-off tactics, having a strategic roadmap ensures that all your efforts work together to accomplish a purpose or achieve a goal. Focusing on your audiences rather than the tactics ensures your marketing includes multiple touch points with an audience and moves them through a process of awareness, cultivation and engagement.
Which do you think is more effective? In marketing, there is always more you can be doing — more ads to run, more pieces to create, more places for your brand to show up and more dollars to be spent. Especially in a cluttered digital world, prioritizing your efforts keeps marketing cost-effective and keeps you focused on the efforts that will drive results. Having a strong strategy in place gives you a baseline to check these real-time KPIs against.
The bottom line: tactics take time and money. While strategy often requires an upfront investment, it saves you money in the long-term and helps you be the best steward of your resources and your mission as possible. Everything we do, whether mapping out a website or developing a multi-year marketing plan, begins with strategy.
Every day there are new technologies, new opportunities, and new tactics for companies to employ in order to engage with their customers. But in this increasingly complex world, it can be easy to lose your way. To use the old adage, it can be hard for organizations to see the forest for the trees.
Take your business plan for example: Did you just come up with an idea and set it into motion, repeatedly adding to it every time you saw a new opportunity to diversify or to engage with new customers? Instead, you took the time to research the marketplace, to analyze your competitors and identify who your customers are and what they wanted. But how much solid data actually went into establishing that strategy, and how closely is it being followed? How much knowledge of the nuances of different channels and technologies went into its development?
Typically marketing strategies exist in the realm of the theoretical, designed to justify the work you had planned to do rather than guide it. They get lost along the way and are only referred to fleetingly by those who are operating on the frontlines. But for a strategy to be truly effective, it has to be put into action.
It has to get its hands dirty, informing each and every marketing decision that is made. Whether you partner with an outside agency or want to bring it to the forefront of your own marketing department, there are a few key things that you need to consider if you want to make strategy central to everything you do.
Who is your audience? This clear strategic aspiration linked the work of many leaders, across time and divisions, making growth not solely dependent on any particular individual. Similarly, Columbia and Harvard are planning extensive expansions of their campuses that will require decades and billions to realize — but are necessary for them to thrive in the years ahead.
Because nonprofit organizations are immensely complex organisms and need to be highly and carefully managed, significant thought and attention must be given — day in and day out — to making certain that each program and each activity bespeaks, at least incipiently, the longer-term goal.
By thinking continuously about opportunities, vulnerabilities, changes in the environment and the like, strategically oriented institutions can adapt more thoughtfully to changing circumstances, make better tactical decisions and achieve greater levels of sustained performance.
There are a number of reasons why continuous and informed strategic thinking can be beneficial to an organization:. From time to time, an organization may make a concentrated effort to summarize its strategic thinking and undertake strategic planning, which will typically involve individuals throughout an organization who are formally charged with thinking systematically about its direction over the following five to ten years. The purpose of strategic planning is to chart a multiyear road map — a strategic plan — that will provide a framework for action, but not a detailed blueprint.
But process is as important as the resultant planning document — without the right process, the document will be useless. Strategic planning is time-consuming and demanding for executive leadership, staff and volunteers, and there are better and worse times to undertake it. But it is likely to benefit organizations that are stable, but face difficult and complex choices of future direction in the context of a rapidly and continuously changing environment.
The planning process should be tailored to the culture, dynamics and personality of the organization. Successful strategy sometimes seems — and is — extremely difficult to achieve, for a number of reasons:. Strategic planning in the nonprofit sector differs significantly from that in the private sector in focus, purpose and design.
Nonprofit organizations are, by definition, mission-driven, and so central to every nonprofit is its mission statement, the encapsulation of what it seeks to accomplish, whom it serves and how it does so. It may or may not actively involve many individuals within the firm, but rarely anyone from outside; it will be more concerned with numbers than ideas; and it will be typically updated or thrown out within six months to a year. It is usually more of a business plan than a strategic plan — though the wise and profitable firm is continuously thinking strategically and long-term.
Successful business people who sit on nonprofit boards sometimes have difficulty understanding why nonprofit strategy is inherently more participatory, long-winded and complex than what they are used to in their day jobs.
The wise nonprofit thinks strategically, understanding that the realization of its mission is dependent upon a longer view that is periodically reassessed and reset, informed by a set of clear three- to five-year goals and objectives and embodied in a formal plan that serves as a road-map for everything the organization is doing.
What Strategic Thinking Is All About At its simplest level, strategic thinking is continuing, thoughtful attention by its leadership to the longerterm future of an organization. New York University decided in the s that it wished to become the equal of an Ivy The best strategic thinking focuses on a big, audacious, long-term goal and sustains a long-term commitment to realize it. A robust strategy provides the ideas and the words to build commitment, strengthen morale, improve communications and gain supporters — and, fundamentally, build organizational confidence.
Good strategic thinking can help an organization dispel myths it may have about itself and allow it to confront, directly and honestly, what it does well and where it is not up to speed; what its true strengths are and where it needs improvement. Most organizations have unrealized potential in both people and context: leaders, staff and volunteers are energized by bold organizational ambitions and will stretch to help gain them; reframing of mission or vision often excites the world-weary board member or discouraged executive; looking analytically at key trends, evolving competition and new opportunities helps unlock unseen institutional possibilities and generate new organizational energy.
While no institution is safe from a competitor down the block or on the other side of the world — particularly as the cost of communications continues to fall, unmet needs for service increase and ambitions for organizational success grow — vigorous strategic thinking permits institutions to understand the character and nature of their competition and deal with it proactively and effectively. Successful fundraising depends upon clear strategy.
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