Stress-Free Strategic Planning: Achieving Organizational Alignment without Annoyance

November 6, 2025

9:00 am - 10:00 am | Peachtree Ballroom, 8th Floor

Let’s get real about the practical things your nonprofit needs to do to create strategic plans that will amplify your mission and elevate your performance. How do we create a practical road map for your future without making you want to tear your hair out from working with your board, staff, stakeholders, donors, and the dreaded Strategic Planning Consultant?  

We’ll share checklists, pitfalls, smart moves, and lessons learned from designing and facilitating more than 130 nonprofit strategic plans, with the goal of helping you ace your first strategic plan or vastly improve your next one. 

After this session, you’ll:

• Feel more confident about how to develop great stakeholder research questions
• Understand when to partner with a consultant (or not!)
• Be able to leverage the planning process to reshape your board
• Craft compelling identity statements
• Battle the nefarious forces of Writing Enormously Overstuffed Strategic Plans.

And we’ll talk about how to live with your new plan in a way that keeps it real, usable, and flexible, especially in constantly changing environments like ours.  So bring all your questions and your I-was-involved-in-a-strategic-plan-once-and-it-was-excruciating emotional baggage, and we’ll set you on a path to enjoying a successful process in the future.