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Step Four: Document Your Strategic Plan

At this point your collaboration had identified a common mission and vision, evaluated and prioritized the needs within your community, and chosen those needs that you will address in the immediate future. Now that you have established the building blocks of your strategic plan, it is time to create a document that you can share with community members and use as a guide to your team’s goals, activities and timelines.

Writing Your Plan

Often, one member or a small group from the collaboration will write a draft of the document and submit it for review to the larger collaborative team. It will be important to address any concerns that come up from that review; revisions should be made to address major concerns.In addition, if conflict develops as a result of revision or review, it will be invaluable to address it at that point in time. Do not try to skim over conflict to manage time; serious conflict or bad feelings about the final product could harm the effectiveness of your strategic plan.

While there are different ways to draft a strategic plan, you may want to consider the following general format. Your collaboration may need to adapt existing sections or include supplementary ones for your specific strategic plan.

  • Executive Summary: This serves as an overview of your entire strategic plan. This is written so that an outsider can grasp your mission, the issues at hand, your plans and the time frame of the projects. It is often used as a way to quickly share your plans with funders or important community members who may not have time to read through your entire plan.
  • Mission/Vision Statement: The mission/vision statement of your collaboration will give the reader an idea of the history, future and intentions of your work together. It can include any guiding principles your collaboration has set into place and should serve as a reminder of the intentions with which you address the issues of violence against women with disabilities and Deaf women in your community.
  • Background: This summary--about how and why your collaborative team exists and what you have achieved to date--will serve as an introduction to the methods by which you selected your projects in the strategic planning process. It should include some information about the history of your collaboration and your work on the needs assessment in your community.
  • Information Review: This review should be a summary of the information gathered in the community needs assessment, each collaboration (or relevant community) member’s profile, the projects that have been chosen from the needs, and staff, time and resource availability.
  • Goals and Objectives: This section should include a list and explanation of all the goals and strategies of your strategic plan, as well as the objectives you have put in place to achieve them during this strategic planning process.
  • Resources: This section should focus on the expected financial and staffing needs for each goal and strategy. It can also address from where those resources will come.
  • Implementation Plan: This section should focus on the plans for the implementation of each goal and strategy- who will assume responsibilities for each goal and task and the date by which tasks will be completed. These should also incorporate time for review and revision by the larger collaboration.
  • Monitoring Plans: These plans should include plans for monitoring and evaluating the progress of the strategic planning process. They should also include a timeline and framework for monitoring and evaluating the writing and implementation processes.
  • Appendices: You should include any documents by which your strategic plans are supported or were created. This could include documents from your needs assessment work, timelines for implementation, as well as any monitoring or evaluation tools.

This strategic planning document will serve to address the priorities and direction of your collaboration’s efforts to address issues of violence against women with disabilities and Deaf women in your community. It will most likely be distributed to numerous community members and organizations, as well as to current and potential funders. As such, you should consider making decisions about the format of your document that consider the various forms it may need to take. Your document should fit the culture and preferences of your community and collaboration, and should also be able to be converted to be more appropriate for sending to outsiders.

Reviewing Your Plan

Once the draft has been written, it will be crucial for your collaboration to establish a more formal review of the strategic planning document. The team will need to review the content and writing of the document, incorporate feedback from the various members and, finally, to polish the plan for distribution. This review will serve to strengthen your strategic plans before incorporating them.

As we have said before, depending on your collaboration and the needs in your community, there are various ways to conduct this process.In general, there are two approaches to the reviewing process. First, the collaboration should select a small number of key stakeholders to review your strategic plan. Secondly, you should choose to include the entire collaboration in the review process. Either way, these groups will need to have sufficient time and support to conduct an effective evaluation of the work. Your choice for reviewing will depend on the availability of collaboration members and key stakeholders, the amount of information to review, and the result for which you are looking.

Once you have decided who will review the document, it will be important to think about the questions that will best solicit useful feedback.

Questions to Consider

  • Do you have a clear understanding of each of the sections in the plan?
  • Are the goals and objectives realistic and achievable? Why or why not?
  • Are the strategic goals and objectives helping fill in gaps of services to effectively meet the needs of persons with disabilities and Deaf persons who have experienced violence? Why or why not?
  • Does anything in the plan seem incorrect or biased? Is the language consistent and inclusive?
  • What other strengths and challenges do you see in the plan?
  • What specific suggestions do you have to improve the plan?

Finally, even if you chose to have only a few stakeholders review the plan, it will be important to allow the larger collaborative group a chance to see the final document before further steps are taken to disseminate and implement the plan. Doing so can establish a more secure sense of ownership and can make for a more successful implementation.