50 People, Five Themes, One Plan | Strategic Planning Exercise
Updated: Oct 1
Let me tell you about the last large strategic planning session I facilitated.
Around 50 people, all day, a regional organization with a mission I genuinely admire, focused on helping young people move forward. Stakeholders from every part of the organization were in that room, which is both the best thing about a session like that and the hardest thing about it.
A Nonprofit Strategic Planning Session That Almost Stalled
We started where I like to start, with what's going well. What's worth celebrating, what people are excited about, what the last few years actually produced. That part went fine.
Then we got into the main exercise, and I could tell I was starting to lose the room a little.
The exercise was a version of the World Café method that we've adapted at PASQ. Before the session, we'd done interviews and surveys inside and outside the organization, and five themes kept coming up. So we set up five tables, split everyone into five groups, and gave each table a scribe. Fifteen minutes per theme.
Look at the plan, look at how the outcomes have actually gone, talk about what you're seeing in the communities you serve, and name three to five priorities that make sense to you. Then the scribe reports out to the room, and everyone rotates.
The first couple of rounds, the energy was low. I've done this enough to expect some of that, but I'll admit I was watching the room closely.
And then somewhere in the third round, there was a spark.
I couldn't quite figure out what it was while it was happening. What I could see is that people had started reading what the group before them had written. A frontline staff member's idea would be sitting there next to something from a board member or the CEO, and nobody could tell which was which, and the next group would pick it up and build on it rather than start over.
When the rotations were done, everyone went back to their original table, took a clean sheet, and turned everything on it into three to five real goals. Those went up on one wall, and everyone voted.
It wasn't until the end of the session that someone put words to it better than I could have. One person stood up and said, honestly, he hadn't understood where we were heading with the whole thing. But by the third or fourth round it started to click, and what he realized was that the point was to give everyone a chance to weigh in on every part of the plan, and to build on what each other had already put up there. What came out of it were real goals that made sense for their organization.
Then he said something I didn't expect. That he was going to use it in his own community work, and in other parts of his life that matter to him.
How to Run a World Café
Time: Plan on about 15 minutes per theme, plus 30 minutes for goal writing and another 20 to 30 for voting and the closing check-in. Five themes runs roughly 2.5-3 hours. People: 20 or more, mixed across board, senior staff, frontline, and volunteers Space: One large room with a wall or table for every theme, far enough apart that groups aren't talking over each other
Supplies
One flip chart or large pad per theme, plus extra clean sheets for the goal round and painter's tape for hanging
Markers in two basic colors, like black and red, alternating so each round's additions are easy to tell apart
Printed copies at each table: that theme's section of the current plan, plus whatever outcome data you have
Sticky dots, or a separate color of marker used only for voting
A timer that everyone can hear
One person who is not participating, watching the clock and calling rotations
Prep ahead of time
Build your themes from real data collection: interviews, surveys, and conversations inside and beyond the organization.
Assign groups in advance, on paper. Do not let people pick, and do not let departments cluster.
Choose a scribe for each table. That person stays put, writes down the ideas, and becomes the table host who reports out.
Pull the real outcome numbers for each theme. Especially the ugly ones.
Decide who's taking photos of every sheet before anything comes off the wall.
Running it
Set up the tables. One for each theme. Each gets a flip chart, the relevant piece of your current plan, and the real numbers, not a summary of them.
Run the first round. Each group names three to five priority areas for its theme. The table host reports out to the full room.
Rotate. Groups move to the next table. They can add three to five new priorities or build on what's already there, tweaking or expanding it. Host reports out again. Hold the 15 minutes even when a group asks for more.
Let the early rounds be slow. They will be. That's not a sign it isn't working.
Go home and write goals. Every group returns to its original table and, on a clean sheet, writes three to five SMART-E goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-Bound, Evaluated) that pull together everything the room added.
Post them together. Put every new sheet on one wall, whiteboard, or table where everyone can see all of them at once.
Vote. Each person gets one dot per sheet and picks the goal that would be most helpful or effective to accomplish in that theme.
Check in before you close. Go around the room. Was anything missed? Are there questions about where this goes next?
Why It Works
I've stopped treating the flat opening rounds as a problem to solve. A group can't build on ideas that aren't there yet. It's when a group walks up to a table that already has a dozen things on it that the work changes. The question stops being what do I think and becomes what do I think about this. Only one of those gives you a plan a room will stand behind afterward.
The rotation also puts everyone's contribution on the same wall with the same weight. In a normal planning conversation, who's talking sorts the ideas before anyone has really considered them. By round three, nobody remembers who wrote what.
And the second pass is where the wall becomes a plan. Writing ideas down isn't planning. Turning them into goals, choosing between them, and leaving those choices up where everyone can see them is what makes it their plan rather than something handed to them.
Understanding Outcomes
Read the votes out loud before you close. If one goal in a theme pulls most of the dots, the room has made a call. If they're spread evenly, nobody really chose yet, and that's worth naming. And if a goal gets a lot of support that nobody discussed much, pay attention. That's usually something the organization already knows and has never said out loud in a group that size.
That's how you build consensus in a nonprofit. And I think it's also, maybe more importantly, how a group of people finds common ground and a way forward when the next steps aren't obvious to anybody.
Heading into planning season? I'm doing 8 free Planning Readiness Reviews this fall. Forty-five minutes on where your organization actually stands before you commit to a process, and you walk away with a written, scored one-pager you can put in front of your board. Yours either way, whether or not we ever work together.
