“By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail.”
On the surface, that old adage may sound like a clever play on words. But in today’s unforgiving marketplace, preparation represents both a critical challenge and an indispensable opportunity for any organization.
Successful preparation, also known as strategic planning, involves methodically mapping your future, and it lies at the core of any successful organization.
Strategic planning is a deliberative effort to produce fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide who you are as an organization, what you do, and why you do it. Planning helps you set priorities and allocate the resources you need to meet short-term objectives and long-term goals in a timely, targeted manner, and with results you can measure.
Planning also provides a framework for analyzing and quickly adapting to future challenges. In other words, strategic planning is a roadmap you create to advance your mission. You do that by asking three key questions:
- Where are you?
- Where do you want to be?
- How do you get there?
At Dogwood Philanthropy Group, we guide you along each step of the strategic planning process. We help you evaluate the environment and marketplace in which you work. We work with you to analyze your past successes and your current and future challenges. We guide you in refining your mission and vision and outlining your short-term and future goals. We conduct interviews with stakeholders, evaluate priorities, hold a board retreat, and develop an action plan to help you reach your goals. And throughout the entire process, we work closely with you and your planning committee, providing support and guidance each step of the way.
Our goal is to help you prepare your organization for long-term success – and to help you avoid the failure that awaits organizations that do not invest in preparing for the future.