The strategic planning process – what to do and why?
Strategic planning is a big undertaking, but to provide a clearer picture we have stepped through the process for you.
Before going through the steps, it is important to understand the big picture of where your club sits as an organisation. It is recommended that you first read and review the Victorian Water Safety Strategy, as well as Life Saving Victoria’s Strategic Plan to ensure that your club planning will be in alignment.
Diagram 1: A visual representation of the strategic planning processWhy strategic resources? Life Saving Victoria, through the Council of Lifesaving Clubs identified the need to provide clubs with more support and resources to assist them with the Strategic Planning process. Strategic Planning is becoming of vital importance to community organisations and without the right expertise it can be a daunting task to undertake. By creating a suite of resources and templates, we aim to help guide clubs through the process.
1. Define your club’s mission and vision
A club’s mission and vision are central to everything it does, it directs strategy, and provides purpose and goals. If it’s not already, it needs to be defined before progressing with any planning.
Mission, vision and values guide
2. Define your clubs’ values
As with the mission and vision, values set standards, give members purpose, and can attract and retain the right people to your club.
Mission, vision and values guide
3. Complete the self-assessment
As a committee go through and evaluate the club’s current performance and capabilities. The self-assessment is broken up into the 7 key topics below.
How to complete the self-assessment
- Strategy
- Corporate Governance
- Facility and Asset Management
- Member and Market Focus
- Financial Sustainability
- People and Capability
- Information and Knowledge Management
Once you have finished your self-assessment, the next steps including completing your gap analysis and development plans.
Summarising and acting on your results
We also have a financial ratio tool which you may choose to use. This can help to further evaluate areas where your club might be performing well, or areas for concern.
4. Complete the gap analysis
Once you have completed the self-assessment, fill out the gap analysis form to identify where your gaps are. The form attached has some examples included to show you how it works.
5. Create a development plan
Based off the results of the self-assessment and gap analysis, identify the areas of priority, and put together actions to address these.
6. Write a strategic plan on a page
Using the template provided, put together the overview of your club’s strategy. This will include your mission and vision, goals, and outcomes.
Strategic plan on a page template
7. Develop a full strategic plan
The most important step in the process is developing the actual strategic plan. By completing the previous steps you should now have all of the information in place to feed into this, with your mission, vision, values, and priorities identified through the self-assessment and gap analysis.
*We are currently working to develop further templates and guides to assist in compiling your strategic plan
8. Ongoing review and assessment
Setup regular reviews of your strategic plan, this could be annually and can include conducting the self-assessment on a regular basis.