Discover
Prepare
Confirmed scope, the project team, and working norms — and, critically, the specific decisions leadership needed the plan to resolve. Naming those up front kept the process from drifting into a general discussion about values.
Strategic Planning
A Multi-Program Nonprofit Rebuilds Around Four Priorities.
Seven programs, a leadership team pulling in different directions, and no shared basis for saying no. Ten weeks later, four strategic priorities and a roadmap the board could hold leadership to.
Representative Engagement
This is a representative engagement — an illustrative profile showing how this CAMPBELL engagement works, what it produces, and the kind of change it creates. It is composed to demonstrate our methodology and does not describe a specific client or report a specific organization’s results.
The Situation
What Was Actually Happening.
The organization had grown steadily for a decade, mostly by accepting funding that was offered rather than by choosing a direction. Seven programs had accumulated. Each had a champion, a funder, and a reason to exist.
The strain showed in the leadership team. Budget conversations ran long and ended unresolved. New opportunities were evaluated on whether the organization could technically deliver them, which it usually could, rather than on whether it should. The board and the executive team, asked separately, named different top priorities.
The previous strategic plan had been approved four years earlier. Nobody on the current leadership team had opened it.
The CAMPBELL Organizational Performance Diagnostic™Dimensions where this engagement found the problem
Strategy & DirectionGovernance & DecisionsPeople & CapacityPrograms / ServicesOperations & ProcessPerformance & DataSustainability & Scale
Our Approach
How We Worked It.
Every CAMPBELL engagement is delivered through the CAMPBELL 6D Method™ — Discover, Define, Design, Deliver, Demonstrate, Drive. Each step below is tagged with the phase it belongs to.
Discover
Discover
Reviewed financials, program data, and prior plans. Conducted stakeholder interviews across the board, leadership, frontline staff, and partner organizations. Ran a current-state analysis and a competitor scan.
Define
Synthesize
Built the strategic positioning narrative, aligned mission and vision, and completed a SWOT, a panoramic PESTLE, and a program gap analysis. The gap analysis was the turning point: it showed two programs serving a population three other agencies already served well.
Define
Prioritize
Facilitated a North Star workshop with the board and executive team, and converted the result into four strategic priorities with SMART goals attached to each.
Design
Mobilize
Set KPIs, built a three-year implementation roadmap with named owners and milestones, aligned revenue and funder strategy to the priorities, and produced a board and leadership action list.
Deliver
Launch
Delivered the full package, an executive summary, and a board-ready presentation, plus the operating cadence to keep the plan in active use.
The CAMPBELL Model™Where this engagement sat in our problem-solving framework
ClarifyAssessMapPrioritizeBuildExecuteLinkLearn
Strategic planning engagements run the full front half of the CAMPBELL Model™ — moving an organization from ambiguity through assessment and mapping to a prioritized set of choices, then building the roadmap that links those choices to measurable results.
Deliverables
What the Organization Received.
- Current-state analysis and stakeholder findings
- Strategic positioning narrative and mission/vision alignment
- Program gap analysis, SWOT, and panoramic PESTLE
- Four strategic priorities with SMART goals
- KPI alignment summary and success measures
- Three-year implementation roadmap with owners and milestones
- Revenue and funder alignment
- Board and leadership action list
- Strategic plan, executive summary, and board presentation
The Outcome
What Changed.
Illustrative of the change this engagement is designed to produce.
From seven programs to four priorities
Leadership agreed to sunset one program and transfer another to a better-positioned partner, freeing capacity that had been spread thin across all seven.
A shared basis for saying no
New opportunities began being evaluated against the four priorities. Two funding opportunities were deliberately declined in the first year — the first time the organization had turned down money on strategic grounds.
Board and staff describing the same direction
The plan's one-page summary went into board packets, staff onboarding, and grant applications, so the same four priorities were repeated everywhere.
Quarterly review that actually happens
Each priority had a named owner reporting monthly to leadership and quarterly to the board, which made stalled work visible early enough to act on.
Free Consultation
Does this sound like your organization?
If you recognised your own situation here, let’s talk about it. A consultation is free, carries no obligation, and starts where every CAMPBELL engagement starts — with finding out what is actually wrong.