BEST PRACTICE: STRATEGIC PLANNING
FOR COMMUNITY ASSOCIATIONS
No matter how well things are going, you can’t just sit back and hope the situation will
continue, and when things are not going well, you need to make sure they get better. Both
situations require strategic planning. It’s an essential, ongoing feature of good management.
History
Accomplishments
Failures
Current Status
Internal
External
Desired Status
Strategy
Review and amend
Strategic planning definition and philosophy Applying strategies in community associations
Strategic planning is about projecting where your association Drawing up a strategic plan involves:
expects to be in five, 10 or 15 years – and how your association • • recruiting core leadership and team members including
will get there. It is a systematic process of planning, scenario
representatives from all stakeholder groups
• • training, motivating and empowering the group to see how
setting, forecasting, and identifying the impact of occurrences
before they happen.
they will be adding value to the community
• • setting objectives, timelines, key roles and success indicators
• • understanding the history of the association, how it came
It involves a number of phases of thinking and application
into being and why it was established
that identify the current status of the association – including
• • imagining and understanding multiple visions of the future,
its mission, vision for the future, operating values, needs and
by setting possible scenarios including size, financial position,
goals – and where it is going.
market expectations and the impact that the political,
environmental, social and technological environment will
Benefits of the long-range plan
have on the community
• • identifying current opportunities and likely changes
• • identifying things that the community does well, and what it
Some of the benefits of strategic or long-range planning are
does badly, and measuring these against the core values of
that they:
• • stimulate thinking to optimise the use of the association’s
the community
• • describing a picture of the vision of the future using
resources
• • ensure that responsibility and work schedules are assigned
strengths and opportunities, and integrating the threats and
weaknesses
to individuals or teams that are best equipped to fulfil that
• • describing the plan to all association members, at each
role
• • ensure coordination and unification of effort
phase of the development of the plan, to solicit comments
• • facilitate better control and evaluation of the association’s
to fill gaps where critical areas may have been missed
• • restating the
activities and the association’s mandate, thereby ensuring
popularised
plan,
seeking broad-based
consensus for it, and soliciting more feedback and
accountability
• • create awareness of obstacles that may occur well in
involvement
advance so that they can be overcome through sound • • developing operating plans, budgets and schedules
decision making • • prioritising goals and allocating and planning resource
• • identify opportunities
utilisation
• • monitoring accomplishments, and soliciting and reaffirming
• • ensure that creative thinking is used to solve potential
consensus on remaining items
problems.
• • restarting the vision-making process with a new group of
interested members.
61