Strategic Planning

Strategic planning offers vital benefits for nonprofit organizations by providing a clear roadmap to achieve their mission while adapting to changing environments. It helps organizations set measurable goals, allocate resources effectively, and align programming with community needs and values. Strategic planning enables arts and culture organizations, like the Calgary Arab Arts & Culture Society to proactively identify opportunities for growth, innovation, and impact, rather than singularly reacting to external pressures or shifting priorities.

As a social worker, I enjoy the creativity of group facilitation. As a business person with experience in branding and communications, it’s my pleasure to discover the creativity that comes with facilitating strategic planning with nonprofits like the Calgary Arab Arts & Culture Society.

The work focused on a one-day retreat with the entire board of directors and the executive director. We used qualitative data collected via a pre-retreat survey and combined it collaboratively with the discussion during the in-person retreat. Participants were able to identify governance, fundraising, communications, and programming strategies and collectively ranked tasks in order of preference to identify timelines for completion. I then combined all information into a report along with sample editable terms of reference for each committee the board identified as important to their goals. The report itemized the work required to achieve the goals identified during this process.