Take The First Step Toward Creating A Spectacular Strategic Plan
I get it. You’ve already got a lot on your plate. You don’t have time to create a detailed Strategic Plan for your community. So you write up a couple of goals and bullet points into an email, send it off to your boss, receive approval, and that’s what you’ll base your efforts on for the next year.
It’s an option, but how is that going for you?
Putting effort into the Strategic Plan can show leadership how truly beneficial the community is to the brand. A well-thought-out Strategic Plan can create alliances and opportunities within your company. It also benefits in other ways:
Serves as your guiding light throughout the year. If a situation comes up regarding the community, and you don’t know which step to take, open your Plan and remind yourself of what you’ve committed to.
An easy-to-reference document that can be shared with other departments when they are wondering what you’re working on and why they should care about the Community.
Similar to the bullet point above, it’s also easily shared with any vendors that you’ve signed on to help with Community work. It will bring them up-to-speed quickly on your efforts. (In my past experiences with clients, being able to review the Strategic Plan early on always allowed for a quicker start to the project and less confusion about priorities as the project went on.)
Benefits in the event of employee turnover and being able to onboard new employees to the Community team.
As your community matures, keeping record of all of the annual Strategic Plans creates a track record where you can easily monitor the progress of the Community over the years (in conjunction with end-of-year reports).
I want to make it easier on you to create a Strategic Plan, and sometimes the hardest part is just setting up the Plan itself. That’s why I’m providing a FREE Strategic Plan template to anyone who signs up for my mailing list.
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According to The Community Roundtable’s State of Community Management 2021 Report, “…37% of all communities reported having an Advanced Strategy; one that is approved, operational, and measurable.” Even though that’s an increase from 2020, it would be still be great to see that number increased even more. Will you be one of them?