Related Strategy Templates
Dive into our curated selection of free templates for strategic planning. Whether you’re crafting your business model, conducting market analysis, or mapping customer journeys, these templates can help your business refine its strategic approach to meet all its goals.
- Free Microsoft Word Action Plan Templates
Browse our collection of action plan templates for Microsoft Word for resources to help you simplify project coordination, improve task oversight, and reach your objectives with ease. - Free PowerPoint Action Plan Templates
Check out our selection of free action plan templates for PowerPoint for powerful tools to help you streamline project execution and enhance task supervision. - Free Gap Analysis Templates
See our assortment of gap analysis templates, designed to help you pinpoint the differences between your company's present conditions and its target goals, allowing you to identify areas for strategic improvement. - Free Scenario Analysis Templates
Use our scenario analysis templates to examine any future event, fostering informed strategic choices and effective risk management. - Free Scenario Planning Templates
Try our scenario planning templates to equip your team with the tools to plan for any future scenario. - Free SWOT Analysis Templates
These SWOT analysis templates can help you and your team identify their strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats so they can make informed strategic decisions. - Free Goal Setting and Goal Tracking Templates
Use our goal setting and goal tracking templates to help you clearly define your objectives and strategically monitor progress towards achieving them. - Free Project Roadmap Templates
Take a peek at these project roadmap templates when you need to visualize the timeline, key milestones, and progress of projects, facilitating clear communication and strategic planning. - Free Balanced Scorecard Templates
Try one of these balanced scorecard templates for help measuring and managing performance across key areas, aligning daily activities with your strategic objectives and vision. - Free Risk Management Plan Templates
Use our risk management plan templates to help your organization identify, assess, and develop a strategy to mitigate potential risks, ensuring smoother project execution and strategic goal achievement. - Free Social Media Marketing Plan Templates
These social media marketing plan templates can help businesses strategize their social media presence, streamline content creation, and measure the effectiveness of their campaigns to maximize online engagement and reach. - Free Action Plan Templates
Once you develop your strategy, download one of these action plan templates to execute on your plan and achieve your business goals.
What Is Strategic Planning?
Strategic planning is an organization’s process for defining strategy to accomplish their goals. Strategic planning might be done on a large scale, such as planning for business growth over several years, or on a small scale, such as developing strategy for a single department.
Strategy is distinct from planning. Whereas strategy looks at why certain steps should be taken, a plan outlines how to enact those steps. Strategic planning marries these two concepts in order to provide a thoughtful, deliberate approach to reaching objectives based on an in-depth analysis of both internal and external factors. Learn more about how to do this in our guide to writing strategic plans or our article on the strategic planning process.
A strategic plan often covers multiple years and addresses both short-term and long-term goals. It provides a way of tracking progress and measuring success, but it’s not fixed in stone. Revisit and adjust a strategic plan periodically based on the evolving vision, objectives, needs, and resources of a business or institution.
Depending on the scope of your plan, you might be working with a team of multiple stakeholders during the strategic planning process. To keep the process running smoothly, make roles and responsibilities clear. Different parties might be responsible for providing data, reviewing the plan, or authorizing strategic decisions. As you prepare for planning, make sure all participants understand what’s involved in the process and have received any relevant information prior to meeting.
Many strategic planning frameworks are available to help set you and your team up for success. See this guide to strategic planning models to learn more.
Benefits of Strategic Planning
Strategic planning is beneficial to teams and organizations for several reasons: They help align smaller goals and initiatives with the larger vision of the company, offer clarity on how to address certain challenges, and more.
These are some of the top benefits of strategic planning:
- Better Alignment: The goal of strategic planning is to align the goals of a department or project with larger business objectives, leading to a cohesive and unified direction for the entire organization.
- Improved Communication: Strategic planning requires clear communication between team members, stakeholders, or clients, resulting in enhanced collaboration across all levels of the organization.
- Clearer Vision: By clearly defining the vision and mission of an organization, strategic planning helps everyone understand the organization's core values and objectives.
- Increased Adaptability: Strategic planning provides clarity on how to deal with internal or environmental changes, helping the organization adapt quickly to new challenges and opportunities.
Parts of a Strategic Plan
Strategic planning allows teams to identify gaps between their current and desired future states, and outlines how to close those gaps. To achieve this, strategic plans should include several key elements, such as a background statement, mission statement, and executive summary.
Here are the parts that make up most successful strategic plans:
- Introductory Statement: Briefly describe why the strategic plan was developed, what time period it covers, and list the authors of the plan.
- Background Statement: Provide information about the organization, such as its history, management structure, and supporting partners or agencies. Alternatively, use this section as a brief business statement — an elevator pitch — to concisely describe your business.
- Organizational Structure: If relevant, describe how your business or organization operates and is structured, from the governing board to staffing.
- Vision: Briefly describe what your company wants to achieve or become. This is one of the primary organizational tenets to consider, along with values and mission.
- Values: Outline the principles that your organization stands for and abides by. Many businesses create core value statements to guide company culture.
- Mission Statement: Describe the purpose of a business or organization. This is distinct from a vision statement because it is not a projected goal for the future.
- Problem Statement: Outline key or discrete issues that need to be addressed, if applicable.
- SWOT Analysis: Provide context for your strategy by examining the strengths and weaknesses within an organization, as well as external opportunities and threats. Download one of these free SWOT analysis templates to get started.
- Goals: Include long-term and short-term goals when applicable. Objectives should be measurable and broken down into actionable steps. The action plan for each goal should specify who is responsible for implementing the strategy, a timeline for starting and ending the action, and how the outcome will be evaluated.
- Evaluation: Spell out your chosen methods for evaluating your strategic plan. This might include tracking key performance indicators (KPIs) and documenting the progress of action steps on an ongoing basis. Learn more in this all-inclusive guide to KPI business dashboards.
- Executive Summary: In this final section, help employees, investors, or other readers quickly understand your plan with a quick summary. For more guidance, see these executive summary templates.
