Facilitated Strategic Planning

The goal of our comprehensive facilitation-training is to assist groups, organizations, and individuals in developing a results-oriented action plan through which clients identify concrete steps necessary to achieve their mission. SAI consultants are highly skilled at using this model.

SAI uses the Social Reconnaissance model as its primary facilitation and planning tool. This is a collaborative process between SAI, the client’s board, and staff. At its heart is a community assessment approach designed to create grassroots involvement and ownership of the community assessment and change process by engaging community members in a results-oriented process. Community stakeholders are brought together in a tightly timed series of community meetings and focus groups, and surveys are completed to identify resources, share information, and broaden engagement in a community-wide coalition.

The approach has three components: identifying problems; identifying barriers to solving problems and identifying solutions to barriers; and (in the future) resource development and deployment. Key processes include structured interviews with key stakeholders; information gathering from staff and board; data collection and analysis; skill mapping to assess strengths, weaknesses, and gaps in staff and board capacity; environmental scan to assess allies and competitors in an organization’s mission; internal and external organizational threats; and thorough exploration of funding resources and capacity to implement the plan.

Each component of the community assessment creates greater grassroots involvement in the coalition through comprehensive data collection, information sharing, collaborative planning, outreach, and feedback to the community. With increased community ownership and expansion of the coalition, the community assessment process yields significant concrete results. SAI consultants are highly skilled and experience at using this model to facilitate comprehensive strategic planning. Over the past few years, SAI has successfully used this facilitation process with thousands of people with documented results. The model has been tailored for use on issues such as methamphetamine, homeland security, school violence, and educational reform.