The Strategic Planning Design Sprint
This full day sprint is for nonprofit leadership teams and Boards who are ready to stop agonizing over months-long planning cycles and move from alignment to action. We use Human-Centered Design and Design Sprint methodologies to force teams out of the weeds, eliminate analysis paralysis, and co-design your organization’s next era.
at a Glance
| Duration: | Full Day (8 Hours) |
| Best for: | Nonprofit leadership team and Boards |
| Core Benefits: | Organizational Alignment, Rapid Strategic Prototyping, and Team Capacity Building |
Engagement Overview
Traditional strategic planning isn’t for everyone. It takes months, drains morale, and usually ends up sitting on a shelf, untouched. Instead of writing your strategy for you, Olio facilitates the environment for your team to connect and co-create.
required pre-work
To ensure the one-day sprint is effective, we lay the foundation first. We work with you behind the scenes to develop a Stakeholder Insight Report and Sprint Pre-Read to interpret external data and prime your team for an ambitious day of work.
The Sprint Experience
a high-energy session for your team to design, debate, and decide your organization’s future, together.
Step 1: Understand
We start by checking assumptions and grounding in community needs to critically evaluate the relevance and authenticity of your organization's mission, vision, and values.
Step 2: Ideate
With the baseline established, we break out of conventional thinking. The team engages in design thinking exercises to imagine and define the big bets the organization should take.
Step 4: Decide
A strategic plan is only as strong as what you choose not to do. We build alignment by forcing the room to make the hard choices and confidently select the final strategic pillars.
Step 5: Write
Unlike traditional workshops that end with photos of whiteboards, this sprint ends with collaborative drafting. The team comes together to actively translate the day's decisions into the final, or nearly final, language for your strategic plan directly in the room.
Step 3: Target
A strategy needs specific horizons to be actionable. We collaboratively filter your big bets into clearly defined 3-year goals and overarching strategies.
Outcomes & Deliverables
Following the sprint, Olio synthesizes the day's outputs into an executive-ready package:
The Strategic Plan: A clear, concise, and actionable document outlining your Mission, Vision, Values, Strategic Pillars, 3-Year Goals, and Key Strategies.
Strategic Context: A supplemental brief providing context and justification detailing how and why key decisions were made during the sprint.