Engaging Stakeholders in Strategic Planning

Engaging Stakeholders in Strategic Planning is a practical toolkit designed to help nonprofits and NGOs meaningfully involve stakeholders in the development of their strategic plans. It emphasizes that staff, board members, clients and beneficiaries, funders, partners, and community members bring different perspectives that can help organizations identify blind spots, strengthen decisions, and build ownership of the resulting strategy.

The toolkit provides a simple framework built around three questions: Who and Why, How, and When. Organizations are guided to identify which stakeholder groups need to be engaged, clarify what they want to learn or achieve through each engagement, select appropriate methods such as interviews, surveys, focus groups, and meetings, and determine when engagement should happen during the planning process. It also includes a ready-to-use Stakeholder-Engagement Plan Template with fields for stakeholders, objectives, messaging, format, owner, and timing.

A particularly useful feature for NGOs is its emphasis on inclusive and intentional engagement—seeking diverse perspectives, being clear about decision-making roles, avoiding tokenistic or purely transactional consultation, and closing the feedback loop by communicating how stakeholder input influenced the final strategy.