To establish your listening and engagement plan, begin by brainstorming a list of all the individuals and groups who care about your nonprofit and who are impacted by your decisions. As you draft your list, consider the following groups.
After creating the full list, prioritize the individuals and groups you plan to engage. Be intentional about the demographics prioritized in your engagement efforts. Choosing your engagement methods will largely depend on the types and number of people and groups identified as well as the level of engagement you hope to achieve. Also, consider the topics or questions you want to address with each group as you select your engagement methods.
Potential Engagement Methods:
- Interviews (in-person, online, or by phone)
- Surveys
- Focus groups
- Identity-based caucusing
- Community meetings or gatherings
- Informal consultation
- Social media interaction
- Invitation to join strategic planning team
Regardless of the engagement methods used, think about how you can reduce barriers to participation. Also, consider how you will acknowledge and honor the time, energy, and insights shared in support of your nonprofit’s strategic planning process. A few examples include offering an incentive or participant honorarium for focus groups, providing transportation and dependent care support for in-person gatherings, scheduling meetings at a time that works best for that group or community, and ensuring closed captioning is enabled in virtual meeting spaces.
Through your engagement plan, provide a way for participants to submit accessibility requests. Be sure to have clarity around what accessibility requests you are able to fulfill within your available resources and who is addressing the requests when received. In addition, if you are engaging individuals and groups whose native or primary language is not English, create a format that allows for participation in their preferred language.
Lastly, consider how you will track all the contacts, collect information, and summarize input in a way that helps with learning and application to the overall strategic planning process. Making meaning of the data collected and converging on what is most important will likely require more than one planning session. If you are leading your own strategic planning process, you may find it useful to work with a professional facilitator to help co-design and facilitate these sessions.