Strategic planning and the board

Strategic planning is a method used by a trustee board to help ensure the charity maintains a clear sense of direction.

Trustees must ensure the charity’s work exclusively furthers its formal objects or purposes, as set out in its governing document. Trustees must also ensure that all assets or resources of the charity are used exclusively to further its purposes. 

Strategic planning involves standing back and deciding on the future direction of a charity: whether it should carry on doing what it has always done or if it should be making changes. 

In practice, strategic planning can take place in many different ways. Trustees of even the smallest charities can benefit from strategic planning. 

As part of a strategic planning process, trustees usually agree a written business or strategic plan setting out what the charity will do, how it will do it and how its work will be of benefit and further its overall objects or purposes. Subsidiaries such as trading subsidiaries should have their own plans. 

A strategic plan may have involved many different people including staff, volunteers and stakeholders, as well as the trustees themselves.

A written strategic plan is not the end of the process: the board should regularly monitor and review how the plan is being implemented.

Many guides exist to help boards carry out a strategic planning exercise. For more information, visit NCVO's Strategy and Impact team.