By Katie Kempen, CEO, Victim Support
As chief executives, one of our key roles is to set the direction of travel for our organisations.
A clear, well-written and compelling strategy is the engine that can move your organisation in the right direction, gather support from colleagues and funders and deliver real, positive impact for our beneficiaries.
But crafting a strategy is no easy task. How do you condense your ambitions into a single document? How to ensure it balances exciting new ventures with getting vital business-as-usual done? How do you weave meaning and your values through the document to bring it to life?
When I joined Victim Support in 2023, I hit the ground running to take a lead in developing our strategy for 2024-2029. As we hit a midway refresh this year, here are my tips for fellow chief executives.
Engage, engage, engage
You can’t develop an effective strategy in isolation. When new to the organisation, I simply did not hold enough knowledge to develop a strategy without significant engagement. Now that I’m established in the role, I’m more conscious than ever that I can only bring one perspective on the organisation, and I need to listen to others to develop the most effective and impactful plan.
Your trustees and senior leadership team have key roles in setting the strategy. Your colleagues and volunteers have a vested interest in it, as do your commissioners, funders, beneficiaries and service users.
It’s important to find and listen to all of these voices. As well as helping to develop the content for your strategy, this shared working ensures that you are developing a strategy that others will buy into, believe in and work with you to deliver.
Think about your external environment
For many of us, the environments we’re working in are more volatile than they have been for some time. It’s important that your strategy recognises and responds to this.
An assessment of the external environment will tell you the term your strategy should cover, the level of ambition it should contain, how much risk you can take and how often you’ll need to take stock. Build in flexibility and recognise that, to be truly effective, you’ll need to be open to pivoting and course correction as your strategy unfolds.
Spend longer than you think articulating what you want to say
When developing our strategy, I invested time researching approaches from other organisations (particularly favouring the RNLI strategy structure) to steer our document.
A kind and decisive trustee spent a day in my board room with me, going over our priorities and objectives, writing and rewriting them. What may seem like a simple structure, priorities and objectives took significant work to design and write.
This is a worthwhile investment. Being clear about what we want to achieve is essential for a good strategy, and essential for bringing colleagues and volunteers together behind shared goals – but it takes work.
Translating the page to reality
Spend time now thinking about how you’ll translate your strategy document into real life action. In a larger organisation, like Victim Support, this means thinking about how the strategy comes to life through organisational structure, through business planning and through internal projects, innovation and reform.
This stage may require some refining of your draft strategy; it may require a reality check. However, this is best done now to ensure the ambition and credibility of the strategy.
Building in reviews
With the best will in the world, no chief executive is going to be able to develop a strategy that will remain untouched throughout its lifetime. Things change and we need to change with them.
Use the tips above to have a think about what reviewing your strategy will look like. How often will you do it? Who will do it? You may be confident that you can do so yearly or you may need to carefully balance giving enough time to meaningfully deliver against ensuring you’re still heading in the right direction.
Leading on strategy development and delivery is a true privilege for a Chief Executive. It means that you can see the plans that you’ve worked to develop bring about real change. However, it’s no easy task and a great responsibility.
There are lots of great strategies out there, creating real change. Take a look and best of luck.
More resources about charity strategic planning: