How Many People Should Be Included in the Strategic Planning Retreat is FREE courtesy of Funding for Good
1 Lesson / 3 Minutes / FREE
How many people should be included in the strategic planning retreat? There is no one size fits all, and it really depends on what you’re going to cover during your strategic planning retreat. You can discuss this at a monthly board meeting. Here at Funding for Good we prefer two consecutive days so that everyone stays energized and focused. We recommend groups between 5 and 12 people as the ideal number of participants for strategic planning. This number tends to result in productive and great diversity of ideas while remaining manageable. We do facilitate groups up to 25-30 people. Larger groups are a little bit more complicated. Every person involved in a strategic planning process after 7 reduces the ability to achieve consensus as quickly quickly. Part of the strategic planning process is having those difficult and exciting conversations with people who have diverse opinions. It’s important to consider how many board members will participate in strategic planning. If you have an extremely large board you may have 20-25 people. You also need to hear from staff. Perhaps you want to get 70% of board in the actual strategic planning retreat. You will engage the others in other processes. We want to get lead staff (think department heads or executive director’s) in there and it’s OK as long as you can get a manageable number for the strategic planning retreat. At the end of the day, having the right stakeholder in the room with a mix of board members and key staff and in the right, manageable numbers will lead to the strategic planning facilitation process achieving the best results.
