A strategic planning stakeholder survey is designed to gather insights about your organization from a diverse set of stakeholders. These insights should then directly inform your strategic planning process.
Let’s look at what goes into an effective stakeholder survey process.
How a Stakeholder Survey Benefits Your Strategic Planning
Adding a stakeholder survey into your strategic planning process:
- Increases engagement by enabling more diverse stakeholders to participate. Some people are more comfortable providing honest feedback in writing rather than speaking in a room full of people.
- Provides a cost-effective way to get feedback from a wide range of stakeholders. You’ll be able to hear the perspectives of people who otherwise wouldn’t be in the room during your strategic planning retreat. For example, you can survey all staff, volunteers, clients, community partners, and even selected donors.
- Offers new insights through data analytics. Comparing responses across stakeholder groups—such as management and non-management staff—often reveals unexpected insights and new priority areas for investment.
Questions to Cover in a Strategic Planning Stakeholder Survey
We recommend combining multiple-choice questions with open-ended questions in all stakeholder surveys. This sets you up to conduct both quantitative and qualitative analyses.
Be sure to include questions that help you:
- Set organizational baselines: Part of the strategic planning process involves reviewing and honing your vision and mission. Survey questions can help you assess how well your mission and vision statements are working by evaluating how well stakeholders understand your organization’s work.
- Identify internal operating challenges and strengths: When surveying staff, we recommend asking questions about organizational culture, management, internal communications, and other systems. You’ll want to identify areas of tension—such as inconsistent management practices across departments—as well as areas of strength. For example, perhaps your organization has become excellent at communicating internally about budget priorities and processes, but struggles to share goals across teams.
- Target opportunities for growth: One benefit of strategic planning is getting clearer on your organization’s goals and metrics for success. That includes identifying areas of mission creep, as well as new opportunities you may be missing. You’ll want to ask direct open-ended questions, such as: “What do you see as the biggest opportunities for the organization over the next three years?” You can also add in multiple-choice questions, such as asking respondents to rank core programs by perceived impact and effectiveness. Questions like this help you not only assess the programs but refine how you communicate about them. For example, you may have a program that’s showing incredible results on metrics that your donors, board, and staff simply don’t know about.
Always Customize Stakeholder Surveys
It may be tempting to use a stakeholder survey template, but we strongly recommend against this. An off-the-shelf survey template likely won’t get the real data you need to inform your planning process.
Effective stakeholder surveys should be custom-built for your organization, your goals, and the moment. You’re looking for insights into challenges and opportunities your organization is facing right now (versus last year).
Surveys should also be tailored to WHO is being surveyed. For example, questions you ask staff about internal barriers and challenges might not be appropriate for volunteers or clients.
If you’re working with a strategic planning consultant, they should be able to advise you on crafting your survey to get the most useful data.
How to Use Your Stakeholder Survey Results
Reviewing survey results can sometimes be difficult for leaders. The goal of a good survey is to find out both what IS working and what is NOT working. That means some answers may be hard to hear. Some answers may even feel like personal attacks!
That’s why we recommend working with your strategic planning consultant to design, distribute, and evaluate the survey results. As a third party, your consultant can pull out the trends and nuggets of wisdom and even help you increase response rates.
Once you get survey results back, it may also be worth sharing with your staff how their input is informing the strategic planning process. Your team may appreciate feeling heard during the planning process—which can help build buy-in for successful strategic plan implementation.
