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Strategy & strategic planning

Strategic retreat design and facilitation for nonprofits

Signs you need a strategic retreat

Away days tend to be unfocused, dominated by a few voices, and end with a long list of actions that nobody follows up on.

What you'll achieve

A well-designed retreat that surfaces real tensions, builds team alignment, and ends with clear decisions and next steps.

How a Nonprofit Builder consultant helps

  • Design the full agenda in consultation with leadership, facilitate the sessions, and produce a structured summary with agreed actions.

Key deliverables

  • Retreat design and facilitation guide, pre-retreat survey or interviews, facilitated session, post-retreat summary and action log.

From the resource library

Free tools and guides to get started

  • 2.3C026

    SWOT Analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats

    A section of the Community Tool Box on running a SWOT analysis with a group. It explains what SWOT is, when to use it, the internal factors (strengths, weaknesses) and external factors (opportunities, threats), how to run the analysis with a diverse group of stakeholders and how to turn the results into goals and action plans. Community groups and nonprofits use it for strategic planning and to review new or existing initiatives.

    Start hereClassicTool or templateFree
  • 2.1C017

    Strategic planning: a toolkit for small NGOs

    A short, step-by-step strategic planning toolkit for small NGOs, including those that fund partners and those that work directly with communities. It is one of 5 toolkits from INTRAC's Strengthening Small Organisations with Big Ambitions project (2021 to 2022), funded by the UK Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. It comes as a PDF and as a lighter online version for low-bandwidth and mobile users. It is licensed CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

    Start hereCurrentKey manual or guideFree