Be ambitious: 2026-2030

Many of our clients are coming to the end of their 5 year strategic planning period at the end of 2025 and gearing up for the next 5 year strategic plan starting 2026-2030. It’s these important turning points that offer the opportunity to be more ambitious about impact and innovation for social organisations. Yet it’s common for social organisations to produce very similar bland strategies that play it safe. Here are the 5 standard strategic goals (and yes these were generated with AI unlike the rest of this article) -

1. Enhance and expand program delivery to maximise mission impact.

2. Achieve long-term financial sustainability through diverse revenue streams.

3. Strengthen organisational infrastructure and operational efficiency.

4. Cultivate a high-performing, resilient, and inclusive workforce.

5. Elevate the organisation’s profile and advocacy.

By curious coincidence, there is one goal for the Head of Operations or COO, and one for each of the Heads of Finance, Technology, HR/People and Research / Advocacy. Symmetry.

But true strategy is supposed to be about tradeoffs - what to do and what not to do to achieve your mission. The question for the executive team and board needs to be about what makes your organisation unique - what specific problems and approaches will you take to addressing a difficult social problem? This is about focus and what you fight for in the face of apathy or opposition from others.

Strategy is about having the confidence to pursue innovations and program solutions even when the government of the day hasn’t asked for it. While most of your funding might be understandably defined by what major funders want to fund (for our clients, that’s mostly state or federal governments), what are the solutions you are developing that are core to mission but maybe don’t yet have funds attached? What strategic innovations are you willing to undertake and invest in? Leading organisations, whether large or small, undertake strategic innovation as critical to Mission.

So whether your organisation’s strategy provides the nuance of focus, or whether that’s down to teams developing operational plans, this time is an opportunity to review programs and decide which ones are really having an impact. Your very best programs should not just have evidence they make an impact, you should be confident that they are better than the next best program out there. And if they are, then you should have a strategy to scale them.

Our view is that all your areas of impact and programs should be mapped against these 5 stages on the journey to impact (see the companion blog about our 5 stages). Some programs are mature with good evidence and the task is about scale, finding partners, expanding geographic or sector reach. But others are at the start of the impact journey where you need to invest in understanding needs, developing service models, and gathering nuanced data about what works for whom when and in what context. Still others may be established but the challenge is to deliver with fidelity across diverse teams and places, and ensure efficiency, consistent high quality and reliable outcomes.

This simple framework also helps your teams decide what’s next for each program or area of focus. Do we need to develop or improve the program and service model itself? Do we need to understand its impact or how we are performing? Do we need to get better at delivery, compliance, quality and achieving outcomes? Do we need to make the case for funding? Do we need to find partners and new methods to scale? Of course, as a program moves through these stages, the work of the previous stage keeps going via continuous improvement. You don’t stop collecting data or managing fidelity to model when you are scaling - you keep doing that to ensure the program stays relevant and preferable to alternatives.

Strategic focus also means that when you find a program that isn’t delivering outcomes or high enough value for the dollar spent, then you put in place a plan to either reinvent it (going back to stage 1), or to end it.

For Latitude Network, the next five years will be about helping social organisations and systems advance across those five stages of impact. We'll provide advice and support, and build Apps, tools, dashboards and systems to make that journey easier and more effective.