📢Welcome to the StratSimple Newsletter!

Welcome to the inaugural edition - your monthly source for insights, updates, and practical guidance on strategic planning for non-profits and mission driven organizations. We're excited to share our journey of making high-quality planning more accessible.

🏆Partner Spotlight

We are honored to have been selected by the La Salle University Non-Profit Center to be a partner in their upcoming Strategic Planning cohort. La Salle University recently received funding to develop this cohort-based approach to non-profit strategic planning, with the goal of making high-quality planning more accessible through innovative solutions. Applications are currently open and La Salle is looking to select eight Philadelphia area non-profits into the program for a 2025 launch.

StratSimple will work with cohort members to conduct and analyze virtual interviews of their stakeholders and then cohort members will work with guidance from experienced La Salle partner consultants to develop the skills needed to build out sustainable plans for their organizations. The intention is to demonstrate success so that the opportunity can be expanded to more organizations in the future.

🚀Product Updates

We're thrilled to announce the launch of v2.0 of our AI-powered virtual interview and analysis system. Since launch v1.0 in July of this year, we’ve distributed surveys to over 60,000 participants. Over 50% of all participants are responding to AI coaching with significantly improved responses. We're revolutionizing how non-profits gather and analyze feedback and we’re learning a lot about how to continuously improve in the process.

Here's what's new:

• Enhanced multi-lingual support for non-English fluent interviewees.

• Support for new question types (Likert, rankings) and improved response validation.

• Completed cloud infrastructure upgrade to improve survey speeds by 10x.

• We’ve made significant improvements in our analysis automation that has allowed us to drop our timelines by 50% down from 2 weeks to 1 week turn-around.

• Improved e-mail validation to maintain our excellent performance in ensuring surveys consistently get delivered to participants’ inboxes.

📢New Resource Center

We’ve launched a free on-line resource center to share tools for non-profit strategic planning and leadership. As we work with non-profits and consultant partners, we find opportunities where the same challenges come up repeatedly. When we observe this, our goal is to prepare free shared resources to support our partners and clients. So far we’ve published guides for organizational alignment, quarterly OKRs, “stay interviews”, and a cheat sheet for OKR and KPI best practices. Stay tuned for more resources as we find more opportunities where reusable guides will be helpful. You can check it out here (https://www.stratsimple.com/resource-center). If you have any you would like to see, please let us know!

💡Strategic Planning Insight

Traditional strategic planning relies on a narrow lens - typically just 20-30 stakeholder interviews. But what if you could hear from everyone impacted by and involved with your organization?

Our solution enables strategic listening at scale, allowing you to gather insights from all your stakeholders: team members, board members, volunteers, community partners, funders, and clients. This comprehensive approach is especially crucial for non-profits committed to Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.

The power of scale becomes clear in the numbers. While internal stakeholders (staff, board) typically show nearly 100% participation, even a seemingly low response rate from external groups provides statistically significant insights. For example, in a recent project with 18,000 potential participants, we received 400 responses. This sample size gives us 95% confidence in understanding the overall group's perspectives, with just a 5% margin of error.

Most importantly, large-scale feedback allows us to analyze responses across different subgroups, ensuring minority voices are heard and properly represented in your strategic planning. Rather than relying on a handful of opinions, you get a truly representative picture of your diverse stakeholder community.

🔮What’s Next

We are hard at work building out v2.0 of our goal management dashboard and targeting a launch for early 2025. We are focused on implementing customer feedback for a more polished user interface, enhanced self-service capabilities, and improved reporting features.

Thanks for your support!

-Mike & Alan
https://www.stratsimple.com