Everyone knows what strategic planning is, right? Unfortunately, we also know how difficult it can be to develop and sustain an effective strategic plan. Strategic planning can fail without staff commitment, adaptability, and the right goals for your community.

This selection details how Rock Hill, South Carolina, used performance measures throughout the strategic planning process. Rock Hill is a participant in the ICMA Center for Performance Measurement™ (CPM) program, later renamed the Center for Performance Analytics. The selection shows how Rock Hill used citizen surveys and focus groups to develop a strategic plan.

The value of strategic planning

Strategic planning has been defined as a “systematic process by which a community anticipates and plans for its future.”¹ To implement a strategic plan successfully, the organization needs to see strategic planning as both a process and a product.

Strategic planning is an organization-wide method of determining goals and responsibilities. The strategic plan consists of the documented actions that the organization will take to achieve the goals. The strategic planning process should consist of the following elements:

1. A mission statement for the organization
2. An organizational, industry, and geographic environmental scan and conclusions about future scenarios in a three- to five-year period
3. Basic goals for the three-to five-year time frame and goals for the coming one-year period
4. Strategies and action steps that will move the organization toward the agreed upon goals
5. Implementation plans that assign responsibilities for action steps.²

Knowing precisely how an organization is performing is critical for each of the steps above. Performance measurement can be overlooked for many reasons. A local govern­ment may not monitor performance because departments “know” how they are per­forming, either through anecdotal evidence or through gut feeling. Or city officials might consider a performance measurement system too time-consuming or expensive to develop.

However, undertaking an environmental scan and setting goals are effective only if an organiza­tion can determine where it is underperforming and where it is achieving quality results. Therefore, performance measurement is an essential part of strategic planning.

Rock Hill is a growing community located roughly 20 miles south of Charlotte, North Carolina, on the I-77 corridor. At the time this selection was written, it had a population of 66,154. Rock Hill was the second city in South Carolina to adopt the council-manager form of government and has operated under this model since 1915. The council consists of a mayor elected at large and six council members elected by ward. Every three years, the mayor, city coun­cil, and city staff collaborate to develop the strategic plan.

Rock Hill includes many performance measures in its strategic plan, divided into three categories, Plan, Act, and Evaluate:

• Plan: Input measures are identified in the “plan” category, so named because they help the jurisdiction to plan accordingly for the future. These measures are used when gathering information and are generally reviewed prior to any city actions.
• Act: Output measures correspond to the “act” category. These measures allow the jurisdiction to act appropriately to meet desired achievement and service levels.
• Evaluate: The last category is “evaluate,” using outcome/impact measures. These measures indicate the effectiveness of jurisdiction planning and actions, and ensure that programs are producing the desired outcomes. Examples of “evaluate” measures include crime reduction, job creation, and customer satisfaction. Customer sat­isfaction is an essential measure because it identifies what is important to residents and indicates areas for improvement as perceived by the community.

Rock Hill became a participant in ICMA’s performance measurement program in 2007, but it was not new to performance measurement. Starting in 2003, Rock Hill participated in The National Citizen Survey™ (NCS), a uniform survey tool used to assess resident satisfaction with community amenities and government service provision.

The NCS was developed by the National Research Center, Inc. (NRC), a research firm specializing in performance measurement and evaluation, and a strategic partner with CPM and ICMA. While the city has always found the survey results to be useful, for FY 2012 the city decided to use the survey data more deliberately so the results would be more meaningfully applied to the strategic plan.

Going beyond the survey numbers

In August 2011, city leadership decided that supplementing The NCS data with qualita­tive data would both complement and enhance the city’s survey results, making them more effective in the strategic planning process. The city’s first step was to draft a timeline to align survey distribution, review, and analysis with citizen focus groups.

The city man­ager’s office led efforts in developing an appropriate implementation schedule and con­tracted with the local university’s political science department to manage the focus group recruitment process. The university routinely conducts regional polls through the uni­versity research center and had all the necessary resources—including trained staff and a computer-aided telephone system—to contact potential focus group participants. NRC was brought in to facilitate three citizen focus groups.

Here is the timeline:

• August 2011: City staff works with NRC to plan for the National Citizen Survey
• September 2011: NRC administers National Citizen Survey to randomly selected households
• Late October 2011: NRC and city staff review survey results/reports and develop focus group design
• October 18-24, 2011: Local university conducts focus group recruitment
• November 1-2, 2011: NRC conducts three focus groups
• December 2011: NRC provides city staff with focus group summary report and transcript report
• December 2011-January 2012: NRC and city staff work to design city council/city staff strategic planning retreat
• January 2012: City staff provides focus group and survey reports to city council and media
• January 23-24, 2012: City council/city staff participate in strategic planning retreat to review and discuss survey results, focus group feedback, past strategic goals, and new strategic goals.

The focus groups

The goals of the focus groups were to (1) obtain qualitative data from the opinions of residents and (2) better understand the priorities for the community in an effort to shape the city’s strategic plan. In conjunction with city staff, NRC developed a focus group script with questions that were asked in all three focus group discussions. The com­monality in the script enabled a deeper understanding of residents’ opinions. The script focused on participants’ current perspectives about Rock Hill, their visions for the com­munity in the future, and their opinions about city goals.

The focus groups were held at a city facility for which no fee was required. City staff were not present during the group discussions. All groups were digitally audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis purposes. NRC identified key statements and general themes in a focus group summary report.

Sharing and using the focus group data

Committed to transparency, city leadership shared the summary report, full survey results, and focus group transcripts with elected officials and senior management, fram­ing the material as guiding documents for a city council strategic planning retreat. City staff provided the local newspaper the full survey results in advance of the retreat and invited the media to discuss the results with the city manager and public affairs staff.

During the two-day retreat, the NRC executive director reviewed both the survey results and the focus group feedback, and a city staff representative offered highlights on department performance in terms of meeting established performance benchmarks.

This format allowed for meaningful comparisons of actual performance to public satisfaction and perception. For example, safety perception ratings were compared to actual crime data trends. The city’s survey results showed that the perception of being very or somewhat safe from violent crimes was at an all-time high. This perception trended with actual crime data that showed violent crime rates at historic lows. Focus group feedback and survey results also revealed that the perception of safety in the downtown area after dark continued to receive some of the lowest marks, even though the downtown area had very low crime rates. Consequently, one of the tasks developed during the retreat was for the city to hold focus groups to delve deeper into how the city could improve the perception of safety in the downtown area.

Stemming from this retreat, Rock Hill incorporated public safety measures in its FY 2013–2015 strategic plan. In the plan, an identified task for police services is to “evaluate the efficiency and effectiveness of police services as it relates to reducing crime and increasing the community’s perception of safety.” In order to achieve this goal, several measures were identified, each with an associated target:

• The “plan” measures included exploring methods to improve response times and visibility in neighborhoods/patrol zones.
• The “act” measure was to respond to 70 percent of all Priority-One calls within 5 minutes.
• Rock Hill would then “evaluate” its success by achieving a reduction in violent/property crime per 1,000 residents from the three-year trend and increasing the percentage of residents who feel very or somewhat safe from violent/property crime by 3 percentage points.³

Lessons learned

By coupling citizen survey results with qualitative focus groups, Rock Hill found it was important to

• Reflect on the data: Delve deeper into the data themselves. How do the survey results compare with actual citizen comments? What are the trends in performance? How does the city compare with its peers?
• Discuss the data: Create structured opportunities such as a retreat, community open house, or staff meeting to discuss the context of results, the results themselves, and next steps.
• Share the data: Commit to sharing the results with staff, elected officials, residents, and the media. Transparency helps to promote an insightful and rich discussion that not only helps the local government respond to citizen needs but also conveys a com­mitment to the community.

Taking the time to reflect, discuss, and share the data collected allowed Rock Hill to effectively use performance measurement and implement a successful strategic plan.

Conclusion

Strategic planning is a nuanced endeavor, with no one solution that works for every orga­nization. Other communities will take different approaches, but Rock Hill has implemented an effective strategic plan that has been shown to measurably improve city services and citizen perception.

To utilize strategic planning successfully, it is important first to measure how the organization is performing currently. The jurisdiction then sets goals for improvement based on input from a variety of sources, and strategies and actions are identified to help the city achieve its goals. Finally, performance measures are monitored throughout the implementation of strategic planning to ensure that the organization is effective and meeting its targets.

Performance measurement cannot be separated from strategic planning; indeed, one’s ability to gauge the success of the plan depends on performance measurement being incorporated into every step of the process.

Notes

¹ Gerald L. Gordon, Strategic Planning for Local Government (Washington, D.C.: ICMA Press, 1993).

² Ibid.

³ Rock Hill, South Carolina, Strategic Plan FY2013–FY2015 (2012).