In my last article, I discussed the mutual trust dilemma that we all confront in local government. In this context, I suggested that the best way I’ve found over the course of my career to elevate trust with residents is to demonstrate both our trustworthiness and competency. I shared my experiences with a concept known as community-based strategic planning and asserted that it’s the most effective method I’ve found to demonstrate both critical elements necessary to build trust. 

With that, I would like to share the basic recipe for a community-based approach. There are five basic steps to the creation of a community-based strategic plan:

• Set the stage.
• Listen.
• Identify priorities.
• Compose the plan.
• Return and report.

Whenever I’ve become aware of a strategic planning initiative not being successful (not exclusively “community-based”), it has always, and I mean always, been because one or more of these steps were neglected. I bet you can guess which step is the most often short-changed by cities. Yep, it’s listening. I’ll explain later, but I will say that the “return and report” step is also a common omission. However, let’s start at the top with setting the stage.

Setting the Stage

As one of the most critical steps in the strategic planning process, setting the stage will determine the success of the strategic planning process. It is here that the entire endeavor is officially sanctioned by the governing body. In fact, if your city council isn’t strongly in favor of such an initiative, my recommendation is to leave it alone until they are. You don’t need to be fighting a councilmember or two or three during the entire process. Likewise, the elected body is the one who is going to ultimately be required to adopt the plan. If your elected folks are against the initiative from the get-go, the final plan doesn’t stand a great chance of being adopted, much less implemented.

But let’s be positive here and assume your elected body is in favor of pursuing this initiative. We will want them to appoint a strategic planning advisory committee (SPAC) to serve in an ad-hoc capacity to guide the process and provide a “face” of the initiative to the community. Ideally, we want seven to nine residents who can and are willing to devote quite a bit of time to guiding the process and composing the plan. Remember, this isn’t the administration’s plan nor the governing body’s. This is going to be the residents’ vision for their community. Your SPAC members therefore ought to be residents who demonstrate some acumen for business processes or strategic planning—and free of personal agendas. I have found that my best SPAC members through the years have been those who have never really been involved in their local government before the introduction of this initiative. The most important point here is that the selection of your SPAC ought to be made with the utmost care. This appointment is not a consolation prize for someone who wasn’t successful in a council or mayoral election. It isn’t something used to “finally shut up” that vocal resident who keeps showing up to council meetings. 

Finally, an appointment to the SPAC isn’t for someone who represents or claims to represent any specific group. You don’t necessarily need the chamber, PTO, school district, faith-based coalition, cultural group, etc. on the SPAC. Don’t we want these people involved? Of course we do, but we’re going to address that need differently. For now, it is enough to know that your SPAC should be composed of capable individuals without agendas, free to consider the needs of the community in a comprehensive and very broad-based manner. And one more word on the SPAC. Make sure they are appointed by the elected body and officially commissioned by resolution. You don’t want to leave any doubt in their heads that they have the sanction and blessing of that body.

At their very first meeting, the SPAC is going to elect a chair and a vice-chair. There isn’t a need to appoint anyone else. We just need someone to lead the discussions and generally make sure that the group stays focused and engaged. The vice-chair is there to take minutes, making note of assignments given to SPAC members. The vice-chair is also there to fill in for the chair as needed. I am often asked whether the meetings of the SPAC need to comply with open meeting laws. That will depend on the laws of your state. However, I will say that it is best if the SPAC can meet without a gallery of involved residents and the press. It isn’t that what they are doing constitutes a state secret. However, these are residents who need to be able to express themselves and offer ideas without those remarks becoming emblazoned on the front page of the next edition of the local paper or otherwise publicly debated prematurely.

As the next order of business, the SPAC is going to develop a mission statement. Now, why would I suggest this? Well, you know as well as I that elected folks aren’t the only ones who like to venture off into the weeds. I think we all do this if we’re not grounded to a common objective or mission. I won’t go into great detail here, but the mission statement ought to be short, clear, and capture the very reason why the group exists and what the end product will be. From there, the SPAC is ready to gather the stakeholders of the community. Every city/county is different. What may be a key stakeholder in one community is not necessarily one in another. You’ll have to decide who your stakeholders are. As a general rule, you will need to identify those groups with whom your community frequently partners to serve your residents and/or who make an indelible contribution to your community. Commonly, these can be business, faith-based, civic, service clubs, educational, and ethnic or cultural groups.

Stakeholders are critical because you will have a limited capacity to generate sufficient participation in the planning process using a shotgun approach. It is imperative that you take advantage of the influence, trust, and lines of communication that have already been long established by your stakeholder groups. The SPAC should bring representatives of these groups together and explain the strategic planning initiative, describing in detail the anticipated benefits to them and the community, and inviting their participation. 

I have rarely heard of a stakeholder group that fails to not only enthusiastically express support, but also compliments the city for pursuing such an endeavor. Instinctively, people want to be involved in determining their collective future. You will want to describe the entire process to them and explain that the SPAC’s ability to communicate with their constituents/members will be integral to the success of the process. That means that there will be instances when you’ll want to send something to their members and associates. This could include a survey, an invitation to participate in a workshop and focus group, or simply updates on the planning process. Be sure to commit to accomplishing this in the manner with which they (the stakeholder groups) are most comfortable.

Once you have the support and commitments of the stakeholder groups, it is time to begin branding and promoting your strategic planning initiative. There are so many surveys, ideas, events, celebrations, and promotions flying around out there. It is critical that residents identify this initiative as the official strategic planning project of the city/county. They need to feel the importance of it and know that this is something real. Most SPACs accomplish this in a variety of ways. The most effective method I’ve witnessed involves developing a visual element that can quickly identify the initiative and that can be replicated physically and digitally. Online examples are abundant if you simply search for “strategic planning logos.” It’s also effective for the SPAC chair to sit down with the local paper’s editorial board to develop stories about the initiative, from its introduction to the community to providing information about data gathering events. This is where you’ll also want to craft messaging that can be disseminated by your stakeholder groups introducing their people to the strategic planning initiative. Lastly, it is important to take full advantage of the city’s internal media. Most cities have access to not only websites, but also possibly a cable channel, social media, newsletters, etc.

As a final step to the “setting the stage” process, the SPAC will need to consider the various means of gathering feedback from residents during the “listening” phase. Post-pandemic, there are far more ways to gather feedback from residents than I recall when I first wrote the book. Prior to 2020, most of the emphasis was placed on physical gatherings at workshops, open houses, and focus groups. Not that I don’t encourage these physical interactions, if possible, but people are much more reluctant to participate in these than they were before 2020. There has meanwhile been an explosion of applications that can allow you to gather people in virtual environments. My recommendation is to take full advantage of these. At the same time, allow your SPAC to be creative in the way they involve residents and liberal in scheduling as many events as possible. Be sure to take advantage of celebrations or festivals when you already know people will be gathering. As a final word about these events, don’t forget the often forgotten. When it comes to strategic planning, I have found that young people are frequently left out of the process. Work with the school district and/or your youth council to get the young involved.

Listening

I know that was a lot to say about setting the stage. Hopefully, you can sense the importance I place on making sure your strategic planning initiative starts out on the right foot. Our next phase in the planning process is perhaps even more critical. I’ve already described the various ways to gather resident feedback. What I want to focus on here is what you’re going to ask your residents. I have found that the five most powerful questions you can ask are:

• What do you like most about living in our community?
• What do you perhaps like least?
• Why are you here or what made you move here?
• What, if it changed, would cause you to consider leaving?
• If you were “king or queen” for a day, what would you change or what would you do?

By asking these probing questions, the SPAC will eventually be able to piece together a multi-dimensional image that shows what residents truly hold as most critical to their quality of life. We meanwhile take for granted that there are services that cities provide that make it possible for residents to live in their community. I very much appreciate one of the more memorable scenes from Robin Williams’s Dead Poets Society where his character explains to a group of students the difference between those things that enable us to live and those that provide us with the rationale for living. 

In a municipal sense, there are services we provide our residents that enable them to live in our communities, but such don’t explain why they live in our communities. To be sure, there are likely factors that at least appear to lie well outside our immediate circles of control or influence. However, don’t we want to know what those are? Don’t we want to know if there are things that do indeed land inside our means to affect? Absolutely!

The listening phase is that portion of the strategic planning process where I really want the SPAC to slow down, take their time, and pull as much input together as possible from our residents. To explain why, I’ll use an analogy with a principle. The involvement we obtain from our residents acts like a collection of pixels in an image—the more pixels, the clearer the picture. If the base of participation in the strategic planning process isn’t broad enough, the SPAC will have a very difficult time interpreting the data; and worse, they may interpret it incorrectly. Likewise, every community enjoys the presence of some extreme voices. 

As you broaden your base of participation, you will nevertheless be surprised that even the few and shrill blend into a tapestry of reason and intelligence. My counsel to any community is to continue public involvement and data gathering until priorities start to come into clear view. Not only will it make composing the final plan easier, but you will likewise find that broadening the base of participation in creating the plan makes it more likely to be implemented and even survive political and administrative changes.

Identifying the Priorities

It should not astound or surprise anyone that 50% or more of their time pursuing a strategic planning initiative will be spent listening to residents. After all, community-based strategic planning is best described as “deep community listening.” Take a tip from Dr. Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” Successful cities and counties, just like highly successful people, have learned and applied the same principle.

We have now arrived at the data interpretation portion of the planning process. I usually regard this as one of the more exciting phases. It is here where we finally get to find out who killed the butler, like a good murder mystery. What on earth do they really want? While I have not addressed this yet, it is very critical that your SPAC organize the data in a manner that makes this phase a snap. Okay, I’ll be real with you. Even if your SPAC does a great job in organizing the data gathered over the last several months, it is still going require them to exert patience and discernment. You may have a fairly good idea of what residents are saying, but another SPAC colleague may not. Additionally, you’re going to have to filter a few things out as well. Here’s an example.

A Utah community I was assisting was a candidate host city for a new state prison. They hadn’t asked for this consideration and most residents were adamantly opposed. Many organized and were very vocal about their opposition to the new prison. It just so happened that the community was attempting to put together their five-year community-based plan at the same time that the prison controversy was in full bloom. You can imagine that when the SPAC sat down to identify community priorities, “don’t let the prison come to town” was front and center. Since they were composing a plan for their future, it didn’t make sense to include an issue that was going to be decided within a few months. By the way, the prison ended up going somewhere else. What would their plan have looked like if the SPAC hadn’t filtered a one-time, finite issue? Likewise, in a Texas community I was assisting, just after Hurricane Harvey, what do you think dominated the landscape? That’s right—storm drainage and emergency response. Not that those aren’t valid concerns that couldn’t be addressed by the plan, but if the SPAC hadn’t exercised some prudence, the entire plan would have been about those two things.

I compare data analysis to looking at one of those three-dimensional, computer-generated posters. You have to spend time gazing deeply into it before you see the image. As I did before, I encourage the SPAC to take their time. Look at the data, discuss together what it’s saying, and carefully begin to identify the highest-level community priorities. I call these “strategic directives.” Strategic directives are large bucket categories that describe a broad topic as a community priority. They are not intended to prescribe solutions. Instead, directives are the key themes the residents view as the most critical areas of community need. In a typical plan, I am used to seeing five to eight directives. Soley as a hypothetical example, strategic directives could be articulated in the plan thusly. Again, this is only an example:

• Community engagement and civility.
• Economic prosperity.
• Transportation and infrastructure.
• Parks and environmental stewardship.
• Our rising generation.
• Neighborhood quality.

One of the most creative ways I’ve seen a SPAC articulate a strategic priority is by putting it into the form of a resident expectation. I’ll show you what I mean. “Economic prosperity,” for example, turns into “I want go live in a community where I can live, work, and play without having to leave town.” Can you see how that captures so much more of what residents were saying than simply “economic prosperity”? The SPAC can turn all their directives into resident expectations. In fact, I encourage them to do so.

In my next and final article addressing elevating trust through resident engagement in strategic planning, I will discuss “putting the meat on the bones” of your strategic plan. We accomplish this by identifying the strategic initiatives that will make our directives live. I’ll also describe the final phases of the process, the presentation of the plan, and its implementation.

RICK DAVIS, ICMA-CM, is assistant city manager of League City, Texas, USA. He is the author of Elevating Trust in Local Government: The Power of Community-Based Strategic Planning. (rick.davis@leaguecitytx.gov)