The short version
- A strategic planning survey asks the board, staff, and funders some of the same questions on one five point scale, so the answers can be compared side by side.
- Twenty five questions, split by audience with three asked to all three groups, are enough to find where perception splits before the retreat.
- The finding is the gap between audiences, not the average score, and a gap belongs on the retreat agenda, not written straight into the plan.
- Funders answer three short questions sent by the board chair, not the full survey, or the response rate drops to nothing.
Your board thinks it knows the three priorities for the next plan. Your program staff would name different ones. Neither has asked your two largest funders what they think is settled and what is still open. That silent disagreement is the actual planning risk, and it is cheaper to find with a survey than to discover it in meeting three.
Twenty five questions, three audiences, one number that matters
Send a short survey before the strategic planning process starts: twenty five questions on a single five-point scale, most of them split by audience so the board answers a governance version and staff answer an operational version of the same idea, with three questions asked in identical wording to the board, staff, and your funders. The answer you are looking for is not the average score. It is the size of the gap between audiences on the three shared questions, because that gap is what the retreat has to resolve before anyone drafts a priority. The template at the end of this piece is the survey, a paste-in grid for the responses, and the formulas that compute the gap for you.
The twenty five questions
Every question maps to one of the five decisions a strategic plan actually has to make: who you serve, which programs grow or close, which revenue lines carry the plan, what you build, and what you stop. A question that does not trace to one of those five is a tactics question, and tactics do not belong in a planning survey.
Three questions go to all three audiences in the exact same words. Eleven go to the board only, in a governance frame. Eleven go to staff only, in an operational frame on the same underlying themes, so the two groups can be read side by side even without shared wording.
| # | Audience | Question | Why it is asked |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | All | How confident are you that the current mix of revenue sources will still support this organization’s work three years from now | Tests whether the money story funders believe matches what the board and staff actually see |
| 2 | All | How confident are you that the organization’s current strategy will still make sense in three years | A flat score across groups means alignment. A split means someone was left out of the conversation |
| 3 | All | How well does the organization communicate changes in strategy or programs to you between formal updates | Low staff or funder scores here point at a reporting gap, not a strategy gap |
| 4 | Board | How well do you understand the three priorities the board is being asked to hold itself accountable to this year | Tests whether governance has a shared answer before the retreat asks for one |
| 5 | Board | How much do you agree the organization should keep growing the programs it grew last year, without new evidence they still work | Surfaces status quo bias before it becomes the default plan |
| 6 | Board | How much appetite does the board have for adding a new program or service in the next three years | A high score here without a matching staff score is a capacity fight waiting to happen |
| 7 | Board | How clearly could you state what the organization would stop doing first if a major funding source ended | Tests whether a stop list exists anywhere outside one person’s head |
| 8 | Board | How confident are you that leadership would tell the board about a serious problem early, rather than at the annual meeting | A governance trust question, not a performance question |
| 9 | Board | How much do you agree the mission statement still describes what the organization actually does today | Mission drift is a planning input, not a copyediting note |
| 10 | Board | How well have recent board meetings left you knowing a specific decision you personally own | Distinguishes an engaged board from a board that receives reports |
| 11 | Board | How well do you understand the organization’s financial trajectory over the next three years, beyond this year’s budget | Tests oversight depth, since most boards see one year at a time |
| 12 | Board | How confident are you that you could explain, in two sentences, why the organization does what it does and not something else | A board that cannot say this cannot defend a priority under pressure |
| 13 | Board | How adequately staffed are the board’s committees for the work the next three years will require | A governance capacity gap that rarely gets named before it causes a missed deadline |
| 14 | Board | How confident are you that the board could agree, without staff in the room, on the one program it would protect first if the budget had to shrink | Tests whether the board has practiced the hard call before it has to make it for real |
| 15 | Staff | How well do you understand the three priorities you are expected to help deliver this year | Tests whether the plan has actually reached the people who execute it |
| 16 | Staff | How much do you agree programs keep running mainly because they ran last year, not because of current evidence they work | The operational version of the board’s status quo question, and often scored lower |
| 17 | Staff | How prepared do you feel to take on a new program or service if the board approves one in the next three years | Names a capacity gap the board’s appetite question alone would miss |
| 18 | Staff | How clearly has leadership told you what the organization would stop doing first if a major funding source ended | If the board scores this high and staff score it low, the stop list was never actually communicated |
| 19 | Staff | How confident are you that leadership would act on a serious problem you raised, rather than waiting for it to become urgent | The staff-side trust question that pairs with the board’s version above |
| 20 | Staff | How much do you agree the mission statement still describes the work you actually do day to day | Mission drift as staff experience it, usually earlier and more clearly than the board does |
| 21 | Staff | How often are you doing work that does not appear in the strategic plan or your job description | A direct, scored version of the stop-doing conversation |
| 22 | Staff | How confident are you that staffing is enough to deliver current programs well, not merely deliver them | Separates surviving a program from running it well |
| 23 | Staff | How much of a typical week goes to tasks that do not clearly serve one of the organization’s stated priorities | Quantifies drift instead of asking staff to diagnose it themselves |
| 24 | Staff | How much do you agree leadership acts on the feedback staff give about what is and is not working | Predicts whether the next plan gets executed or shelved |
| 25 | Staff | How confident are you that the organization would notice quickly if a program stopped working, rather than continuing out of habit | Tests whether monitoring is a habit or an accident |
The scale, and why five points
Every question uses the same one to five scale, anchored so that one is strongly disagree or not at all and five is strongly agree or completely. Keep the direction consistent: five always means more of the good thing, one always means less, even though the wording shifts between “how confident” and “how much do you agree.” That consistency is what makes the column average meaningful.
Five points is not an arbitrary choice. The Community Tool Box’s chapter on gathering feedback from constituents during strategic planning notes that “five point scales (between one and five) and seven point scales are often the norm,” and recommends keeping the instrument to closed questions with room for a comment, so responses can be scored rather than read one by one (Community Tool Box, Obtaining Feedback from Constituents). Five gives you a true middle point, which matters here because “no opinion yet” is itself information about how much explaining the plan still needs to do. Seven adds precision nobody at this scale will use. Do not add a sixth option to force people off the middle. A cluster of 3s on one question is telling you something a forced 4 would hide.
What this costs
- Time
- About two hours to adapt the wording to your organization and load it into a form, plus one week open for responses.
- Money
- Nothing. A free survey tool or the spreadsheet in the template handles twenty five questions for a few dozen respondents without trouble.
- Attention
- One person, usually the executive director, owns getting the link in front of the board and staff and following up once at the halfway mark.
- Stop when
- Fewer than half the board or fewer than half of staff have responded by the deadline. Extend a week once. Do not read the results as representative below that.
Who gets which questions, and getting funders to answer
The board answers the three shared questions plus its eleven governance questions, fourteen in total. Staff answer the same three shared questions plus their eleven operational questions. Funders answer only the three shared questions, nothing else.
That asymmetry is deliberate. A funder who is asked twenty five questions about your internal operations will not finish, and most will not start. BoardSource runs its own flagship governance survey the same way: it collects separate responses from chief executives and board chairs rather than blending them into one instrument, “creating opportunities to compare and contrast these perspectives” (BoardSource, Leading with Intent 2021), a report built on 689 responses from chief executives and a separate 131 from board chairs, not one combined pool. Three questions respects a funder’s time and still gives you a real data point next to the board’s and staff’s answers to the same words.
Send the funder version yourself, as the board chair, not through a survey platform’s automated invitation and not from a staff member’s email address. Two sentences of context, the three questions inline in the email, and a one-week deadline outperforms a linked form that a program officer has to open separately. Ask no more than three funders unless you have ten or more active relationships, and pick the two or three who have been closest to your strategy conversations, not simply your largest checks.
What this costs
- Time
- Twenty minutes for the board chair to personalize and send three emails.
- Money
- Nothing.
- Attention
- The chair, specifically. A staff-sent funder survey reads as a compliance exercise and gets a lower response rate.
- Stop when
- You have no funder relationship close enough for the chair to email directly. Skip the funder rows this cycle rather than send a cold form.
Reading the gaps
Score every response, average each of the twenty five questions by audience, and for the three shared questions calculate the spread between the highest and lowest audience average. Sort by that spread, largest first. The questions at the top of that sorted list are the finding. Everything else is context.
Here is a worked example for a hypothetical $6M human services organization, with every figure invented for illustration.
| Question | Board average | Staff average | Funder average | Spread |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Revenue mix will support the work in three years | 3.4 | 2.1 | 4.3 | 2.2 |
| Organization tells us about changes between formal updates | 3.5 | 2.8 | 2.2 | 1.3 |
| Current strategy will still make sense in three years | 3.8 | 3.6 | 3.9 | 0.3 |
The third row is not a finding. A 0.3 spread across three audiences on a five-point scale is agreement, and the plan can proceed on the assumption that the current direction is not in dispute.
The first row is the finding, and it is a specific and useful one. Funders are confident about the revenue mix. Staff are anxious about it. The board sits in between, which usually means the board has not seen the numbers staff live with day to day or the reassurance funders have given informally. That 2.2-point spread is exactly the kind of split that Scenario planning for funding cuts is built to resolve, because the question underneath it is not “are we confident” but “what happens to which program if one of those funders is wrong.” Take the finding to the fact-gathering meeting, not the funder’s answer at face value and not staff’s anxiety at face value.
What this costs
- Time
- About ninety minutes for the executive director to average the columns, sort by spread, and write one sentence per gap above 1.0.
- Money
- Nothing. The template's formulas do the averaging.
- Attention
- Whoever reads the gaps has to say them out loud accurately, including gaps that reflect badly on the board or on leadership. Softening a 2.2 spread into "mostly aligned" defeats the purpose of running the survey.
- Stop when
- Every shared question scores a spread under 1.0. That is an aligned organization in practice, not just on paper, and the survey has done its job by confirming it. Move straight into the twelve-week process.
What to do with a gap
A gap is not a finding for the strategic plan. It is an item for the board retreat agenda that produces decisions, and the distinction matters. The plan records decisions with an owner and a deadline. A gap is not yet a decision, it is a disagreement that has not been discussed out loud, and putting it straight into a draft priority skips the conversation that would have told you which side was right. The survey and its scoring sheet can run to several pages of tables without that affecting how long the finished strategic plan should be, which stays short no matter how much data went into resolving it.
Frame each gap above 1.0 as a single retreat agenda item: the question, the three averages, and one open question for the room, such as “funders are more confident about this revenue line than staff are. What does staff know that we have not shared with funders, or what do funders know that we have not shared with staff.” Give it twenty minutes. The room’s job is to close the gap into one shared answer, which then becomes the input to the priorities the twelve-week strategic plan process drafts at its facts meeting, not a separate line item the plan has to carry forever.
Mistakes
Three show up often enough to name directly.
Surveying before the evidence pack exists. If nobody has pulled three years of revenue and expense by program yet, the survey measures impressions instead of informed judgment, and you will have to run it again once the numbers are in front of people. Pull the facts first, survey second, so respondents are reacting to the same record rather than to memory.
Asking about tactics instead of direction. “Should we be on Instagram” and “should the gala move to spring” are operating questions, not planning questions, and a survey stuffed with them produces a long report nobody reads and no gap that matters. If a question cannot be traced to who you serve, which programs grow or close, revenue lines, capacity, or what you stop, cut it.
Anonymous board surveys that produce nothing. Anonymity feels safer on a small board, but it removes the one thing that makes a gap useful: the ability to ask a specific person what a 2 meant. Keep responses attributable to the chair or facilitator, even if the summary shown to the full group is aggregated. A board that cannot be followed up with individually has answered a survey that changes nothing.
When not to do this
Skip the survey if your leadership team is small enough that the executive director already knows every board and staff member’s honest view from ordinary conversation. A five-person organization does not need an instrument to detect disagreement it would hear in the hallway; run the twelve-week process directly and use the time the survey would have taken on the evidence pack instead.
Skip it if no strategic planning process is actually scheduled. A survey with no destination collects opinions nobody will act on, and running one a full season before the retreat means people answer questions about a plan that has not started, then answer differently once it has.
Skip the funder rows specifically if you do not have a relationship close enough for the board chair to email directly. A cold survey to a program officer who has never spoken with your chair reads as outreach, not research, and the response you get back will not be honest enough to build a finding on.
Skip the whole exercise if the board is already in a merger, wind-down, or acute cash crisis. Those conversations produce their own forced answers to the five decisions, and a perception survey run alongside them measures anxiety about the crisis rather than disagreement about strategy.
Template
Strategic planning survey and scoring sheet
A twenty five question strategic planning survey split by board, staff, and funders, a paste in response grid, and the formulas that score the gap between audiences.