The 2020-2023 strategic plan is the result of parallel and iterative evaluation and strategic direction visioning processes that began in May 2018. Our goal with the overall strategic planning process was to provide multiple opportunities for APC community members to provide insight and feedback and shape our new strategic plan.
The first process was an external evaluation of the outcomes, impacts and lessons learned to date of APC’s implementation of its 2016-2019 strategic plan. A total of 141 APC community members provided feedback for the evaluation process, representing 60% of the total possible number of APC stakeholders during this evaluation period and including members, partners, political allies, donors and staff.
The second process was a series of iterative, strategic direction focus groups that took place with members and staff. The first set of consultations focused on identifying contextual trends and opportunities in the current and expected environment that people felt were critical for APC to position itself to respond to or leverage. Focus groups took place from July to September 2018 with the APC Board of Directors, APC staff and at regional member meetings that took place in Argentina, Thailand, Macedonia and Ghana.
Using the results from the evaluation and the strategic direction focus groups, APC members were provided with another opportunity to provide feedback into the 2020-2023 strategic planning process via a second set of seven virtual (4) and in-person (3) strategic direction consultations. The focus of these consultations was to collectively reflect on the findings, themes and trends in all the data collected and begin to discuss and debate what the APC 2020-2023 priorities should be and why.
Following these consultations, 35 APC members (24) and staff (11) met for a two-day strategic planning retreat in Tunis in June 2019 to debate and confirm APC’s priority areas using all the data collected to date. Outputs from this meeting were used by a small group of staff volunteers to build a draft skeleton of a strategic plan, including a first pass at defining outcome areas and their accompanying impact objectives for the 2020-2023 planning period. The results of this work were presented to all staff via two virtual convenings to test the validity of the thinking to date and identify gaps or flags that would need to be further unpacked in the next step of the process.
A sub-group of 18 APC management and staff, representative of all the current key result areas of focus, met again in August for a final three-day strategic planning retreat to finalise the draft strategic plan. This was then sent out for testing and validation to all staff via an online survey before it was finalised for presentation to APC’s Council.
The proposed strategic plan was presented, discussed and approved with changes during the APC online member meeting from 2 to 24 September 2019. A total of 45 member organisations and nine individual members participated in the meeting.