This article was written by Sara McKeown White, LCPC, the executive director of the Mental Health Coalition of Teton Valley. She and her team have been engaged in Mission Met’s strategic planning cohort program with other nonprofits in Idaho’s Teton Valley. It explains how a regular email process has helped build their relationships with each other and their strategic plan.
As a mental health organization, the Coalition takes relationships and culture seriously. Maybe too seriously sometimes. That’s why having a strategic planning tool like Causey (formerly Mission Met Center) that integrates metrics, timelines, and status reports has been so helpful for our growth.
However, we didn’t want to completely lose track of the relational component of moving our organization forward. After all, people are at the heart of those metrics. That’s why we updated our Friday Fives email to include a report about the “touchy-feely” side of strategic planning.
What is Friday Fives?
The Friday Fives email is something we started doing when I first became Executive Director a couple of years ago. I was looking for an easy way to build relationships, keep connected, and share information with board members without bombarding them. While I was mainly fueled by my obsessive desire to have healthy relationships with all of them, I also wanted to keep the organization at the top of their minds. That way they could better do their jobs of fundraising and outreach.
Now, it’s one of the easiest things on my To-Do List and has a pretty high return on investment. At first, I just emailed five bullet points summarizing “what had been happening this week at the Coalition” to all our board members every Friday. Over time I realized I was only sharing positive things, which meant my board was missing out on a critical component of healthy relating—knowing the hard stuff too. So one point is now reserved for something I’ve been struggling with that week.
How I Incorporate Our Strategic Plan into Friday Fives
For the first year or so, there wasn’t a rhyme or reason for what I shared. It was just a greatest-hits list. As we’ve refined our strategic plan, we’ve updated our Friday Fives email to track the three focus areas we have. This allows us to highlight the work we are doing, or not, in real-time. It also makes our strategic plan a living document we are all relating to every week.
Brene Brown, one of our organizational heroes, says, “Clear is kind.” The Friday Fives email is a clear way of communicating. It builds the relational power of your team by keeping board members connected to the organization through bite-sized stories. It boosts morale because each week they are seeing the good work they are part of, which makes them more likely to engage in and help spread the word about that work. And it gives you an opportunity to highlight staff when you let them write one of the points and copy them on the email. So healthy office culture grows too.
Your strategic plan doesn’t just have to move your mission forward in a sustainable way, it can move your relationships and culture too. Try it and let me know how it goes. You might just make one of our Friday Fives!