Jun 27 / Staff

Charting a Strategic Future for a Global Conservation Leader

Guiding a complex networked organization through strategy, structure, and identity realignment.

Client Context

A globally recognized nonprofit in the conservation sector—responsible for protecting wildlife and natural habitats across the Americas—found itself at a pivotal crossroads. With a distributed footprint of over 700 staff, dozens of centers and sanctuaries, and a vast membership network, the organization had recently undergone significant leadership turnover, internal culture challenges, and external pressures related to its historic identity. Simultaneously, it faced escalating climate threats and intensifying demands for equity, clarity, and measurable impact from its partners and stakeholders.

The organization’s leadership recognized that to meet these internal and external challenges, it needed not just a new strategic plan but a fundamentally different strategic planning process—one that was more inclusive, adaptive, and transparent than any prior effort.

The Challenge

The organization’s last strategic plan was developed before a series of destabilizing transitions and cultural reckonings. Since then, staff morale had declined, internal coordination had frayed, and key stakeholders had grown uncertain about the organization’s identity, priorities, and future direction.

The organization needed to:
  • Rebuild internal trust and engagement through a more participatory planning process
  • Align a decentralized and matrixed structure toward a unified strategic direction
  • Make deliberate, data-informed choices about its role in a crowded, shifting conservation field
  • Integrate climate science, equity values, and organizational identity into a single, cohesive narrative

The question was not only what it should do next, but how to make those choices in a way that inspired belief, ownership, and alignment across its diverse internal and external ecosystem.

The Symphonic Approach

Symphonic Strategies was selected to design and lead a multi-phase, organization-wide strategic planning process. Our method emphasized structured inclusivity, field-based research, and executive decision support—ensuring that every phase of planning deepened clarity and cohesion.

The engagement unfolded over five sequenced phases:

1. Designing the Governance and Engagement Structure
We launched the project by co-designing the process with a cross-functional Working Group and a newly constituted Steering Committee. Together, we refined the scope of work, clarified decision roles, and set the cadence for strategy conversations across the organization.

2. Landscape and Identity Research
Our team conducted a comprehensive landscape analysis through over 80 hours of interviews and focus groups with scientists, policy makers, advocates, and movement peers. We mapped the current and future conservation ecosystems, assessed benchmarking data, and explored critical questions of influence, equity, and strategic positioning.

3. Strategic Choices Facilitation
Using our structured “If-Then” decision framework, we worked with leadership to explore key questions:
  • Where should the organization focus its energy and resources?
  • What role should it play relative to its peers?
  • What implications would different choices have for membership, funding, partnerships, and internal culture?

We delivered a comprehensive PESTLE analysis, SWOT framework, and a Strategic Choices and Implications Guide to support informed, values-based decisions.

4. Action Planning and Organizational Road Map
Building on the strategic decisions, we worked with cross-departmental teams to translate ideas into actionable initiatives. Through participatory “listening sessions,” we helped staff co-create a multi-year implementation roadmap that aligned culture, operations, and strategy.

5. Final Strategic Plan and Communication Tools
The plan was synthesized into a suite of outputs tailored to different audiences:
  • A detailed internal plan with initiatives, KPIs, and accountability structures
  • A high-level external narrative for funders and partners
  • A strategic dashboard for leadership monitoring

The Impact

This process represented more than the creation of a new strategic plan—it reintroduced a disciplined, participatory approach to enterprise-wide alignment.

The results included:

Strategic Clarity
The organization made bold but bounded choices about where it would focus and how it would measure success—balancing its legacy identity with future imperatives.

Organizational Alignment
Staff across departments and regions reported a clearer understanding of the organization’s direction and their role in achieving it.

Reengaged Stakeholders
By building engagement into every phase, the planning process became a mechanism for repairing trust, surfacing innovation, and rebuilding a sense of shared mission.

Data-Informed Visioning
Leaders now had ecosystem maps, decision logic models, and strategic diagnostics to guide future pivots and investments.

Reflections

This engagement illustrates how strategy is as much about process as it is about priorities. For this organization, strategic planning was not simply a document—it was a tool for healing, alignment, and momentum. The process introduced new internal governance practices, gave voice to underrepresented perspectives, and clarified what it means to lead in today’s conservation landscape.

Symphonic continues to advise select initiatives as the organization enters its next phase of implementation and learning.

Feedback

“This process helped us ask the hard questions and gave us the structure and language to answer them together.”
— Senior Strategy Executive (anonymous)