14 Free Strategic Planning Templates (2024)

Good strategic planning is the foundation for making your business or project successful. It boosts performance and helps all stakeholders and team members understand what the company’s ultimate goals are. 

To make the complex strategic planning process easier, you can use premade templates and save valuable time and energy. 

We’ve created 14 free strategic planning templates, ranging from those you’ll need for a specific business type to those you’ll need for specific business planning stages. Templates don’t need to be strictly followed and adhered to — you can always further adapt them to your specific needs. They’re intended to be used as a guideline rather than a strict rule.

So, let’s get down to templates.

Template #1: Nonprofit Strategic Plan 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The strategic plan template for nonprofits is a comprehensive roadmap that outlines general information about your organization, such as its importance, geographic region, mission, vision, and values. 

Additionally, it offers a dedicated section for budgeting, including projected income and expenditure. 

This nonprofit strategic plan template also includes sections to describe your marketing strategies, SWOT analysis, and KPIs. Finally, you can add your SMART goals and tasks to achieve these goals.

Template #2: Strategic Marketing Plan

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The strategic marketing plan template should help you and your marketing teams gain a better understanding of your overall marketing strategy. 

It allows you to keep the most significant information stored in one place. This includes information on the product value, target audience, strategy and business objectives, budget overview, competitor analysis, and marketing mix.

Template #3: Strategic Business Plan 

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The strategic plan template incorporates a section with basic company information and a summary of the strategic plan, accompanied by the company’s vision and mission statement.

Your business plan may also include the SWOT analysis, business goals, and operational plan. Additionally, there’s a section dedicated to key performance indicators (KPIs), financial projections, risks, and team roles and responsibilities. 

This free strategic plan template can be tailored to suit different industries, including IT, sales, or any other industry.

Template #4: Strategic Communication Plan

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The strategic communication plan template is excellent for planning a communications initiative. It is a highly detailed template that delves deeper into the context of your initiative, including external and internal factors that may affect it. 

There are sections dedicated to PEST, SWOT, stakeholder, and target audience analysis, as well as space to list your objectives, strategies, and tactics. The communication plan template also emphasizes issues and budget specifics, along with metrics.

Template #5: One-Page Strategic Plan

Download: Google Docs | Google Docs Printable Version | Word | Word Printable Version

The one-page strategic plan template is a short version of the comprehensive business strategic plan mentioned above. This simple strategic plan template aims to present a concise overview of the plan, ideally with 1 or 2 sentences dedicated to each section. 

The template features a summary, mission, and vision statement. Also, it has space dedicated to KPIs, SWOT analysis, operations plan, as well as finances, risks, and team organization. 

It fits perfectly on one A4-sized paper when printed.

Template #6: HR Strategic Plan 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The template intended for human resources strategic planning includes a short summary, HR mission, vision, and values. Moreover, the HR strategic plan template facilitates goal setting across various HR domains, such as talent management, employee satisfaction, performance management, diversity and inclusion, compensation and benefits, and resource allocation. 

Within each of these areas, you can include goals and further specify them with action steps, owners, due dates, resources, and desired outcomes. 

Template #7: Strategic Action Plan

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The strategic action plan template will help you track all the tasks necessary to achieve planned goals. 

The template includes an outline for tracking tasks by categories such as the person responsible, priority, status, and start/end date. By keeping all actual tasks transparent, you should increase the chances of reaching the set goals.

Template #8: 5-Year Strategic Plan

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The free 5-year strategic plan template helps you establish long-term strategic goals for your company. 

This template may serve as an excellent visual starting point for planning. It displays your company goals over a 5-year period, including those related to product, marketing, sales, financial, and operational goals. 

You can edit the template by adding any other category relevant to your business.

Template #9: SWOT Analysis

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

As one of the most commonly used strategic planning tools, the SWOT analysis aims to identify internal (strengths and weaknesses) and external (opportunities and threats) factors that may impact projects’ or business’ success. 

The SWOT analysis template is a useful visual representation of these factors and may help gain a better understanding of a company’s or project’s current strategic position.

Template #10: Strategic Vision and Mission 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The vision and mission strategic template aims to focus on the big picture – what your company stands for. This template will help ensure that all team members and stakeholders work toward a common goal that aligns with the overall company vision. 

The key elements of this vision and mission template include vision, mission, values, strategies, and tactics.

Template #11: Executive Summary 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

Executive summaries serve as concise introductions to strategic plans before they are presented to stakeholders. 

Utilizing this template can assist you in quickly drafting such summaries. It comprises 3 categories commonly addressed in executive summaries — objectives, challenges, and solutions.

Template #12: Balanced Scorecard

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The balanced scorecard template offers a better perspective on your business by examining four crucial areas involved in the strategic planning process. These areas include financial, customer, internal business processes, and employee growth. 

Utilizing the scorecard template may assist you in better defining overall goals and objectives.

Template #13: Simple Change Plan 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

This simple change plan template is designed to help you address a common issue faced by many companies, which is reflected in the following question:

What needs to change? 

The template focuses on several business areas, including financials, customers, product, location, employees, and culture. It’s designed to provide a visual representation of the current situation compared to what you aim to change in the future. 

This template may aid you in better defining your objectives. 

Template #14: OKRs Strategic Plan 

Download: Google Sheets | Google Docs | Excel | Word

The objectives and key results (OKRs) template, as its name suggests, is designed to assist you in setting objectives and key results for your team by visually tracking your goals. 

Key objectives are listed in the far-left column, with key results listed right next to them. This layout provides clarity on what to expect from each objective, along with details such as the responsible person or team, deadlines, and progress.

What is strategic planning?

Strategic planning is a process used by many modern companies with the aim of strategy formulation. It involves creating strategies by analyzing a company’s mission and values, as well as its internal and external environment. 

Based on the analysis, strategic planning aims to address key issues a company might face and set appropriate goals to address these issues.  

The goal of strategic planning is to enhance organizational performance and improve decision-making processes. Its application goes beyond large-scale business planning. It can also be utilized for strategic planning at departmental levels, such as marketing, sales, or HR.

What is a strategic plan template?

A strategic plan template can serve as a ready-made guide for developing a company’s strategy. Such a template may be available in various formats, including Word templates, PowerPoint templates, Excel templates, and Google Sheets and Docs templates.

The strategic plan template contains pre-made sections, but you can always add any categories of your own to fit your specific needs. The point is to use a template as a guideline, and not to follow it rigidly.

4 Stages of strategic planning

Before you start planning your strategy, it’s good to get familiar with 4 crucial stages of a strategic planning process you must go through:

1. Analysis is the initial stage of any strategic planning process. It includes analyzing your own company and its current situation. After defining where you are at the moment, it’s time to analyze your competition and environment. This often includes using tools such as SWOT analysis or the balanced scorecard. 
2. Setting goals is another stage you must go through as it helps you clearly visualize where you want to see your company in the future. The more precise you are with goal-setting, the better, and the previously conducted analysis should help you with that. 
3. After you’ve defined your goals, you can move on to putting your plans into action. At this point, you should craft a strategic action plan with specific tasks that lead you toward each of the specific goals, along with important details such as deadlines and the people responsible.
4. Evaluating what you’ve achieved is crucial for successful strategic planning, and it involves establishing and tracking your key performance indicators. Following the metrics will ensure you’re on the right track and recognize if there’s a need to adapt the process.

Keep in mind that strategic planning is a process that may be constantly adapted, and you can always switch from one phase to the next and then come back to the previous one if necessary. The key is to remain flexible throughout the process and ready to make changes along the way. 

Benefits of strategic planning

Strategic planning may bring many advantages to a business, especially when utilizing a visual strategic plan, as it boosts organizational performance and leads to success:

• It offers clarity and coherence to the strategic planning process. All information is transparently displayed and thus more effectively communicated to all stakeholders.
• With strategic planning, you’re more likely to focus on pursuing the right goals and make better decisions. 
• The chances are you won’t overlook possible issues with your strategy. You’ll remain aware of your strengths and weaknesses and beware of any internal and external threats. 
• Having a clear strategic plan will also ensure better cooperation and understanding among team members, as everyone will precisely know their job and what they’re working toward achieving. 
• On the department level, with strategic planning, everyone will know how to align their goals with wider business goals. 

Strategic planning with Plaky

After you’ve created your strategic plan, it’s time to start turning it into action. The Plaky project management tool can be a great asset in turning plans into reality. 

Plaky is designed to help you track and organize tasks with ease. For instance, you can create a space, invite all your team members, create tasks, and assign them to team members. 

To make organization even easier and a lot more fun, you can group tasks into sections, and assign them different colors, statuses, and tags. The customization options are endless, and it’s up to you what your space will look like.

With Plaky, you won’t need to worry about anyone missing important information, losing a document, or missing deadlines. All information in Plaky is updated in real-time and will make your strategic planning a stress-free process.

And if you’re looking for a strategy plan template, Plaky has already got one ready for you. 

With this free template, you won’t need to spend time planning and organizing your space from scratch. All the basic marketing tasks are already grouped according to quartals, and all the important columns are set. You’ll be able to add the following information:

• Assignees,
• Statuses,
• Dates, 
• Tags, and
• Links.

We suggest trying Plaky as it is super easy to use and has no learning curve. Plus, it offers a completely free plan, making it perfect for all types of small businesses not looking to invest too much money into a work tool.