LFS was founded in 2020, and growth came quickly. By its sixth school year, the school had already accomplished much of what it set out to do in an earlier strategic plan developed with support from coLAB.

With that progress came an important question: What was the school’s next best step?

Answering it required a deliberative approach. Andrea wanted the next planning process to incorporate perspectives from across the school community. Strategic planning affects more than organizational leadership, and LFS wanted the people invested in its future to have a meaningful opportunity to be heard.

The goal was to turn those perspectives into a practical foundation for the school’s next strategic plan.

For a young organization, a comprehensive planning process can compete with the demands of running the organization day-to-day.

LFS had limited staff and financial resources. Another traditional, consultant-led strategic planning engagement represented a significant financial investment, while managing the process internally would put much of the work of gathering, organizing, and interpreting stakeholder feedback on Andrea.

But gathering the feedback was only part of the challenge. Someone still had to make sense of the information being collected.

Stakeholders bring different experiences, priorities, and perspectives to a planning process. Turning those responses into useful information requires identifying themes and understanding what the feedback says collectively. It can become yet another responsibility for an already-busy organizational leader.

LFS needed a process that could preserve the value of broad stakeholder participation without making the process itself unmanageable.

Because coLAB had worked with Lancaster Friends School during its previous strategic planning process, the team already understood the school and the progress it had made.

“They had a very engaged board and staff and limited resources, but a real drive to execute strategy,” said Kate Gallagher of coLAB. “I’d seen them do it in the past, so they seemed like really good candidates to try VERVE.”

The question was whether VERVE could give LFS the same structure and output of a traditional strategic planning engagement in a more self-directed and manageable framework.

VERVE gave Andrea the ability to take on more of the process through the platform while continuing to have access to support from coLAB.

VERVE provided a central place for stakeholder information to be gathered and evaluated. Instead of Andrea having to manually sort through responses and determine what they meant collectively, the platform helped organize and analyze the input and turn it into reports she could use in the planning process.

For Andrea, the quality of those reports mattered.

“The reports were really reflective of the answers that we got,” she said. “I think that they were right on with what people were saying.”

The process also made it easier to give board members visibility into what was happening, helping Andrea share the progress of the planning work without having to recreate it separately for them.

But Andrea’s experience also underscored an important part of how Lancaster Friends School used VERVE: the technology did not mean working alone.

Training and access to the coLAB team remained part of the experience.

Andrea also emphasized the importance of the human support behind the platform. Training, responsiveness, and knowing she could reach out to Kate or the broader coLAB team were, she said, “a really vital part” of their ability to use VERVE effectively.

The combination of self-guided technology through VERVE and the human support from coLAB allowed Lancaster Friends School to handle more of the strategic planning process through VERVE while still having people to turn to when guidance was needed.