Mid-Year Strategic Plan Audit: Check-In Guide for Social Impact

Summer is time for vacation – and for your organization’s mid-year impact check-in! Your organization likely had a strategic planning session about six months ago. Ideally, your organization has a deliberate plan for creating social change just like it has a strategic plan to guide its overall growth goals.

Now is the time to sit down and adjust based on situations that have occurred since your planning session. Even the plans designed with strong motivation, good intentions, or clear goals can get off-track. The unexpected challenges and positive opportunities that arose throughout the year were not factored into your work, and should cause your team to review and make adjustments.

Remember, your organization creates change for the people it serves by being intentional and consistent. Change happens over time, through the mundane commitments and consistency to something bigger.

It doesn’t matter what your organizational model is: impact is not dependent upon whether you are a credit union, CDFI, corporation, or a small pizza shop that wants to be an anchor in the community. If you want your work to stand out, be noticed, and make a difference, you have to have a plan for engagement.

To get started with a mid-year audit, take a half day (or even a full day) to go through these questions with your leadership team.

1. Does the organization have an impact plan, or just a business plan?

Profound Hope Industries works with a spectrum of organizational types, and the degree to which impact is addressed in the annual strategic planning process varies greatly across organizations. From experience, most organizations start out with an organizational business plan and neglect to clearly define impact in the strategic planning process. Your organization must have a plan for impact, regardless of whether you call it Corporate Social Responsibility, Community Development, or Community Engagement. The plan will act as a guide to help you determine exactly what you are trying to solve, and how to leverage your organization’s model to do it.

2. What circumstances have changed since we wrote our plan?

If you are reading this in 2025, your organization knows the United States has faced big upheaval, in the form of federal funding modifications, tariffs, natural disasters, etc. Those circumstances have created turbulence for organizations of all sizes and structures. Even if your organization doesn’t feel directly impacted, chances are someone you work closely with has been. This someone might be a vendor, competitor, industry influencer, customer, client, or program participant. It is ok to go back and revise goals based on real life circumstances. Caveat: Don’t throw away good goals because circumstances feel harder, but do modify them to align with other changes your organization has absorbed. This includes your stakeholder changes. It is possible someone you partnered with closely no longer has the capacity they did six months (or may have grown and be ready to do more!)

3. Do our metrics measure the right thing?

If your organization does have an impact plan, you likely have some quantifiable goals around the related objectives. Even with these metrics in place, it is common for a purpose-focused organization to struggle to define and measure impact. If you are feeling this, you are not alone. Many organizations choose metrics to track, without proper incentives to follow-up and determine whether moving that particular needle was actually meaningful. Strong impact tracking begins with clarity around the problem your organization is trying to solve, and why you think this is one your organization can have influence around. Use some of the time in your check-in session to discuss whether your chosen metrics are creating change for the people you aim to support.

Strong impact tracking begins with clarity around the problem your organization is trying to solve, and why you think this is one your organization can have influence around.

4. What partnerships have we built, or community stakeholders have we spoken with throughout the year?

Creating impact takes a network! Your organization is a community anchor and local stakeholder. You might have some big goals, but there are a lot of external factors that influence how successful you will be in your social impact efforts. Once you identify the relationships you have made, identify your top 3-5 to build deeper connections with. If you reflect and find you have not been working with partners with similar purpose driven goals, make it a point to add some measurements around working with other stakeholders.

5. What has gone well in our progress toward social impact?

Spend some time being grateful and remembering the positive things that have happened. You have made progress somewhere. The real secret to impact is that everything has impact – even NOT being present somewhere has an effect. When you choose intentional social impact strategy or purpose work, you have taken the first step to making a difference. Although you can’t be everywhere, you have been SOMEWHERE so celebrate what has gone right.

6. What is your big vision for purpose and community engagement?

As you wrap up your organization’s review, take the time to consider the long- term opportunities you want to be prepared to take advantage of if they arise. Create some goals around short-term, mid-term, and long-term impact. Understanding what your organization hopes to achieve around impact (just like every other area of your business) will help you set appropriate priorities and give you a framework for decisions around how to spend your teams’ time. As you build toward the long-term strategy, you also get prepared for the long-term goals should unexpected opportunities come about.

7. What can we do to set ourselves up for a strong community engagement strategy next year?

Take inventory of your resources and capacity, and start setting yourself up for a strong strategy in the future. You are building the blocks of a social impact strategy today, and it make take some time to see the benefits. If you find you are behind where you wanted to be this year, take steps to make the adjustments now. Do not wait until next year to start building vision. In doing so, you will find your organization makes progress and gets further ahead than anticipated. If you are exactly where you hoped to be by now, have your leadership team start reviewing what should go in next year’s strategic plan.

Good strategy is important. Strategy informs tactics, projects, and to-do lists. The best strategic plans help you let go of things that are not core to your objectives, so you can spend your energy working on plans that matter.

Get our full supporting audit questionnaire here.

It is time to start preparing for fall strategic planning! Do you need someone to guide you in building impactful social impact goals that actually create change while balance profitability? Reach out to Profound Hope Industries to discuss.