It has been a busy month for our strategic planning work. We’d like to share a quick update on our progress and our plans moving forward.

After reviewing the extensive materials ACA staff provided for the initial discovery phase, our strategic planning consultants, OrgCentric Partners , have conducted interviews with more than 45 individuals, including ACA volunteers, ACA board members, camp leaders, and ACA staff. The materials and interviews gave our consultants valuable insights and a deep understanding of ACA, our members, and the service we provide to the organized camp movement.

Through December and most of January, our Strategic Planning Committee and ACA staff have conducted a series of planning meetings to identify a diverse group of critical stakeholders and develop a research methodology to garner appropriate input from the identified groups. A significant part of this planning process has been used to create a robust plan for leveraging our National Conference as a central venue for gathering data from many of our important stakeholder groups. Our efforts in Nashville will include:

• Additional individual interviews
• Stakeholder focus groups
• Small group meetings of 3–5 people
• Input sessions with the National Board and National Council of Leaders
• Auditing selected breakout sessions identified by our consultants
• Open office hours for conference attendees to share thoughts with our consultants

In addition, we are developing strategies to collect data from our three affiliates at their conferences and a variety of our stakeholder groups who do not typically attend our National Conference. With this in mind, OrgCentric will continue to review our 2018 Membership Survey results and other research that has been compiled. The major focus of our efforts through the next two months will be to gather data from key audiences. In March, our Strategic Planning Committee, ACA staff, and our consultants will participate in a planning retreat to synthesize data and build the first draft of our Strategic Plan.

We are steadfastly committed to an open and inclusive process. If you have insights that you would like to share with our Strategic Planning consultants, please reach out to any ACA staff member, who can connect you with the correct person to ensure your feedback will be included in the process. If you have any thoughts specific to defining our stakeholder groups and the methodology used to gather that input, you can reach out directly to Laurie Browne, our director of research (lbrowne@ACAcamps.org).  

Thank you for your time and attention on this important topic, and we will continue to provide regular updates throughout the planning process.