Introduction
As its 2005-2009 strategic plan expired, the Florida Nursery Growers and Landscape Association (FNGLA) enlisted the PIE Center to help set the course for the 2010-2012 strategic plan. The PIE Center conducted a strategic planning session that included revising the organization’s mission and vision statements, addressing industry trends in other organizations’ priority areas, and identifying new goals, action steps and measures of success for the upcoming strategic plan.
The PIE Center and FNGLA strategic planning committee members analyzed the association by examining its strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. Strengths and weaknesses address the internal components of the organization while opportunities and threats examine external components. The committee members also completed a survey to rank the goals in the five priority areas.
Key Findings
While reviewing the previous strategic plan, committee members proposed to modify the organization’s mission and vision statements for clarity and brevity. Committee members developed two vision statements to be used with different audiences.
FNGLA staff and board members examined current trends within each of the strategic priority areas, which are political leadership, education and certification, marketing, membership benefits and services, and finance and administration. Attendees were then divided into groups and asked to create strategic goals that supported the priority area and identify key steps for success.
In the survey results, respondents ranked each goal on a five-point Likert scale, from “Not Important” to “Extremely Important.” Within the political action leadership priority area, respondents identified advocating the industry’s legislative and regulatory positions as the most important, followed by strengthening the FNGLA Political Action Committee. Respondents stated that positioning FNGLA certifications as recognized premier or gold standard, as well as urging local governments to require certified professionals as the most important education and certification priority area goals.
In the communications and marketing priority area, respondents found promoting Florida plants, products and services to be the most important goal. This was followed by strengthening internal communications and showcasing the environmental stewardship.
Developing targeted marketing to recruit and retain members was identified as the most important goal for the membership benefits and services priority area, as well as producing tangible benefits. Within the finance and administration priority area, respondents identified that evaluating programming efficiencies was the top goal, ahead of hiring a field person to support chapters and build membership.
Based on PIE Center’s analysis, political leadership was ranked as the most important strategic priority area, followed by communication and marketing, member benefits and services, education and certification and lastly, finance and administration.
