How to Write Clear Strategies and Priorities in JOD

This article helps you write strategies and priorities that create clarity as your organization moves toward its purpose. The JOD system is designed to connect important work to strategy, enabling alignment and activation—this requires more precision than traditional strategy frameworks. When strategies have clear boundaries and priorities are specific, your teams know exactly where their work fits, reports reveal real patterns, and your organization can see what's actually activating.

Before You Start

If You Already Have Strategies

Many organizations come to JOD with existing strategic plans. That's great—you've already done the hard thinking about direction and priorities. Now you're converting that work into JOD's framework, which is designed specifically to enable real-time strategy activation and learning.

What's different about JOD strategies:

• They need clear boundaries so staff can confidently connect their work to the right strategy
• They include implementation guidance (Distinct Approaches) that helps staff make critical choices
• Priorities should be specific enough that linking work feels obvious

Foundation Reading

Before diving into the craft of writing, understand how strategies connect to your reporting system:

→ Using Your Data to Adapt and Celebrate - How Strategy Reports and Group Reports reveal alignment

→ The Relationship Between Strategies and Priorities in JOD - The structure and purpose

→ Linking Actions and Decisions to Strategies and Priorities - How staff will use what you create

What Clear Strategies Enable

This is the shift: from strategy as aspiration to strategy as activation.

When strategies have clear boundaries and priorities are specific, three things happen:

Groups activating strategy see where their work connects. Teams and Tables working on strategic priorities understand how they contribute to organizational purpose. Staff don't waste mental energy debating which strategy/priority they are activating—they know where their work belongs.

Leaders see patterns in real-time. Strategy activation becomes visible, not assumed. You see which strategies are activating, which are stalling, where work is concentrating, and where gaps exist. This visibility enables smart adjustments without waiting for quarterly reports.

Organizations learn and adapt. You can spot what's working and course-correct quickly. When strategies show little activation, you investigate: Is this intentional focus elsewhere, or unintended drift? The patterns inform decisions about resources, structure, and strategic direction.

Writing Clear Strategies

The Framework

Each strategy in JOD includes three components:

1. Strategy Name (75 characters max)

Action-oriented and memorable. Something everyone can reference in conversation.

Examples:

• BUILD grassroots power in affected communities
• DEFEND immigrant families from deportation
• SHIFT public narrative on climate justice

2. Strategic Intent (2-3 sentences)

Explain the direction you're taking with this strategy. What opportunity or challenge does this address? Why now? What makes this strategically important at this moment?

3. Distinct Approaches

Implementation guidance that helps staff connect their work to the bigger picture. These are explicit choices that reflect your political analysis and organizational values—guidance for decisions about priorities, resource allocation, and partnerships.

Sample Strategy

Strategy Name: BUILD grassroots power in affected communities

Strategic Intent:

We're building grassroots power by investing in community leaders who are directly impacted by housing instability. Traditional advocacy hasn't shifted decision-making power, and we see an opportunity right now as city leadership changes. This strategy positions us to influence policy through authentic community voice.

Distinct Approaches:

• Center community members with lived experience in all program design decisions
• Invest in leadership development before program expansion
• Partner with grassroots organizations before seeking national affiliations

Writing Clear Priorities

Priorities are where strategy becomes concrete—the specific focus areas your Teams and Tables work on to activate each strategy. Because staff log Actions by selecting strategy-priority pairs, the clarity you build here directly affects whether teams work with momentum or spend mental energy debating where work belongs.

What makes priorities clear

• Be specific about what you're prioritizing this year. "Support community members" is vague. "Pilot case management program for families facing housing instability" tells staff exactly what kind of work belongs here.
• Connect each priority to its strategy. Someone reading the priority should understand how it activates that specific strategic direction—not some other strategy you also have.
• Create distinct priorities. Even across different strategies, each priority should have its own specificity. If two priorities sound similar, clarify what makes each one distinct—different populations, different approaches, different contexts.
• Match granularity to your learning needs. If you need to understand how work flows through distinct phases, break priorities into those phases. If you just need to see overall progress, keep them broader. The question: Will seeing these activities separately help us make better strategic decisions?

A note on single deliverables: Sometimes a significant deliverable represents your strategic focus for the year—like "Launch community-led participatory budgeting process." If completing it would meaningfully advance your strategy and your staff will log significant work toward it over time, make it a priority. The test isn't duration—it's strategic impact.

If everything is a priority, nothing is. Not every group's work will map to priorities—and that's exactly how it should be.

What Success Looks Like

You know your strategies and priorities are working when:

Groups can explain how their work serves organizational purpose. Ask any Team or Table how their work connects, and they can tell you which strategy it activates and why.

Staff don't struggle to log Actions. Choosing which strategy-priority pair to select feels straightforward most of the time. Some edge cases require quick judgment calls, but regular debate about where work belongs signals that boundaries need clarification.

Reports show meaningful patterns. You can see which strategies are activating, which need attention, and where adjustments might help. This visibility is why JOD requires precision—it's what makes organizational learning possible.

New staff understand direction quickly. You don't need insider knowledge to understand what your organization is trying to do and how different groups contribute.

Next Steps

Review your reporting system. Read "Using Your Data to Adapt and Celebrate" to understand how Strategy Reports and Group Reports will reveal patterns in the strategies you're building.

Start with your existing strategies. You've done the hard strategic thinking. Now translate it into JOD's framework—adding the boundaries, implementation guidance, and specificity that make activation visible.

Use the principles as your guide. Clear boundaries enable confident action. Most work should map to strategy most of the time. Priorities are selective by definition. Let these principles inform your choices.

Test with your teams. Once you've written strategies and priorities, check with the groups who'll use them. Do they know where their work belongs? If not, refine until the answer is yes.

Updated on: 17/01/2026