Agenda:Design Process

Aspiration follows a fairly standard process for developing meeting agendas:

• We work with co-organizers two to articulate 3-5 preliminary "event outcomes" or "outputs", articulated in the language of those who will participate in the event. Types of outcomes might include:
  • Strategic planning assets, e.g. visioning statements, strategic and/or tactical goals
  • Draft campaign, program and or product plans
  • Organizational stock-taking, e.g. program and project retrospectives, SWOT analyses, impact assessments, organizational health assessments, etc.
  • Financial planning assets, e.g. working budgets, fundraising goals and tactics, revenue diversification, etc
  • Community strategies, governance designs, stakeholder mappings, etc.

• We invite input from confirmed participants, asking them both whether the stated objectives sound like the right ones, while also inquiring about what is going to make their time feel most well-spent. This is normally done by engaging each participant via 1-1 email conversations, and then aggregate all the input.

• Based on all the above, we draft out a preliminary agenda, and take stock of how well it maps to event objectives.

• Once there is a stable draft agenda, we think through who from the participant group could be well-suited to help facilitate specific sessions or conversations.

• We then engage those facilitators, and work with them to think through simple and clear facilitation plans.

• As the agenda comes further into focus, we discuss documentation and capture, deciding when and how to capture meeting and session outputs.

• At the event, we treat the agenda as dynamic, evolving the plan in real time based on both preliminary meeting outcomes as well as participant feedback.

• The agenda is "final" when the event is over :)