Case Study 1: Strategic Repositioning for a Regional Public Health Agency
THE SITUATION
A regional public health agency responsible for programming across four counties was approaching a significant leadership transition. The incoming director had inherited a department with strong staff and legitimate community impact — but no shared strategic framework, no documented priorities, and no roadmap for the next program cycle.
The previous director had operated on institutional knowledge and personal relationships. The new director needed a clear strategic foundation she could communicate to funders, align her team around, and use to make resource allocation decisions. She had ninety days before the first board presentation.
THE CHALLENGE
No existing strategic plan — the last formal document was five years old and no longer reflected the agency's portfolio.
Four program leads with strong individual ownership but limited cross-departmental alignment.
Pending federal funding renewal required a clear three-year programmatic direction.
New director needed credibility with both the board and the frontline staff — a plan that was seen as hers, not imposed from outside.
THE APPROACH
RSG began with an organizational diagnostic: structured interviews with the four program leads, a review of existing reporting and outcome data, and a stakeholder mapping exercise to identify the audiences the new strategy would need to serve — board, funders, staff, and community partners.
From the diagnostic, RSG identified three areas of strategic tension: a gap between the agency's funded priorities and its community-facing mission, an under-resourced prevention portfolio that was producing measurable outcomes with no formal strategic support, and a data collection infrastructure that could not support the performance narrative the funding renewal required.
RSG facilitated two planning sessions with the full program leadership team. The first session established shared agreement on the agency's strategic priorities. The second pressure-tested the implementation roadmap: where the resource assumptions were thin, where the dependencies were fragile, and what the director needed to be able to say publicly before the work was complete.
The final deliverable was a 12-month implementation roadmap with three strategic priorities, program-level milestones, a data narrative framework for the funding renewal, and a board presentation deck the director could deliver as her own.
THE RESULTS
Strategic Priorities
Three clear priorities, agreed by full program leadership in two facilitated sessions
Funding Renewal
Performance narrative framework completed and incorporated into federal renewal submission
Board Alignment
Director delivered first board presentation using the roadmap; received unanimous approval of new strategic direction
Team Alignment
Program leads reported higher clarity on cross-departmental priorities than at any point in the prior three years
“We had the work. We just didn’t have the story — or the structure behind the story. RSG helped us build both. The plan felt like ours because it was built from our actual work.”
— Incoming Director, Regional Public Health Agency
