Strategic planning is pivotal to prevention success. It brings together all of your data collection and capacity-planning work to create an overall vision of what your coalition is attempting to do and how it will evaluate the results of its efforts. Strategic planning increases the effectiveness of your prevention efforts by focusing energy, ensuring that staff and other stakeholders are working toward the same goals, and providing the means for assessing and adjusting programmatic direction as needed.
Use the information you obtained via your needs assessment to develop a strategic plan for addressing substance misuse and abuse in your community. Detailed guidelines on developing a strategic plan are provided here.