Planning Your Annual Retreat

COCo held our annual retreat just last weekend, and so our staff and Board have been reflecting on what makes for a great one. Whether you’re using it for planning, visioning, or some crisis management, we’ve included some of our top tips for making a retreat great.

Juniper, our funding development coordinator, says “Make it realistic, and don’t bite off more than you can chew. Take lots of breaks, have some social time, respect the humanity of the people there. You know retreats that feel like a really long meeting? That’s not what you want.”

Sabrina, our planner extraordinaire, says taking retreats as a time to be more creative can make them especially great. What kinds of out-of-the-box activities could you come up with to help you understand the bigger picture of your organization?

Kira says that in her experience an important part of a great retreat is advance planning and buy-in: making sure that everyone knows, and has agreed in advance, what will be on the agenda and thinks it is the right thing for the organization to address at this time.

For more thoughts and advice from the COCo staff on retreats, check out this video we produced a couple of years ago on how to plan your annual retreat.