By Assistant Chief Dustin Harrison
Fire service strategic plans often begin with strong participation and thoughtful priorities, yet their value depends on what happens after the planning sessions end.
Beavercreek Township (Ohio) Fire Department (BTFD) faced the same practical challenge: How could the department keep a multiyear strategic plan active while balancing emergency response, training, staffing, budgeting and daily administrative demands? The answer was to distribute ownership through a Goal Champion program.
| READ MORE: Are your policies supporting your fire department strategic plan?
Goal Champions are firefighters and company officers who volunteer to help prioritize, implement, manage and evaluate assigned strategic initiatives, goals and objectives. The model is supervised by the department’s planning and quality improvement leadership, but it intentionally gives non-senior-staff personnel meaningful responsibility and access to the organizational improvement process.
Rather than relying on one chief officer to track every objective, the program creates a network of engaged members who connect strategic direction to operational experience.
The impetus for the practice
BTFD’s first formal five-year strategic plan was developed in 2019 as part of the department’s pursuit of accreditation through the Commission on Fire Accreditation International. The department recognized early that adoption of a plan did not guarantee implementation. Strategic goals competed with emergency demands, projects spanned divisions, and many objectives needed years of sustained follow-up. A process was needed to prevent the plan from becoming a static document reviewed only during accreditation or budget preparation.
The Goal Champion approach addressed two needs at once. First, it broadened participation in organizational decision-making. Members closest to the work could research options, gather feedback, build committees and recommend practical changes. This helped the department treat the strategic plan as a living management tool rather than a compliance product. Second, it created accountability for monitoring progress, identifying barriers and maintaining documentation.
When BTFD updated its plan for 2025-2029, the program continued. The new plan was developed during four facilitated planning days in September and October 2024 with external stakeholders and a cross-section of department personnel.
Six strategic initiatives emerged:
- Internal Communication
- Workforce Management
- Community Engagement
- Training
- Capital Resources
- Continuous Improvement and Accreditation
Goal Champions were assigned to carry those priorities forward.
Key players and roles
The program works because strategic ownership is shared but not unstructured. Executive leadership and senior staff provide authority, resources and alignment with township priorities. Planning and quality improvement leadership coordinates the process, schedules reviews, maintains the tracking structure and connects the work to accreditation, annual reporting and budget development. Goal Champions serve as initiative-level owners who monitor objectives, recruit subject-matter experts, identify action items and report progress.
For the 2025-2029 plan, the Goal Champion group represents a cross-section of the organization, including firefighters, company officers, chief officers and executive leadership. Champions are assigned to initiatives that align with their experience, professional interests or areas of organizational responsibility. Champions receive support from administrative staff, program managers, labor representatives, other township departments and outside service providers. As needed, these partners provide specialized expertise, funding authority, policy guidance or technical assistance. This broad collaboration gives each initiative an operational perspective while ensuring that recommendations remain connected to the department’s administrative, financial and governance responsibilities.
This structure is deliberately cross-rank. Firefighters contribute firsthand operational knowledge and community perspective. Company officers translate strategic priorities into station-level practices, coordinate teams and help maintain momentum. Chief officers connect projects to policy, budgets, accreditation requirements and long-range planning, while executive leadership removes barriers and preserves alignment with township priorities. The result is supervised autonomy: Members at different ranks have meaningful opportunities to lead and collaborate, while senior staff retains responsibility for policy, funding, labor and governing-body decisions.
General timeline and operating rhythm
The practice began during the 2019-2024 strategic plan cycle and was formalized through volunteer opportunities, assigned champions, meeting agendas and progress-tracking tools. Buy-in was slow at first. The Goal Champion role was new, expectations were still being defined, and members had not yet seen how their participation could influence organizational priorities.
By 2021, the department was actively recruiting members, including relatively new department members, to serve as champions.
During 2022 and 2023, quarterly meetings and monthly status templates were used to document task completion percentages, barriers and comments. As champions helped move initiatives from discussion to completion, the value of the program became more visible and interest gradually increased.
The 2025-2029 cycle strengthened the process. By the time the updated plan was rolled out, members could point to completed initiatives and operational improvements that had resulted from the earlier Goal Champion work. As a result, champion positions were easier to fill, participation reflected a broader cross-section of the department and turnover in the roles decreased.
Today, each champion receives responsibility for one or more initiatives. Champions update a shared Strategic Initiatives Tracking Table before quarterly meetings. The group reviews progress, barriers, changing priorities and next actions with the planning chief. Annually, the same information is converted into a Strategic Planning Annual Compliance Report that documents prior-year accomplishments and establishes goals for the coming year. The report is presented to the Beavercreek Township Board of Trustees and made available to the public.
This cadence creates a simple chain of accountability: ongoing project work, quarterly review, annual evaluation, public reporting and revision when organizational conditions change.
Success metrics and stories
The clearest measure of success is that strategic work has produced visible operational results across all six initiatives. Some examples:
- Implementation of a new policy platform and publication of new or revised policies;
- Improved access to daily briefing and trustee information through SharePoint;
- Staffing, deployment and long-range levy analyses;
- Individualized customer-service survey development;
- Expanded EMS outreach;
- Officer development and probationary evaluation processes;
- Train-the-trainer investments;
- Coordinated facility and fleet inspections;
- Deployment of new apparatus and technology; and
- Completion of major accreditation documents.
The program also improved the department’s ability to document progress. The annual compliance report identifies accomplishments, unresolved barriers and next-year priorities instead of relying on institutional memory. Champions can show how a project moved from discussion to research, committee work, funding, implementation and evaluation.
External validation provided an important success story. During BTFD’s 2026 peer assessment, the assessment team identified the Goal Champion process as a best practice. The peer assessment report described the model as a “supervised autonomous collaboration” that uses firefighters and company officers to institutionalize strategic goal development, implementation and achievement. That recognition reinforced what the department had experienced internally: Greater ownership improves both the quality of the plan and the likelihood that goals are completed.
Tips for replication
Other agencies can replicate the model without creating a new administrative position or purchasing specialized software. The following practices are the most important:
- Start with a limited number of clear strategic initiatives. Assign one accountable champion to each initiative and keep senior-staff sponsorship visible.
- Recruit volunteers, not just rank-based appointees. Explain the workload, authority and development opportunity. Don’t discount members early in their career; they often bring energy and firsthand operational insight, but they need protected time and access to decision-makers.
- Define the champion’s role in writing. At minimum, champions should monitor assigned objectives, organize contributors, maintain status information, identify barriers, recommend changes and participate in an annual review.
- Use a single tracking tool. A spreadsheet, Microsoft Lists or Loop workspace or similar shared table should capture the initiative, goal, objective, strategy, owner, status, evidence, next action and target date. Avoid separate files that cannot be reconciled.
- Establish a predictable rhythm. Quarterly meetings are frequent enough to maintain momentum without creating excessive administrative burden. Require updates before the meeting so discussion can focus on decisions and barriers rather than data collection.
- Connect goals to budgets, policy and performance data. Strategic objectives that require funding should enter the budget cycle early. Policy changes should follow the agency’s approval process. Measures should include outcomes where possible, not only completed activities.
- Publish an annual compliance report. Summarize what was completed, what changed, what remains open and what will be pursued next year. Presenting the report to the governing body strengthens transparency and helps preserve support during leadership transitions. Highlighting accomplishments also helps obtain buy-in from department members.
- Allow the plan to change. Minor objectives and strategies should be revised when conditions, technology, staffing or community needs change. Preserve the strategic direction, but do not force outdated tasks simply because they appear in the original plan.
Extending ownership
The essential lesson is straightforward: Strategic planning becomes sustainable when ownership extends beyond the chief’s office. By giving members meaningful responsibility, a clear reporting structure and regular access to leadership, agencies can turn a written plan into a continuous improvement system.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
The essential lesson is straightforward: Strategic planning becomes sustainable when ownership extends beyond the chief’s office. By giving members meaningful responsibility, a clear reporting structure and regular access to leadership, agencies can turn a written plan into a continuous improvement system.
