a creative story
Beyond mission and vision are strategies, objectives and benchmarks
City of Belmont 2020 Strategic Plan and Budget
The opportunity
The City of Belmont decided 2020 was the year to institute a long-term strategic plan and embarked upon a process to define the city’s priority focus areas. Then came the difficult work of relaying those priorities to the community and realigning the budget to strategically advance the priorities. The city relied on Team JPW to create a suite of functional materials that would help the community understand the goals and stay updated on the city’s progress toward achieving them.
The approach
The process began with adding visual hierarchy, color-coding and imagery to the strategic plan itself to help illustrate the five focus areas. We then designed a strategic plan summary document to provide a high-level overview with aligned visuals. JPW then tackled the next challenge of adapting the staff dashboard, an up-to-date tracker on projects and initiatives, with the new design while still maintaining its spreadsheet functionality. Finally, we redesigned the budget brief to align with the new priorities, working collaboratively with the city to condense the massive 300-plus page budget book into its most pertinent highlights, using charts, images, and key messages in the city’s first separately published budget brief.
The solution
City of Belmont 2020 strategic plan
City of Belmont 2020 strategic plan summary
Ongoing strategic plan progress dashboard
2021 City of Belmont budget book cover
2021 budget brief
2021 budget presentation to City Council
Ongoing monthly budget highlight report and tracker
The reward
City of Belmont staff were able to implement the dashboard and report templates with all of the functionality of Excel documents, and all of the branding and design of the new strategic plan and budget brief. The new documents help build familiarity and ownership of the city brand for both staff and the community, with a clear understanding of the city’s priorities, direction and progress.