Guest post by Aly Sterling, Aly Sterling Philanthropy
As a nonprofit professional, you understand the value of a plan. Whether you’re running a fundraising campaign or starting up a new volunteering initiative, a clear roadmap for how you’ll achieve your objectives will help set your nonprofit up for success. Your organization might make project plans throughout the year, but do you also have an overarching plan to guide your nonprofit’s operations?
A nonprofit strategic plan aligns your nonprofit’s goals with its values to create a performance map for future endeavors. Instead of making major decisions on the fly and working on tasks that might not support your priorities, a nonprofit strategic plan gives your organization the clarity it needs to make its mission a reality.
While creating a strategic plan requires ample time and effort, your organization will be able to work more productively and effectively throughout the year, allowing you to reap the rewards over the long-term. In this article, we’ll explore these major benefits of strategic planning:
Improved time management
Better staff and board organization
Ability to assess results
Creating a strategic plan for your nonprofit requires all hands on deck. By collecting a variety of insights and opinions from your stakeholders and working with your team to set firm goals, your team will be in great shape to grow its revenue, expand its donor base and achieve its major goals.
Before we jump into the benefits of strategic planning, let’s go over what exactly a nonprofit strategic plan is.
What is a nonprofit strategic plan?
A nonprofit strategic plan is a document that outlines your goals, priorities and projects so you can clearly define how you’ll make strides towards growing your organization. By assessing your nonprofit’s current situation, consulting with stakeholders and formalizing your findings into a plan, you’ll be able to create a dynamic roadmap that gives your nonprofit the clarity it needs to advance its mission.
With this in mind, let’s take a closer look at the benefits of nonprofit strategic planning.
Improved time management
Between running campaigns and leading donor stewardship activities, your nonprofit is likely often strapped for time. This is especially true if you’re a small or medium-sized nonprofit that often feels like you have more tasks than staff or volunteers on hand.
If this sounds like your organization, a nonprofit strategic plan can help your organization manage its time and resources more effectively. According to Aly Sterling Philanthropy’s guide to nonprofit strategic planning, a plan allows your organization to establish priorities and figure out which projects are most pressing to complete. With these insights, you can shape your daily operations around tasks that will push your goals forward and say no to the activities that don’t align with your priorities.
Creating a strategic plan also enables your nonprofit to rework staff responsibilities that conflict with your organization’s priorities. For example, let’s say your nonprofit has experienced low engagement numbers online and struggles with fundraising. Focusing your marketing staff’s efforts on developing a user-friendly website and donation page would then take precedence over spending hours each day trying to hone your direct mail strategy.
Better staff and board organization
Your nonprofit might have broad goals for the year, but does each team member have a clearly-defined role for how they’ll bring that goal to fruition? By developing a nonprofit strategic plan, you can clearly delegate roles and responsibilities among your staff, board members and upper-level volunteers, making sure everyone is on the same page.
Specifically, a nonprofit strategic plan gives your nonprofit the opportunity to pinpoint specific actions associated with each of your priorities, the point person in charge of each action and other key details. Let’s take a closer look at these elements:
Action steps: Based on the priorities your team has laid out, what tasks or projects will help you to meet your goals? Outline the specific steps that need to be taken in as much detail as possible.
Timeline/milestones: Map out the associated timeline with each project or task to create accountability. You can also list out milestones that you’d like to hit along the way, as this will help your nonprofit’s team measure progress.
Leaders: Who will be responsible for carrying out each project or task? Assign the point people to each action step so your staff and board members understand their role in contributing to your nonprofit’s success.
Necessary resources: What resources will your organization need to complete these action steps? This can include people, databases and technology solutions that will streamline your approach and help you improve your organization. For example, if your organization is experiencing low fundraising numbers, you might consider embedding a matching gift database into your donation page. According to 360MatchPro, a matching gift platform allows donors to easily check if they’re eligible through their employers for matching gifts. This way, they can easily double or triple their impact!
Future/ongoing actions: Once your staff and board members begin their projects, it’s important to set up a check-in process to assess progress and resolve any issues that might pop up. For example, you could create a weekly meeting where the relevant team members get together and discuss what they’re working on and what they’ve achieved.
As you lay out these details, maintain them in a document that can be accessed at any time. This way, your staff and board members can reference their roles and ensure they’re each meeting their responsibilities.
Ability to assess results
Another significant benefit of strategic planning is the opportunity to measure your progress and determine whether you’re meeting your goals. This is made possible through the SMART (specific, measurable, attainable, relevant and time-bound) goal setting process, where you’ll clearly outline how you’ll track progress in a quantifiable way.
For example, let’s say that after collecting insights from your stakeholders, you’ve determined that you need to bolster your major gift fundraising strategy. Your quantifiable goal could be to increase your total major gift income by 15%. To do this, you might reach out to existing major donors to increase their gift amount as well as prompt mid-level donors with the capacity to become major donors to give a gift at or above that threshold.
Remember to consistently track your results and check in on whether you’re on the way to meeting your goals. For example, if you’re at the halfway point of your determined timeline for improving your email communication strategy, but less than halfway towards meeting your goal, you’ll likely need to adjust your strategy. Work with your organization’s leaders and stakeholders to optimize your approach or reframe your goals so they’re more realistic.
Strategic planning gives your nonprofit the foundation it needs to advance its mission. With a clear roadmap for the future, you’ll be well-prepared to push your priorities forward and rally your team around your guiding principles for better efficiency. Work with an expert nonprofit consultant to craft a plan of action that makes sense for your organization and will accelerate your growth.