Strategic planning is a universal requirement of leadership. The rewards are enormous, both in terms of benefits to the communities which nonprofits serve and the satisfaction nonprofits receive from devoting effort to furthering efficient, meaningful work. Petrea Marchand, founder of Consero Solutions, developed these Top 10 strategic planning tips for nonprofit board members based on her 13 years of experience working with nonprofit boards to support sustainable operations and governance. She understands, however, that many people may not share her enthusiasm for strategic planning; it is hard work without immediate reward, plus it takes people away from the day-to-day work of running a nonprofit. So these Top 10 tips are designed to encourage nonprofit boards to assist staff with development of a simple strategic plan.
Why Is Strategic Planning Important?
Strategic planning ensures a nonprofit’s actions and decisions are aligned with the nonprofit’s mission and vision, helps allocate scarce resources through the annual budget process, provides clear information about the nonprofit’s focus to donors and other interested parties, and helps staff and the board measure progress. And of course, strategic plans are also inspiring.
Is Strategic Planning Time-Consuming?
Consero Solutions believes a simple strategic plan, as well as regular review and updates, is an effective tool to guide expenditure of organization time and resources. Some nonprofits opt for hiring outside consultants and conducting multiple Board retreats or meetings to create a strategic plan, which can require a significant investment and take a year or more to complete. Nonprofits also can opt to ask executive staff to develop a draft for board review, hold a simple session with a facilitator to secure feedback, and commit to regular updates to the plan to address any weaknesses. Consero Solutions believes it is more important for an organization to have a simple, imperfect strategic plan developed in a short amount of time than to have no plan at all or to take years to complete the planning process. The plan will improve with time if staff and the board regularly discuss progress at board meetings and review and adjust the plan at least once a year.
What Happens In the Absence of a Strategic Plan?
Without a strategic plan, both the board and staff may spend time exploring or implementing actions inconsistent with the nonprofit’s mission and vision, may be slow to respond to changes in the political or economic environment, and may miss opportunities to implement projects or grow services in agreed upon areas. The absence of a strategic plan also may contribute to governance and operational issues, as strategic plans should include financial oversight and related goals to improve board governance, and misalignment of the budget and staff time with the nonprofit’s top priorities.
Simple Strategic Plans: Real Life Examples
Consero Solutions assisted a water conservation district with writing a strategic plan with direction from the Board of Directors to write the plan with executive staff and bring it to the Board for review. The Board provided feedback, held one public outreach meeting to present the draft plan, and approved the plan. The plan helped the District successfully pass a landowner assessment for groundwater sustainability consistent with the plan’s goals and continues to guide the work of the organization due to its specific, measurable objectives. This year, the district hosted a public outreach meeting to provide an update to the landowners on progress on each strategic plan goal, ensuring the district is accountable to the people who are helping to finance its activities.
While serving as President on the Board of Directors for a local nonprofit, Petrea Marchand worked with the Executive Director to conduct a short introductory retreat at which the board members brainstormed “top of mind” ideas important to the mission and service delivery. Petrea collaborated with the Executive Director to turn the ideas into goals and related measurable objectives to support the goals. The board provided edits to one draft of the plan and subsequently approved it. The entire process took less than three months. The plan was imperfect but guided the organization’s work in key areas, such as organizational sustainability and budget development. It also allowed the Executive Director to steer board members away from ideas lacking alignment with the adopted plan.
Top 10 Strategic Plan Tips
Consero Solutions hopes these Top 10 tips will encourage nonprofit board members to assist staff with development of a simple strategic plan.
Iterate and adapt. Strategic planning is not a one-time event. The nonprofit should utilize existing data (interested party interviews, past impact data, peer benchmarking) to develop the plan, update the data on a regular basis, and measure progress at least quarterly. The nonprofit should also review the strategic plan as part of the annual budget process and update if needed.
Utilize a facilitator. Consero believes nonprofits with limited resources can complete a strategic plan in-house but also recognizes a facilitator can help hold a nonprofit accountable for completing a plan on a designated timeline, resolve issues related to specific language, and provide an expert’s perspective to guide nonprofit representatives immersed in the work. Using a facilitator to assist with an in-house strategic plan is different than hiring a consulting firm to complete the plan. Some nonprofits have the resources to hire a consulting firm, but a nonprofit can also create a simple plan with no outside assistance or hire a facilitator to help manage the process at a much lower cost.
Use SMART objectives. The strategic plan should include SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound) objectives to achieve strategic plan goals. Too often nonprofits include objectives for which the board cannot measure progress, such as “expand community engagement, “enhance organizational capacity, or “increase fundraising.” The development of SMART objectives will help ensure the board can track progress towards achieving objectives, as well have productive conversations with staff in the future about why achieving the objective is difficult and adjust the plan as necessary.
Develop a monitoring and evaluation framework. The strategic plan is only as good as the monitoring and evaluation of progress. The nonprofit should establish key performance indicators and metrics to monitor progress towards achieving the SMART objectives, including updates to the board. Online project management software (e.g. Asana, Monday.com) contain systems to allow organizations to input strategic plan goals and SMART objectives, create performance metrics, and allow team members to post updates on progress towards achieving the performance metrics.
Allocate budget to each SMART objective. The nonprofit’s annual budget should include funds or staff time for implementation for SMART objectives which the strategic plan indicates are a priority for that fiscal year. The strategic plan should therefore estimate the amount of money or staff time necessary to achieve the objective. Staff should track their time working on each objective using time-tracking software (e.g. Noko or Harvest) and provide regular updates to the board on progress towards achieving the objectives consistent with the budget.
Develop actions and a timeline separate from the strategic plan for each SMART objective. To ensure progress, a nonprofit should develop specific actions and a timeline to implement each SMART objective, as well as assign a point person responsible for achieving the objective. Including actions in the strategic plan can create an unwieldly document, so Consero recommends using project management software (e.g. Asana, Monday.com) or a spreadsheet to develop, track, and assign actions.
Use templates. Developing a strategic plan may seem overwhelming if the nonprofit is starting from scratch. Review strategic plans from other nonprofits you respect and ask consulting firms with whom you work for templates. The nonprofit may also wish to use artificial intelligence tools (e.g. Chatgpt) for templates.
Set a schedule. It’s easy to postpone a strategic planning task in favor of other more urgent actions. The board should adopt a schedule and receive regular reports on progress towards strategic plan completion, as well as help address workload issues that prevent staff from achieving recommended milestones.
Designate an executive staff person to work with a board officer to complete the plan. Every strategic plan needs a champion and an author. The board should designate an executive level staff person to complete the plan, as well as a board officer to provide support to the staff person and oversee the process on behalf of the board. The board should further ensure that staff person has sufficient time in their schedule to complete it, as well as carefully manage the scope of the strategic plan to ensure completion is feasible.
Seek clarity and simplicity, not perfection. A nonprofit’s strategic plan should reflect the organization’s best effort to create clear, simple, measurable objectives, not perfection. The board should trust executive staff to present a simple strategic plan with a handful of goals, measurable objectives, and actions to the board as a starting point. Seek public input as needed but hold staff accountable for a tight timeline so the nonprofit completes the process expeditiously and can start implementation.
This Top 10 is provided as information for consideration only and does not constitute advice or a recommendation by Consero Solutions specific to individual nonprofit needs.
Like this blog post? Share with friends! Sign up to be a member to leave a comment with your thoughts below!