Strategic Planning for Nonprofit Organizations

As a nonprofit organization grows, changes program focus or has staff turnover, they often experience one of four issues:

• Loss of sight of their vision and mission.
• The line between day to day activities and long-term mission has been blurred.
• Feeling overwhelmed with the long list of tasks and goals to achieve.
• Can’t even remember the last time they spoke about long-term goals and objectives.  

Moments like these are critical moments and require a strategic planning process to maintain the sustainability and growth of an organization.  Developing a strategic plan will refocus the organization on what is truly important and will pave a path that allows people to execute the basics while looking ahead to the future.

This resource will outline the purpose, use, contents, creation, and review of a nonprofit strategic plan.  

Purpose and Use

Strategy empowers an organization to focus on their core mission and avoid potential distractions.  Persistent attention to agreed-upon direction is the key to both innovation and refinement of practice.  A coherent strategic plan provides nonprofits with structured mission alignment, organizational development, and formulated logical next steps for progress of the organization.  In addition, it does the following:

1.  Addresses the timing for expansion and adoption of incremental mission-related activities.
2.  Instills qualitative and quantitative goals and objectives over an extended period of five-years.

Overall, strategic planning gives the organization a practical direction as to how staff and volunteers should allocate their time.  Not only will the plan give focus to daily work and how the staff is to work together, it will ensure these daily tasks flow into a balanced plan for the next five years.

We often find that strategic planning becomes overwhelming for an organization, and the document itself includes an abundance of different goals.  Such abundance contributes to the lack of focus for the organization often paralyzes the staff from getting anything done. The strategic plan should be a clear, concise, and short document.  The plan should create specific, measurable, realistic, and dated goals that range from 30, 60, and 90 days with a few that expand into 1-, 3- and 5-year goals.

If the organization has previously developed a 3-5 year strategy, the strategic plan should be a fresh twelve-month plan created at the beginning of every year to guide its short-term efforts toward these goals.  Such short-term planning will take the extensive strategic plan and create achievable mile-markers for the coming year.

Contents and Creation

The executive committee of the Board of Directors, working with the Executive Director, should create the strategic plan.  If the board does not have an executive committee, members of the board should work with the Executive Director. 

It is important to get broad-based buy-in to your strategic plan, to the extent that you are able.  The Giersch Group has found that this process can generate helpful feedback from on-the-ground workers and generate a feel for the opinion of the general public.  Furthermore, it assists in transparency and staff implementation, as people are more willing to implement a plan to which they contributed compared to one that was created in a closed session by a select group of people.  One way to facilitate this is to involve everyone from front-line staff to board members in parts of the process. This can often be done through focus groups, surveys or a half-day board/staff retreat. From there, the smaller sub-group of the board can work directly with the Executive Director to develop and complete the plan.

It is important to note that although broad-based feedback is helpful, the process can bring distractions and/or turn the focus to individual agendas. It is important to find the balance between the two extremes. The Giersch Group believes that 'leaders lead' and the executive committee along with the board should set the primary responsibility for setting the priorities of the plan.

Lastly, it is also helpful to complete a brief environmental scan. This involves reviewing the demographics of your community, and finding and speaking with other organizations that do similar work to you to determine how your work complements or competes with their work. The Giersch Group has worked with several organizations that were established to serve communities that have now completely different populations and now require different staffing and programming.

In order to keep your strategy brief and well organized, we recommend that all organizational activity be broken down into three categories:  administration and operations, program, and fundraising.

Usually, the board of directors has committees that focus on these three areas. If this is not the case, committees of both staff and board members should be temporarily created for strategic planning purposes.  We then recommend the following process:

1. Each committee meets outside of the regularly scheduled board meetings to develop short-term and long-term goals in the area of discussion.  The committee should also outline how progress and success toward these goals will be incrementally measured.
   1. The goals should be organized in such a manner that they chronologically make sense and, in some cases, build off of each other.
   2. The Giersch Group often states that a strategic plan without numbers is just noise. Therefore, each goal should be supported by financial data.  For example, if the program committee has thoroughly reviewed current services and recommends to discontinue specific activities or create new services, how the change affects both the mission and financial position of the organization should be outlined.
   3. It can be difficult when a larger group of people are involved in this process.  We recommend no more than 5 people per committee.
   4. Sometimes there is an emotional threshold that ratifies the true objective in this process. This is why the Giersch Group recommends creating specific, measurable, dated goals supported by the financial implications; this data eliminates the emotion and outlines the logical next steps.
2. Once each committee has developed a set of logical goals, the next step is to meet with the board and present each goal.
   1. In discussing and approving each goal, the board should have a clear understanding of how each goal is working in harmony with the others.  It is important that some goals do not hinder the success of others going forward.
3. After the board discusses and approves each set of goals, the bulk of the strategic planning process has been accomplished.  Each of the goals should be combined into a comprehensive document supported by a timeline of implementation and financial forecast. Part of the implementation includes dividing responsibilities between board and staff and then identifying specific point people within each group to oversee the implementation of each goal. This allows for accountability and streamlined reporting on goals.
   1. This document can be as simple as a PowerPoint and doesn’t have to be a large document. While many may believe that a strategic plan needs to be a large document the Giersch Group finds that a low-key document is often greeted with more optimism.
   2. The focus is not to create a final version, but rather a finalized working document that will be constantly reviewed and be an active part of the organization’s function.
4. The final version of the strategic plan is presented to the board and approved.
5. Staff and board members report back on progress toward their progress on implementing assigned goals in the plan on a quarterly basis.

Reviewing the Strategic Plan

The plan should outline the ways in which the progress and success of each of the goals will be monitored and measured.   Review of the strategic plan should be conducted accordingly.

Furthermore, the Executive Director should meet internally with staff on a quarterly basis to determine the following:

1.  All organizational activities are within the parameters of the agreed strategic aims and objectives;
2.  All activities are consistent with organization’s vision, mission and values; and
3.  What internal and external changes need to be made in achieve thee objectives in outlined in the strategic plan.  

Articles for Further Reading

1. Strategic Planning for Nonprofits. http://www.zimmerman-lehman.com/strategic.htm
2. The Strategic Planning Process. http://www.almond-architects.com/Benefits%20of%20Strategic%20Planning.pdf
3. Strategic Planning for Public and Nonprofit Organizations. http://docushare.usc.edu/docushare/dsweb/Get/Document-8775/

For more information, please visit the Giersch Group at http://www.gierschgroup.com/ or contact us at prosper@gierschgroup.com