| How do I create a strategic plan that people actually use? | Forget what those old-fashioned templates say and focus on the practical information your team can use to guide their everyday work. Read on to see our six recommendations. |
Any non profit that wants to deliver programs and services to the world needs a strategic plan.
Full stop.
It can be one page long. It can be bullet points. One person can draft the entire thing. But it needs to exist.
This is more true today than ever before.
Few topics in the non profit world generate as many eye-rolls, groans, or winces as strategic planning.
One of the knocks against non profit strategic plans is the process behind their creation. Bad planning processes might include a series of never-ending meetings talking about abstract things, word-smithing sentences no one will ever read, watching colleagues argue, and feeling anxious about all the “real work” that isn’t getting done.
Another knock is the old-fashioned planning document itself: we’ve all seen a wordy document that took a year to write … and then sat in a drawer.
Even if you’ve had a bad experience with the strategic planning process, you still need a strategy.
Your nonprofit strategic plan doesn’t have to come from a clunky planning process or outdated template.
You don’t need 10 pages of vision, mission, mantra, purpose statements or to spend months analyzing your history and writing up where you’ve been. Defining separate goals, objectives, benchmarks, targets, and indicators can wait. To create a helpful strategic plan, you don’t even need to learn vocabulary or write in complete sentences.
All you need is six things:
What are you aiming for? What are you trying to accomplish with your work? You organization’s north star should be clear enough that people who work there know what they are working towards and feel inspired doing it. The North Star should help people make decisions about how to do their work so that leadership doesn’t manage every single task.
For small and medium-sized organizations, every project should pursue the same North Star; that’s how you know you have a coherent strategy.
This statement is your strategy. How are you going to get from where you are today to your North Star? Will you lobby? Provide an ongoing service? Build shelters? Manage wild lands? Train people? Raise and distribute funds?
You should be able to state your how in a single sentence.
What programs or projects do you operate that bring the “how” to life? Whether it’s one project or 20, people need to know what to do when they roll out of bed in the morning.
Don’t forget to include the management, fundraising, and communications programs that glue all of an organization’s work together.
Check point: This is the first point where you should check your strategic plan. Is every project and program essential? Will your strategy get you closer to your North Star? If the answer to these questions is “no”, correct course now.
How many people do you need to carry out your projects and programs? What roles do they need to play? Paint a (brief) picture of the team that will bring the strategy to life. (We start with people because human resources is the biggest item in the budget for most public interest organizations. If that’s not true for you, it might be easier to do step 5 first.)
Check point: This is the next point where you should check your strategy. Do you have the right number of people in the right roles to carry out your work? If not, you need to put some of the work on hold until the roles can be filled.
People need resources to do their work: computers, phones, pens, meeting rooms, offices, Internet access, etc. Your strategic plan shouldn’t itemize every type of office supply, but the big items need to be covered. If you’re running a health care clinic, you need a building, for example.
Besides the office basics, what else do you need? Do you need custom-built apps to facilitate the work you do, or equipment like drones, sampling devices, and AI tools? Acquiring, using, and maintaining these tools impacts your resources, people, activities, and budget.
Technology must be considered in your strategic plan. Most older Strategic Plan templates skip technology entirely, which reinforces the mistaken belief that technology is someone else’s job. In a digitized world, the technology you use and your strategy go hand-in-hand.
Check point: Do you have the tools you need to do the work? Are your tools appropriate for your scale? If not, make sure your project and fundraising activities prepare you for success.
Your budget should include the costs of the resources, technology, people, and programs you’ve listed above. Ignore the amount of money you have in the bank; it should be the actual amount of money it will cost to do the work.
Your budget should also include the revenue you’ll need to generate to fund the work in the next 1-3 years. Your revenue isn’t completely aspirational; it should reflect realistic results from the fundraising activities you listed in Step 3. If you can raise $100,000 this year, don’t plan to spend $2-million.
Check point: Can you raise enough money to fund the work you want to do? If not, you’ll need to revisit your project or fundraising plans. Keep refining your program and fundraising plans until your revenue covers your expenses. Anything that you can’t do immediately can go in your plans for the future.
A Strategic Plan doesn’t need to be perfect. It’s enough to have a check-list that a leader uses to make decisions or a reference that managers use to create workplans, project outlines, and budgets.
Your Plan can be shorter than this article. What matters most is that it exists. When you articulate what you are trying to do — either as an individual or an organization — you make it possible for people to help you do it. You create opportunities for others to get involved and to excel. You are no longer on a journey alone.
Q: “How do I … create a strategic plan that I can actually use?”
A: Keep it simple and focused, our Simple Strategic Plan template (PDF and Google Template) can help.
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