The Real Scoop on Strategic Planning
Let’s get started. If your charity or nonprofit doesn’t have a sound strategic plan, you’re basically flying without a compass.
And frankly, I don’t want you to wander around in the woods with your eyes shut. I certainly don’t want to. If you’re running a charity or thinking about upping your game, it’s time to think strategy.
Because you’re not going to get very far if you just make it up as you go along.
So why bother with strategic planning?
For starters, it’s not just corporate speak that’s made its way into the philanthropic space; it’s the skeleton key to your operations. Simply put, it’s about articulating purposeful, achievable objectives and plotting the roadmap you’ll take to reach them. And without it, you’re just sending your efforts off into the ether and hoping for the best. Hopes and dreams, not strategy.
Vision and mission
Right, let’s get the ball rolling: what’s the overarching vision for your charity?
This isn’t about targets; it’s about what you’re aiming for, how you want the world to look.
The mission then becomes the ways in which you’re going to achieve it.
Get this right and you’ve got your strategic north star.
Analysis: Know Your Battlefield
When I say ‘Know Your Battlefield’, I don’t mean to be using fancy military-sounding jargon – it’s a reference to truly knowing the context in which your charity operates. By internal, I mean the way your organisation works, and by external, the way the rest of the world works. Here’s how to do it.
Internal Analysis – Look Inwards: Start with assessing your charity’s internal environment. This means evaluating your charity’s strengths and weaknesses – such as the capabilities of your team, your resources, financial health, operational processes, staff or volunteer capacity, partnerships, or other assets. Where are you strong? You might have a good volunteer base or sound fundraising processes in place. Where are you weak? Perhaps your IT systems are not up to date, or you suffer from staff churn. Knowing what you’ve got lets you make decisions about where best to use your time and resources to strengthen your operations.
An external analysis – scanning the horizon: This is just as important as the internal analysis. This is about looking at the environment around your charity to see opportunities you can use and threats you can prepare for. For example, are there changes in the way people give, shifts in government policy, chages in the economy, or technological trends that will affect your work? Is there a growing groundswell of social media fundraising that you can exploit? Are there changes in regulations that will affect you? Is there a radical change in the way people communicate that you can use? You can shape your strategy to advance when a particular trend looks positive, and prepare for the downside of changes.
Competitor Analysis – Welcome to the Club: You’re not operating in a bubble. Who are the other organisations working in your space? What do they do well? Where do they struggle? This is not about competition in the traditional business sense. (After all, that’s not what you’re there for!) But understanding what others in the field are trying to do can help you figure out how to position your charity better; make connections with other organisations that are working on related problems; and avoid reinventing the wheel.
SWOT analysis – putting it all together: When all this information is gathered, a SWOT analysis can be very illuminating. It gives you the opportunity to take all the data you learnt about your internal capabilities and external context and collate it into a clear, simple, easy-to-use framework. The strength of a SWOT analysis is that it does a simple job very well; it takes raw information and turns it into actionable intelligence. By drawing out Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats, you create a snapshot of your situation that you can use to guide your strategic choices, ensuring that they are based on a comprehensive and sound basis of understanding.
Applying the in step is not analysis for analysis’s sake. Your insights mean nothing if they don’t set you in a new strategic direction. Make your strategies reflect your strengths, compensate for your weaknesses, and play to your opportunities and threats. Redeploy your resources, adjust your programs, train your staff, beef up your marketing. Turn your analysis into action, and use this action to propel your charity forward.
Finally, understanding your battlefield by analysing it is not just about collecting data, but interpreting it so you can map out the best way forward for your charity. It is an important step because it lays the foundation for everything else that comes after, so that your strategy is informed, intended and in sync with both your internal reality and the external context. Take the time, do the homework, and watch your strategic plan become built on a foundation of analysis.
Setting SMART Goals: Fine-Tuning Your Charity’s Aims
Setting SMART goals is absolutely essential if your strategic vision is to be translated into actions that are practical, measurable and meaningful. These aren’t just nice wishes: they are the concrete milestones that will drive your charity’s work and judge its effectiveness. So why are each of these elements of a SMART goal so important?
Specific: Fuzzy goals are the enemy of momentum. Your goals need to be razor-sharp. Don’t say ‘raise more money’; say ‘increase annual fundraising by 20 per cent’. When you are precise in your descriptions, you remove ambiguity and give your team something to aim for.
Measurable: What gets measured gets done. Goals without a measurable metric for success are often vaguely defined and not truly targets. Make sure each goal is paired with a measurable outcome. For fundraising purposes, it might be an amount of dollars raised. For volunteer engagement, it might be a number of active volunteers or hours of volunteer time.
Feasible: Goals need to challenge your team, but also be achievable. If your goal is too lofty, it runs the risk of de-motivating your team and setting you up to fail. Taking into account your resources, your current capabilities, and the external environment, consider just how high to set your bar.
Relevant: Each goal should be directly tied mission. Irrelevant goals can be a huge waste of resources and risk diverting your organisation away from its core objectives. Ask yourself how each goal helps to achieve your charity’s broader goals.
Tight-coupled: All goals need an end-date. Without a timeframe, there is no urgency and no schedule for completion. A deadline of six months, or one year, or longer will help with planning, and also with keeping things moving.
Action Plans: Who’s Doing What
With your SMART goals defined, it’s time to pin them down into action plans. This step is all about the who, what and when: Action plans are the roadmap of how you will reach your goals, with enough detail to plan days at a time.
Owners: Specify who owns which tasks. When everyone knows what needs to be done, the magic of accountability kicks in. Assigning ownership to a specific person makes it their responsibility. For example, if the goal is to increase donor engagement, who on the team will develop new communication strategies, who will manage the donor events, and who will track the metrics for engagement?
Resources for Success: What do you need to successfully complete each goal? This includes dollars to do the work, tools, and personnel time. Make sure the team has what it needs to be successful. If you need to increase your budget, think through where this money will come from.
Step-by-step processes: Break down the goal into manageable steps. Perhaps one of your goals is to improve your digital footprint, so you might have steps such as a website redesign, a greater number of social media posts, and perhaps a monthly newsletter. The purpose of each step is to be actionable.
Timelines: Where can you set deadlines that will help you achieve your goal? Set a timeline for each step on your path, and a timeline for your ultimate goal. Ideally, your timelines should be realistic: they should provide sufficient time to do what you need to do, without sending you into panic mode. Make your timelines as visible as possible, to you and your team.
Check-in on Progress: Set up consistent meetings with your team to track against goals and steps. The timing could be weekly, monthly or quarterly based on your goal’s timeframe. Use these meetings to adjust plans as needed, work through barriers and celebrate milestones to keep your team going.
When you set SMART goals and develop detailed action plans, you are not just daydreaming about success – you are planning for it. It is only through this degree of specificity and clarity that strategic dreams can become real-world outcomes, and that your charity can pursue its mission with the unity and clarity of purpose that will turn it into one of those three charities that always deliver. A goal that is well-set is half-finished; add the action plan and your charity is fully set for success.
Monitoring and Adapting: Keeping Your Strategy Dynamic and Effective
Take the ‘Monitoring and Adapting’ phase seriously.
Strategic planning is not just about ticking off to-do lists and completing progress reports – it’s about keeping your strategy alive, responsive and continuously attuned to your charity’s goals and the external environment. Here’s how to make it work:
Regular Review Sessions: Schedule regular review sessions to keep a pulse on the extent to which your strategy is being executed and how effective it is at hitting your goals. These can be monthly, quarterly or bi-annually, depending on the nature of your goals and the cadence of your projects. Gather your team, look at the data, and check in on the status of each of your key strategy areas. This is not just a check-the-box activity – dive deep into what’s working and what isn’t.
KPIs: The best way to track your progress is to set clear Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for each goal. KPIs are a metric or measure that delivers a value, helping to show how your charity is achieving key objectives. For example, if one of your goals is to increase your community’s engagement, then relevant KPIs may include metrics such as the number of volunteers, participation percentage of your members in community programmes, or feedback score from participants. These metrics help you quantify your strategy, thus enabling you to assess its impact.
Data-Driven Insights: Use the power of data to inform your monitoring. Put in place systems and software that allow you to track and analyse performance indicators relevant to your strategic goals. This could be a financial management software package, a donor management system, or a custom-built dashboard of indicators that draw data from multiple sources. As much as possible, try to avoid guesswork and be driven by data.
Internal Feedback Mechanisms: Feedback from your teams, volunteers, beneficiaries and donors is important. Create mechanisms to capture feedback on a continuous basis – this could be through surveys, focus groups or informal feedback sessions. This could help you see things differently that your strategy is trying to achieve and how it is being experienced. This could also help you identify issues or problems that are not obvious from the quantitative data.
Adaptability: The only thing harder than making a strategic plan is making it a good one. Because the external environment changes fast – a new set of challenges, new technology, changes in government policy, shifts in donor behaviour – just about anything that affects your strategy will! So make sure that in your monthly monitoring sessions you are prepared to pivot or make adjustments to your plan. Steer resources to the areas where your formative research or MEL shows more impact; scale your successes; or park your losers.
Documenting Changes: Ensure that any changes you make to your strategy are well-documented. Your documentation should explain why the change was needed and what the key outcomes from the change might be, as well as what the process of gaining agreement to the change is. This will keep everyone updated, and will also help to maintain the integrity of the information over time, particularly as team members change.
Monitoring and adapting your charity’s strategy is not just about ensuring that your charity sticks to its strategic plan – it is about maintaining a strategic plan that responds to new challenges and opportunities as they arise. By being committed to reviewing your strategic plan regularly, and being willing to adapt your strategic plan when solid data and feedback indicate that your charity’s needs or environment have changed, you ensure that your strategic plan is a truly ‘living’ document. Maintaining a living strategic plan is a critical component for long-term success and sustainability in nonprofit management.
Why a Nonprofit CRM is Crucial for Nailing Your Strategic Planning
If you don’t have solid data, you can’t create a data-driven plan for your nonprofit organisation, let alone implement that plan. At the end of the day, the sole purpose of strategic planning in a nonprofit is to help your organisation efficiently and effectively move towards its goals, and you can’t do that if your planning is not targeted, based on solid data, and tracked and monitored until your goals are met. And that’s where a strong nonprofit Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system comes in. It’s not just a helpful tool: it’s a game-changer, and it’s why every nonprofit should be using a good nonprofit CRM to supercharge their strategic planning.
Centralised data hub: The first advantage of a CRM is simply that it puts all of your data in one place. A CRM is a data hub. All of your donor information, all of your volunteers’ habits, all of your fundraising campaign results — it’s all in one place, and it’s all there for the taking in one neat, centralised package. And that makes it infinitely easier to plan strategically. It’s no longer a matter of digging through filing cabinets or different formats to pull together the information you need to see where you stand and plan your next move. All you need to do is open up your CRM to get it all.
Faster decision-making based on real-time data: When you’re on the leadership team of a busy nonprofit organisation, things move fast, and decisions need to be made quickly and with solid evidence. The real-time data a CRM provides can be at your fingertips and can inform your strategic decision-making in moments. How’s your latest fundraising campaign going? Check the CRM. How are your donors behaving over the past few months? The CRM will tell you. This means your strategic decision-making can be agile and fast because it’s based on hard data.
Better Donor Engagement Strategies: Understanding your donors and engaging with them appropriately is key to any nonprofit’s strategy. A CRM allows you to segment your donor database in nuanced ways and then craft messages and strategies tailored to individual segments. For example, you might choose to communicate about endowments to long-standing donors, but about getting ‘off to the right start’ to new donors. Using a CRM to refine how you communicate with different segments of your donor community can help enhance engagement and thereby lead to increased donations.
Reports at Your Fingertips: Tracking progress, keeping your board and other stakeholders informed of your progress towards your goals, can be a challenge in strategic planning. A CRM makes this task easier than you can imagine. Most CRM systems include tools to track important key performance indicators and generate reports on them. This functionality will allow you to monitor which strategy works or not, and to share your success or challenges with your board, donors and other stakeholders. Regular reporting to your board and other relevant stakeholders with data from your CRM will ensure everyone is on the same page regarding the organisation’s goals and achievements.
Nurturing Ongoing Relationships: one of the most important tasks associated with strategic planning is to build towards the future – a CRM can help you build and maintain a history of interactions with donors, volunteers, and other supporters, which can be critical to nurturing ongoing relationships. How did you interact with a supporter in the past? What was the level of engagement then? Was that supporter a donor before, and if so, when did they make their last gift? What other forms of engagement have they had in the past? A CRM can help you make sense of these past interactions. This can be critical in planning future engagement and understanding the life cycle of your supporters. When are you likely to be able to re-engage a lapsed donor or enhance the engagement of an existing supporter?
A nonprofit CRM is not merely a tool to organise relationships but, rather, the very foundation of your planning process, one that provides data insights, enables better decisionmaking, supports donor engagement and retention, facilitates reporting, and enables planning towards long-term strategic goals. If your nonprofit doesn’t already have a CRM, it’s time to think about how a tool like this might change not just your data management but your entire strategic life: because, in nonprofit management, knowledge is power is progress.
Share the Plan
Finally, a plan kept in a drawer is no plan at all. Tell everyone in your organisation about your strategic plan – everyone, from your board members to your volunteers. When the whole team knows your vision, your goals and your plan, they are engaged and aligned, and that’s pure gold for morale and effectiveness.
And that’s it. Planning a strategy for your charity or nonprofit is not just about ticking a box. It is a blueprint that makes sure you are directing your efforts in the best possible direction and that you are on track to achieve your objectives and, potentially, even exceed those goals, securing your mission for the long term. Get out the roll-up sleeves.
It’s time to plan.
