Nonprofit Strategic Planning to Transform Your Organization

1. Assess

Successful future plans require a deep understanding of your nonprofit’s current state. Our strategic planning process begins by assessing your organization’s history, infrastructure, core programs and vision to get a sense of your nonprofit’s background.

Then, we’ll help you survey various stakeholders, such as board members, major donors, influential community members, volunteers, staff and service recipients, to get a holistic view of your organization from different perspectives.

2. Align

To help your team get on the same page, our consultants will organize and lead a dynamic strategic planning retreat for board and staff members. We’ll facilitate conversations about your team’s top priorities and help you reach a consensus about how to move forward.

As a neutral third party, our consultants keep the retreat running smoothly and empower your nonprofit’s leadership to identify short- and long-term opportunities that will launch your organization to success.

3. Act

At the final stage, our consultants will summarize findings from the surveys and retreat to develop a cohesive action plan. We’ll help you define your team’s top priorities and create a plan for achieving them with associated goals, initiatives, key performance indicators and timelines.

While every plan is a little different because it is built on each organization’s specific challenges and opportunities, they all include key priorities, goals, initiatives, steps and success measures.

The areas we typically explore include:

• Board Governance: Does your board function properly? Is it diverse and representative of the client population? Are board members highly engaged?
• Fundraising: Have you implemented a solid fundraising strategy? Do you have diverse revenue streams? Does your board participate in fundraising?
• Financial Health/Sustainability: Is your nonprofit financially viable? Do you have financial best practices in place, including an audit or finance committee and consistent reporting?
• Programs/Service Delivery: Do you effectively meet constituent needs and requirements?
• Collaborations & Partnerships: Does your nonprofit use partnerships to collaborate and share resources?
• Awareness, Mission Recognition, & Credibility: Is your community aware of your mission, and do they understand it? Do people view your organization as credible and a responsible steward of funds?
• PR, Marketing, & Communication: Does your nonprofit have effective marketing, branding and messaging?
• Leadership/Succession Planning: Do you have strong board and staff leadership with succession plans?
• Diversity: Do your staff and board leadership come from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, ethnicities, races, genders and lifestyles?
• Volunteer Solicitation & Management: Do you thoughtfully engage and coordinate volunteers?
• Outcomes & Impact: Do you have clearly defined measures and outcomes for programs? Do you have ways to evaluate progress and articulate how you measure success?
• Organizational Culture: Does your organization have effective internal communication? Do team members have a foundation of trust and respect with each other?

We’ll work with your team to choose strategic priorities from this list, breaking each down with initiatives that allow you to achieve your goals and success metrics that help you evaluate performance.