Nonprofit Services » Strategic Planning | Board Catalyst

Strategic Planning for Nonprofits

We lead your nonprofit through a thoughtful assessment to align goals with organizational values and create a bold action plan.

The Aly Sterling Philanthropy Strategic Planning Process

Our nonprofit strategic planning process involves three key steps:

The ASP Strategic Planning Process

Our strategic planning process involves three key steps:

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.

While strategic planning is essential to the work of high-impact nonprofit organizations, dynamic performance plans can be difficult to develop internally.

That is why we offer a process that helps nonprofit leaders realistically and objectively consider their organizations’ financial health, effectiveness, capacity and relevance within the community.

“We hired Aly Sterling Philanthropy to help us discover the shortcomings of our youth program and create a roadmap for the future. Susan was brilliant – she really listened to everyone’s perspectives and kept us on track toward the same goal. We had several sensitive issues and these were handled beautifully with discretion and understanding. We could not be more pleased with the resulting plan. It has energized our youth team and led to many positive results.”

Lisa Richard
Zoar Lutheran Church