Strategic planning is one of the most overused (and misunderstood) terms in the nonprofit world. Over the years, I’ve noticed that when nonprofits ask for “strategic planning” services, they often aren’t clear on what they actually need—or even what the term really means.
Rather than getting stuck in debates over definitions, I’ve found that starting with four key questions can help organizations diagnose their needs and determine the type of strategic support that will truly move them forward.
Phase 1: Visioning
When I am first determining what support to offer, I begin by asking if the organization’s leadership has a clear vision for what they want to achieve in the future. What are your goals? Why those goals? How will you know you have achieved them? If leadership cannot answer those questions, then it’s not “strategic planning” they need; it’s visioning. There is no way we can create a plan if we don’t know what we want to achieve or how we will measure it.
This comes up often in terms of impact. Many organizations want to “grow impact,” but how is impact defined? Is it reaching more people or reaching fewer people in more profound ways? If we can’t answer that, we need visioning to define that goal because the strategic plan will look different if you are trying to grow your reach, pivot, or narrow your focus.
Phase 2: Diagnostic Assessment
If you know what you want to achieve and how to measure it, I then ask if leadership already has an accurate picture of the current state of the organization. It may be easy to say “yes” to that question, but then I follow up with: What are the main challenges you are facing? What is getting in the way of you achieving your goals? How do you know those are issues? What have you already tried?
If I don’t hear that they have an accurate description of their challenges, only provide limited evidence, or blame failures on external forces outside their control, then they don’t need “strategic planning;” they need a reality check in the form of a diagnostic assessment support.
There is no point in crafting a list of action items and milestones stretching out 3-5 years if we have not honestly and accurately diagnosed what isn’t working at the organization and addressed it in the plan. While visioning is the first step, we must have an accurate understanding of where we are now in order to begin identifying the steps to get us to the desired vision.
For example, I see this a lot in fundraising. Leadership may say they want to double revenue in three years, but do they have the resources to do so? An organization that is already struggling to reach its annual funding goals and lacks adequate fundraising staff to grow is certainly in no position to “double revenue in three years” without some kind of miracle. So, while it is possible to create any kind of plan with any goals, if the organization is not in a position to implement, then the plan is useless.
Phase 3: Strategic Planning
If you know your desired goals and have a clear picture of your starting point, but don’t necessarily know how to get there, than that is the essence of “strategic planning.” Strategy is about choice. Strategy implies that you have multiple paths to achieving a goal and must choose one because you can’t do it all. If there is really only one path, then there is no choice to be made, and there is no strategy.
Strategy is all about the how. This is why my process and approach to strategic planning no not involve a huge amount of time spent on redefining the Mission and Values. I’m not saying those are unimportant, but I do think nonprofits lean towards spending too much time pontificating the Mission and Values in the strategic planning process and not enough time understanding their options for achieving their goals and making hard decisions about what to do and what not to do.
It’s easy to spend an entire day discussing “Values” when you don’t have to deal with opportunity cost. How about we have 5 Values? Sure. Or 27 values? Why not? In a theoretical world of Values, you can have as many as can fit on your webpage, but in the world of action, your time and resources are finite, and deciding what to do and what not to do will be the determining factor in whether you achieve your goals.
Giving up good ideas in favor of even better ones is hard, but this is the heart of strategic planning.
When it comes to revisiting the Mission, I prefer to approach it at the end of the process rather than the beginning. This allows us to reflect on the goals and plan we’ve developed and ask, “Does this mission truly align with what we’ve created?” Starting with the mission without a clear sense of what you’re doing often becomes an exercise in wordsmithing rather than meaningful strategy.
Phase 4: Accountability
Every once in a while, a potential client reaches out asking for “strategic planning,” yet they already have a clear vision of what they want to achieve, a clear understanding of where they are now, and have basically identified how they want to get there. So, I then inquire why they are seeking support for “strategic planning” if they pretty much already know what they want to do. Inevitably, it emerges that only the Executive Director really knows what to do, but the board needs to be bought in, or the staff need some motivation.
In this case, you don’t need “strategic planning”; you need accountability and buy-in support.
Often, many organizations will run through the whole process of visioning, diagnostics, stakeholder interviews, and multi-day meetings just to get buy-in when they already know what to do. This is performative and a waste of time. I don’t advocate for asking people for their input just to make them feel more engaged when the real decisions have already been made. Instead, let’s be honest about the starting point and bring people together to discuss the next steps.
Now, in this hypothetical example, just because the Executive Director already knows what they want to achieve and how to achieve it, doesn’t mean they are unequivocally correct or even that their idea is the best possible one. But instead of pretending to start from scratch, we can use the team’s time to discuss how to prototype and test the idea or look for evidence of successful implementation elsewhere. After all, we don’t know if a new idea will work unless we try it.
So next time you think about reaching out for “strategic planning,” ask yourself these four questions to better identify what you really need:
- Visioning: Do you know exactly what you want to achieve and how to measure it?
- Assessment: Do you know what is currently holding your organization back and what is in your control to change?
- Strategy: Are you aware of the many ways to get from your starting point to your goal, and are you prepared to make a decision on which course to take?
- Accountability: Are the people you need to implement this course fully on board and supportive?
