Jonathan Poisner Strategic Consulting

What do we mean by strategic planning in the nonprofit context?

In my mind, there are three key distinguishing characteristics.

First, it’s long term.  Certainly more than a year.  It might be as short as 2 years.  For most nonprofits, it generally runs 3-5 years, though I’ve heard of organizations with 10 year strategic plans.

Second, it embraces the entire organization, across functions   It covers your program (the ways you’re trying to change the world) and your institutional capacity.  One test to know if it’s comprehensive:  for any significant activity of the organization, you should be able to point to what part of the strategic plan that it fits within.

Third, it answers a series of big questions about the organization.  Put in the simplest terms these questions are:

• Who we are?
• Where do we want to go?
• How do we get there?
• How will we know if we’re successful?

That’s it.  I’ve seen strategic plans as short as 3 pages and as long as 50 that meet these tests.  What’s right for your organization, of course, depends on many factors.

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Public service announcement: A goal is not an activity, it’s an outcome.

The activity of educating people is not a goal.

More educated people could be a goal, with educating people (or more specifically classes, workshops, publications, etc.) the strategy achieve it.

Another example: Advocacy/lobbying is not a goal. Better public policies could be a goal, with advocacy/lobbying being the strategy to achieve it.

It shocks me sometimes how often people confuse the outcome they are seeking (the goal) with the activity to get there (the strategy).

End of PSA/rant.

Instead of thinking about all the reasons groups can benefit from strategic planning, a friend recently asked me: why do some groups fail to do strategic planning?

Here are the top reasons that have been shared with me.

1. Past planning processes are perceived as having failed to yield real benefits. This could be past planning by the organization in question or past planning by other organizations with which board members or staff have been involved.

2. They are too busy. Good planning takes time and some organizational leaders believe time taken up for strategic planning carries too high an opportunity cost.

3. Overconfidence. Some leaders are so confident of their ability to think through challenges on the fly that they just don’t see the benefit of thinking things through ahead of time.

4. Fractured leadership. Some organizational leaders are aware that they have deep schisms either on their board or between board and staff and feel like strategic planning might expose those schisms in an unhealthy way.

5. Not exciting. For some people, the thought of sitting in a room with others discussing strategy is worse than watching paint dry. They want to be “doers.”

For each of these, there are obviously rejoinders. But sometimes given where organizational leadership is, it may just be that it’s the wrong time or cast of characters to plan.

One lesson I’ve learned for certain: if the organization is doing planning to satisfy a funder, but doesn’t actually believe in the value of the planning process, the process will almost certainly fail.

When talking to organizations about evaluation, I often find myself explaining evaluation on two levels.

These levels ask two related, but different questions.

1.  Did the organization take the specific action steps called for in the Strategic Plan?

2.  Did the organization achieve the Objectives of the Strategic Plan?  This latter question doesn’t ask: did we do what we set out to do?   It asks the equally important question:  Did doing what we set out to do change the world in the way we hoped?

In evaluating whether Objectives were achieved, organizations need to take into account that some Objectives (eg. those related to fundraising) are easily quantified and thus easy to measure.  Other Objectives are more subjective and should be evaluated with the eye of a trial lawyer marshaling facts towards a conclusion.

There will be times when the organization does everything it set out to do, but intervening factors (e.g a recession) will prevent it from accomplishing its Objectives.  Conversely, sometimes organizations fail to implement their tactics, but nonetheless achieve their Objectives because intervening forces are in its favor.

In the end, both levels of evaluation are critical.  If you fail to determine if you did what you set out to do, an organization will develop a culture lacking in accountability.  But if you fail to ask the second question, you may congratulate yourselves on implementing your plan, but learn nothing of value to figuring out what you should be doing in the future.

I’ve previously written about the importance of generating work plans once wrapping up strategic planning.

One of the most useful tools in a work plan is the concept of triggers.

Too often work plans focus on end products without thinking through what other steps must be completed before a specific tactic can be accomplished.

One of my clients this summer, for example, is using “tabling” at public fairs/festivals as a tactic for the first time.  The initial work plan simply said: identify two tabling opportunities, recruit 5 volunteers and table.  Of course, it soon became clear that this also meant developing the necessary materials, setting up new systems to identify/train volunteers, finding a table/chairs, designing/printing a banner, etc.

Another client recently discussed with me her experience putting together the organization’s first corporate sponsorship packages for an event.  Because no work planning had happened, she hadn’t identified the triggers that had to be done in advance of actually asking corporations to sponsor (updated materials, agreement upon sponsorship levels, relationship-building, etc.).   The process therefore took her considerably longer than they had anticipated.

Rather than just creating a to-do list, good work planning identifies the outcomes you want and then works backwards to identify all the triggers or precursors that must be accomplished along the way.    In addition to making sure steps are done in the right order, on time, making explicit all the triggering steps that must first be taken is essential to make sure the work plan is making realistic assumptions about how much staff time a project will take.

More than once I’ve watched organizations go awry when they fail to plan in this way and find themselves 2-3 weeks out from a major milestone scrambling because a trigger wasn’t taken into account.

Occasionally, there are brilliant people whose minds can do this all in their head.

But for mortals like me and you, putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard is an essential step to make sure the work gets done in the right order on the right timeline.

I was recently talking to someone who plays the staff role for a medium sized nonprofit organization.

She had raised the possibility of doing strategic planning with her boss and was told in no uncertain terms that their organization’s CEO was against strategic planning based on past negative experiences.

Yet, in her assessment the organization very much needed it.

My feedback to her is: it doesn’t matter what you call it.  So don’t call it strategic planning.

Instead, I recommended she suggest to her boss that they need to reach clarity on the organization’s identity (who they are, what they uniquely do) and business model (what they do, how they fund it), along with 3-4 long-term goals that everyone on staff can rally behind.

Rather than do a “planning retreat,” they can tackle these questions in much shorter, discrete meetings that involve a subset of the board/staff that then comes back with proposed answers.

Of course, in the end, if the CEO of the organization doesn’t want anything along these lines to happen, forcing it on them won’t accomplish anything.  But there are ways to bring along reluctant staff and board members to the idea that organizations with a strategy and with everyone rowing in the same direction are more likely to thrive than those that wing it.

You don’t have to call that strategic planning to make it work.