Are you a leader struggling with nonprofit strategic planning? You’re not alone. Many find the process confusing, wondering where to start, fearing internal conflicts, and questioning if a consultant will understand their challenges. As a seasoned nonprofit strategic planning consultant, I created this guide to cut through the noise and provide clear, actionable steps for you.
This isn’t a theoretical document. It’s a roadmap to a living, breathing nonprofit strategic plan. Follow this guide, and your plan won’t gather dust; it will become a well-worn, essential tool you reference daily to drive your mission forward.
Nonprofit Strategic Planning: Your 101 Guide
- What is a Nonprofit Strategic Plan? Why Does it Matter?
- What is the Strategic Planning Process for Nonprofits?
- How to Know Your Nonprofit Strategy Planning Process Worked
- When Is It Time to Develop a Nonprofit Strategic Plan?
- Strategic Planning: A New Nonprofit CEO’s Secret Weapon
- Who Should You Invite to Participate in a Strategic Planning Process?
- Who Selects Your Nonprofit’s Strategy?
- What Happens in a Nonprofit Strategy Selection Session?
- Hazard Warning: The Biggest Nonprofit Strategic Planning Hazard
- What Tools Do You Recommend to Monitor Implementation?
What is a Nonprofit Strategic Plan? Why Does It Matter?
As a nonprofit strategic planning consultant, I’ve seen firsthand how a well-crafted strategic plan transforms organizations. Simply put, your nonprofit strategic plan is a customized roadmap that outlines how you’ll increase revenue, engage supporters, and achieve your mission impact.
It’s composed of the key elements:
- The Strategic Planning Process: The activities used to gather input from supporters, staff, board, and other stakeholders
- The Strategy: Your overarching vision and approach to achieving your goals.
- The Strategic Plan Document: A detailed document that translates your strategy into actionable steps.
This document includes:
- Objectives, and Goals: What you aim to achieve (e.g., increasing donor engagement).
- Key Results: Measures you’ll use to define success (e.g., a 25% increase in annual donations).
- Methods, Tactics: The specific actions you’ll take to reach your objectives (e.g., implementing a new donor outreach program).
- Measures: How you will determine your success.
- (Optional) Yearly Plans: Specific activities for the next 12 to 24 months,
Why Does It Matter?
Without a clear strategic plan, nonprofits often struggle with:
- Direction: Teams work in silos and at cross purposes, leading to waste.
- Missed Opportunities: Inability to capitalize on trends and funding.
- Stagnant Growth: Failure to adapt to changing needs and donor expectations.
A robust strategic plan, developed with the guidance of a nonprofit strategic planning consultant, provides:
- Clarity and Focus: Aligning and energizing stakeholders toward a common vision.
- Increased Efficiency: Prioritizing resources and maximizing results.
- Sustainable Growth: Building a resilient organization that can thrive in all environments.
When you invest in strategic planning, you invest in your work now and in the future.
What is the Strategic Planning Process for Nonprofits?
Strategic planning helps nonprofit leaders turn vision into action with a clear, practical roadmap. While every organization is unique, most successful nonprofit strategic plans processes follow these seven key steps:
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Clarify Your Mission, Vision, Values & Positioning – Ground your strategy in a strong foundation. What drives your nonprofit? Where are you headed? How do you differentiate yourself?
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Gather Input & Align Your Team – Strategic planning works best when you invite many voices into the conversation. Staff, board members, and key stakeholders offer insights that strengthen the plan. (See Who Should You Invite to Participate in a Strategic Planning Process for ways to do this effectively below.)
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Assess Your Current Reality – Take an honest look at where you stand. What are you great at? What could be stronger? What might help you get there?
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Develop Distinct Options That Allow You to Win – Consider different strategic pathways before locking into one plan. What bold choices will move your nonprofit forward? Explore multiple approaches before selecting the best path.
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Set Strategic Priorities – Identify the big-picture goals that will move your mission forward. Keep it focused—less is often more.
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Develop a Practical Action Plan – Break your priorities into specific, achievable steps with clear owners and timelines.
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Track Progress & Adapt – Your plan should be a living document. Regularly check in, measure progress, and adjust as needed.
A strong strategic plan isn’t just a document—it’s a tool for decision-making. When done well, it helps leaders stay focused, aligned, and ready to respond to new opportunities.
How to Know Your Nonprofit Strategic Planning Process Worked
As a nonprofit CEO with a big vision but limited resources, you need your strategic plan to drive real results, not collect dust. Your strategic planning process succeeded when:
- It Breaks Through Barriers: The strategy addresses what’s holding your organization back—especially financial constraints. You see clear pathways around obstacles that have kept you stuck for years.
- Your Team Owns It: Board members and staff reference the plan unprompted in meetings. They’ve shifted from “your vision” to “our roadmap” because they helped shape it and see their fingerprints.
- It Makes Decisions Easier: When opportunities arise, you evaluate them against your strategy instead of chasing every unlikely win. Your programming, board recruitment, and capacity building align with your core priorities.
- It Drives Daily Action: The plan translates to benchmarks. Directors reference it when explaining their department goals and progress.
- It Stretches Without Breaking: You and your team feel productively challenged rather than overwhelmed. The goals push your organization beyond comfortable patterns while remaining grounded in workload reality.
When your strategic plan delivers these outcomes, you’ve created more than a document—you’ve built a guide from where you are to where your organization needs to be.
Here’s what one nonprofit executive said about our nonprofit strategic planning consultant-led process:
Before the strategy retreat, board members were emailing, calling, and texting me—even on the weekends after the event, that stopped. The board now knows its job. They understand it includes fiduciary responsibilities. It’s not only about showing up at meetings or micromanaging the staff.
Sarah Pallone, Executive Director, Highland County Habitat for Humanity
Successful strategies provide the framework for overcoming the critical roadblocks that restrict your nonprofit’s three bottom lines: growing supporters, generating revenue, and growing mission.
Before we delve deeper, let’s clarify a common point of confusion: the term ‘strategy’ itself.
Test Your Understanding of the Nonprofit Strategy
“Strategy” is one of those words. It’s used frequently and imprecisely in the sector, and even people who are active in strategy work misuse it. Watch for the word. Whether you hear or read it, the odds are greater than 50 percent that the term will be misused.
Here are four quotations from recent articles that mention strategy. Which of the four quotes uses the word correctly?
- “In their strategy, nonprofits must acknowledge the hardships people are experiencing and then make fundraising asks from a place of empathy.”
- “A nonprofit executive leading in times of uncertainty ramps up their stakeholder engagement strategy, providing empathy and selfless help to all around them, while cutting both their burn rate and all nonessential business activities.”
- “In short, the transition strategy is the best available. “The market is winding down the coal industry, and these workers need jobs to support their families. We can provide good-paying jobs to these skilled workers while restoring the land to productive use . . .”
- “Needless to say, in reimagining your organization, you’ll need to determine how much it will cost to do what you want, plus you’ll develop an intentional revenue strategy.”
Answer
If you guessed three and four, you’re correct. Congratulations!
In number one, the word tactic or technique would be a better word choice. In number two, the sentence would be more precise without the word. Stakeholder engagement is a tactic. The third and fourth correctly reflect a strategic approach, that is, an overall game plan to win.
Three Challenges Caused by Using the Word “Strategy” Incorrectly
As you can see, the term ‘strategy’ is often misused, leading to significant consequences for nonprofits. When you or others misuse it, your organization risks:
- Appearing unprofessional, eroding trust with stakeholders.
- Failing to develop a comprehensive, winning plan.
- Confusing donors, resulting in decreased giving.
To avoid these pitfalls, it’s crucial to understand the correct usage of ‘strategy’ and other key planning terms. For a deeper dive into common communication mistakes nonprofits make, watch this video.
When Is It Time to Develop a Nonprofit Strategic Plan?
Many nonprofits engage in strategic planning on a routine basis, often developing a new plan every two to three years. Others only initiate the process when prompted by external factors, such as grant funding requirements or donor requests.
However, the real question is: when does your nonprofit truly need a new strategic plan?
Your Nonprofit Needs Strategic Planning When:
- Your plan no longer drives decisions. Board and staff meetings rarely reference your strategic priorities, and team members can’t clearly articulate where the organization is headed.
- Financial sustainability challenges persist despite following your existing strategy. Your nonprofit strategic planning process should directly address funding model weaknesses.
- Key stakeholders are misaligned causing confusion and inefficient resource allocation.
- External circumstances have shifted—whether through policy changes, community needs, or emerging opportunities.
- You’ve achieved most objectives in your current plan and need fresh challenges to maintain momentum.
When to Refresh vs. Reinvent
Consider the experience of Kumar Mahadevan, who I interviewed while researching 7 Nonprofit Income Streams. As the CEO of Mote Marine Laboratory, Kumar drove remarkable growth over 35 years by consistently executing a clear community-focused fundraising strategy established early in his tenure.
Successful nonprofits like Mote often maintain their core strategic approach for extended periods, building momentum through consistent implementation rather than reinvention.
Your nonprofit strategic planning consultant can help you determine whether you need:
- A complete strategic overhaul (new mission, vision, priorities, and strategy)
- A strategic refresh (same fundamental direction with updated objectives)
- An annual plan (recommitting to your existing strategy with renewed focus)
When your current strategy remains clear, stakeholder-aligned, and effective at guiding decisions, focus your attention on setting new goals, tactics, and execution rather than creating an entirely new strategic direction.
The next section will explore the optimal times to initiate the strategic planning process.
When Is the BEST Time to Begin the Nonprofit Strategic Planning Process?
Timing your strategic planning process can mean the difference between transformational growth and wasted effort. While many nonprofits default to calendar-based planning cycles, the most successful organizations act during these three opportunity windows.
1. Crisis: When Your Strategy Is Broken
When your nonprofit lacks clear strategic direction, you work harder every day. Like trying to navigate an unfamiliar country without signs or maps, your team wastes energy on detours and dead ends instead of moving forward.
Example: A newly hired arts organization CEO inherited a recently completed strategic plan filled with inspiring but vague language. Despite being only months old, the document provided no actionable guidance for decision-making.
Rather than waiting several years, the CEO engaged a nonprofit strategic planning consultant to develop a concrete, results-focused plan.
The outcome? Revenue doubled within 24 months as the nonprofit aligned around specific priorities and measurable objectives. You might need a new strategic plan even if you just created one.
You might even need to create a strategy if you just completed one.
2. Proactive: 4-6 Months Before Your Current Plan “Expires.“
The most efficient nonprofit strategic planning process begins before you need the new plan. Starting 4-6 months before your current plan or 60 days after you hire a new CEO provides critical advantages:
- Thoughtful stakeholder engagement without rushed deadlines
- Time for deeper research into emerging community needs
- Space to test assumptions and refine approaches
- Seamless transition between planning periods without implementation gaps
This proactive approach prevents the “strategy vacuum” many organizations experience during transitions.
3. When Facing Stagnation or Confusion
At times, instead of moving forward, nonprofits get stuck.
In these situations, the strategic planning process can catalyze the issues for clarity and progress. By engaging diverse perspectives and facilitating open dialogue, you can identify roadblocks, resolve conflicts, and develop innovative solutions. A nonprofit strategic planning consultant can help you to find clarity and momentum.
Now, let’s delve into a specific opportunity window that is particularly powerful: proactive planning with a new nonprofit CEO.
Nonprofit Strategic Planning: A New Nonprofit CEO’s Secret Weapon
For new nonprofit CEOs, the strategic planning process offers an exceptional opportunity to establish strong leadership foundations quickly. While many leaders postpone planning until they’re “settled in,” this timing actually diminishes one of your greatest early advantages.
Why New CEOs Should Prioritize Strategic Planning
The process also allows the new CEO to:
Accelerate Stakeholder Engagement: The nonprofit strategic planning process multiplies your connections. While your initial listening tour might include 50 individual meetings in your first 100 days, a well-structured planning process brings another 50+ voices into the conversation. This expands your understanding and builds your network in months rather than years.
Uncover Hidden Dynamics: Strategic planning discussions reveal truths that rarely surface in otherwise. In one nonprofit, a seemingly disengaged board member was revealed to be not only deeply committed but possessing critical insights they had been waiting for the right moment to share. Without the structured opportunity, these valuable perspectives and the resources they lead to might have been missed.
Capture Less Filtered Feedback: Your first year offers a unique window for receiving candid, less biased feedback. The nonprofit strategic planning process creates legitimate opportunities for stakeholders to share concerns and ideas while you’re still viewed as the newcomer before relationships and assumptions become entrenched and the problems are viewed as belonging to you.
Mix Vision with Legacy: Every leader brings new ideas and approaches. The strategic planning process provides a framework to thoughtfully blend your vision with existing culture and strengths. You generate buy-in for new directions and honor institutional knowledge and history.
Working with an experienced nonprofit strategic planning consultant during this transition period amplifies these benefits. A skilled facilitator asks questions you can’t, creates space for difficult conversations, and provides objective analysis that accelerates your understanding of the organization by months or even years.
Rather than viewing the strategic planning process as something to tackle after you’ve “learned the ropes,” recognize it as one of the most powerful tools for establishing your leadership.
To delve deeper into this topic, I’ve created Strategic Planning for New CEOs: A Guide to Results.
Who Should You Invite to Participate in a Strategic Planning Process?
To create an effective strategic plan involve a diverse range of stakeholders. The following groups can offer valuable perspectives, insights, and a deeper understanding of your nonprofit’s role and opportunities.
Remember, engaging these individuals fosters buy-in and leads to a more robust and successful plan and implementation.
1. Core Stakeholders
These are the individuals most closely involved with your nonprofit’s day-to-day operations and long-term success. Here’s who to include and why:
- Board Members: Guidance and oversight
- Staff: Day-to-day operations
- Major Donors: Financial support
- Founders: Vision and history
- Volunteers: Service and connection
- Clients/Beneficiaries: Feedback on experiences
2. External Partners
Leaders from other entities can provide insights, recommendations, and trend updates. Consider asking individuals from these organizations to participate:
- Friends of your organization and people in your network
- Trusted partners in cooperative endeavors, for example, a partner from a joint grant project
- Representatives of your state, province, or national industry association
- Vendors such as bankers, CPAs, and graphic artists, especially those that service nonprofits.
3. Past Friends and Prospects
These individuals and organizations can provide valuable perspectives.
- Community Partners: Organizations with whom you collaborate or refer customers.
- Industry Associations: Representatives who can offer trend updates and best practices.
- Service Providers: Professionals such as bankers, CPAs, and graphic designers who serve multiple nonprofits.
3. Past and Future Stakeholders:
New and old contacts can offer perspective and build and renew connections. Consider:
- Past Leaders: Former board members, and staff, for historical context
- Prospective Supporters: Potential board members, donors, or funders whose input can influence future support.
As you’ve already realized, this is a lot of people! But don’t panic. While you might invite all of them to participate, you will focus on in-depth information gathering from just a handful.
Why is engaging a lot of people worth the effort?
Scientific American states, “By asking someone to share his or her wisdom, advice seekers stroke the advisor’s ego and can gain valuable insights.”
Inviting diverse perspectives leads to:
- Creative solutions.
- Increased buy-in and ownership of the plan and implementation.
- Enhanced knowledge of how others perceive your work.
Does this mean that everyone I ask has to participate the same way?
No. A skilled nonprofit strategic planning consultant can help you facilitate diverse engagement methods to gather input without overwhelming you or any group. Methods can include:
- Individual Interviews: For in-depth conversations and personal perspectives.
- Focus Groups: To gather collective insights and foster dynamic discussions among stakeholders.
- Surveys: For broad outreach and collecting data across your community.
- Email or Text Chats: For quick questions, feedback on specific elements, or check-ins.
Failing to cast a wide net–that is, inviting your community to get involved–is a common mistake in strategic planning that leads to less support and fewer ideas. To learn more about this error, watch Building a Plan Without Buy-In.
Who Selects Your Nonprofit’s Strategy?
While a successful nonprofit strategic planning process involves gathering input from a wide range of stakeholders, the responsibility for selecting the nonprofit’s strategy rests with leadership. Understanding the strategy decision-making process can provide clarity and build confidence in your strategic plan.
The board of directors is the most logical and common body to select the nonprofit’s overarching strategy. Their fiduciary duty and governance role position them to make this critical decision.
However, in some cases, a dedicated task force may develop and recommend a strategy to the board. This task force could include a mix of board members, key staff, and respected community leaders who bring diverse perspectives and expertise. For collaborative community-wide initiatives, a steering committee comprised of leaders from various sectors (business, civic, foundation, nonprofit, and government) with a vested interest in the outcome and analytical both guides the effort and selects the strategy.
What Happens in a Nonprofit Strategy Selection Session?
After the crucial community listening phase, a focused strategy selection session brings key decision-makers together to choose your path forward.
Here’s a glimpse into what this important meeting entails:
Key Elements of a Nonprofit Strategy Session:
- Reviewing Insights: A summary of the key learnings from your community engagement.
- Presenting Strategy Options: Introducing a clear set of distinct and feasible strategic directions.
- Establishing Evaluation Criteria: Defining how the team will compare the different options.
- Evaluating and Selecting the Strategy: A collaborative process of assessing the options against the criteria, often leading to a unified decision.
- Assigning Next Steps: Outlining the initial goals and assigning teams to begin developing the full strategic plan.
This session is a pivotal moment where the insights gathered transform into a concrete strategic direction, setting the stage for your nonprofit’s future success.
Hazard Warning: The Biggest Nonprofit Strategic Planning Hazard
Failure to Solve the Key Roadblock
One of the most significant dangers in nonprofit strategic planning is creating a plan that doesn’t directly address the fundamental challenges holding the nonprofit back.
I worked with a client where chronic underfunding was the underlying issue driving the need for a new strategy. During our community listening phase, we heard countless stories of fundraising struggles. Everyone agreed on the problem but the conversations got stuck in rehashing what hadn’t worked, rather than generating solutions.
By guiding their discussions, the leadership team recognized that they had inadvertently compiled an extensive list of “what not to do” – a valuable lesson, much like Edison’s journey with the light bulb. Determined to break through, we built upon these lessons and, using innovative techniques, developed fresh strategic options. The focus on problem-solving, shifted their organization’s revenue trajectory, leading to a threefold increase in less than five years.
Your strategic planning process will be a success if you leave your strategy selection session with a clear direction for overcoming your most critical roadblock or blocks. If not, you risk creating a plan that gathers dust and breeds cynicism among your supporters.
Before finalizing your strategy, rigorously test it against these three crucial questions:
1) Will We Win With This Strategy? Does the strategy clearly outline how you will achieve your goals, differentiate yourself, and build financial sustainability?
2) Is It Succinct? While the full strategy will have nuances, its essence should be easily understood and articulated – ideally as a word, short phrase, or concise sentence (e.g., “make art accessible,” “build affordable homes,” “reduce medical debt”).
3) Is It an “Earworm”? Can you easily imagine this strategy guiding daily decisions by your board, staff, and supporters? Effective strategies are memorable and actionable. They become ingrained in your culture.
Avoid the trap of a strategy that doesn’t tackle your core challenges. For more, watch this video.
What Tools Do You Recommend to Monitor Your Strategic Plan Implementation?
What Tools Do You Recommend to Monitor Implementation?
Once your strategic plan is finalized, effectively monitoring its use is crucial for achieving your goals.
Here are two recommended tools to help you effectively monitor your strategic plan in action.
Tool 1: Bridgespan Groups Strategy Tool
- Print out the strategy tool collection from the Bridgespan Group. It provides robust frameworks and templates.
- Tailor to Your Needs: Review the Bridgespan materials, crossing out columns and eliminating pages that aren’t relevant to your organization. The remaining content will serve as a customized draft template.
Tool 2: Cascade Strategy
- Sign up for a strategy execution platform like Cascade Strategy (consistently receives top reviews and offers reasonable pricing, with reviews often highlighting its suitability for nonprofits).
- Integrate the Resources: Import your strategic plan into Cascade.
Ultimately, the best approach depends on your organization’s preferences and resources.
Ready to Create a Dynamic Strategy for Your Nonprofit?
I’d love to partner with you if you want to move beyond static plans and create a thriving, impactful nonprofit. Let’s discuss how a tailored strategic approach can help your organization reach new heights. Schedule a complimentary discovery chat here. – Karen
