Later this month I’ll publish my upcoming book, Mission Met: Proven Strategic Planning Guidance to Help You Build a Financially Secure and Impactful Nonprofit. The book will provide you with a suite of practical strategic planning practices that will help you and your team better execute your strategic plan. 

This blog entry, about the benefit of strategic planning software, is the fourth article in a five-article series where I’ll share a brief preview of some of the guidance that I provide in the book. 

A Software Journey

For the first decade-plus of my consulting career, I helped our customers capture and track their strategic plans in Microsoft Word and Excel documents. That worked fine. 

However, Word- and Excel-based plans were fairly static and didn’t actively engage teams to take any action. Plus, not everyone felt comfortable using Excel, and the plans were avoided as a result.   

I had a nagging thought that there must be a better way. 

With that in mind, I searched to see if there was any strategic planning software on the market that could help us and our customers make their strategic plans more dynamic and engaging. Although I succeeded in finding some good platforms, they were designed for large corporations and were too complex and expensive for the organizations that I was working with. Put differently, the software solutions were Ferraris when I was looking for a practical and affordable Toyota that my customers could easily own and drive. 

Not finding a solution, in 2015 I decided to create one. I hired a software development team to work with me to build easy-to-use and cost-effective strategic planning software designed specifically for the practical needs of small and midsize nonprofits. 

The result, as you may know, is Causey, a wonderful software platform that has transformed my approach to strategic planning. 

What I’ve Learned

Since then, we’ve had thousands of people utilize the software. It’s been a completely amazing and exciting journey. I could write a separate book about all that I’ve learned. 

But my key takeaway has been that my initial hunch was spot on: strategic planning software significantly catalyzes strategic planning success.

I first realized this at a planning retreat where I introduced the software to a team of about twelve people. I had worked with the team before, using Word to capture their prior plans. 

This time, however, we documented their plan in the software. During the retreat, everyone was fully engaged in the plan via their laptop. The software made the process more enjoyable, logical, and engaging. The executive director told me that she’d never seen her team so fully immersed in the process. 

The team’s engagement continued, over time, as the team built a habit of tracking and measuring their plan in the software in a way that they had never done before.

I knew that my software team and I were onto something. 

Key Benefits 

I’ve learned that using strategic planning software has several key benefits:

• Ensures that your planning is a good investment
  Effective planning can be a significant investment of time and money. By capturing and tracking your plan in planning software, you help to ensure that your plan will be used and that it provides a positive return on investment. Further, using planning software sends a clear signal to your team that strategic planning is something for everyone to take seriously.

• Builds your measurement habit
  As I described earlier, one of the best ways to catalyze your team’s strategic planning success is to build a habit of regularly measuring the plan. Planning software can help you and your team build that muscle by sending automated reminders to review and measure progress on your plan. Further, the templates and forms in the software simplify the measurement process. 

• Integrates the plan into your calendar
  By linking to your online calendar, strategic planning software can help you keep track of when key goals and action items are due. 

• Strengthens communication
  Most planning platforms provide easy tools to report and share progress on your plan with your team and key stakeholders. 
  

Learn More

If you’d like to learn more about Causey then visit our web site where you can watch a two-minute overview video and review some of the software’s key features. You can also schedule a demo and get a free trial.