Later this year 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 I’ve learned in over two decades of working with nonprofit leaders.

In this blog entry, the third in a five-article series, I’ll share a brief preview of some of my guidance in the book.

The #1 Problem with Strategic Planning

In my work as a planning consultant, I’ve learned that poor execution is, by far, the number one problem with nonprofit strategic planning.

Research conducted by TCC Group, a social impact consulting firm, supports this. They found that “the biggest challenge that nonprofits face with capacity building is implementing the often first-rate strategies that are devised.”

Additional research in the Harvard Business Review involving employees at more than 1,000 companies, government agencies, and nonprofits in over fifty countries indicated that three out of five organizations were weak at execution.

The bottom line is that creating a strategic plan isn’t typically a problem. Executing it is.

In my book I describe, chapter by chapter, the common barriers that get in the way of executing a plan. Two of those barriers are:

• You view planning as an event, and

• Your plan is too complex 

I’ll briefly review each of these.

You View Planning as an Event

Perhaps this sounds familiar... 

You and your team would like to achieve some important goals, so you say, “We’re going to create a strategic plan.” 

You get excited because it’s something new and you likely get some immediate positive results. 

But after a few short weeks or months, you and your team become bored by the plan, you get distracted by other pressing issues, and the plan gets shelved. In the end, you don’t hit your goals, you lose some faith in strategic planning, and you’re less likely to do it again. 

Essentially, your failure was doomed from the beginning, since you and your team viewed strategic planning as an event, as a moment in time. You didn’t internalize, from the beginning, that real success took more than creating a plan.

As described in this blog article, instead of thinking of planning as an event, we approach it as an ongoing process called the CAPE Cycle. Approaching strategic planning as a cycle will help you and your team design and implement the critical steps to execute your plan.

While thinking of strategic planning as an ongoing process is essential, your efforts can still be doomed if your plan is too complicated. 

Your Plan is Too Complex

Several years ago, I came across a strategic planning document that got my attention. The plan was spiral bound, forty-two pages, and full of lovely photographs of children running through fields of grass and flowers. It was well organized and quite attractive. 

However, there was one major problem with the plan: it was utter overkill.

The plan was for a tiny nonprofit that had a $25,000 annual budget and one very part-time executive director. The well-meaning consultants who facilitated the effort were used to working with municipalities and, as such, led the organization through an overly complex process that engaged nearly ninety stakeholders. The plan included thirteen major strategies and took over six months to finalize. 

Over the ensuing years, I tracked the organization to see if the plan helped to strengthen the organization’s programs and impact. Tragically—but not surprisingly—the plan never got any traction, and the nonprofit continues to limp along, struggling financially and programmatically.

Given the challenges that a complex plan creates, I’ve worked throughout my career to find a practical strategic plan framework that would work for executive directors and their teams. By trial-and-error, I’ve arrived at this simple two-section structure that is easy to understand and communicate:

• Section One: Our Compass

• Section Two: Our Actions
  

The Compass section serves as an organizational “North Star” and remains relatively unchanged from year to year. Elements of the Compass may include:

• A mission statement

• A vision statement

• Core values

• Key metrics
  

Section two, Our Actions, contains a small set of:

• Focus areas (e.g., programs, fund development, board engagement, operations, etc.), including a three-year vision 

• Goals that support the vision for each focus area (Goals should be for several weeks to a year in length.)

• Short-term action items that support each goal
  

As noted in the “focus areas” bullet above, a key part of section two is establishing a three-year organizational vision for each of the three focus areas. The three-year vision provides guidance for each of the goals and is essential for creating a more strategic plan and not just a list of tactical goals.

Utilizing a simple plan format as part of an ongoing planning cycle will help you to ensure that you and your team will find success in executing your plan.