By Krishna Desai and Kim Tran
Many nonprofit staffers are lost. And it’s not why we think. Recently, I spoke with one of the most committed and effective organizers I know. They’ve been organizing in the same community for close to 20 years, since they were a teenager. They have the will, skill, and people power to create real change. Yet, the organization where they work consistently spins its wheels. No one can tell this veteran organizer what direction to move toward–whether basebuilding or designing campaigns–because the nonprofit lacks a clear, shareable, Strategic Plan.
A good strategic plan is like a map. It protects your time, money, and energy from mission and scope creep. Ideally, it’s the result of a holistic process and several clarifying conversations. So when things get blurry, it can help you decide how to proceed, what programs and funding streams to pursue and which to set aside. Essentially, it helps you say no, or say yes. After nearly 15 years of building Strategic Plans with social impact organizations, we’ve found that a usable Strategic Plan–one that staff, leaders, and community members actually use–has four qualities.
It Offers Perspective
Strategic plans walk a fine line. They need to be broad enough to guide an organization for years and specific enough to determine whether or not you should sponsor an ally’s end of the year gala. Many plans simply offer abstract and generic goals like “deepen our impact,” “strengthen our capacity,” or “expand our reach.” Goals like these could belong to any organization, so they can’t help yours make choices. For a team full of motivated people who want to do everything, clarity is a gift.
An impactful Strategic Plan names how your organization moves forward, which programs should grow, how, and why. It gives leaders, staff, and community stakeholders a shared understanding of your vision. This in turn gives everyone a reason to say yes, guidance on how to allocate precious time and money, and, just as importantly, a clear rationale for saying no.
It Accounts for the Political Moment
Movement organizations are fighting on multiple fronts. They are laser focused on their organizational mandates like advocacy for survivors of sex trafficking or resisting unjust deportations. At the same time, they now face incredible challenges related to the political climate, like existential threats to funding or ICE occupying the communities where they operate.
A good Strategic Plan must anticipate and address these types of threats. When we create Strategic Plans, we look into the future to anticipate global challenges like rising anti-LGBTQ sentiment or funder freeze. We make offsetting these global challenges a priority in the document, whether that means laying out next steps to implement a power-sharing model or diversifying funding streams. Conversely, addressing the political climate can also mean protecting your mission, particularly from scope creep. When political tides shift, it can be tempting to completely change course in response, but staying grounded in your mission keeps you accountable to the communities you serve.
A strong plan can help you decipher when you’ll hold fast (your values) and what you’ll adapt (your tactics).
It’s Built by, with, and for, Real People
It’s understandably tempting to use AI. AI can help you pull together a list of organizations like yours, foundations that fund similar work, or analyze public budgets. What AI can’t do is surface the knowledge that only comes from deep relationships and authentic connection.
AI won’t tell you that base-building has stalled because of tension between coalition partners, and that repairing those relationships must come first. It can’t tell you that you need to implement a power sharing model because a lot of leadership labor has been largely invisible for too long. It lacks the experience to determine which teams are failing to follow through on new programs and why.
AI also can’t tell you how your organizational members have been working together. We all have patterns that need to be reinforced or shifted. A human centered Strategic Plan process can target and lay out ways to close specific gaps in how we work. These kinds of insights often dictate whether a Strategic Plan works and they can only come from a focus on humans, how we build trust, what questions we tend to overlook, and how only we can listen to our staff, board, partners, and the communities we serve.
It’s Specific to Your Context
Who guides your planning process matters. The right partner already understands your field, shares your values, and doesn’t need you to explain the basics. That’s often the difference between a plan that sits unopened and one that becomes a working resource.
A consultant unfamiliar with your context can cost you time and energy by focusing on the wrong things or setting unrealistic goals. Rather than addressing the challenges that matter to you, they might introduce recommendations that don’t reflect the reality of how your organization operates. The plans that come out of these processes feel muddled, disconnected, and lacking a clear connection to what drives you. While they look great on paper, these plans leave staff trying to make sense of solutions that don’t fit instead of helping to make hard decisions about next steps.
The right consultant or firm understands when and how you will use your Strategic Plan. As a matter of fact, they–yes–plan for it. They know the questions your Strategic Plan will need to help answer and the realities that are toughest in your field, whether it’s impact litigation, political advocacy or grassroots movements. They know a Strategic Plan needs to be approachable enough for staff to pull it up on a phone screen when considering new programming. They anticipate it’ll be on the table when an Executive Director makes tough decisions about allocating resources to a coalition in another state. They know that it can even become a tool that a Board President can use to create an approach to fundraising. A partner who knows those moments builds for them from the start. They design a process that invites and facilitates robust collaboration from all stakeholders. The plans they help write include the decision trees, priorities, and tradeoffs your team will need for implementation, then they test the draft against real choices you’ve faced before handing it over. What you get is a Strategic Plan that can consistently help you answer the question you and your team keep asking: “Does this move us in the right direction?”
***
A well-crafted strategic plan doesn’t have to be long or complicated. It has to be specific, politically astute, rooted in authenticity, and true to your staff and organization. When it is, it becomes the document your team reaches for when a hard decision comes up, not the one lost in a shared drive.
If your plan is due for a refresh, or you’re starting from scratch, we’d love to talk.