how to perform strategic planning for a non-profit

I received a few more questions in response to my last post on how to get started in strategic planning if you have limited experience. I have a few resources that I would recommend. This book is a facilitator's guide to conducting strategic planning. Several of the exercises I did with my organization's strategic planning team I took directly from this book. It has great exercises to help you come up with a concrete vision for your organization, for example.

This other book is really useful to help you figure out how to implement Balanced Scorecard in a non-profit environment. It's not just a fad, a newer way of doing strategic planning -- it's the only tool I've come across which really ties strategy to execution, and helps you come up with targets so you know where you're going, how to get there, and when you've accomplished your goal. The book focuses more on governments than non-profits, but it's still useful in figuring out how to apply a business-oriented strategic measurement system to an organization whose ultimate goal isn't to make a ton of money.

A friend suggested that I offer a jumpstart workshop to help get organizations off and running on these concepts. It's an interesting idea, and could be a lot of fun.

So the excruciatingly short version of what strategic planning for a non-profit looks like:

1. Figure out what business you're in.
2. Identify, as clearly as possible, what your future looks like. This one is harder than it looks. It requires talking to your members, understanding a couple scenarios about how the environment will change in the future, and determine how to change to help your members adapt to that new environment.
3. Break that vision into components, in much the same way that you'd break a project down into a work breakdown structure. In what areas do we need to improve in order to achieve our vision?
4. Determine strategies in each of those component areas. For example, if you have a group around improving how you work with volunteers, you may have a couple strategies to help you get there, like developing a volunteer lifecycle, and developing strategic competencies in the board.
5. Now it's starting to look more manageable. For each strategy, create projects to help you achieve the goal. Determine a target, or how you know you will have that strategy addressed. Targets don't need to be too detailed -- it's just how you ultimately know you hit the mark. So for our volunteer example, your target might be increasing your number of volunteers by three times, etc.
6. Throughout the process, communicate and iterate. Now you have more of a purpose for meetings, and folks should get more excited -- they can see that they're progressing towards a real, important goal, instead of just performing operational tasks.

Does that start to address the question? It's still a bit of a longer view, so it doesn't get into the details of how to perform each step. I think that's the book that I need to get started on one of these days. = )

Happy New Year!