Five Reasons YOUR DMO or Non-Profit Needs a Strategic Plan

A strategic plan is not just a simple list of annual goals. It is meant to be visionary, multi-year, and a collaborative representation of your leadership’s desired outcomes. This plan defines the aspirations of your organization – that fine line that unites your mission and values with your vision – and lets you say to your stakeholders, “Come aboard and buckle your seats because you will love where we are going!”

If you are currently operating your organization with an annual operating plan – good! You have a solid understanding of your funding and current situation. This is an important foundational step before developing your longer range goals.

The next step is to begin to stretch your timeframe to three to five years. This allows your organization to gain consensus on the bigger dreams and to drive passion for the broader outcome. There are so many goals that just can not be accomplished in a 1 year timeframe and how are you acknowledging that reality?

There are other benefits that I have experienced over the years leading organizations that come with a longer range strategic plan. Here are my top five reasons to spend the time and effort to develop such a plan:

Direction – Where are you going? As an investor, member, donor, or sponsor, this is a critical question. One of the primary functions of a board of directors is to determine this direction.

You may have heard this quote: “If you don’t know where you are going, any path will take your there.” Getting off track and losing your direction is easy to do if you are only doing short term planning.

Focus – With board members and staff constantly transitioning in and out of your organization, it is easy to lose focus on the bigger picture. The urgent problem ‘de jour’ can easily take over and competing interests and agendas can leave you feeling scrambled.

It is not uncommon for organizations to become ‘issue oriented,’ and unable to say “no” to the well intended ideas that are generated by your board or committees or key partners. With a long (3-5 year) plan, you can develop your human capital, committee structure, and really focus on progressing your goals forward without becoming distracted.

This certainly doesn’t mean that you can’t undertake a brilliant and innovative program! But it does mean that you will do so thoughtfully, reexamining your existing goals and priorities and assessing impacts to staffing and volunteers before saying “yes!”

Engagement – Board Members are critical to the strategic visioning of your organization, but how can you keep them from ‘getting into the weeds’ of your operations? How do you generate passion from your volunteers and donors?

This is where the longer range strategic plan is so valuable. By structuring your board meeting agendas to allow for strategic discussion on various aspects of the strategic goals. Key partners can be brought in to provide additional information and an update on the tactical accomplishments can be provided by staff or committee chairs.

Donors and sponsors can buy into the big picture and can receive regular updates as to progress and success metrics of the goals that are most important to them.

Continuity – Depending on your Board of Directors structure and succession process, you may change leadership annually. Each Board Chair may have an agenda of what they would like to leave as their legacy. Without a longer range strategic plan, an organization can be subject to a path of tacking against the wind depending on the Chair’s agenda.

The driver’s seat can also be taken over by powerful donors or sponsors, leveraging their dollars to achieve their personal goals, which may or may not be aligned with the strategic goals.

Having a commitment to the strategic goals with full support of the Board of Directors, will help the organization to retain it’s continuity in direction and focus.

Sustainability – Every non-profit organization is dependent on revenues, public or private, to sustain their mission. Very few donors or sponsors will fund operations and certainly public dollars are very mission driven.

Painting the big picture of 3-5 year goals is critical to finding people who are aligned with your organization’s efforts. Whether it’s ridding the world of polio or establishing air service for your community, these are big goals that will drive dollars for your organization, sustaining you for the future.

To begin the process of creating a 3-5-year Strategic Plan for your organization, contact Sandy Hall Consulting, LLC for a free consultation. sandyevanshall@gmail.com or 970-846-6284