Who Needs a Strategic Plan?
You Do!
W
Linda Lysakowski ACFRE
Linda is one of just over 100
professionals worldwide to hold the
Advanced Certified Fund Raising
Executive designation and has trained
more than 30,000 development
professionals in Canada, Mexico,
Egypt, Bermuda, and most of the fifty
United States.
She is the author of Recruiting and
Training Fundraising Volunteers;
The Development Plan; Fundraising
as a Career: What, Are You Crazy?;
Capital Campaigns: Everything You
NEED to Know; Are You Ready for a
Capital Campaign? workbook, Raise
More Money from Your Business
Community; Raise More Money
from Your Business Community
This Year workbook, Fundraising for
the GENIUS 1st and 2nd editions,
a contributing author to The
Fundraising Feasibility Study—It’s
Not About the Money and YOU and
Your Nonprofit Board, co-editor of
YOU and Your Nonprofit and The
Nonprofit Consulting Handbook; and
co-author of The Essential Nonprofit
Fundraising Handbook , The New
Donor, Nonprofit Strategic Planning.
and The Leaky Bucket: What’s Wrong
With Your Fundraising…And How
You Can Fix It. Linda is a contributor
to 4Good and CharityChannel, and a
member of AFP and ANN.
hether you are a small business, a
major corporation, or a nonprofit
organization, you need a strategic plan.
Businesses, and sometimes nonprofits, may
refer to this as a business plan, and the two
concepts are very close. What makes the plan
strategic is that you will identify strategies to
help meet your goals and objectives.
All organizations, for-profit and
nonprofit, have goals. The overarching goal
for most for-profits is to make money for the
shareholders, partners, or owners. However,
a business also has other goals—to be
socially responsible, to be a good corporate
citizen, to create a good work environment
for its employees, to serve a need of its
clients or customer, etc. So all its goals will
not revolve around the bottom line.
A nonprofit will have similar goals--to
remain or become financially viable; to serve
its clients; to have a happy, well-trained,
professional staff; to help solve a community
need. Sounds a lot like the for-profit plan,
right?
What’s the difference between a plan for
a nonprofit?
Two things that make nonprofit plans
different are that there is a charitable
component to most nonprofits; many rely
heavily on charitable donations. Although
nonprofits usually also have a revenuegenerating model that might include
fee-for-services, or social enterprise, even a
for-profit part of their organization, for many
donations are crucial to their existence. So
a great part of a nonprofit’s strategic plan
often revolved around fundraising and a
development plan (see article on page xx)
will be part of the overall strategic plan.
Another big difference is that the role
of the board of a nonprofit is different from
the role of a board of a for-profit entity.
The board of a nonprofit has the role of
governance and oversight in addition
to, in most cases, fundraising. So board
development is a huge issue for nonprofits.
Very seldom does the board gets voted in by
members, and being a major “stockholder”
does not enable board members to wield
influence over the nonprofit organization. So
board development is often a major division
of the nonprofit’s strategic plan.
Back to similarities.
No matter whether your plan is for
nonprofit or a for-profit company, some
things that will common to both:
• The plan will have overall goals (such as
those listed above)
• Every goal must have measurable
objectives (we often call these objectives
SMART—they must be specific,
measurable, action-oriented, realistic,
and time-defined.
• Strategies answer the question—“How
are we going to achieve our objectives
and, as a result, our goals?”
• Strategic plans must be translated into
departmental work plans which include
timelines, areas of responsibility, and
budgets.
So, at the beginning of this New Year, if
you don’t have strategic plan, get ready to
do one. If you already have one, it might be
time to update it, and by all means, evaluate
the plan you have and see if your goals,
objectives, and strategies are still viable and
are departmental plans on track?
For more on strategic plans for
nonprofits see Nonprofit Strategic Planning,
co-authored by Lynne Dean, CFRE and Linda
Lysakowski, ACFRE. You can find the book at
www.LindaLysakowski.com.
The Philantrepreneur Journal
7