What is the Purpose of Outlining Current Operations in a Strategic Plan?
What is the purpose of outlining current operations in a strategic plan? It is a fair question. In fact, many people would say if we don’t know what we are already doing we probably are failing. There is, however, a simple answer here. Your organization needs a baseline that looks at operations, staffing, marketing and communications, sales and fundraising, etc. If you don’t know where you are starting from, it will be incredibly difficult to outline the path to where you are going. This is a key component of strategic planning and overall nonprofit strategy. So let’s take a look at what you need to assess and how to take the next steps.
What Do You Need To Assess?
Simply put, it’s what you’re doing, typically we break this down into the following categories but there are times where there are differences based upon the organization:
Staffing/Board of Directors
Marketing/Communications
Sales/Fundraising
Operations
As noted, there may be other areas of focus for your organization that do not feel quite right grouping with the others, in some nonprofit organizations they need strategy developed around their volunteers and volunteer engagement and it plays such an impactful role for their organization rolling it into staffing or operations does not make sense.
How do we assess our current Staffing/Board of Directors?
This is likely the simplest piece of the Current Operations, start with your org chart. If you don’t have an organizational chart this is likely an example of why the current operations are a necessary piece of your strategic planning process. As a part of this process, develop an organizational chart and job descriptions for each role. The job descriptions are incredibly helpful in later identifying gaps in responsibilities.
For the Board of Directors, list the board of directors, their background, and a current assessment of their value to your organization. Here’s an example of a Board Assessment document. This Board Assessment is built to identify target board members, but an organization should always start with what is currently there. This document may be customized to ensure it meets the interests/needs of the organization, but is a good template to understand and assess what is currently there.
How do we assess our current Marketing/Communications?
When looking at your strategic plan, marketing and communications play a critical role in ensuring people know who you are and what you’re about. This area needs to take a look at all the ways in which you reach both external and internal groups, identify how those mediums are utilized and what has been successful or failed.
Look through traditional media, social media, paid advertisements, and earned media. Discuss what has worked and what has not worked.
Discuss who your target audience is and what they read, and what platforms they use. Is there an audience shift going on?
Identify fundraising audience and how you’re reaching them (often different than programming audience or at least platforms).
How do we assess our current sales and fundraising?
Start simple here, go to your foundation’s 990, in its simplest form this can be found on your foundation’s “statement of revenue.” This is where you can identify if your revenues primarily come from membership, ticket sales, fundraisers, etc. Use this section to identify anywhere revenues (sales or fundraising) come in and then identify who the audience is that supports that line of revenue and how you reach them. Identify any trends in the last few years for that line item (Is it dramatically increasing or decreasing, if so why is that?), is the line item primarily supported by one or two groups (for example do you have sponsorship in there, but really only one company writes you sponsorship dollars), and most importantly identify your financial vulnerabilities (Are you too dependent on one donor and need to decrease your dependency by bringing in new major donors? A good area to identify this is your public support percentage, line items 14 and 15 in Part II - Support Schedule for Organizations, highlighted below). Understand the importance of the Public Support Test.
When looking through fundraising events go into as much detail as possible including how much staff effort goes into each event. It’s important to understand how much effort and expenses go into the revenue generated to make further decisions later on. It’s also important to understand the event as fully as possible to identify new potential revenue streams to increase the profitability of the event.
Similar to events, your membership or annual giving platforms should be defined clearly to understand what you are doing to make a dollar. Are you spending $0.50 to get $1.00 or are you spending $1.25 to get $1.00? How much is renewing donors costing versus finding new donors? What avenues are you taking for these and how much time, effort and money is it costing you to do so? Again, the more information provided here the better opportunity to adjust, align and improve your current situation later in the plan.
How do we assess our current operations?
Hopefully, you have a good grasp on all you do here, but, similar to the note about events and effort above, it’s important to look at the efforts that go into each piece of your operations. Nonprofit Organizations have very different operations, whether you’re a museum, a shelter, a food pantry, etc. while there may be some cross-over in operations between many of these what you do is unique. To the fullest extent possible you need to define those efforts and who manages and executes each of them. Make sure you give the whole picture of what you’re doing, as it can open new doors or also new opportunities to replace current efforts that may arise that can improve your organization.
Find our whole “Purpose of” series here:
You can also download our sample/template Strategic Plan Request for Proposal for free here, no sign up or anything necessary: Strategic Plan Request for Proposal Template
NMBL Strategies specializes in Nonprofit Planning, we utilize the above approach as a deep part of our background assessment of an organization to ensure our clients can move forward from the current point they are at. To complete a strategic plan appropriately, you have to know where you are coming from and where you are in order to develop where you are going. Contact us today to allow us to assist you on your path!
