When Not-for-Profit Strategic Plans Are Not Strategic
I have been reading several not-for-profit strategic plans lately. These are from great organizations that are growing and doing amazing work. What has stood out is how few of them are actionable. Most have a colorful design with great graphics and information about the organization. But they have in common a fatal flaw: they are visions, not strategic plans.
A vision states the outcome that the organization seeks to achieve; the desired future state. It is something to reach for. It might be a higher literacy rate or more affordable housing in a community. It could be an increased numbers of corporate volunteers providing professional services to local organizations, or the construction of a new neighborhood park. Whatever the cause that led to the creation of the organization, the vision is the outcome they seek to create through their efforts.
A strategic plan is quite different from a vision. A strategic plan must lay out a strategy to achieve the outcome envisioned by the organization’s leadership. The strategy is not what you want, it is how you get there. It refines the vision into a series of goals that, if met, will result in the sought-after outcome. Many of the plans did, in fact, list goals that related to the vision. But the problem was that the goals were still lofty, aspirational outcomes, and not all were well defined. To implement a strategy, one needs to have a way to measure progress toward one’s goals. The team must understand exactly what is expected of them and when.
A helpful rubric is SMART. SMART goals are specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time bound. SMART goals are derived from the broader aspirations, which are broken down into multiple steps to be achieved, each bringing the organization closer to the outcome it seeks.¹
SMART goals are very specific, narrowly constructed, and typically quantitative. They focus on one item. Where a goal sought is qualitative, the organization must look to other proxies that can help determine if an outcome is achieved. Examples of a smart goals are a specific percentage increase in a school’s test scores, a decrease in wait times, a percent increase in customer satisfaction based on surveys, or the number of people who obtained benefits through the organization’s efforts.
If progress toward a goal cannot be measured, then it is impossible to assess if one is achieving it. Indeed, goals must be achievable; a stretch is fine, even desirable, but a goal that cannot be achieved within the capacity of the organization is a set up for failure (unless of course, it is set as a prelude for increasing the resources available).
Each goal must relate to the overall strategy and be tied to the vision. A goal that is extraneous to the organization’s mission, even peripherally, is a questionable use of organization resources.² Irrelevant goals should be carefully reviewed and discarded, and the resources redistributed toward goals connected to the mission. Goals must also have realistic deadlines. Of course, time frames may change, but creating a time for each goal helps create urgency and a context for measuring progress.
Within each goal are a series of tasks — what the team does in order to achieve the goal. These may be part of the strategic plan or a separate document, but setting these down helps management determine progress toward achieving each goal.
Even multi-year strategic plans are not fixed documents. While an annual review of progress, and revisions are necessary, the team should be monitoring progress regularly, certainly quarterly and even monthly. Dashboards that track progress on each goal (and in some cases tasks) can automate this, reducing the need for taking time for meetings just to review each item. Team leaders can see which items are moving along and which are stuck, and focus time on those needing help. There are many cloud-based programs available that are specific to tracking strategic plans, but many general purpose project management programs can do this as well.
Each SMART goal and task needs to have a team member who is responsible for tracking and reporting on its progress. If progress is behind schedule, the team can confer and determine if it is a resource issue, an externality that was not accounted for, or if the goal itself needs to be revisited. These issues can then be escalated as needed. Since most organizations operate in a dynamic system, new goals can also be added as needed, keeping the strategic plan fresh and relevant to the changing needs of clients served by the organization.
Strategic Plans should be more than just a statement of aspirational outcomes, they should be a detailed roadmap for teams on how to achieve the organizations mission. They must have specific ways to measure progress, reasonable goals to be achieved that are clearly understood in terms of how much and when, with reporting mechanisms that tell team members where they stand at any given time. Organizations whose strategic plans lack these attributes will find themselves frustrated and unable to provide their boards and stakeholders with clear reports on their progress toward achieving their vision and mission. They need to take the time to revise their strategic plans with SMART goals and tasks that can be used to assess and evaluate the organization’s operations.
NOTES & CREDITS
¹ They are similar to what in some industries are known as Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). KPIs are often standardized across an industry and allow one company to compare their performance against peers.
² Compliance with regulations, grant conditions, etc. is, of course, connected to the mission.
SMART Goal graphic from Wikimedia Commons: CC BY-SA 4.0. Other images from Pexels
