I can't believe this fiscal year is almost over. Come June 30th, many of us will stick a fork in FY '24 and call it finished! On a personal note, it also marks the end of our comprehensive campaign. For eight long years, we have thought about this campaign, its priorities, its goals, our donors, and the impact they have made. My team and all my colleagues are tired, crispy, and deliriously happy that we were successful.
Everyone has earned a good long break, but we still have a celebration to plan, and it is now time to begin planning for the next campaign. Such is the cycle of our fundraising industry, right?! The need for philanthropic dollars does not end just because we have concluded our campaign. There will always be a need, so we must always plan for what's next.
That's why strategic planning is critical to our organizations, departments, and teams. If we want to be ready for the future, we need to create a plan to help guide us.
But where to start? Here are a five steps you can follow to create your strategic plan:
Step 1 – Assess Your Current State
Before you can decide where you are going, you first need to understand where you are. With our campaign ending, I want to know what worked and what didn't and why. A great way to do this is to conduct a SWOT analysis. This can be done for an entire organization, an event, staffing—anything. The key is identifying your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:
What are you doing well?
What is your biggest strength? Is it staff talent or commitment? Or maybe it's access to great data to make really good decisions.
What are you lacking?
Who is doing it better?
What is holding you back?
What can you leverage or capitalize on right now?
If others (internally or externally) knew about your weaknesses, would your donors or the media have a negative impression of you?
Step 2 – What is Your Goal?
Use the Stephen Covey concept and begin with the end in mind. Is your goal to be a best-in-class donor relations program that is the envy of everyone in our industry? Is it to have a team of high-functioning members who are on fire for their work? Is it to use data to drive all your decisions? Whatever your goal may be, make it specific. Make it measurable. Make it lofty. Be sure it aligns with your organization's mission. And don't forget to use the information you have from the honest inventory of your program.
Step 3 – Develop the Plan (And How You Will Measure It!)
Now, you are at the development stage of your plan. Map out what it takes to reach your goal, and understand that it takes time to build something great. This plan should be three to five years. It takes time and effort and cannot be done overnight. You may have to involve outside partners—other teams, vendors, leadership, etc., so plan together and clearly define roles and responsibilities. It will also take resources—both people's power and budget dollars. This must also be a part of your plan. Remember, this does not always mean a new influx of dollars or people—it may mean you have to stop doing what no longer works and spend those dollars to use in a new way. It may also mean reimagining positions and aligning them with where you need to go. Finally, you will need a very high-level roadmap —what you will do in year one, how you will measure your progress towards those goals, and so on for each year of the plan.
Step 4 – Put Your Plan into Action
OK, the plan is built. Now, it's time to share your plan with others. Make sure your partners are included in the rollout so it is a coordinated effort. Also, share the final plan with senior leadership and let them know how you will be tracking your progress. Plan regular check-in meetings and communicate your progress to senior leadership and the rest of your organization. I like to do both a mid-year and an end-of-fiscal year progress report that I can share publicly with all invested and interested partners. And each year, I add on to show the progress from year to year. I also love to use this report to celebrate the wins with my team. Remember, your strategic plan should be monitored regularly.
Step 5 – Revise and Restructure
The final step of strategic planning is to refine the plan. This is the most important step, and often, it is the one I see so many team leaders miss. Many will take a lot of time to build a great plan, then put it on a shelf, and then wait to look at it again, maybe three to five years later. The world and our industry are ever-changing, so we can't do that and expect to be successful. A strategic plan must be more fluid. It must be visited and revisited many times throughout the year. My strategic campaign plan blew up when the pandemic hit. Instead of scrapping the entire plan, we went back and modified it based on what we could and could not do. I am proud to say we had great success during a very difficult time and learned how to do things better because we had to change.
Listen—I love to geek out on planning, but it can take up a lot of bandwidth. I love it because it is one of my favorite tools for making changes and improvements. A plan keeps us on track, holds us accountable, and helps us create boundaries when leadership or others try to hand us new projects that are not in our plan.
However, I also know that planning takes time and sometimes we get so busy in the weeds that we will not or cannot pull up to see what we could be. The biggest objection I hear from my own team leaders or our DRG clients is that they do not have time to plan. And I get that– time is precious, and many of us are doing more with less these days. Yet, if you don't make the time, you can't expect anything to change. Moreover, if you do put in the time for planning now, you'll be reaping the rewards from that effort very soon. Some additional planning upfront will allow you to make the changes and adjustments your organization needs. So—what is it you want to change?
Written by Angie Joens
