6 Steps to Operationalize a Nonprofit Strategic Plan

One of the biggest complaints about nonprofit strategic plans is that once created, they just sit on a shelf. A strategic plan is completely wasted effort if you neglect the final step of operationalizing it.

And by that I mean creating an annual tactical plan and monitoring process that directly tie to the larger strategy. In fact, lack of the operational part of your strategic plan is one of the 3 biggest problems with nonprofit strategic planning.

It does absolutely no good to have big goals that you want to accomplish and a larger future direction for your nonprofit’s work if you don’t have a way to connect that to your day-to-day operations.

So here are the 6 steps to do just that:

1. Create the Strategy
Start with the broad goals and objectives of your strategic plan. Typically, I recommend a nonprofit have 3-6 broad goals over a future (say 3 years or so) period. These should always tie to your longer term Theory of Change, and each goal should be broken down into the 5-10 objectives necessary to get there. And it goes without saying, but you have to create this strategy through a defined strategic planning process.

2. Create Annual Milestones
Once the board has approved those broad goals and objectives, staff needs to create a milestone table that articulates a lead person responsible (“Lead”) and a deliverable for each objective at the end of each year of the strategic plan (“Milestone”), like this:

3. Create a Year One Operational Plan

Once you have that milestone table, you can pull out the milestones for the first year and develop your Year 1 operational plan (below), which lists monthly or quarterly checkpoints for each objective’s milestone for that year. This will helps you monitor (step #4 below) whether the plan is coming to fruition.

4. Monitor Monthly at Staff Level

This operational plan should be reviewed on at least a monthly basis, where the staff comes together to analyze their checkpoints and report on what’s working, what’s not, and where they need to make adjustments.

5. Monitor Regularly at Board Level
Whether your board meets monthly, quarterly or (yikes!) less, you need to report to them on the progress of your strategic plan at every meeting. Since the board is ultimately responsible for the strategic direction of the organization, they need to understand how it is going. Using the operational plan above, you can easily highlight where: things are moving smoothly (green), things need discussion or action (yellow), and serious problems or hurdles (red) lie.

6. Adjust Accordingly
On at least an annual basis, the full board should review the organization’s Theory of Change and goals and objectives of the strategic plan to determine if any revisions (due to changes in internal and/or external circumstances) need to be made.

I believe that a huge reason for the distaste nonprofit leaders have for strategic planning comes from the poor operationalization of those plans. You simply cannot hope to execute on a strategic plan without tactics to get there.

You can learn more about what a strategic planning process looks like here.

Photo Credit: Kevin Utting