To run a successful nonprofit, your team must continually adapt its approaches, strategies, and activities to improve your results. By creating a strategic plan, you can ensure that your organization has a clear roadmap to follow at all times—whether you’re applying for grants, seeking corporate sponsorships, or planning its next fundraising event.
If you’re new to nonprofit strategic planning or hoping to improve your process, we’ll discuss four steps to set your plan up for success:
Determine your strategic plan’s goals and purpose.
Assess whether your nonprofit is ready for strategic planning.
Consider hiring a strategic planning consultant.
Examine your nonprofit’s current state and engagement.
By taking the time to prepare your team before you jump into strategic planning, you’ll be able to streamline your journey and get the most out of your efforts.
1. Determine your strategic plan’s goals and purpose.
There are many reasons for conducting strategic planning. Therefore, it’s important to define exactly why your nonprofit is developing a strategic plan and what you hope to accomplish with it. For example, your leadership and board members might decide that you need to:
Address recent changes within or surrounding your nonprofit. For example, you might be facing board turnover, adjusting to regulatory changes, or reacting to a global event that has amplified the demand for your services within the community.
Identify the most important areas to allocate resources. Your nonprofit only has so much time, energy, and funds to devote to your operations and programs. Strategic planning allows you to pinpoint the most critical areas to direct your resources toward.
Realign team members and prevent mission drift. In your pursuit of funding opportunities, your nonprofit might find itself drifting from its mission and taking on projects, seeking grants, and pursuing sponsorships that don’t closely align with your purpose. A strategic plan can keep your team members focused on what matters most.
Implement a new program or fundraising strategy. If your nonprofit is launching a program to deal with an emerging need in your community or adding a strategy to secure more donations, incorporating it into your strategic plan can establish clarity on your goals and ensure that everyone on your team knows how to contribute.
Boost morale and commitment among staff and other stakeholders. The strategic planning process provides valuable opportunities to engage your staff and other stakeholders. In doing so, you can re-energize their commitment to your nonprofit and keep them invested in your success.
Typically, nonprofits produce a strategic plan every three to five years. Another common reason for strategic planning is that your organization has reached the end of its last one. This way, you can re-examine your performance and update your strategic directions accordingly. As you continue to solidify your mission, vision, and values, you can hone your grant strategy, strengthen your messaging, and pursue initiatives that amplify your impact.
By understanding the primary reasons why your nonprofit needs to create a strategic plan, you can ensure that your planning efforts successfully address the main challenges and opportunities you’re hoping to address.
2. Assess whether your nonprofit is ready for strategic planning.
There are two types of data cleansing activities: data formatting and data quality. Data formatting cleanup activities are relevant for any software migration project. Examples of this type of data cleansing include standardizing addresses and phone numbers (e.g., two-letter codes for state abbreviations versus shortened abbreviations of the state name with a period, hyphens in phone numbers versus parentheses and a hyphen).
For data formatting, consistency is king! There’s no right answer. These standards are more about style and readability in various reporting forms than about substance. Which fields need greater formatting consistency for your organization? Review the existing data by sorting and scanning to see trends and identify relevant cleanup needs.
By contrast, the data quality cleanup activities are highly contextual. From a development perspective, building relationships with constituents is critical to an organization’s sustainability and impact. First and foremost, this requires good contact and communications records. In particular, it’s a good idea to spend time reviewing and updating relationship codes and household records, checking for deceased records, and updating mailing lists or flags accordingly. Here’s a short list of specific data items to review and address as time allows:
- Bounced emails: Which emails have bounced from your email marketing service? If the email marketing service is external to your current contact database, consider how to update the records by removing the old email addresses (or indicating that they are old) in the contact records.
- Missing addresses: How many email addresses are missing? If the number is too large to tackle, segment the list by focusing first on major donors and other strategic individuals. (This assumes that your organization uses email communications as a primary contact method.)
- Status change codes/flags: Review mailing and other status change flags or codes. What is your organization’s process for updating records when you learn that a person is deceased? Or changed addresses? Or changed households? Review the relevant codes/flags to ensure that all are aligned with other contextual information available in the record.
Remember, any upfront effort to clean the data will help build users’ trust and confidence in the new system and result in higher quality reporting.
3. Does all of the data for each donor record move into the new system? How does an organization decide what data to keep and what to leave behind for an individual donor?
The data cleansing exercises referenced above will help identify the records to load into the new system. With this list in hand, the next question is: should all data fields come along? Most of it will, and some might not be necessary. Data tracked historically may no longer be needed. A field-by-field analysis can determine the value of the data and where it should be stored in the new system.
To conduct field-level analysis, first, create a list of all donor fields. Next, go through each field and answer the following questions:
- What is the purpose of the information stored in each field?
- Is the information required, or will it be helpful going forward? What is the value of the information?
- Will the information continue to be tracked for new records created in the new system? If not, then the data will likely become less useful.
- Is there a place for it in the new system?
- If yes, what is the field name it will map to in the new system?
- If no, is there value in it? Do you want to align with the way this data was stored in the past or start anew? Do you need to create a custom field for it? Will new donor records be expected to track this data?
4. Should the donor data be updated before migration?
It’s not mandatory to update all records before migration. Life happens. People change jobs, get married, change addresses, and even get new phone numbers. Some portion of your data will likewise always be outdated at any given point in time. However, incorporating data hygiene practices into your data management processes on an ongoing basis will reduce the number of records with stale information, thereby improving the quality of your data overall.
With that said, is this a good time to undertake a data cleanup project? Could be. Since you’ll be translating the data from one system to another, it makes sense to spend some extra effort to make sure that it is cleaned up. Plus, the staff will appreciate the software that much more and likely adopt it at higher rates when they experience better reporting with higher quality underlying data. What motivation do they have to learn the new system if the information is not better than before?
We’ve provided specific examples of cleanup activities to consider in the following two questions. The value of each activity must be weighed against the time and effort required and figured into the overall software transition plan. In general, it’s a great idea to clean up the data as much as feasible before loading it into a new system.
5. Does missing data need to be filled in before migrating a donor to a new system?
In some cases, yes. Contact information is critical to the donor relationship-building process. Without either a phone, mailing address, or email address, the development team will face significant hurdles when seeking to build a relationship with a person. However, identifying which pieces of information are important to track down and for whom is a customized exercise. Some questions to help guide you:
- What are your organization’s methods of communication?
- Is one form of contact information more critical than another?
- What information do you need to build a relationship with someone?
Run reports to find out how many records are without crucial data as defined by the questions above (e.g., How many records don’t have email addresses? How many records don’t have mailing addresses? How many are missing both?).
Once you have a list of records to analyze, look for other key indicators. Do you want to fill in the gaps for any of these records? This is a judgment call about how much value is in the records in question. If there is very little other information available in the system, you may choose to delete records with limited/no contact information and no donation history. Create your own definition of what situation warrants further investigation and what type of missing data warrants removing the record. Here are some examples of questions that might be of interest when identifying important donor records despite lack of contact information:
- Has the constituent made a donation in the last five years?
- What is the constituent’s total lifetime giving?
- How often does the constituent make a gift?
- Are there any notes from previous conversations with this person in the system?
- How are they connected to the organization?
6. What are the best data formatting standards in a new system?
Data formatting standards create order out of chaos. They provide consistency in a sea of unchartered waters. What is a data formatting standard? Simply put, it’s a formatting rule for a specific field or set of fields. For example, an email address should always have an @ symbol and end with a common extension (.com, .org, .edu, .net, …). Simple rules such as this streamline the data entry process and increase the likelihood that a user will understand system-generated reports.
In some cases, the software does the work for you by restricting fields to allow specific characters, pre-set values, or character patterns. Restricted fields automatically enforce data entry rules (email address fields that require an @ symbol or phone numbers that only accept numbers).
In other cases, fields allow free form text entry (category labels, codes, tags, or other user-defined custom fields). These situations require standardization to rein in the possible form. In these cases, think about how data is used and in what context. Not every field will need a formatting standard, but many do. Use common sense to evaluate which fields would benefit from a formatting rule and then consider the following questions to determine which formatting standards to use:
- How is this field used?
- What reports use this field?
- What are some downstream effects of this field’s formatting?
- Do mailing labels use this field?
- Do email newsletter merge tags use this field?
- Do thank you letters, appeals, or other automatically generated mailed letters use this field?
The most important rule of thumb: consistency! Making a rule, documenting it, and sticking to it will ensure easily digestible database reporting. Also, be sure to enlist the support and advice from those using the data when making these decisions. Hearing from multiple users will often provide perspectives that might have otherwise been overlooked.
Danielle Rocheleau
The foundation of Danielle’s professional experience, career, and passion has been rooted in community development. Prior to consulting, she held executive roles with the Greater Peterborough Innovation Cluster (GPIC) and Peterborough & Kawarthas Economic Development (PKED). While in those roles, she facilitated international partnerships in agricultural and environmental research at Trent University with the aim of driving commercialization and a local innovation economy, as well as managed the business advisory centre (BAC) offering guidance to small businesses. As a result of her work with GPIC, Danielle worked diligently with partners which resulted in $35 million invested in research locally, a number of international partnerships in Japan and across Europe, the beginnings of research centres in biomaterials and small ruminants, and over 100 new jobs. Danielle has an educational background in Mass Communications from Laurentian University and Public Relations from Cambrian College. She recently completed her Chartered Director (C.Dir.) program at McMaster University. Bilingual, Danielle is originally from Timmins.
This blog is an original work of the attributed author. It is shared with permission via Foundant Technologies’ website for informative purposes only as part of our educational content in the social good sector. This text’s views, thoughts, and opinions belong solely to the author and do not necessarily reflect Foundant’s stance on this topic.