Strategic Planning

While many people look forward to the 
opportunity to start the new year with a clean slate, nonprofit professionals should make sure that they take sufficient time to reflect on what worked—and what did not—over the past year. To that end, I 
present my top 10 nonprofit resolutions for 2017. Best wishes for a productive year. Make the ask and go get that win...

As an industry, I think we have trouble innovating. Let’s be clear, I’m not talking about our desire and ability to test. We love testing. We love setting up objectives, stating hypotheses and looking at things from a statistically valid perspective. Most of those tests are tactical, and when it comes to really moving the marble, those won’t work. What I’m talking about is strategy innovation, audience innovation or even brand-wide offer innovation...

It is hard to believe that 2017 is almost here. Where did the time go? Many of us had a fiscal year that started in July 2016, so we are at halftime in this fundraising year. Others are just beginning a new calendar year filled with hope and possibilities. Wherever you are in the fundraising calendar continuum, you should take a moment to stop, look and evaluate before you jump without a parachute into 2017...

Do you have some fundraising strategies ready to roll to close out your year end campaign or the final three days of the year? If not, you may want to as, depending on your data source, anywhere from 5 percent to 25 percent of all online giving happens in the last three days of the…

Football brings about a lot of passion (and agony), especially this time of year. A few years ago, I was guest lecturing in my Lighthouse Counsel colleague Tom Landrum’s class on higher education fundraising. Many of the students had just returned from the annual Georgia - Florida football game in Jacksonville (also referred to as…

“And how will we implement it?” That’s one of the more exasperating but essential questions a board can ask itself. A board can throw a lot of time and effort into creating a considered and forward-thinking strategic plan, but one reason the “plan that just sits on the shelf” is such a cliche isn’t so…

The other day, I was thinking about what the perfect resource-development job is like. In this complex society and profession, there are many moving parts in play. In my mind, however, I thought, "Wouldn’t our jobs be easier if we created our own organizational vision of the perfect nonprofit organization?" Here's what my dream organization would look like...

A process is "a systematic series of actions directed to some end." The process in strategic planning, for example, can even be more important than the resulting plan. If you conduct planning as a process and not an event, have a proven outside facilitator and let the process work without a leader trying to control it (after all a plan is about the organization, not one person), the results are phenomenal...

We are working with a client who is undergoing a CEO transition. Over the past two years, this organization had invested in a master planning process and also an extensive strategic planning process. When asked if it should pause while searching for a new CEO, our response was an emphatic "No!"...

For more than a decade, the blogosphere has touted the power and promise of social media (this blog included), but there is also a downside to using social media for your nonprofit. Granted, the positives do outweigh the negatives, but it is important to step back occasionally and take a critical look at how social…