Nonprofit strategy worthy of our missions
Nonprofit leaders are undertaking the most important work of our generation.
While our governments serve the few at the expense of the many, and while corporations extract without abandon from our people and planet, nonprofit leaders are courageously defending our rights and building toward more equitable, people-centered systems.
Their vehicle for change? The nonprofit organization.
Their most underappreciated challenge? Nonprofit organizations are ‘vehicles’ with notoriously challenging navigational, steering, and alignment issues.
Nonprofit leaders often feel confident about their organization’s general direction, but can find prioritization and focus elusive.
Sometimes, it can become hard to explain why current activities remain the right activities to fulfill the mission.
Other times, existing structures and business models become mismatched to an organization’s evolving aspirations.
After all, purpose is much easier to assert in a grant proposal than to bring to life in an organization. And yet, for many nonprofits, bringing purpose more fully to life is indeed what this moment calls for.
These nonprofit leaders want not only to celebrate and affirm their organization’s strengths—but also to help their organizations meaningfully evolve.
This is where good strategy comes in.
In these situations, nonprofit leaders seek nonprofit strategy that boldly envisions an organization’s highest purpose and translates it into practical implications for organizational evolution.
The interconnected choices of nonprofit strategy
The key to nonprofit strategy that works is to connect a compelling purpose to a clear analysis to a coherent organizational response through a set of interconnected strategic choices.
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Describes the compelling future the organization is building.
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Defines the organization’s unique contribution to the collective endeavor to build that future, in terms of the desired change it exists to bring about.
Purpose: Why are we here?
Analysis: What’s our strategic challenge?
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Frames the strategic challenge an organization must overcome to fulfill its unique contribution.
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Presents a perspective on how the organization can overcome the strategic challenge.
Response: How will we show up to overcome the strategic challenge?
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Identifies the unique stakeholder value an org must offer to fulfill its theory of change.
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Articulates the programming or services that deliver the value proposition.
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Outlines the organizational form (structure/ process/culture) supporting the program model.
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Aligns funding streams to the different kinds of value created by the program/operating models.
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Sketches the journey to embody the value prop and program, operating, and business models.
When our missions deserve better from strategy
Without an interconnected set of decisions within a complete strategy framework, strategic planning can fail to translate purpose into practice in a variety of ways:
Organizations can find it difficult to push beyond high-level alignments to actionable organizational implications.
In the absence of real choices and tradeoffs, organizational priorities and activities tend only to expand.
Problem solving from within current structures and mental models can bake organizational inertia into the strategy.
When ambiguity in strategic decisions allows almost any activity to be linked to the strategy, little changes.
Over-emphasis on objectives, plans, and metrics can spin up lots of activity without clarity about “to what end?”
Plans can often lose relevance as reality diverges from assumptions and as more is learned over a multi-year period.
How nonprofit strategy can live up to it’s promise
These pitfalls can be avoided by connecting a compelling purpose to a clear analysis to a coherent organizational response. Here’s how.
(A) It starts with clearly articulating an organization’s purpose
Nonprofit leaders build a strong foundation for subsequent strategic decisions when they establish a clear articulation of the compelling future the organization is building (vision) and the desired change it exists to bring about in service of that future (mission).
(B) A well-specified organizational purpose enables clear strategic analysis
Only when a concrete desired change is identified can an organization can clearly describe the strategic challenge standing in the way of that change (diagnosis), and a perspective on how the challenge can be overcome (theory of change).
(C) A strong analysis provides clear criteria for an organization’s response
A good theory of change explains the outcomes an organization must achieve to ultimately bring about its desired change. Clarity on an organization’s intended outcomes allows it to rigorously assess and chose among potential options for:
The value it must offer stakeholders for its targeted outcomes to arise (value proposition);
The programming or services that best deliver that value (program model);
The organizational structure, processes, and culture that best support the program model (operating model);
The sustainable, scalable alignment between funding streams and the value created (business model); and
The evolutionary journey the organization must undertake to embody its value proposition, program model, operating model, and business model (roadmap).
These are the elements that concretely define how an organization will ‘show up’ to activate its theory of change and fulfill its mission. In this way, good nonprofit strategy coherently connects high-level purpose to practice.
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