You’ve all heard the advice: If your nonprofit strategic plan includes everything but the kitchen sink, you’re going to struggle. In contrast, when you prioritize, you can:

• Align scare resources (both staff time and funding) to the most important activities that are likely to have a bigger impact
• Know when to say “no,” helping prevent staff burnout
• More clearly communicate your successes (and impact!) to a range of audiences

It’s much easier to prioritize daily decisions if you embed clear priorities in your strategic plan.

Yet, it’s not always obvious the best way to narrow your priorities in a way that is meaningful and will truly lead to more strategic impact. I’ll walk you through the four major steps we typically take during strategic planning, which are:

• STEP 1: ASSESSMENT
• STEP 2: INITIAL DEVELOPMENT OF STRATEGIC PRIORITIES
• STEP 3: NARROWING YOUR PRIORITIES
• STEP 4: REVIEW OF CURRENT PORTFOLIO OF PROJECTS

Part of the reason nonprofits often struggle in narrowing their priorities is the following: They don’t have enough information to make an informed decision about what matters.

I’m not recommending that you get stuck in analysis paralysis. Instead, what tends to work well is having a designated, more intensive period of 2-3 months to collect data and engage stakeholders.

During the assessment phase, you’re gathering data on trends and talking to a diversity of stakeholders, which may include staff, Board members, partner organizations, funders, and residents. During this period, the main questions to answer typically are:

• What is the ideal role that your organization does or should fill to ensure you are meeting a unique community need and not duplicating efforts?
• What does your organization already do very well at? How can you leverage your current successes – and strengths – to expand your impact?
• What are the top challenges your organization aims to solve for communities and nature?
• What ecological and quality of life outcomes matter most for the communities with which you work?

Collect all of the information you can to answer these questions and pull together all that quantitative and qualitative data in a Findings Report. Share this with your strategic planning team.

Initially, this step may feel like it is slowing down your team. However, it’s an investment that pays off: Decision making actually goes faster when you invest the time & resources needed in Step 1.

In Step 2, you’re still focused big picture, on what matters to communities & ecosystems, what aligns with your strengths & mission, and where your ideal niche is. This is iterative, where you first start broad and then gradually narrow over the next couple of steps. The idea is to incorporate the key words that came up in your assessment in Step 1, and key findings as relevant.

Don’t focus heavily on funding at this early stage. Why is funding not important at this stage? It’s because nonprofits are more impactful when they first focus on their mission and the types of outcomes that truly matter. Financial feasibility matters – it’s just not a major consideration until the next step.

At the end of Step 2, the result is a set of draft “long-term goals” or “strategic pillars.” It doesn’t matter exactly what you call these – provided they represent the main areas of focus for your organization.

Another way to think about Step 2 is this is your opportunity to define what success looks like. What if your organization were wildly successful and achieved your mission in 30 years? How would you benefit the lives of communities and how would ecosystems be better off?

In step 3 we go back and narrow our priorities based upon other factors – like fundability. Depending on a couple of organizational factors, there are two common ways you can approach this step.

Approach 1: Consensus-based decision making

Sometimes consensus-based decision making sounds scary – won’t that totally derail the process? It doesn’t have to. I use this approach often. It works well for established organizations who already have a good sense of what works for their organization and what doesn’t. This also works well when you have a smaller strategic planning team (i.e., less than 10-12 folks).

If you’ve been successful at collecting targeted input in Step 1, this approach works very well. I say half-jokingly, “The goals write themselves.” While that’s an exaggeration, I say it because in these situations, finding consensus is relatively easy. This is because the areas where your organization can have the most impact naturally emerge.

Approach 2: Criteria-based decision making

Criteria-based decision making is useful for larger strategic planning teams and for new programs. It’s a preferred approach for newer programs because there are typically so many opportunities, yet your organization doesn’t have a long history of testing what works and what doesn’t. Thus, it helps have objective criteria so you can narrow.

Three things to think about with this approach.

1. It tends to work best when you include the whole team in developing the criteria you will use to narrow your priorities.
2. Your criteria should be specific. Don’t have criteria like, “Will help us be a leader” (it’s too subjective and hard to assess). If you do want leadership to be a criterion, find some aspect of being a leader that could be measured (e.g., in 3 years, surveys show that residents look to your organization as their top source of information on your area of expertise).
3. Don’t have too many criteria. While this is a bit arbitrary, having 4 criteria to narrow priorities tends to be the sweet spot.

Numerical scoring for the criteria works well. You can have the team score each Priority Area based on whether it aligns with each criterion as follows: Just a Little (a score of 1), Somewhat (a score of 2), or Very Much (a Score of 3). Then you move forward the priorities with the highest aggregate scores.

This is the step that nonprofits most often skip: Going back and reviewing your current portfolio of projects. If you skip this step, you risk having legacy projects that no longer align with your current priorities. Therefore, to finish the process, go through and review the level of alignment of your current projects with your new priorities. As much as it’s difficult to say goodbye to certain longstanding projects, if you don’t find some projects or programs to eliminate, then you’re only adding on – and that is probably not sustainable.

One key lesson I’ve learned about effective nonprofit strategic planning is that having a structured process makes everything easier. Organizations who are overly casual and don’t have a clearly defined, iterative process will struggle more when they go to narrow their strategic priorities.

Keeping that in mind, please do not feel the need to follow my exact process. It’s simply one approach that might help you move forward. You may find that you prefer to design your own process – which is great! As long as you have clear decision points, a logical order to your process, transparency, and good communication, you’re likely to succeed. Good luck!