What You Need to Know for Setting and Measuring Your Strategic Plan’s Goals

This blog entry, about setting and measuring goals for your strategic plan, is the final article in a five-article series where I share a brief preview of some of the guidance that I provided in my book, Mission Met: Proven Strategic Planning Guidance to Help You Build a Financially Secure and Impactful Nonprofit. 

Results and Process Goals

Take a look at the goals in the following table. Do you see how the wording of the first three goals has a different style and format than the last three goals?

I organized the table to highlight two different types of goals that you’ll want to consider including in your plan. The first three goals listed are “results” goals and focus on a numerical result. The last three goals are “process” goals and lead to the completion of a plan, process, or system. 

For example, the first goal, “Raise $750,000 in individual donations,” is a results goal. Its correlating process goal is the fourth goal in the table, “Document and implement an individual donor plan.” 

Both of these goals follow my overall guidance. They have a goal topic. They represent a specific and desired achievement. They have due dates and goal champions. They’re excellent goals. 

So, which goal is better? Although the correct answer is “it depends,” research suggests that the process goals may have greater impact. 

As described by Chip and Dan Heath in their book, Switch, researchers indicate that process goals may be nearly three times more effective than results goals in helping you get what you want (note that they use the term “behavioral goals” to describe process goals):

In a pioneering study of organizational change, described in the book The Critical Path to Corporate Renewal, researchers divided the change efforts they’d studied into three groups: the most successful (the top third), the average (the middle third), and the least successful (the bottom third). They found that, across the spectrum, almost everyone set goals: 89 percent of the top third and 86 percent of the bottom third. A typical goal might be to improve inventory turns by 50 percent. But the more successful change transformations were more likely to set behavioral goals: 89 percent of the top third versus only 33 percent of the bottom third. For instance, a behavioral goal might be that project teams would meet once a week and each team would include at least one representative of every functional area. Until you can ladder your way down from a change idea to a specific behavior, you’re not ready to lead a switch.

In my work with executive directors and their teams, I’ve found that process goals are especially relevant. Most nonprofit leaders are great at putting out fires but struggle when it comes to building organizational processes. By deliberately incorporating a plan, process, or system as a goal within the strategic plan, the team will be more likely to build its capacity and effectiveness over time. 

Use a Simple Method for Measuring Goals

If you follow this guidance, then the goals you and your team will write will be specific and measurable. Assuming this is the case, here is a simple method that you can use to measure them. 

Commonly called the “traffic light system,” the method uses the colors of red, yellow, and green to quickly communicate goal progress:

Red—The goal is off track, and it won’t be completed by its due date.
Yellow—Progress on the goal is slow, and it may not be completed by its due date.
Green—The goal is on track to be completed by its due date.

I have added two additional colors to provide a little greater measurement specificity:

Blue—The goal has been completed.
Gray—The goal has not been started. 

In the following table, the “Goal Status” column provides an example of what the traffic lights would look like. 

If you and your team want to be more exacting in your measurements, you can supplement the colors with percentages. The “Percentage Complete” column in the table indicates what that might look like.

Bottom line: it’s important to set goals and measure them regularly. Focus first on the process, then the result. Using a simple method to track and measure will help you build a habit of analyzing this information. I recommend reviewing your goals monthly, as it will help you and your team build a learning culture that will catalyze your strategic planning success. 

Why Some Strategic Plans are Doomed from the Start: From Eric Ryan's Upcoming Book

Later this year I’ll publish my upcoming book, Mission Met: Proven Strategic Planning Guidance to Help You Build a Financially Secure and Impactful Nonprofit. The book will provide you with a suite of practical strategic planning practices that I’ve learned in over two decades of working with nonprofit leaders.

In this blog entry, the third in a five-article series, I’ll share a brief preview of some of my guidance in the book.

The #1 Problem with Strategic Planning

In my work as a planning consultant, I’ve learned that poor execution is, by far, the number one problem with nonprofit strategic planning.

Research conducted by TCC Group, a social impact consulting firm, supports this. They found that “the biggest challenge that nonprofits face with capacity building is implementing the often first-rate strategies that are devised.”

Additional research in the Harvard Business Review involving employees at more than 1,000 companies, government agencies, and nonprofits in over fifty countries indicated that three out of five organizations were weak at execution.

The bottom line is that creating a strategic plan isn’t typically a problem. Executing it is.

In my book I describe, chapter by chapter, the common barriers that get in the way of executing a plan. Two of those barriers are:

• You view planning as an event, and

• Your plan is too complex 

I’ll briefly review each of these.

You View Planning as an Event

Perhaps this sounds familiar... 

You and your team would like to achieve some important goals, so you say, “We’re going to create a strategic plan.” 

You get excited because it’s something new and you likely get some immediate positive results. 

But after a few short weeks or months, you and your team become bored by the plan, you get distracted by other pressing issues, and the plan gets shelved. In the end, you don’t hit your goals, you lose some faith in strategic planning, and you’re less likely to do it again. 

Essentially, your failure was doomed from the beginning, since you and your team viewed strategic planning as an event, as a moment in time. You didn’t internalize, from the beginning, that real success took more than creating a plan.

As described in this blog article, instead of thinking of planning as an event, we approach it as an ongoing process called the CAPE Cycle. Approaching strategic planning as a cycle will help you and your team design and implement the critical steps to execute your plan.

While thinking of strategic planning as an ongoing process is essential, your efforts can still be doomed if your plan is too complicated. 

Your Plan is Too Complex

Several years ago, I came across a strategic planning document that got my attention. The plan was spiral bound, forty-two pages, and full of lovely photographs of children running through fields of grass and flowers. It was well organized and quite attractive. 

However, there was one major problem with the plan: it was utter overkill.

The plan was for a tiny nonprofit that had a $25,000 annual budget and one very part-time executive director. The well-meaning consultants who facilitated the effort were used to working with municipalities and, as such, led the organization through an overly complex process that engaged nearly ninety stakeholders. The plan included thirteen major strategies and took over six months to finalize. 

Over the ensuing years, I tracked the organization to see if the plan helped to strengthen the organization’s programs and impact. Tragically—but not surprisingly—the plan never got any traction, and the nonprofit continues to limp along, struggling financially and programmatically.

Given the challenges that a complex plan creates, I’ve worked throughout my career to find a practical strategic plan framework that would work for executive directors and their teams. By trial-and-error, I’ve arrived at this simple two-section structure that is easy to understand and communicate:

• Section One: Our Compass

• Section Two: Our Actions
  

The Compass section serves as an organizational “North Star” and remains relatively unchanged from year to year. Elements of the Compass may include:

• A mission statement

• A vision statement

• Core values

• Key metrics
  

Section two, Our Actions, contains a small set of:

• Focus areas (e.g., programs, fund development, board engagement, operations, etc.), including a three-year vision 

• Goals that support the vision for each focus area (Goals should be for several weeks to a year in length.)

• Short-term action items that support each goal
  

As noted in the “focus areas” bullet above, a key part of section two is establishing a three-year organizational vision for each of the three focus areas. The three-year vision provides guidance for each of the goals and is essential for creating a more strategic plan and not just a list of tactical goals.

Utilizing a simple plan format as part of an ongoing planning cycle will help you to ensure that you and your team will find success in executing your plan.