Mission Met: Proven Strategic Planning Guidance to Help You Build a Financially Secure and Impactful Nonprofit
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Additional Resources After Purchase
In the book, provided instructions explain how to access a set of free supplementary resources that are referenced throughout the chapters. The resources include:
Three sample plans and a walk-through video
Two graphically-designed strategic plans
A checklist for executing your plan
A video about being a champion of your planning process
Report: Research Indicates a Strong, Positive Correlation Between Strategic Planning and the Fundraising Success of Small Nonprofits
Sample Annual Planning Calendar
Organizational Assessment Information
Mission and Vision Statement Worksheet
What gets in the way of Strategic Planning?
Discover a beautifully-simple approach for breaking through the biggest barriers in developing a strategic plan that works— for your organization and for you.
Your vision should be your organization’s future. Successful strategic planning gets you there. Implement the innovative solutions explained in this book to discover:
A supportive, inclusive mindset that supports manageable and healthy growth
Candid reflection on current reality and realistic goal setting
Advocacy and buy-in of your goals across your team
A roadmap for nurturing your plan to grow alongside your organization
What’s Inside
Introduction
Barrier #1: The Executive Director Doesn’t Champion the Process
Strategic planning will likely not work well at your nonprofit unless the executive director commits to championing the process.
Barrier #2: Strategic Planning is Viewed as an Event
Implementing effective processes is essential to improving the quality of all aspects of your organization.
Barrier #3: Your Plan is Too Complex
A focused and practical plan is more adaptable, simpler to implement, easier to communicate, and leads to better outcomes.
Barrier #4: Weak Goals
You and your team need to have a common understanding of how to create goals for your strategic plan.
Barrier #5: Plans Aren’t Measured
A small set of key metrics can significantly aid you in measuring your ultimate impact and appealing to your key stakeholders.
Barrier #6: Poorly Crafted Mission, Vision, and Values
Create your memorable, simple mission, vision, and values and then refine them over time.
Barrier #7: Software Not Leveraged
Strategic planning software can significantly catalyze your strategic planning success.
Conclusion
The Author
Eric Ryan is a co-founder of the nonprofit strategic planning consulting and software firm, Mission Met.
He has been an executive director of two nonprofits and held several board positions. For nearly twenty-five years he has provided strategic planning consulting and facilitation services to hundreds of organizations.
He spends his professional time writing, creating new strategic planning products, building the capacity of his team, and providing consulting services to executive directors and their teams.
He lives in California with his wife, son, and daughter.
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excerpt from Chapter 6: “Poorly Crafted Mission, Vision, and Values
Below is an excerpt from Chapter 6 of the book. If you’d like to read the full chapter, sign up above.
Defining the Mission and Vision Statements
It’s true. If you take ten different planning consultants and ask them to define what a mission and vision statement is, you’ll get eleven different answers.
Bottom line, there are a lot of mission and vision statement definitions floating around out there.
What’s important, however, is that you and your team share a common definition.
Based on years of working with organizations about what works, I’ve arrived at the following definitions:
Mission Statement -- One succinct and somewhat timeless sentence that states what your organization does and for whom.
Vision Statement -- One succinct, inspirational, and a somewhat timeless sentence that describes what "the world" will look like when your organization succeeds at its mission.
Importantly, there is a cause-and-effect relationship between the mission and vision. You want to be able to say that “if we succeed at our mission then our vision is more likely to happen.”
Given this interrelationship, you can’t write a mission and vision statement in isolation from each other. They are two parts of a whole.
Note that a key element of each definition is that each statement is only one sentence. One-sentence statements will:
Be easier to remember.
Help you and your team focus on the absolute essentials.
Serve as clear filters for making organizational decisions.”
. . .
Your Organization’s Values
Several years ago I came across some guidance about organizational values from the prominent management consultant and author, Pat Lencioni, in his book The Advantage. Much of what follows is influenced by his guidance.
What you’re after in identifying your values are your organization’s “core” values -- just two-to-four behavioral traits that are uniquely at the heart of your organization. They don't change over time and you and your team consider them non-negotiable.
Further, try not to include “permission-to-play” values like trust, integrity, and professionalism on your list of core values. Those are basic professional standards that you shouldn’t have to highlight on your strategic plan.
. . .
Sample Values
There are two ways to write your core values: as one word or as a short, action-oriented phrase.
Examples of one-word values are:
Inclusion
Justice
Humor
Examples of values that are captured as a short phrase are:
Make it Happen
Keep it Simple
Willing to Sweep Floors
For example, 'results' might be a one-word value that you and your team come up with. An alternative way of saying it as a short phrase could be 'make it happen'. The description: We achieve ambitious goals without compromising our work/life balance.”