How to Leverage Data in Nonprofit Strategic Planning

When you work at a nonprofit, it can be easy to get caught up in the finer details of your work and forget about the bigger picture. You may be so engrossed in setting up an online fundraising campaign or developing marketing materials to promote your membership program that you forget to look at the big picture and how these activities ultimately serve your mission.

By creating a nonprofit strategic plan, you can keep your overarching purpose at the forefront of everything you do. As Aly Sterling Philanthropy explains, “A nonprofit strategic plan is a bold plan of action that aligns an organization’s goals with its values to provide a dynamic performance map for future endeavors.”

Your plan will be strongest if you let data drive your process. That way, you can base your decisions on the facts and quantitative results of your organization instead of mere guesses. In this guide, we’ll walk you through the three main strategic planning steps and how you can incorporate data at every turn.

1. Assess your nonprofit’s current state

Analyze your starting point to identify what’s working and what you can build upon. By reviewing your nonprofit’s history, infrastructure, and core programs, you can examine your organization's current state, identify areas for improvement, and start developing a foundation for your plan.

During this initial stage, survey or interview stakeholders to gather their insights about your nonprofit’s operations. The more people you hear from, the better you’ll understand how your stakeholders generally perceive your organization. For instance, you can solicit opinions from:

• Current and past board members
• Current major or planned giving donors
• Influential community members
• Volunteers and staff
• Program participants
• Beneficiaries

Try to collect feedback from several groups to ensure you incorporate diverse needs and perspectives into your plan.

How to incorporate data into this step:

• Gather data from different sources to establish your baseline. This step is inherently data-driven, considering you’ll start by investigating your nonprofit’s history, infrastructure, and core programs. Ensure you collect various data types to get a comprehensive view of your nonprofit. For instance, in addition to financial, program, and donor data, UpMetrics recommends gathering impact data to determine the “short- and long-term positive outcomes of the work you're doing.”
• Conduct a SWOT analysis. Use this data to conduct a SWOT analysis, which stands for strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. For example, your data may indicate that one of your strengths is high beneficiary satisfaction, and one of your weaknesses is low donor retention. An opportunity for growth may be a potential partnership with a business where many of your donors work, whereas a threat could be an economic downturn that may decrease donors’ giving capacity.
• Compile qualitative data from stakeholders. When you survey stakeholders, you may have them choose answers on a rating scale to collect quantitative data, but you can unlock even stronger insights by asking open-ended questions. For example, you may ask about their experience moving through your donor pipeline or open it up even further by asking how they think your organization can improve in general.

2. Align with your team on your goals and priorities

Using the data you’ve collected, determine which issues or opportunities you’d like to focus on for your strategic plan. Work with board members and staff to consolidate this information, prioritize the most pressing problems, and outline how to solve them.

For example, perhaps say that your donors mentioned that other organizations they support have more engaging fundraising opportunities. Additionally, your donor retention rate is lower than it has been in the past. Both of these insights may prompt you to adjust your fundraising strategy to focus on donor engagement.

How to incorporate data into this step:

• Establish criteria for ranking priorities. Streamline the process of determining your priorities by developing a ranking strategy. For instance, you may narrow down your options and then have board and staff members rank them based on mission alignment, feasibility, projected cost, and expected impact. Once you’ve collected their responses, tally the scores for each priority and implement the ones with the highest scores.
• Create SMART goals using past performance data. Once you’ve determined your priorities, transform them into SMART goals, which stands for specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-bound. Whether your goals are achievable will depend on your past performance, so dig into your data to determine feasibility. For example, if your donor retention rate has historically hovered around 30-40%, it’s more realistic to strive for 45% than 60-70%.
• Start mapping out key performance indicators (KPIs). Each goal should be measurable with a KPI attached to it. That way, you can evaluate your performance using data. Let’s say that one of the ways you plan to increase your donor retention rate is through segmented communications. You may measure your success using email open rate and conversion rate.

3. Develop an action plan

Now, put everything together into a cohesive plan that drives your team forward. Your action plan should include the following elements:

• Action steps:. Break your priorities down into clear steps your team should take. Continuing with the previous example, you may increase your donor retention rate via segmentation by grouping similar supporters in your database, developing communication templates for each segment, and creating a separate fundraising cadence for each group.
• Timeline and milestones:. Create a timeline to keep your team on track. Incorporate milestones that allow you to check in with your team and evaluate their progress.
• Leaders:. Decide who will be responsible for each action step in your plan and clearly communicate their responsibilities so they know exactly what they must accomplish.
• Necessary resources:. If there are any resources you’ll need to obtain to execute your plan, make sure to note them. For instance, you may invest in a new graphic design tool to create more engaging social media posts, flyers, and newsletters to boost donor retention.
• Future and ongoing actions:. Your plan shouldn’t fizzle out after its initial implementation. Decide how you’ll encourage team members to continue completing these activities for the long term.

Ensure your action plan document is easily accessible to all team members so they can reference it at any point and stay informed as they execute their individual action steps.

How to incorporate data into this step:

• Leverage predictive analytics. With the help of artificial intelligence (AI), you can leverage your data to predict how donors will respond to different elements of your plan. For example, you can use an AI fundraising platform to analyze your donor data, predict donors’ willingness and likelihood to give, and focus your donor retention efforts on your highest-value donors.
• Track KPIs to assess progress:. When creating your timeline, build in time to analyze your KPIs with your team. If your results aren’t as strong as you had hoped, make adjustments as needed and continue tracking these metrics to see if they improve.
• Share insights with stakeholders:. Let your stakeholders know about the work you’ve been doing to enhance your operations. Consider creating an impact report that summarizes the initial results of your plan and explains how you’ll continue with these initiatives moving forward.

Strengthen your nonprofit’s strategic plan with data

Data is the key to creating a robust strategic plan that reflects your organization and its stakeholders. To further optimize the strategic planning process, consider partnering with a nonprofit consulting firm that can offer its expertise and a fresh, outside perspective on your nonprofit.

‍

This article is authored by Aly Sterling. Aly is the founder of Aly Sterling Philanthropy and advises select clients on the organizational opportunities that impact their mission success, scalability and sustainability. Aly’s expertise includes fundraising, strategic planning and board development for the well-positioned nonprofit.