A frequent question we hear from strategic planning clients is: How often should our organization review and/or revise its strategic plan?
At Funding for Good, we believe successful strategic planning is an active process, not just a static product. This process doesn’t stop once you have a written plan in hand. This means that:
Nonprofits and businesses alike should be reviewing, updating, and revising their strategic plan on an ongoing basis.
A strategic plan is a roadmap for your organization’s future. That means you should use it like a roadmap! Imagine you’re on a road trip without GPS or a cell phone. How often do you look at your roadmap? At every turn. Which is exactly how you should treat your strategic plan.
Reviewing vs Revising Your Strategic Plan
Reviewing and revising your strategic plan are two very different activities:
- Reviewing your strategic plan means consulting it as part of the ongoing work of leading your organization. This could be an informal activity or a formal process. For example, you could pull out your plan weekly to check upcoming benchmarks. Or more formally, you could organize quarterly sessions with your board or leadership team to review and evaluate progress (something we highly recommend).
- Revising your strategic plan means making updates to reflect new realities or lessons learned. The level of revision can range from small updates to reworking major goals. For example, you might discover that a key program is exceeding expectations, so you want to update that initiative’s three-year goals. Or your organization could experience a major shift—such as losing a major grant—that necessitates more substantive revisions.
How often should a company REVIEW its strategic plan?
At minimum, your organization should review its strategic plan quarterly, with at least two of those sessions involving the board of directors. This enables you to collectively learn, evaluate, and course-correct in real time.
A few examples of when you should be consulting and reviewing your strategic plan include:
- When you get to a fork in the road and need to make an important decision, such as whether to expand into a new market.
- When you want to assess how much progress you’ve made toward your goals.
- When you face an unexpected roadblock, such as an unforeseen drop in funding or clients.
These are all ideal moments to review your strategic plan.
How often should a company REVISE its strategic plan?
Your organization should revise its strategic plan when the conditions under which it was written have materially changed.
Conditions that can trigger the need for to revise your strategic plan include:
- Unanticipated real-world outcomes that may lead to strategic shifts. This could be a positive—a strategy that outperforms expectations—or a more negative outcome—a strategy has underperformed so dramatically it needs to be rethought entirely.
- Changes in external circumstances that affect your organization or key programs. For example, in the past two years, many nonprofits have needed to make rapid strategy shifts due to changes in federal funding.
- Variations in internal implementation that mean your original strategic plan no longer matches your organization or programs as they are today. For example, you may have planned to build out your communications capacity to increase press coverage. But you’ve struggled to get the right people in the right roles, and the consulting firm you used was a disappointment. You’ll want to reassess whether your press goals are still a priority and, if so, if there are other ways to meet them.
When to Invest in a New Strategic Plan
Sometimes you need to do more than revise your organization’s strategic plan. You need a wholesale update and revamp.
At the point where your strategic plan no longer makes sense for your organization or for the external context in which you are operating, it’s time to get a new one.
Since a strategic plan generally covers 3-5 years, you should also start planning to update your organization’s plan in the same timeframe.
Revision Is Part of Running a Business
For nonprofits, keep in mind that nonprofit is a tax status, not a business model. Your nonprofit IS a business.
It might feel frustrating to think that, after spending time and energy to finalize a strategic plan, you might need to revise it within a year or two.
Here at Funding For Good, we recommend quarterly check-ins to keep your team on track with goal tracking, progress, and updates. Then, at the end of each year, an update on where you landed with the goals from that year, and time to lay out the next year of goals and implementation planning. This way, you’ve already established a process for keeping your plan current and relevant.
Luckily, revising a strategic plan doesn’t have to be a laborious process. The more you use your strategic plan as part of your day-to-day work, the easier it will be for your team to revise it when needed.
Plus, you can always ask your strategic planning consultant to assist. For example, a facilitated board and staff retreat after the first year of implementing your plan could turn a strategic plan revision from a chore into an opportunity to tighten your strategy, adapt to new challenges, and reenergize your team.
Tools to Make Your Strategic Plan a Long-Term Success
Here at Funding for Good, we know strategic planning is about so much more than just producing a written document. That’s why we provide a full suite of strategic planning resources to help organizations at every stage.
You can get started with our FREE Strategic Planning Quickstart Kit, learn about our strategic planning services, and then schedule a free discovery call with our team when you’re ready to get started.
