The future belongs to the curious.

After we facilitated a one-day nonprofit board retreat, here’s what one attendee shared with us:

In this article, I’ll share what made this board retreat both productive and enjoyable, including engaging icebreakers, a well-defined agenda, and interactive activities so you can have a successful offsite.

If yours is like most nonprofits, virtually all mission-related tasks are handled by your in-house team.

In effect, your organization is an internal agency, a service group much like an ad agency or a law firm. Except instead of billable hours, you deal in productive hours (see Chapter 13 in my free book).

Your team does its best to ensure those valuable hours are used wisely for, say, a specific donor campaign or a live fundraising event.

On April 11th, CauseMic held an in-person event to launch my new free book, The High-Growth Nonprofit.

What a great turnout and a chance to meet a lot of terrific, cause-driven folks. Along with us handing out copies of the book, I gave a short presentation on how to grow your nonprofit during times of economic uncertainty.

If you’re a nonprofit leader looking for real growth, drop in on Dan Bruton’s PDX Executive Podcast with CauseMic leader Matt Scott as they discuss Matt’s free book, The High-Growth Nonprofit.

Along with experiences from his pre-CauseMic days, Matt’s book captures 10+ years of tips, successes, and lessons learned helping cause-worthy groups achieve exponential growth. Dan and Matt discuss some of the contents, beginning with the all-important high-growth mindset.

I’m happy to say my new bookThe High-Growth Nonprofit is hot off the press.

I kicked off the book’s launch on the Nonprofit Radio yesterday by noting why reading the book makes sense for nonprofit leaders everywhere:

• It features proven steps to quickly double your revenue and drive impact
• It includes tips plus the mistakes, lessons learned, and successes of others
• It’s guaranteed to be worth the cost (it’s free)

Nothing centers your focus on things you’ve learned in your career like writing a book about them.

Unless you launch into some stream-of-consciousness, rambling mumbo jumbo, it forces you to categorize your knowledge into specific chapters that make sense.

But within each chapter, it’s easy to succumb to the notion that future readers will hang on your every word, even if it’s Gone With the Wind, Volume II. They won’t.

So you have to be succinct enough to get to the actual heart of the matter, even if there seems to be many hearts of many matters. I had to follow my own advice: Be decisive—pick something and run with it! (Thank you, page 49).

I learned these things (and others) while writing my book, The High-Growth Nonprofit.

Boiling it down to two  

• Along with people who dominate conversations, bias exhibited toward particular groups in meetings impedes the flow of good ideas, motivation, buy-in, and productivity.  
• Inclusive strategic planning sessions that also feature effective, facilitated structure are good tools for creating a great plan.

All nonprofit executives recognize strategy is important. But it’s a safe assumption that most also find the creation of their organization’s strategic plan to be daunting, sometimes scary. When making decisions on the path ahead, you will cut off other possibilities and opportunities. Those choices become a reflection of you as a leader and what if they don’t pan out? 

Strategic planning in days (yes, days!), not months

So it’s time for strategic planning—the process that typically involves three to six months of meetings and splinter groups and task forces.

Comprehensive agendas rule the day along with copious note-taking and prolonged brainstorming that drifts off-target. The management team tries to assess the organization’s position using market data and employee feedback and a SWOT analysis.

Then comes freeform bantering about goals and objectives inspired by mission and vision statements that haven’t changed in years.

Lastly, revenue is forecast based on past performance instead of desired growth, prompting budgets and timelines for a high-level project roadmap.

And Voila—The Strategic Plan!

Whether developed annually or every three to five years, a strategic plan involves lots of time and money. Three to six months is the norm for, say, mid-sized nonprofits, while the average price tag in outside fees and inside labor can range well over $200,000.

So what’s the purpose of this costly endeavor?

Well, the standard answer may be that it’s a roadmap for organizational growth. Or, it’s a blueprint for achieving long- and short-term goals.
 
Regardless of how it’s framed, oftentimes the unfortunate truth is that the strategic plan is more of an obligatory exercise than a usable document. “We’re expected to have one, so we do.”
 
It’s likely voluminous and ambiguous and rarely referenced until its next makeover.
 
In short, it’s just not practical for daily operations.