Strategic planning is often viewed by nonprofits as a necessary yet expensive and impractical exercise, encouraging at best only incremental rather than meaningful growth.
Several reasons contribute to its ineffectiveness as a true planning document.
Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats—SWOT, more familiarly.
One would think that if an organization really fleshed out these four crucial business pillars using a SWOT analysis, nothing could escape improvement or growth.
However, while the SWOT process can be a useful tool for some for-profit entities, it may not be the best fit for nonprofits.
With the amount of time, thought, and expense that many nonprofits put into their strategic planning process, the last thing they’d want is for it to be a wasted effort.
Yet, unfortunately, a variety of mistakes can creep into the process to make their strategic planning less than usable.
Let’s take a look at some of the more prevalent issues.
If your nonprofit is struggling with subscriber conversions or timely donor engagement or segmenting communications, chances are you don’t have HubSpot anchoring your “tech stack.”
HubSpot is a powerful constituent relationship management system (CRM), a main component of which is the HubSpot Marketing Hub that tracks all activities taken by your donors. Their first website interaction, a newsletter signup, an event registration, that first donation—it’s all there in a donor’s contact record.
While nonprofits exist to serve clients in need rather than stockholders, they do share a few things in common with their for-profit counterparts:
Today, scaling a nonprofit has to include technology that captures and responds to audience preferences.
Once those constituents are reached, that same technology must then engage them to foster an impactful, trusted connection. That’s the surest way to prompt vital support like donations and volunteering.
When we talk about this type of growth—real, transformative, significant—we just have to mention HubSpot’s Marketing Hub in the same breath.
In the dynamic world of nonprofit leadership, few individuals possess the blend of experience, passion, and vision that Brian August, newly appointed as Chief Growth Officer at CauseMic, brings to the table. With a diverse background spanning various positions across multiple industries, Brian embodies a wealth of strategic insight that has driven growth and success at every turn.
First of all, what is a “nonprofit offsite” and why have one?
Held outside the usual workplace, a nonprofit offsite (or, nonprofit retreat) is an event at which all members of a nonprofit come together to achieve specific objectives.
Duration is up to you, but it can run anywhere from a single day to a full workweek.
Most have little doubt that, to thrive and grow, nonprofits must embrace the right technology.
There’s simply no other way to engage today’s stakeholders on their own terms, be it with the right communications channels, browsers, payment options, mobile platforms, and the like.
Suppose you were handed an effective fundraising strategy, all wrapped up with what you need to maximize donations.
For your year-end campaign.
A doable-right-now action plan tailored specifically to your nonprofit’s cause, donors, and channels.
And you received this plan just three weeks after you said “Put it together.”