Before you start your strategic planning process, you need to identify who your stakeholders are and why they matter to your nonprofit. Your stakeholders are anyone who has an interest or influence in your organization, such as your beneficiaries, donors, staff, volunteers, board, partners, funders, and community members. You can use tools like stakeholder mapping or analysis to categorize and prioritize your stakeholders based on their power, interest, and relationship with your nonprofit. This will help you decide who to involve in your strategic planning process and how to communicate with them.
You should also include people who are not yet involved with your organization that could become partners, ambassadors or donors. Ask them what they know about your organization and how your work could become more relevant to them, either as individuals or as part of a larger constituency. Don’t be afraid to include government and business leaders in the community.
One of the most important steps in your strategic planning process is to consult your beneficiaries and partners. These are the people who directly benefit from or contribute to your nonprofit's work, and their feedback and input are essential to understand your impact, challenges, and opportunities. You can use various methods to consult your beneficiaries and partners, such as surveys, interviews, focus groups, workshops, or participatory approaches. The key is to ask relevant and respectful questions, listen actively and empathetically, and acknowledge and appreciate their contributions.
Beneficiaries are Stakeholders. Organizations review your list of stakeholders that you just identified. If beneficiaries are on that list move forward. Good work. If Beneficiaries are not on that list, put your pencils down, recognize this as a major miss, and head over to the aisle called “Values Alignment” before coming back to strategic planning. Look, it happens. So no need to wallow in shame and guilt, that doesn’t help anything. And even more importantly it doesn’t change anything. The important thing is to own it and work on changing it.
Another way to involve your beneficiaries and partners in your strategic planning process is to involve them in decision-making. This means giving them a voice and a choice in shaping your nonprofit's goals, strategies, and actions. You can do this by creating a diverse and representative steering committee, inviting stakeholders to join planning sessions or working groups, or using tools like voting, ranking, or consensus-building. The benefit of involving your stakeholders in decision-making is that it can increase their ownership, commitment, and accountability to your nonprofit's plan.
Finally, you need to communicate your plan and progress to your beneficiaries and partners. This means sharing your vision, mission, values, goals, strategies, and indicators with them in a clear and accessible way. You can use different channels and formats to communicate your plan and progress, such as newsletters, reports, social media, websites, or events. The purpose of communicating your plan and progress is to inform, inspire, and invite your beneficiaries and partners to support and participate in your nonprofit's work.
By involving your beneficiaries and partners in your nonprofit strategic planning process, you can create a plan that is relevant, realistic, and responsive to their needs and expectations. You can also build trust, collaboration, and learning among your key stakeholders and enhance your nonprofit's impact and sustainability.
Remember: beneficiaries and stakeholders are providing you with feedback and ideas on an ongoing basis - through program surveys, social media comments, conversations, and phone/email inquiries. Leverage this feedback effectively by creating a regular cadence for reviewing it and retaining promising ideas. If you are only gathering, reviewing and elevating feedback every three years during your strategic planning cycle, you are missing critical opportunities and ensuring your plan will only have point-in-time relevance.