Streamline your strategic prospecting process for non-profit organizations

How to create outlook signature

hey changemakers Holly rustic here with grant writing and funding and I'm here to help you grow capacity increase funding into advance mission alright guys so we are talking all about nonprofit strategic planning today and that might be if you're in a non-profit maybe you're on the board of directors maybe you're an executive director or a development director and you're really wanting to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of the nonprofit that you work at for this year at war this could be if you're a freelance consultant and you want to develop another stream of income healthy nonprofits right so maybe you're a grant writer but you realize that some nonprofits just aren't ready for grant or they could benefit from other services to be more effective for their other streams of funding or just to be more competitive in grant world it's nice for them to build internal capacity so this is a great great great topic for you to know how to do now if you have not subscribed yet to the channel please do subscribe now as you'll be able to get insights to all of the different things that we talked about gret running and funding okay so this is also in kind of a plus for the nonprofit strategic planning master course that I just released online and this is fantastic for you it's a ten module series with forty-seven videos with an average of five minutes each it leads you through the entire nonprofit planning that we're going to be talking about today there's also more than 21 downloadables and checklists so you can just lead your entire nonprofit through the strategic planning throughout the year or over intensive weekend or maybe you just incorporate one item per week in your staff meetings or one item per month at your board of directors meetings and this is something for you as a freelancer that you can then learn and then you can apply you can use the templates as you're working with your clients so you can advance them in strategic planning so take the guesswork out of it take downloading a million different videos and different types of templates and a 200-page manual go ahead and get the course today so as we move through I'm gonna be talking about the ten different ways that applies strategic planning to your nonprofit or the nonprofit's that you work with the first thing you want to do number one is to schedule out your time to actually do your strategic planning and like I said this could be done over a Thursday and a Friday an intense period right now it's the beginning of the year so you could totally do this you can do this at any time really but it's really nice to be able to analyze last year and get prepared for next year right like I said you could also just add this into your staff meetings or you could do it at a monthly board of directors meeting so it really depends on what you want to do and as a freelance consultant you can facilitate this in the exact same way so you can definitely facilitate this over a weekend or over two days during the week or once a month however you really want to roll it out but you do have to prepare it and put it into the calendar that you're actually going to do this the second thing of course is to have the mindset around it that this is going to work okay so we're all gonna bring to the table different ideas of why we're involved why we're passionate about being a part of the nonprofit what we want in return and what we can really offer so you really want to go over that number two you want to conduct a SWOT analysis and a SWOT analysis stands for strengths weaknesses opportunities and threats so you really want to be able to say what are the strengths in our nonprofit what do we do we bring to the table you know strung them around or staff a lot of partners a lot of grant funding that sort of thing and then you want to look at the weaknesses in your organization maybe you don't have strong around maybe you don't have a lot of funding that sort of thing so you really want to be able to identify those those items and then the external things from your organization what are the opportunities that you maybe have not totally jumped on yet what are some things out there that could really benefit your nonprofit or that could leverage something you're doing or you could leverage that those are things you want to look at external opportunities and then of course you want to look at the threats what are the external threats that you do not have control of that could affect negatively you're not profit right so different types of you we always have grants you know from the federal government and if there's a change in administration that sort of thing that can affect your funding the environment things in the environment if you operate an outdoor garden agricultural business and then you have a big hurricane that comes right these are the types of threats that you just want to be able to be aware of and then of course you want to say how can our strengths actually mitigate any of our weaknesses or mitigate the threats right how can our weaknesses be reduced by leveraging our strengths by leveraging opportunities so you really want to look at that the other thing that's really great about your SWOT analysis it's just the words that get out on paper right once you start brainstorming all of these different things you're gonna see some words that are consistent and inspire you and you can then pull those words and say what are our values does any anything from our SWAT can we pull into our values and of course you can use your SWAT for number three reviewing and updating your mission and vision statement now you may see some things that were near values or your SWOT analysis but then you can apply to your mission and vision right and you may have a mission and vision already but it's always good to annually look at these so you ensure that you're still on track with what you're doing or you don't need to change anything right because sometimes you do need to change these and these are fluid for a reason but your mission is basically and maybe you're like Holly I don't know what these are your mission is basically what you're doing today who do you do it for and what is the benefit right your vision statement is what are we doing tomorrow who are we going to serve when are we going to do it so your vision is much more big big audacious kind of look and your mission is today so you really want to make sure that those are clear succinct easy to memorize right 20 words or less all right so let's move now into number four number four is really redefining your target demographic and conducting a simple needs and strengths assessment now in order to really identify your target demographic you may think that you serve all the people in recovery in your community right but really when you look down at it and you start seeing who's actually coming in who's accessing your services etc and who you're passionate about serving is really 12 to 18 year olds who have co-occurring disorders or substance use disorders in your city right so or even in the inner city that sort of thing so you really want to be very very clear and mission down isn't necessarily of that thing right you can always niche down get really good at your what you do your projects will be very specific then and then you might see that there's something bigger going on and there's other secondary sources maybe there's a lot of trauma from those youth so then you start implementing a trauma project as well to reduce trauma right but first you want to start very narrow and then kind of go abroad if you need to and then of course it needs an strikes assessment it's something you can simply do it doesn't have to be like this super crazy expensive report that you do are hiring somebody for $30,000 although you can do those things and those things can be grant funded wait wait but you could also just do a simple survey among you know the 12 to 18 year olds that you're serving and then that's where you're going to find out oh there's a lot of trauma involved as well or what they really want is more access to these types of services or what they really want is more camaraderie among the youth so in this way you can really get some great information so putting together a small easy to fill survey is really good also just conducting focus groups with maybe six simple questions you know bring the 12 to 18 year olds in the room and just ask them some questions you're like what needs do you guys believe that you have and you know what are the strengths that already exists in the community that you guys leverage and this gives you a lot of information the other good thing about doing this is it helps to find projects that you may want to roll out in the future and it really helps you understand who are we really serving what are we doing and are we doing it right because of you to say this is a this is a need I just am thinking that this is a need but it might not be when you really start talking to your beneficiaries you may discover that it's something a little bit different and that is actually very common so the other thing is can help with of course is your data for grants for funders for putting on your website all of this really cool stuff now that you're doing it needs a strength assessment even through simple surveys or focus group you're developing data number five resource mapping all right and so what is that exactly well that's basically looking at all of your resources and really thinking of it as partners all right so if you're looking at your resources you need to look at monetary resources and that's basically what's bringing into cash and then in-kind resources what things maybe you know allow you to not use your cash but they still add value to your nonprofit so what you want to want to do first is to look at the monetary resources that you have secured last year in the last few years before and really say ok who is you know every product service grant fundraiser donation what did we get and itemize all of those how much was it for who gave it to us and what was it for right so maybe somebody gave you you know a foundation give you $25,000 to run a certain project for your youth right maybe it was a dietary project or a workforce project and then you would say ok that was given to us in 2016 and we haven't followed up with them in a long time so maybe that's what we're gonna put next year so that's what you really want to do it and that gives you a good idea to see how healthy is our nonprofit are we actually selling products are we selling services or are we just depending on grants and funds and fundraisers because that's not necessarily a good healthy fiscal need appropriate nonprofit you want to look at all of these different streams of income and say what can we do to do think at least one thing for each of these and that will make you more healthy because then you're getting diverse multiple streams of income and of course I do want to look at what are were the in-kind things and that would be any donations of services Goods people's time volunteers interns that sort of thing that were given to our nonprofit that offset then our expenses and that would simply just be you know you could look at if somebody your landlord doesn't charge you rent you know that saving me minutes $1,000 a month that's saving you $12,000 per year so look at all of these and then say what is our goal for next year who do we want to reach out to who is going to be responsible for reaching out to eat per each person how much are they going to ask for what are they gonna ask the money to be for right or the in-kind donations for and then how are we going to thank them how are we the show appreciation that's really important so that is resource mapping number six all right so as we get into this we also need to look at what are the goals objectives and activities for your nonprofit now you might hear me talking about these things a lot in grants but you also have to look at it what is it for your organization do you have a goal to raise five hundred thousand dollars for this year what are the objectives how are you gonna get there what are the activities each and every week who's going to be responsible for moving the needle forward okay number seven projects all right then you want to identify what projects are we gonna implement for this year are there other projects that just aren't meeting our need now they're not meeting that target demographic anymore did we lose funding do we need to get more do we want to keep those going do we want to start something new so what you want to look at is what how much money is do these projects cost that you want to do next year what resources do you need right manpower do you need volunteers you need to tap into those in-kind or resources or the monetary resources how many people is it going to serve what is the impact for your organization so is it gonna serve you're gonna start a residential center for 12 to 18 year olds and that have co-occurring disorders or substance use disorders in your city right and you can serve 300 people and it's totally aligned with your mission so yeah that's a low-hanging fruit let's do that so you really want to look at that so once again how much money does it cost how many resources is it going to take what is the impact what is the direct impact and does it align with your mission alright then we want to go ahead and go on to number eight and number eight is really looking at your contingency planning and your logic model so when we look at contingency as we say okay we're gonna start this residential Center this is a project we want to do but what challenges might come up how are we to mitigate those prodigious what are we gonna put in place right to solve the problem that might come up and then how are we gonna make sure that this project is sustainable so that is really important to do and if you put a logic model to it you can look at it in one bird's-eye view and I have more of that on the website so go to Bret Rennie an offending comm to find out that all right and let's go ahead to number nine number nine is looking at data management so you really want to be able to say how are we gonna like keep track of all of our stuff right we do this stuff I see so many nonprofits every year doing amazing things they're busy all the time but they never take the time to really just simply track their data and that they did that then the community would say wow you guys are doing a lot instead of not really seeing what they're doing because if people are just busy all the time so you really want to take the time and I have a simple checklist that you can have for this data management plan right and you ask all the questions there is amazing you're gonna love it but it's basically tracking what information and data are you actually gonna connect collect who's going to collect it how often how are you going to report it where are you going to store the data and why is it important who are you going to share it so those are some simple things that you can ask yourself when you're looking at data and then of course finally you're going to number 10 calendar your year so you want to spread out the whole calendar for the year and say okay what are grants is usually do when I have the big deadlines because they're usually pretty annually cyclically right and then what fundraiser be fundraisers are we gonna do at what time what month right and then what big events are coming up you know if there's recovery month that's in September so you might not want to like put another big event there right a big fundraiser or you might because that's what all the buzz is going around so it's really for you to look at each quarter and look at the year as a whole and say how are we gonna implement everything the other thing to consider real quickly is who else is doing what are we gonna be competing with any other big events going on during our big fundraiser so you want to try not to do that or maybe you leverage that other thing it's going on right now so that's really important but it's really nice to have a big view this so you can sit down at the beginning of the year and say this is what's happening for the whole year and now this is the person who's going to be responsible for each task this is our big goal this is how we're going to get there and every week in our meetings we are gonna say okay who was tasked to do what right and are they up to speed and if they're not then you can quickly solve issues when it's just bite-sized but if you leave off until the end of the year and you say okay our goal is $500,000 this year but you never do any planning it's gonna come to November and you say we only raised $30,000 you know it just there's no real plan so as Benjamin Franklin says failing to plan is planning to fail so you want to make sure you plan awesome guys so if you want this entire course once again it has 47 videos 10 modules and it has more than 21 downloadables and checklist plus a certificate of completion lots of cool bonuses then please go to grant writing and funding com all right guys I also click in the link below alright once again please subscribe I hope to see you if you have any questions you can email me Holly at grant writing and funny comm so you subscribe to the channel and give us a like thanks guys [Music]