Your Strategic Plan is your organizational roadmap.

Managing the plan is the car you’ll use on the trip!

The two go hand-in-hand. Without a good car, a map is useless. A good car with no map means you’ll wander aimlessly.

Your strategic management plan gives you the opportunity to work toward the small steps (objectives) along the roadmap to the goal.

The clearer the goals and metrics used to measure success in your strategic plan, the easier your management plan will be.

Your management plan will make sure your strategic plan lives and doesn’t sit on a shelf and gather dust!

Three Keys to Managing a Strategic Plan Effectively

Regularly review and discus your strategic plan—make it a standing agenda item for board meetings. Determine when to do a review process (maybe half-way through the time period covered by your plan). The review should be reflected in adjustments to your management plan and, thus, your day-to-day operations.

Connecting organizational resources—financial, people and other—to your Strategic Plan will provide information that can trickle down to staffing, job descriptions, performance reviews, capital needs, technological needs, communication plans and all other aspects of managing your nonprofit. Again, all these connections make your Strategic Plan live!

Finally, share news and successes with your community, your donors, your clients and constituents, policy makers and anyone who needs to know about the work of you nonprofit. Make your Strategic Plan live by connecting it to your Communications Plan!