End-of-Year Strategic Planning: The Key to Charting a Confident Course For 2025

The end of the year often brings a whirlwind of professional and family obligations – especially for nonprofit leaders.  You may find yourself juggling end-of-year fundraising drives, community events and treasured family holiday traditions.

But there’s also a key step you should take during November and December to set up your nonprofit for success in 2025—spend dedicated time reviewing your strategic plan.  In fact, this may be one of the most valuable gifts you can give your organization during these busy months.  The following questions can be a smart way to get started:

• Where does your nonprofit stand in terms of meeting its goals for 2024?

• Where did your group successfully meet its mission?  Were there areas where your organization missed the mark?

• Do certain goals need to be broken into smaller parts in 2025 to bring a better chance of long-term success?

• Do you see new opportunities or challenges in the coming year that might impact your organization’s long-term strategic plan?

Ways To “Crowdsource” Your Year-End Review

Of course, revisiting your 2024 strategic plan doesn’t need to be a solo exercise.  In fact, tackling this important review on your own can easily result in tunnel vision and missed opportunities for the coming year.

• Consider having various members of your leadership team conduct a review of segments of your nonprofit’s strategic plan.  Getting year-end feedback from different organization leaders can help generate new solutions which might not have been apparent during earlier planning sessions.

• Ask for input from team members who worked directly on certain programs.  People working on the front lines of your organization may have practical insights which could help refine your approach to challenges in the coming year. 

• Reach out to stakeholders within your community to see how local conditions may be impacting allied nonprofit organizations.  Is there a change in the community which they’ve successfully addressed?  Are they choosing to focus on a new challenge which emerged within the past year?

Working with your nonprofit’s leadership team, frontline employees, and community stakeholders can give you a more robust, 360-degree picture of how successfully your organization performed in 2024.  In turn, that can give you a clearer vision of your priorities in 2025.

SMART Strategy Adjustments Can Help Kickstart 2025

After a solid review of the current year’s strategic plan and the results your nonprofit achieved, the next step is using the SMART strategy to fine-tune your organization’s priorities for the new year.  This includes setting up goals that are:

SPECIFIC:  If you currently serve 100 members of your community through an outreach program, your goal could be to serve 20% more people in 2025.

MEASUREABLE:  When writing your goal of serving 20% more people, be sure to define what exactly qualifies as “serving 20% more people.”  Is it a total of 20% more community members attending a certain type of event across the entire year?  Is it an average of 20% more people consistently participating each month? 

ACHIEVEABLE:  Deliberately ambitious goals are intended to inspire staff members.  However, if your team believes there’s no realistic way they can meet the new goal, it may have the opposite effect.  In essence, you’re looking for the sweet spot between a goal which is so easily achievable that your nonprofit doesn’t have to do much to meet it and a goal which is so lofty that people stop trying because it’s too overwhelming.

RELEVANT:  Given the resource limitations often facing nonprofits, it’s critical to make sure your organization’s goals squarely target your mission.  It can often be tempting to branch into new tangents in the hope of reaching new audiences.  But it’s important to take a step back to make sure your goals reinforce your mission rather than spreading your organization too thin.

It’s not uncommon to have a wish list of goals that exceeds your nonprofit’s resources.  One helpful way to narrow down potential strategic goals is to list all goals on a sheet of paper with “Start”, “Stop” and “Keep” boxes next to each one.  Encourage multiple staff members, board members, and other organization leaders to quickly mark one of the boxes for each goal.  Tallying total responses can be an illuminating way to rank the priority of each potential goal.

TIME-BASED:  Setting a specific timeline for each goal can help team members measure their progress.  Consider breaking larger strategic goals into a series of short-term priorities to be accomplished within tighter deadlines.  This can help staff members focus on the basic steps during each short-term priority. 

It’s also a good way to more easily monitor whether the team is on track to meet the larger strategic goal – by spotting missed deadlines when there’s still time to correct your overall approach.

Taking time at the end of the year to evaluate where your organization will land on 2024 goals can be the key to confidently starting 2025 off on the right foot.

In addition to fine-tuning your organization’s strategy and goals for the coming year, November and December can also bring about complex HR questions as your nonprofit closes out 2024.  UST can help you find reliable answers on questions about employee paperwork, whether a staff member should be categorized as full-time or part-time or how your HR staff should handle changing regulations in your state. Sign up today for a free 60-day trial of UST HR Workplace!

SOURCES:

“How To Set Strategic Goals At Year End For Your Nonprofit,” Globalgiving.org, 11/20/23

“Annual Planning for Nonprofits: How To Set Your Organization Up For Success,” Trifecta Advising, viewed 10/28/24