How Do I Write A Business Plan For A Nonprofit Organization?

If you forget to include important details, you could lose investment and jeopardize future opportunities. Every non-profit needs funding to operate, and this all-important section details exactly how you plan to cover these financial needs. Your business plan can be strong in every other section, but if your financial planning is flimsy, it’s going to prove difficult to gather believers to your cause. ‍Obviously, it’s difficult to market an idea effectively if you’re not in operation, but you still need to have a marketing plan in place. People who want to support your non-profit need to understand your marketing plan to attract donors.

Provides a listing of suggested resources on business and strategic planning for nonprofit organizations. Vitamin Angels does a good job of showing how their action supports the mission. As a non-profit business plan, it’s a good idea to include statistics like these to show exactly how close you are to your planned goals. The following framework will guide you through completion of your basic strategic plan document.

Look At Your Mission And Make Sure Part Of It Is An Achievable Stretch Goal

Share the story of your nonprofit’s impact and help us tell the story of the nonprofit sector. When teams have clarity into the work getting done, there’s no telling how much more they can accomplish in the same amount of time.Try Smartsheet for free, today. Enterprise See how you can align global teams, build and scale business-driven solutions, and enable IT to manage risk and maintain compliance on the platform for dynamic work.

Use our template to outline your current objectives and future goals. It could be one of the most important documents you create this year. Both types of organizations need to create forecasts for revenue and plan how they’re going to spend the money they bring in. They also need to manage their cash and ensure that they can stay solvent to accomplish their goals.

Beginning on page 10, he describes the elements of a business plan for a new nonprofit. Generally, this serves as a space to attach additional documents and elements that you may find useful for your business plan. This can include things like supplementary charts or a list of your board of directors. They accomplish this goal through putting together both permanent exhibits as well as regular events at their primary museum. As a start, you want to cover the basic need your nonprofit services, why that need exists, and the way you plan to address that need. The goal here is to tell the story as clearly and and concisely as possible.

National Council Of Nonprofits

If you’re building a bequest program to build your endowment, your target market might be a specific population with interest in your cause who is at retirement age. You’re competing with other nonprofits for donor attention and support, and you’re competing with other organizations serving your target population. Even if your program is the only one in your area providing a specific service, you still have competition. Your organization is special or you wouldn’t spend so much time devoted to it. Layout some of the nuts and bolts about what makes it great in this opening section of your business plan. Your nonprofit probably changes lives, changes your community, or maybe even changes the world.

Readers are encouraged to work with a planning team in their organization to fill in this framework. After completing this framework, readers can move information from the framework to a more suitable document to be the final version of the strategic plan document, if desired. If you’ve never had a strategic plan before, not to worry, you can just skip this section.

Advancing Missions Through Advocacy

It ensures everyone, from your board to your leadership to your staff, is on the same page about your nonprofit’s mission, vision, values, and most important priorities. Then, it details a plan for how you’re going to reach your goals. However, so many organizations fail to have a well-documented, actionable nonprofit strategic plan. Use this fill-in-the-blank template as the basis for building a thorough business plan for a nonprofit organization. Our non profit business plan template includes high-quality slides that will make it easier for you to create your business plan.

The main points of the biography are to showcase Chief Development Officer Jim Asp’s work history as it is relevant to his job. You’ll want to do something similar in your business plan’s team section. You should aim for the same level of clarity and brevity in your own mission statement. With these percentages, you’ll know exactly how much you’ll need to raise through each fundraising category. Once you have these, you can break down your goals further into objectives.

This section should include information that will be informative, particularly to readers from outside of the organization. The National Council of Nonprofits is a proud 501 charitable nonprofit. Find principles of good governance and ethical & prudent practices for your nonprofit. The key here is not to report your target donors as everyone in a 3,000-mile radius with a wallet. Empower your people to go above and beyond with a flexible platform designed to match the needs of your team — and adapt as those needs change. Digital asset management Manage and distribute assets, and see how they perform. Resource management Find the best project team and forecast resourcing needs.

Strategy Development

A lot of the flow and structure concerns you have for a plan don’t really apply with an appendix. For example, let’s look at this profile from The Nature Conservancy.

20% of your funds will be acquired through your planned giving program. About Feedback Legal Privacy Policy Contact Us Website provided by Paradise Media, LLC; all rights reserved. Train board members and employees on portions of the plan during orientations. Note that certain groups of stakeholders might get complete copies of the plan, including appendices, while other groups might receive only the body of the plan without its appendices.

Secure request management Streamline requests, process ticketing, and more. Project management Plan projects, automate workflows, and align teams.

There are probably some amazing, dedicated people with stellar qualifications on your team—this is the place to feature them (and don’t forget to include yourself!). In some instances, you might also be relying on public health programs like Medicaid to fund your program costs. Mention all those strategic partnerships here, especially if your program would have trouble existing without the partnership.

Future Services And Programs

In this section, we provide templates so your nonprofit can look quarter-by-quarter at what you need to do as a team to reach your annual objectives. This ensures you can adopt a structured approach to goal setting, while also maintaining agility to shift and change plans as unforeseen circumstances arise. Going through the process of outlining your organization’s most important priorities and documenting them in a well thought out strategic plan is the first step in answering this question. Having a strategic plan for your nonprofit organization is the first step—but it needs to be actionable to be effective. Though not geared specifically to nonprofits, these resources from the SBA cover in detail the elements that should be included in any kind of business plan. This full-text article by Donald A. Griesman goes into detail on the process of starting a nonprofit organization.

Goals may need to be reworded to be more specific to the authority and resources of the chief executive role. That define the future your nonprofit is working to create and the work you’re doing every day to get closer to that reality. A collaborative national project calling on board members to advance their nonprofits’ missions through greater advocacy. Plan, fund, and grow your business Achieve your business funding goals with a proven plan format. Use this section to talk about how you’ll work with other organizations. Maybe you need to use a room in the local public library to run your program for the first year.

• Many organizations have stumbled badly because they ended up “falling over their feet” while being focused much too far down the road.
• This slide lets you introduce your team to companies and other nonprofits that you want to work with.
• This makes it all the more critical to discuss why you have allocated a portion of your budget to operations and provide context behind that decision.
• Train board members and employees on portions of the plan during orientations.

] is responsible to provide ongoing governance and direction the organization. Usually, the board decides to carry out their responsibilities by including the role of a chief executive in the organization. The board is responsible to oversee the performance of the chief executive and evaluate the performance of the chief executive on a regular basis. You will probably have organization-wide goals, for example, goals in regard to building and running your organization, for example, board development, staffing, getting a new building, etc. You also will probably have goals that directly in regard to building, producing and selling products or services to your customers.

Consider issues over the term of your strategic plan, but look very closely at the next year especially. Many organizations have stumbled badly because they ended up “falling over their feet” while being focused much too far down the road.

Detail any legal information that you want your audience to know. This might include recent legislation that will influence the way you run your nonprofit. This is the space where you can clarify exactly what your non-profit does. Think of it as explaining the way your nonprofit addresses that base need you laid out earlier.

Free Nonprofit Business Plan Templates

This section of The Essential Nonprofit Strategic Plan Template ends with a SWOT, or an assessment of your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The SWOT is a great launching pad for identifying your nonprofit’s upcoming strategic priorities. Before you designed your key programs or services, you probably did some research to validate that there’s a need for what you’re offering. You might use a combination of direct mail, advertising, and fundraising events.

In this guide, I’ll explain how to create a plan for your organization that will impress your board of directors, facilitate fundraising, and ensures that you deliver on your mission. They’ll help you understand how other nonprofits and charities have experienced success from their strategy maps and why you should think about creating one yourself. Key performance indicators —will help you decide if you’re on track to meet your objectives. You’ll need to be able to demonstrate to your stakeholders that you are making progress toward your goals, and measures are the best way to do this.

The organization isn’t directly serving individual groups of people and is instead trying to benefit the environment as a whole. Detail the organizational structure of your nonprofit — how your organization works and the key people who make everything happen. This slide lets you describe the purpose of your nonprofit engagingly. This is also a good place to put text or technical information that you think may be relevant to your business plan, but might be long-winded or difficult to read.