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Nonprofit Mastermind Podcast
10 Annual Planning Questions To Ensure Organizational Resilience in 2025
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Brooke Richie Babbage
If we've learned anything from this election season, it's how quickly tides can change. The key to thriving during times of uncertainty is to make sure that your organization is strong on the inside. Now it's annual planning season, so I want to walk through 10 questions you can ask yourself sort of as an organizational gut check to help you make sure that your annual plan is setting you up for resilience and impact in 2025. Welcome to the Nonprofit Mastermind podcast. I'm Brooke Richie Babbage. I've been in the social impact game for 25 years as a social justice lawyer turned two time nonprofit founder and leader turned growth strategist and coach for leaders around the country. I grew my nonprofit from me and an intern in a tiny closet to a high impact seven figure organization. And along the way I learned so, so much about how to build an organization that has real impact and how to do it without burning out. In this podcast I share the nuts and bolts of all of it so you can do that too. We dive into the mindset, strategies and tactics of how to scale a high impact organization and how to do it in a way that's truly sustainable. As you think through your annual plan, there are really three buckets you should think about. All healthy organizations are made up of these buckets, a combination of these three core elements to your strategic clarity. And that's about your planned impact, right? What do you plan to do in the coming year? Your strategic direction, your goals for the year, your key messages, and how clearly you'll be able to tell the story of your goals and your impact. So that's bucket one. The second is your capacity, which is about the people, power and systems that enable you to do the work right, to have real impact. This is your staff, your board, your networks. And I've talked on this podcast about creating structured leverage networks in your broader ecosystem and how important that is as a source of capacity. I will link to those episodes in the show Notes and this is also about your infrastructure, right? The operations and the systems that you have, the interstitial tissue that's holding everything on the inside of your organization together. And the third bucket is your capital. This is money and resources. And this is all about what fuels the work, right? This is your fundraising and your finance. So you want to make sure that your plan, even if it's not organized into those three buckets, which most plans aren't, you want to make sure that you have addressed your clarity, your capacity and your capital for the coming year. You want to address all three. The problem if you leave one of them out is that your plan and therefore your work, your forward movement in the coming year, it's going to be lopsided. An example is, let's say you were thinking about needing more capacity, as many organizations are, and you think, who do I need to hire, right? Who do I need to build to add to my team? But if you don't also look at how to leverage the rest of your network for people power, your advisors, beyond your board, your partners, then the impact on your capital is very direct and very concrete. You will wind up fundraising for and spending more money on staff than you have to. Capacity and capital are intertwined. Another example, I was talking to one of the leaders that I coach inside my next level nonprofit program the other day and she wanted to walk through how to know who to hire. Hiring is very big on people's minds. Hiring and staffing right now, sort of making sure that they have the team they need in 2025. So that's what she wanted to talk through during one of our coaching calls. And I asked her, what's your three year plan and where does it mean you need to be organizationally a year from now, right? So what kind of infrastructure you're going to need? What kind of work will you need to be doing? So she walked me through her annual plan and how it aligned with her long term vision. And I told her, that's your answer, right? That's how you know who to hire. When you're clear about what you need to achieve in the next year, then the answer to who to hire is who will help me do that? Right? And that is bringing people onto your team that are helping you move in the direction of your strategic priorities and goals over the next year. And three, that intersection between your clarity and your capacity. Your clarity will inform your capacity in a lot of ways, in most ways. So the upshot is you want to consider all three buckets. So the questions that I'm going to walk through you can sort of envision as my way of giving you sort of a framework or a checklist for covering all three buckets. And I'm going to walk through 10 and asking these will help to make sure that your plan is balanced and comprehensive. And I hope. Strategic question one, do our one year goals align with our longer term goals and priorities, our long term plan? So this is a softball pitch. The answer to this question should be yes. Should be a clear yes. You and everyone on your team should be able to see a direct relationship between the goals that you've set for 2025, the work that you plan to do, the outcomes that you're striving for, the way that you want to build your organization and infrastructure, whatever your goals are, they should, you should see a direct line from those to your goals and priorities in your longer term plan. Now, I work with a lot of organizations inside my program. I wouldn't say a lot. Definitely a solid third are between plans right now and or at some point in their work with me. And so that can be unsettling. Right. When you're trying to set one year goals and you can't align them to long term goals. So if that is you, don't be alarmed. That is common when you're moving between strategic goals and priorities. I mean, strategic plans. What I would say to you is when you have done the work of finalizing a three year or five year, some organizations do five years, I recommend three years. When you've done a long term strategic plan, then you want to make sure that your one year goals align with those longer term goals and priorities. When you are between long term plans, then to the best of your ability, you and your team have a lot of insight into what's working, what's not. You're strong, where you're weak, where you want to go. Make that one year plan as strategic as possible. Okay, question two. Looking at our goals, do we have clear, specific and concrete indicators of success? Right. Key metrics of success for each goal. Will it be clear to the whole team when we've been successful? Now that's really important. As you find your way past January, February, you get into the middle of the year and everybody's just like, head down, working hard, moving fast. It can be really easy. It is really easy and it happens all the time. To feel unmoored from your goals that you know, you did all this work on a great annual plan. You had the OKRs, outcomes and key results. You and your team had your individual work plans and everything's great. And now it's May and you're feeling a little floaty, right. New opportunities have come along. This partnership that you were counting on dissolved. You hired two new people. You're still generally moving in the direction of your plan, but it can be hard to know exactly how close you are and how realistic and how feasible what you originally planned to do is. So I'm going to include a link in the show notes to a webinar that I did in June specifically about this. Right. How to take a look at your annual plan and recalibrate for the back end of the year. But the reason that I mentioned this goal now, as you're doing your annual planning, is it is far easier to recalibrate. Whether it's mid year, one month into your year, it's way easier to do your work well and to lead a team of people doing their work well when you are all using the same playbook, right? When what counts as success, when you can spike the ball and do the dance and you've gotten a touchdown, when everybody knows exactly what that looks like. And so as you're crafting your annual plan, build that into the plan itself, right? What are our indicators of success? Third question. Does everyone on my team understand how their work fits into and supports our goals? So one of the things that I see, particularly in growing organizations where there have been new team members added, say in the last year, is that the leadership team, sometimes the executive director, will have a vision for the year and will do a really great annual plan. But not everybody on the team gets it right. They can see the goals, they understand the words that are on the page or in notion or Google, wherever you keep your goals, they understand what they mean. But they don't necessarily see the path there. And that's okay. You don't have to see the path there. But that conversation about how will we co create the path to get there, what will your role be, that's really important for everyone on your team to understand because what happens when you come out of planning season? If they don't understand where they fit and how what they're doing is helping build the sort of end result, then their work is going to get off track. And that's going to feel bad to anybody managing them, to anybody leading that team and to them. So you want to gut check at the beginning. Does everyone on my team, whether it's the leadership team, the coordinators, teaching artists, if you work with them, do they understand how their work fits into the goals? Next question, and this is a big one. Do I have the right staff and board to support the work that needs to be done in the next year? Now, I ask this question not because you have to solve this problem. If you are okay enough with yourself to say no, and I say okay enough with yourself. Because it's really hard for a lot of the leaders that I work with to admit that they don't have the right staffing board. Not because they're not honest and not because they don't see it, but because that's overwhelming, right? Thinking you have to hire and how are you going to build a different board or transfer some people off the board? What is that going to look like? And so it's easier not to really engage with the question. But my very strong advice is that as a gut check question. The reason this question is on the list is so that if not, you know that now. And you build into your plan how you will get the staff and the board that you need. Even if what you put into your plan at this time is March, April, May, figure out the team I need, right? January, February, March, assess the board and figure out who's got to go and who we need to bring on. Right? You don't have to answer the question, but you do need to be honest and build time and work space into your annual plan to close gaps in skills and capacity. Next question. Does my leadership team have what they need from me and the organization to fully own their parts of our plan? This is related to the question about whether they understand how they fit. But this is really about building the capacity of your leadership team to own their workflows. Are you properly delegating? Do they understand their relationship to authority and autonomy within the organization? Do they have the professional development sort of resources that they need access to? Are there trainings that they're going to need? Is there a way in which they're going to need to be skilled up? Do they need training and working together? Right. So this again is not about solving whatever problems or gaps you are observing, because they are always going to be there. No organization is ever perfect. It's really just about building into your plan an honest awareness of what steps you want to take to move in the direction of even more full ownership. If you are not already there thinking about things like how will we practice delegation? What parts of their work plan will allow me to see how much more authority I can give them? Are there partnerships, relationships that I should take off my plate and begin to hand over to my leadership team as I look at this work plan? Right? So what are the ways in which we're building the capacity? Are there trainings that the folks on my leadership team should have, should, should have access to? So what do they need and am I building that into the plan? Next question. This is also a scary one. And again, these are not things you have to solve up front. They are just gut check questions. What if our funding was cut in half? Which parts of this annual plan would be a hard line must keep? So this is really just a question about clear and honest prioritization It's a little bit like back of the envelope scenario planning. So during COVID I did a lot of work with growing organizations that needed to quickly learn how to do scenario plans, which are different than strategic plans. Right? Scenario plans are really stylized what if exercises. I happen to love them, but they make most organizational leaders. And when I was an organizational leader, this was true for me as well. They make me nervous, right? They make people nervous. Because what you actually want is your board and your team to be aligned behind a set of goals for the year work that they have to do. And it feels messy to then start saying, but here's a different scenario that maybe we sort of need to be prepared for. And here's a third scenario that if this happens, I'm going to ask you guys to work in a really different way. People can't hold all of that. It's too much cognitive load. So I am not suggesting that you have a whole scenario plan mapped out. Unless this is something that is relevant for your organization. Say you are. There is actually a meaningful chance your funding will be cut in half. But that's not the case. It's still an important gut check thought exercise to ask yourself, how would I prioritize and lead my team in prioritizing the goals that are in this document if I had to say, push come to shove, these are the two things we must hold ourselves accountable to for the year, right? These are the two outcomes. What would they be? And just sort of know that. Do that thinking up front because that will allow you to pivot and shift more quickly and more easily and with less friction with your team as the year moves on. Do I know how much our work plan truly costs? So this is about a true cost budget. Those of you who are longtime listeners have heard me talk about true cost budgets, I will include a link in the show notes to an entire episode where I talk about the importance of true cost budgets. What I will say here as part of this checklist is that if you don't know the true cost of your work, not how much you think you can raise for the work, but actually how much it would cost if you were to fully operationalize the plan with the team you needed and the leadership and the resources and the systems and the transportation costs and the training costs, right? If you were to take this plan and Jeanne were to come down, be like, you can do it all, you can do it all at a plus level of excellence, tell me how much it costs. You need to know how to answer that question. That will guide your fundraising, that will probably shape your priorities, that will guide who you hire. This true cost budget piece, very, very important. So as you're looking through your annual plan gut check, do I know the cost? Finally, following the results of last week's election, I've added three additional sort of gut check checklist questions to this annual planning sort of audit. These are three questions that I actually think are really, really important when you are taking a look at your long term strategic plan and when I do long term strategic planning work with organizations, and an interesting number of those projects are actually sort of looking midpoint. How do we need to recalibrate? There are questions that you want to ask that take into account shifts in your external environment. So we happen to be one week out from an election, but as we all know as nonprofit leaders, our external environment shifts all the time. Funders decide to pull funding, board members change, policies change, our communities change. And so these are really questions that as you're going through a long term plan, you want to ask to make sure that you don't need to or to figure out how you might need to recalibrate your long term goals. I'm suggesting that organizations do them this year as part of their annual planning because I do think that irrespective of the community or state we live in, they're going to be effects of the election on funding, on public funding in certain communities that many organizations work with. So it's a good year to add these as gut checks. So the next question is, are there parts of our work or how we work, our goals, our strategy, our approach that we may need to rethink? Do we have partners that may be impacted? Do we work at certain public schools that are whose funding is going to be impacted? Do we work with immigrant communities? So just thinking about in bucket one, in that clarity bucket, how might shifts in our immediate and more extended external network, external ecosystem, impact what we are able to do and what we choose to focus on? Second question, are there people that we work with, on our team, our internal stakeholders, our board that might be impacted by this election? And is that something we need to take into consideration as we're thinking about things like benefits, paid time off, salaries, partnerships, et cetera? And finally, for those of you who are reliant on public funding, this is a time to think about the extent to which the election result could impact the funding that is available for the kind of work that you do depends on whether you get state or local money, when this might affect you. This could be a 2026 issue, but definitely something to gut check as you're thinking about your financial plan for the year. So that's it for this week. This is the first part in my annual semi structured year end planning series. Next week I'm going to do a similar walkthrough of how to make sure that you are creating an annual fundraising plan that will support your stability and drive growth in 2025. So definitely tune in next week for more. Mastermind thanks so much for joining me this week. If you enjoy this podcast I would love for you to leave a rating and a review you I read every single one and they really do matter. I also share extra tidbits and resources building on what we talk about here in my newsletter, Leadership Forward 321. You can sign up by texting the word impact to 66866. And finally, definitely check out the links and resources that I mentioned in this episode at brooke richie babbage.com podcast see you next week.