25 Questions to Ask During Nonprofit Strategic Planning

Good strategic planning is mostly a matter of asking better questions, in the right order, of the right people. Use these as your question bank. Pick eight to twelve per audience rather than asking all 25 of everyone.

Mission and relevance

1. If our organization closed tomorrow, what would be lost in this community, and who would notice first? 2. Is our mission statement still an accurate description of the work we do today? 3. Which of our programs is most central to the mission, and which is furthest from it? 4. Who do we serve best right now, and who do we serve poorly?

Evidence and performance

5. What does our data actually tell us about outcomes over the last three years,not our outputs, our outcomes? 6. Which program has the strongest results per dollar? Which the weakest? 7. What trend in our numbers can we not currently explain? 8. Where do our board's perceptions and our data disagree?

Stakeholder perspective

9. What do the people we serve say they need that we are not providing? 10. Where do board, staff, and client perspectives differ most sharply,and why? 11. What do our funders think we are especially good at? 12. Which community partners could accomplish more with us than alongside us?

Capacity and sustainability

13. What percentage of revenue comes from our largest single source, and what happens if it ends? 14. Which key functions depend on one person's knowledge? 15. What is our staff turnover telling us? 16. What can we honestly absorb in the next 12 months alongside current operations?

Environment and risk

17. What has changed in our service area's demographics or economy in the last three years? 18. What external change would most damage us in the next three years? 19. What is the biggest opportunity we are currently too busy to pursue? 20. Who else does what we do, and what do they do better?

Choices and priorities

21. If we could only accomplish three things in three years, what would they be? 22. What are we going to stop doing to make room for them? 23. What are we willing to be worse at? 24. What would have to be true for this priority to succeed, and do we believe it is true?

Accountability

25. For each goal: who owns it, what number will we watch, and when do we report on it?

How to use these

For surveys, translate the questions into short, plain-language items and keep audiences anonymous but tagged,board, staff, donors, clients, community partners,so you can compare across groups. For a board retreat or committee meeting, questions 21 through 24 are worth the most discussion time; they are where a strategic plan becomes a set of choices instead of a wish list.

StrategyAlly asks structured versions of these questions automatically, routes them to the right audience, and analyzes the answers alongside your own data,so the answers land in a plan draft instead of a notebook.