Brief strategic plans help you meet goals

I’ve spent the last few weeks working on my strategic business plan for 2025.

I have a tool I use, a one-page strategic plan, that I’ve modified from other examples out there. Most of the ones I’ve seen are either quite complicated, trying to fit in all the details of a five year plan onto a single sheet of paper, or very limited, only allowing two or three goals.

The one I’ve come up with is a lot simpler and allows significant scope. I realized it would probably be just as useful for putting together a plan for your volunteer program for 2025.

Why, you might ask, do you need to have a strategic plan just for the volunteer program? Isn’t the plan for the organization good enough? If you’ve ever seen the strategic plan for your organization, you likely have noticed how little attention it gives to volunteers. It may give lip service to the need to keep the program strong, but actual, actionable goals are few or non-existent.

Former U.S. president Dwight Eisenhower famously said “…plans are useless, but planning is indispensable.” That includes for volunteer programs.

Planning out the year forces you to take a close look at how your program is actually doing and where it can improve. It gets you into a “big picture” mind frame. Planning also instills the discipline of coming up with annual targets for the program and actionable SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound) goals to help you reach those targets. It makes sure your goals and actions are aligned with your mission and values.

Those goals may change over the year but the act of sitting down and coming up with them can give you a clear direction to move in.

Too often, our plans are vague. “We need to get more volunteers!” How many more volunteers? With what skills? When do we need them by? And, really, do we need more or do we just need to utilize the ones we have better?

It’s those questions that a good strategic plan can answer.

Why a one-page strategic plan? Once you’ve seen as many strategic plans as I have, you quickly realize why. The large, complex, multi-page documents that many plans turn into tend to be put in a binder and placed on a shelf somewhere. They’re dragged out at the next annual general meeting and everyone wonders why the goals weren’t met. Often, it’s decided it just needs more detail. I’m sure you can guess how effective that is.

A one-page plan, on the other hand, can be posted above your desk, where you see it every day. It reminds you to keep working toward one or more of the goals listed. Basically, it helps you stay on track. It also gives you the opportunity to revise the plan if and when things change.

For example, one of your goals may have been to approach the local factory to set up a corporate volunteer program. In April, however, the economy took a downturn and the factory laid off half its workers. It may not a good time to approach them about supporting employees to volunteer. That goal will have to be postponed or replaced. Having the plan in front of you allows you to do that in real time.

The plan itself isn’t everything, though. Part of the strategic planning, though not of the plan itself, are the actions you need to take to accomplish the goals. Whether you type these up in a document or enter them into project management software like Asana or Monday (both of which have free versions), it’s important to know what actual steps you need to take. I’ve seen it a lot where a goal isn’t met simply because no one knows how to get going on it, so it never actually gets started.

By working out at least the first couple of actions, you can build momentum that will carry you through the project. The more actions you can write down at the beginning, of course, the easier and faster it will be to achieve the goal.

With all that in mind, I created a one-page strategic plan template for volunteer programs. If you’re interested in trying it out, let me know and I’ll email it to you.

Now’s the perfect time to think about your plans for next year. The template has instructions on it, as well as examples to help you get started. If you have any questions about it – or suggestions to make it better – please let me know. If you need help working through it, I’m happy to hop on a complimentary call to get you going.

I want us all to have an amazing 2025.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.