The Best Laid Plans...: Creating a Strategic Plan So Your Organization Doesn't Go Awry

There may be no more frustrating feeling in the world than that of having just completed a project, only to find out you did it wrong. You c...

Renew Enthusiasm

Corporations may not be people, but nonprofits fundamentally are. Everyone involved with your organization cares about your cause. But are y...

Tools for Planning

Nonprofits can draw from a broad array of tools to help them connect the qualitative aspirations of their mission and goals to the measurabl...

Zeroing in on a Mission Statement

For the Mission Statement Makeover component of last fall’s Great Mission Statement competition, we invited a few of the entrants to explore...

Mission Statement Winners 2012... and More

It’s time to wrap up the Third Annual Great Mission Statement Competition.  The winner of the Great Mission Statement prize for 2012 is  Lit...

Third Annual Mission Statement Competition Finalists

There was a big jump in the number of entries this year, both in the Great Mission Statement category and in the Mission Statement Makeover...

Third Annual What's Your Mission? Competition

The job of a mission statement is to articulate the essence of why the organization exists. If you don’t articulate it, then it’s very likel...

Nonprofit Webinars Season 12

With the passing of Labor Day 2012 we'll be ready to launch the fall season of our free weekly professional development webinars for sta...

Working Together

In recent years there has been a lot of talk in the funding community about reducing overhead expenses of nonprofits by eliminating redundan...

Good Tension

An informed consensus around mission and the strategic pursuit of it is essential to the effectiveness of a nonprofit. In some areas, howeve...

Succession

Critical Issues #14: Managing Change will be out tomorrow. One important moment of change in a nonprofit is the transition of an organizati...

SWOT

The SWOT (Strengths Weaknesses Opportunities Threats) exercise is a stock feature of strategic planning processes. Over 100 comments in a re...

Learning from This Week's Webinars: Building Teams and Managing Change

Bob Greene's webinar on today in the Nonprofit Webinars Wednesday series on Building Real Teams touched on some ideas that I've be...

Managing Change

I describe my consulting practice as advising nonprofit organizations “facing or creating change.” This phrase captures some of the compelli...

Action!

Currently I am advising a client on how to do a strategic plan internally, with only the most minimal involvement from me, the external cons...

Learning From This Week's Webinars: Collaboration

In more than two years of directing the NonprofitWebinars free professional development webinar series , I’ve had the pleasure of hosting so...

More Mission Statement Makeovers

Winding up the year, this is the last of three posts on the Mission Statement Makeover competition. Despite the caveat in the first post abo...

Mission Statement Makeover: Four more entrants

This post continues our review of entries in this year’s mission statement competition (see the previous post and CI#7: On Mission for back...

Mission Statement Makeover: Overview and First Two Examples

Let’s start with a critical disclaimer: a quick external review can identify ways a mission statement seems to communicate poorly, but it ca...

Second Annual Mission Statement Competition Winner

Our four finalists this year exemplify four different approaches to the crafting of a mission statement. Cancer Connection ( dedicated to ...