Tactical Planning for Nonprofits

What is a tactical plan? Tactical plans break-down an organization’s goals and needs for a short period of time, usually 12 to 18 months. They can work as a support to an overall strategic plan (three to five year goals) or they can work as a catalyst to get an organization’s board on-track to tackle…

Strengths and Weaknesses as part of a nonprofit SWOT analysis

SWOT Analyses are a common way of evaluating where an organization stands, what are its greatest attributes and greatest areas of improvement. SWOT stands for Strengths – Weaknesses – Opportunities – Threats. As we touched on before, strengths and weaknesses are internal and opportunities and threats are external. Today, we look at strengths and weaknesses….

Creating Talking Points for Nonprofits

A big part of an organization’s communication with the world at large is the ability to have clear, concise messaging. As a nonprofit, that messaging is your verbal advertisement, information source and selling point. It is important that everyone – from board members to staff – be able to speak with one voice and keep…

Board Meeting Agendas & Board Packets

All board meetings need to have some kind of formal order provided through a board agenda. Often, these agendas become a basic template used year in and year out without much thought or notice. To have a truly effective handle on your organization and board meetings as a whole, more thought and care should be…

Board Meetings: Introduction

Today we launch into a new section in our Board Basics Training course. We are going to shift focus from documents and policies to what you need for the best possible board meetings. Board meetings are the most vital (and often time consuming) aspect of what it means to be a board member on an…