Is Your Strategic Plan Actually Strategic? 5 Common Pitfalls Nonprofits Should Avoid

Summer marks the beginning of strategic planning season for many nonprofit organizations. But despite the good intentions, too often, the process is anything but strategic.

In our work with leaders across the nonprofit sector, we’ve seen five major gaps that can derail the planning process before it even starts. If you want your next plan to be clear, effective, and actually usable — here’s what to pay attention to:

1. Plan for Less

Many strategic plans read like extensive wish lists overly ambitious, jam-packed, and misaligned with an organization’s real capacity.

Planning to use 100% (or more) of your staff and resources is unrealistic, especially when you factor in turnover, onboarding timelines, and inevitable unknowns. Instead, aim to plan around 65–80% of your team’s capacity, leaving space to adapt, adjust, and respond as things evolve.

2. Make Tradeoffs

Strategy is just as much about what you don’t do as it is about what you do. Trying to do everything at once not only dilutes your impact, but it also makes it harder to measure what’s working.

Effective planning involves making tough, intentional tradeoffs — and committing to them. That’s how real clarity and focused progress are made.

3. Align Your Plan and Your Budget

Here’s a hard truth: if your strategy and your budget don’t align, the budget will win out every time.

Strategic priorities should drive budgeting decisions — not the other way around. When these processes are siloed, your “strategy” ends up collecting dust, and your budget becomes the real operational plan (whether you meant for that to happen or not).

4. Make It Make Sense (for Everyone)

Your strategic plan isn’t a one-size-fits-all document and it shouldn’t be. Your board, staff, volunteers, donors, and community partners all need to understand your vision, but they don’t all need the same level of detail or delivery method.

Create a unified strategic narrative that can be adapted for different audiences. Pair that narrative with the right visuals, data points, and messages that resonate with each group.

5. Ask What You Really Need

Sometimes, leaders come to us looking for a strategic plan but what they actually need is something else entirely. Maybe it's a better operational model, an updated theory of change, or executive coaching to support alignment at the top.

Before you jump into planning, pause and ask: What’s really needed right now? Talk with trusted peers, partners, or advisors. You might discover a different path that’s a better fit for your current moment.

This list isn’t exhaustive, but it captures a few essentials we see overlooked time and again. The most effective strategic plans are the ones that stay grounded in real capacity, real clarity, and real choice.

💬 Want to join the conversation?
👉 Click here to comment on the original LinkedIn post.