Sustaining your nonprofit and furthering its mission is a communal effort. Plenty of people are involved in your nonprofit’s day-to-day activities, from staff members to beneficiaries to your top supporters. Because so many stakeholders matter to your organization, it’s crucial to include their voices in your strategic planning process.

Strategic planning is creating a detailed plan for your nonprofit’s future, which includes specific goals and steps you’ll take to further your mission in the next few years. It’s a highly beneficial process that will give your organization direction and align everyone on its top priorities.

Without the input of key stakeholders, however, you risk choosing unrealistic goals or missing impactful opportunities for growth. In this short guide, we’ll discuss exactly how to involve your most important stakeholders in strategic planning and several ways they can help.

1. Determine which stakeholders need to be involved in strategic planning.

First, think about who plays a major role in your organization and which groups should be involved in its strategic planning. Aside from leadership, who has valuable input into your nonprofit’s operations, program delivery, and development? Which groups are pivotal to successfully carrying out your mission?

According to Averill Solutions, your nonprofit should include the following key stakeholders in strategic planning:

Board members: Your board of directors makes all your nonprofit’s major decisions and has unique insight into your budget and long-term goals, making board members’ perspectives essential to strategic planning.
Staff members: Nonprofit staff teams are familiar with different aspects of your organization’s day-to-day operations, meaning they can offer details about how certain activities and initiatives are going and which might need more attention.
Major givers: Those who give major gifts to your nonprofit have a unique stake in your organization’s success since they provide much of your funding. Make sure you honor their opinions about your nonprofit’s future and assure them that their voices are heard.
Key community partners: Influential members of the community who interact with your nonprofit can offer broader perspectives on how your work impacts the community. These might include politicians, business owners, and other local leaders.
Your fundraising consultant: If your organization works with a professional consultant, it’s crucial to involve them in your strategic planning process from the beginning. They’ll bring years of industry expertise to the table and advice.

Depending on your needs and goals, you may also include stakeholders like your beneficiaries, corporate partners, sponsors, and long-time volunteers. Make determinations based on each group’s influence in your organization and the value of their diverse perspectives. For example, you might include an influential business leader along with a few beneficiaries your nonprofit has served for years.

2. Choose representatives from each group.

While it might be nice if every single one of your important stakeholders could be involved in strategic planning, it’s just not feasible. Instead, select a few people from each stakeholder segment to be present during in-depth planning discussions and represent the opinions of their groups.

Use your nonprofit’s CRM or supporter database to find prospects for your strategic planning team. Invite these individuals to be personally and actively involved in the strategic planning from start to finish. In your invitation, explain why you’re asking them to provide their opinion, why their voice is valuable, and what their role in the planning process would be.

Be sure to invite people with diverse perspectives to ensure your strategic planning team is truly representative of your stakeholder groups. For example, a staff member from your development team might provide input into your organization’s technology needs, while a leader in your local community can provide an outsider’s perspective and give suggestions for how your nonprofit can increase its community impact and reputation. Any groups that will be directly affected by your mission should be represented.

3. Provide additional engagement activities for stakeholders.

Other individual stakeholders who don’t have the time to be as intimately involved in the strategic planning process can (and should!) give their input as well—but in easier ways.

To encourage feedback, provide these individuals with several engagement optionsto participate in their own time. This way, anyone from your core groups of stakeholders can make their voices heard and feel involved in the process, potentially inspiring them to take a more active role in furthering your nonprofit’s long-term goals.

Plan several engagement opportunities that any stakeholder can participate in, such as:

Open-ended surveys
Individual interviews
Focus groups

In these surveys and discussions, ask stakeholders to chime in about your organization’s strengths, challenges, opportunities, and vulnerabilities. For instance, you might include a question like “How can we improve our fundraising activities to better engage our supporters and community partners?”

4. Incorporate stakeholder input into your strategic plan.

Once you’ve gathered plenty of stakeholder input, it’s time to take it into consideration and implement the suggestions that align with your mission and goals.

For example, say that several board members and a few highly involved major givers shared that they think your organization needs to build up its annual fundraising efforts to provide more sustainable funding. Based on this input, you might set a goal in your strategic plan to grow your annual fund by 15% in the next three years.

Or, maybe your staff members indicated that they could better support your nonprofit’s development and mission if they felt more engaged at work. In this case, you might explore resources like eCardWidget’s employee engagement guide to source ideas for boosting staff engagement and reducing burnout. After evaluating options, choose the ones that seem most impactful and include them as action steps in your strategic plan.

No matter what, be sure to keep your stakeholders in the loop. Let individual stakeholders know when you implement their ideas, and send periodic updates to all the stakeholders involved in the process on how strategic planning is going.

Involving stakeholders in strategic planning can feel overwhelming or even unnecessary, but rest assured that the efforts you take to solicit stakeholders’ input will pay off in the long run. By getting well-rounded opinions that represent the entirety of your organization’s sphere of influence, you’ll end up with a more informed, actionable strategic plan that can help your organization achieve its goals and desired impact.