Years ago I attended an event with Thomas Friedman at the Alabama Theater, sponsored by the EDPA. It was a promotion for his book, Thank you for Being Late, a follow up to an earlier release called The World Is Flat. Both essentially are about many unprecedented factors, beginning with the introduction of iphones and artificial intelligence and ignited with social media, would fiercly change the speed at which everything across every industry would operate. There is much more in these books worth studying, but what stuck with me at the time was the revelation of what all this meant for my sector and if we would be able to harness this light-speed change for good.

When social media was still in its infancy in the 2010s, not everyone was enthused about using it and old guard print and broadcast were still where advertising dollars were being spent by businesses and nonprofits with the means to do so. However, non-profits were among the first to embrace the new technology for obvious reasons: it was free. A free means to communicate with our stakeholders, advertise events and opportunities to volunteer. It also became a powerful means of peer to peer fundraising, which is still how most individuals support their favorite causes.

Fast foward another 10 years and most of our free means of doing business is not free. Just about everything has been monetized and the way algorithms drive message distribution across all platforms is almost entirely controlled by back-end investments. And all this has happened so quickly, there are still large portions of the population who are unaware of how and why they receive certain messages and from whom they originated. There are also many of your stakeholders who will never see your posts.

The impact on nonprofits is and will be enormous as these high-speed ecosystem evolution trends continue. Examining one, but possibly the most important aspect of nonprofit operations: In just a few years, software budgets for non-profits have exploded as everything from Quickbooks to Microsoft Office and MailChimp to Eventbrite have become paid subscriptions rather than free to use or purchased and uploaded every three years or so. With hybrid and remote working options required to compete in a very tight workforce, expensive project/employee management software like Asana, Monday, and Salesforce are also adding to the financial burden. Nonprofits are having to redirect funds which would have been spent on recruiting and retaining staff to operations software in order to survive.

With changes like these happening at light speed every day, how do we approach things like strategic plans? How many of us went through an expensive, arduous strategic planning process in the early part of 2020? Has any year since been consistent enough to implement three or five year strategies?

My suggestion to non-profit Executives and Boards of Directors is to carefully consider what you need from strategic planning processes and be realistic about revisiting your plan annually. I would even consider them every six months. Organizations should look outward as often as they look inward for trends in giving (how people are giving, not just how much), political climates affecting services, and most importantly, how technologies are changing and how to adjust budgets, services, and expectations accordingly.

Last year, I was in an antique bookstore an saw a copy of The World Is Flat. And in that moment, appreciated the truth – and incredible irony – of this forward-thinking economic manifesto written only a decade or so ago, lingering among the works of philosophers and economists of the distant past on a dusty bookshelf. This is how quickly we move now. Make a committment to ensure your plans are keeping up.

Interested in consulting services catered to YOUR organization and its needs? Click here for an inquiry or email jhatchett@blindspotal.com.