 Well thank you, thanks to all of you that have joined us for today's episode. I'm really excited to get us started. So just as we start every episode of the non-profit show, we like to extend our deepest gratitude and appreciation to our sponsors. You can see their logos right in front of you on the screen. So many of them, Julia, I believe, as I'm looking at these have been with us for about a year now. So we're so grateful, appreciative. These companies, these sponsors, they are here to support you to lift and elevate your causes across the nation. But if you take a look, one might look a little bit more familiar to you today. Mission Met joins us and I'm thrilled to have Eric Ryan on today's show. So we're going to talk a little bit more with Eric here shortly. Julia Patrick joins us as she does every episode. Julia is the CEO of the American Non-profit Academy and I'm Jared Ransom, so proud to serve alongside you Julia. I'm also a CEO of the Raven Group, also known as the Non-profit Nerd. So now it's time for me to reintroduce because Eric, you've been on our show before and we are so grateful also to have Mission Met as a sponsor. But you're talking to us again today about strategic planning. And I believe, as we said, there was another episode on this. And so we're going to dive a little bit deeper today. So welcome back. Thank you. I always get freaked out when I see that photo now because I've got my beard going. Partially COVID, partially campy, but it's staying. So great to see you. Love working with you guys. This is going to be fun. Thank you. Well, you know, we, this is the second of a series and we don't often do a serialized kind of programming, but we were so taken aback when we first met you now almost a year ago with your whole theory about strategic planning on so many levels. And when we continue to talk to you, we were always just like, wow. And one of the things that you said to us was there are strategic planning killers. There's things that just, you know, you hit a wall. And so we thought, let's go ahead and drill down a little bit. So for those of you watching live or watching the archive, you will know that this is the second of a series and you can jump in or jump out. You can find those archives on Roku, Amazon Fire TV, our Vimeo channel, our site with the American Nonprofit Academy, as well as the nonprofitshow.com. And then Mission Met also has these on their site. So I encourage you, if you've missed Killers 1 or 2 to join us. But Killer Number 3, I think this is like Killer Number 1 for me, Eric. Well, what is it? Plans often are unnecessarily way too long and complex. You tell me more, Julie, like problem number one for you. Well, you know why I think that this is why this resonated with me, Eric, is that I've been through so many of these. It was where I've been sitting there around the table, gone to the hotel, gone to the office room, whatever. And it's such an easy way to check out mentally. You got so much going on and you're just like, oh my gosh, come on. Not to mention the snacks they have, which are usually high sugar. Yeah, exactly. And you're kind of trying to get everybody off their technology. And it just seems like then I think the reality of it is, Eric, that these complex things go into a book or a planning document and they literally collect dust in somebody's office. Right. And that's why we have it highlighted here is the third item. As you know from either the last show or our conversations we've had that at Mission Met, we are especially focused on those organizations that are fairly small. So two or three million and under, we work with larger organizations. But a lot of our ideas in these Killers are for those organizations that don't have the good capacity developed around their strategic planning process. And what happens sometimes, my best slash worst story around this is, it was 2009, so it was 12 years ago now. It's crazy, 12 years ago. And I came across a 40 page strategic, 41 page strategic plan. It varies. Sometimes it's 42, but it's between 40 and 42 pages. It's long for this organization. Drop dead gorgeous plan, spiral bound, beautiful photos, really important mission for this organization. But this 42 page strategic plan, I think had 11 different strategic sections, had 70 people on the back of appendices that were engaged in the process. And this is for a $25,000 organization with one very, very part time staff member. And what's the tragedy of this? What's that? I was saying, and this executive director is overworked, overstressed, I didn't know. No, the tragedy of this is that they have an incredibly important mission. And I've tracked that organization over time, and they haven't gone anywhere. And I think part of that is as the organization was just completely overwhelmed. I'm sure they did bits and pieces of that, but it was just, it was entirely overkill for this particular organization. And so to your point, Jared, like, you know, the leaders of our organizations are busy. They care passionately. They want to make the world a better place in the particular way that they're working. And a strategic plan when it's that large and that cumbersome created in partnership with consultants like us, or facilitators that are very well-meaning and board members that are very well-meaning. Sometimes they bring models that are entirely out of whack with the reality of running an organization that has, you know, an overwhelmed staff and so on. So it's a killer. And if you have that overwhelming plan, you're not going to want it. It feels crappy, frankly, to pause and reflect because every time you sit down and look at it, it's just, it's demoralizing. And so that can kill the overall effort of using the plan. And it can hurt your leadership. It can hurt the board's leadership because you dragged everybody through this process and now nothing's happening. And you just wasted, you know, a lot of money and time. So it's a killer. You feel defeated. I was going to say, I wonder how much of that era comes from maybe an outside consultant that wants this pretty polished, finalized, you know, bound document to say, look what I did. And I don't know that that's really doing the organization justice. Right. Right. And in this case, that particular case, the process was led by a couple of consultants that I suspect are very good. And their core clients, hell, were municipalities, were, you know, big, were cities. And so in a city, I mean, I've been involved in one of those processes, we're interviewing hundreds of people, and we're engaged for a long period. I mean, and you need that approach when you're really trying to get the input of the citizenry around some sort of planning process like that. But just like there's the New York Yankees, there's also the kids baseball team that I coach. They're both strategic planning. They're both baseball, but they're entirely different games. And the game of strategic planning you want for your organization, you want to have the right fit. You know, I love that you use the word model. Because I think that's, if you, if you think about this as opposed to complaining that the plan is too long and too complex, understanding that there are different ways to do this and what is going to work for that size of your organization. Right. Because we hear strategic planning, and I think we all just think, oh, it's, it's pretty much all the same. And if you are a $50 million organization or you're $50,000, you're going out the same way. No, no, no, I mean, you're a baseball player for the Yankees, you've got seven, you know, hired consultants and trainers that are following you around for your, you know, whatever million dollar, you know, my son doesn't have that on his team. Let me just be clear on his baseball team, but he's still out there playing baseball. And it's perfect. It's exactly what it should be. So the strategic planning that you want to do for your organization ideally is the right fit. And, you know, I have a colleague slash friend of mine, and there's an article on our website, on our blog about it. He said, he called us the best strategic plan ever. He, what he was referring to, he wrote an article about it. And actually on, if toward the end here, when we, when we give people the link, the article is referenced on our website. So people will be able to get access to that. But he said it's called one of the best strategic plans ever. And it was for a $10 million association, a trade association that was really well thought of by their members. They get high marks. Everybody thinks they're doing great and everything. And he says their strategic plan was two pages, $10 million organization. He said on the first page, he says, this organization said here are the three basic things we're going to do over the course of this next year. Here's, who's going to do it? Here's our due dates and everything. And you flip the page over and it says, if we get that stuff done, then we're going to do this stuff on page two. Love it. It's a little easier, quite frankly. I mean, it doesn't, I have a slightly more sophisticated version of a plan and we'll talk about that here in a few moments. But it's, but the concept's the same. Simple, practical, useful. And, you know, many consultants all around are, have been zeroing in on, on plans that are much more tactical, practical, because the world's changing so fast. And so you need something simple that your, your team that has a lot on their plate can really, you know, use. And you want this to be useful. So in any event, that was for a $10 million nonprofit. And he's, he's really well thought of as an association executive. He says, this, this thing works beautifully. And we, we get a ton done. So in any event, this, this concept of, of, of plans that, you know, when I was, when I was first getting involved in the nonprofit space or the planning space, you know, over a couple of decades ago, I came across a colleague and he told me about their 50 year plan at IBM that they had created back in the early 70s. And that's 50 year old model. It's gone. You know, 50. Yeah. So anyhow. Wow. Yeah. It's a killer. People, people need to really reassess and try to figure out what's the right size and level of complexity they need in their plan. And so part of that for your solution, you're saying get a two section, one page plan. And I love what you're saying because I think if we've learned anything in this last 12 months, we've learned that we do have to be more nimble. And we do have to look forward. We have to plan out. But the reality is, and Jared and I have said this so often, no last year, we saw two responses. We saw people that were like, hit the pause, we'll come back when this is all over. Right. And then the others were like, hell no, we're leaning in and we're figuring out what we need to do. Right. Big difference. Absolutely. Absolutely. And, and, and what you just said relates back to our first video, our first in the series, because we said a killer was when people view strategic planning as an event. Right. And instead you need to view strategic planning as an ongoing process. That second example you just gave, Julie, was an organization says, we're planning, we're figuring, we're measuring your track and we've got this muscle. This is how we operate. It's not just a once every three year event, whatever. And those are the ones that I've seen succeed. Go get through this. They were planning and revising and everything. And that's what we all really want. Now on the screen, you know, you've got this slide here about this one section, two section one page plan. I'll just give you a highlight of what that model is. And again, at the end, you can go to our website and get the actual model and so on. But our two sections, section one, we call our compass and section two, we call our actions. Really, really simple model. Section one, our compass. As a compass would it gives you direction. It's relatively unchanging. It helps you with your true north. What lives in the compass in that section one of your plan, mission statement, pretty much always. Vision statement can, if you have a vision statement, I think of mission and vision as being, you know, they work together anyhow, the mission statement vision, you could have values, you could have some key metrics that say there's three or four key metrics that are relatively unchanging from year to year that you want to measure. That's the type of thing that could live in there. And any of it, the compass is something that's relatively unchanging. Section one of your plan that gives you long term direction. As a compass does the action section, our actions are where your goals live. Now, in our particular model, we have that section broken up into what we call focus areas like fund development, board development programs, staffing, whatever you have of those particular areas. And then within each of those areas, those focus areas, you have goals. And then you can further break that down into action items. I'm kind of getting into the weeds, but the point is in this section to our actions is a very practical term. It's not very, you know, Jared and I, we can't talk consulting ease with these folks, you know, with people like it's just their actions. And it's great. This is what we're doing to take us in the direction of where our compass is pointing, we should go. And so those two sections of the plan really work nicely together. And it's really easy to understand and communicate to your team. Ideally, you get it focused to where you could land on a play page. Maybe it's two pages. Maybe you break the rule and you go to two pages, but it's not seven, it's not 40. You know, if you can get, if you can get that on a, on a couple of pages, great. And continue to refine that to, you know, more and more focused is, is awesome. Wow. And think about how when you go to meet with a funder or an investor, or you're going to cultivate new donors, new board members to have that document it's almost like a fancy brochure, if you will. I mean, I would say if you came to me with that information, I would think a lot more highly of your organization. Well, absolutely. And to, to the point that they made earlier about that one article that was written about the best strategic plan ever, not only do you have the compass and you have the action section within the actions, you have people responsible, you have due dates, etc. I mean, we can get into the details of that, but it's living, breathing, those goals. We don't ask someone to take like a three-year plan and create three-year goals. We want them to have a long-term vision around their compass, you know, their compass section. And then shorter term, one-year goals, several months, that's where people, and then you review and revise that in the pursuit of that longer vision. And what we found over the years, Julie and Jared, is that model is a great fit. We're not doing this because we think it's cool. We're doing it because we've found that it works with our, the organizations we work with, you know, people come back to us over and over again because they know this actually is strategic. I mean, what's a strategic plan after all? We have an idea of where we want to go. We're here right now and we have a plan that bridges that gap between where we are and where we want to go. That's it. It's as simple as that. And that's what this document does. It takes you in that direction that you want to go in and you have goals and things laid out. And I've seen a lot over my 20 years of my career, Eric, and I will say by far, hands down, Mission Met has really simplified this for the greater impact, right? Like it's not just simplified and, oh, well, that was easy. It's simplified with the impact in mind of where is it that we're going and how do we use this, right? And so that's what I've enjoyed. And I, so yes, I am a user of Mission Met and absolutely love it. It has been so advantageous for me and my clients when I work with them on their strategic planning process. And you're referencing the software specifically? The software specifically, yes. And then the orb, I would really, I still want to get my hands on it. I've been playing with it here this whole time. So I put it back together again, you know, this little, and this was a something that was part of our, our first, it's kind of coming in and out, Eric. Yes. This little wooden model, and we did this in our first video, but this comes apart. So the idea here is this is a strategic planning orb as we now call it on the nonprofit show. I love it. This represents planning. Yeah, it's really hard the way it's coming in with the thing. There we go. This represents planning that represents execution and the ideas you wanted to work together. Work together. The first show, we go into that more depth. I'm glad to know that. Oh, I will never forget it. Talk to us about this other fourth killer, right? Not following through. And I love the image that Julie has put up for us here. Was I supposed to do that? Or are you supposed to do that? Who owns this? Right. Well, and not only another question you say, I didn't know we had to do that. I forgot. Right. So we did that. So there's a whole slew of these things. So the title of this is a little bit of a finger pointing, like not following through, like where you're not following through. And that's not really the, it's related to the topic here, but it's not really the intent. And in the nonprofit space, we care so much. We're so committed to making a difference. We're working long hours to try to support our organization and so on. And it can be that the strategies we've worked on and that we believe in, they start to sit by the side because we have other things that we feel like are more urgent or frankly, things that we'd rather work on. Let's say we've got a background in programs. And we want to keep working on that. And some of these strategic things that are more long term, they aren't as urgent, but they're super important. They fall through the cracks. And that's so normal. But that is a killer. We've never seen strategic planning work unless there was at least one and then the solution that I'll reference here in a moment or two, people that work together to ensure that the overall strategic planning process works effectively. And so this is the reality. And so from the very, very beginning of your strategic planning process, we want you to address this, which is to ideally select two people on your team that you will consider co-champions of not just creating the plan, but that will oversee and ensure that the plan over time is going to get executed. And the beauty of having two co-champions, I mean, think of this. Well, look at the two of you. I mean, I guarantee you, if you two weren't hanging out doing the nonprofit show, this would have died, you know, a terrible death 11 and a half months ago. Because you need both of you. Day three, probably. Okay. Yeah, exactly. It's got to be both of you. Like the two of you are doing a big lift and you lean on each other. And it's a heck of a lot more fun. And you get more, you know, it's just so much better. It's a better model. And so for strategic planning, which is one of those things that can easily slip through the cracks, because you've got all these things going on, having a co-champion creates accountability. It's just like having an exercise, buddy. If Joe, if I'm getting together at 6am with Joe, and I don't show up for Joe at 6am, Joe is not happy. So I don't want Joe to be unhappy with me. So I better show up. And you, so you have that sort of mutual accountability. It's a lot more fun, et cetera. So a key tip, and this is such a basic one, but the length of the lever for this one, the length of impact of having a co-partner, a co-champion here is so valuable. We often think it should be the executive director, and oftentimes an administrative-oriented person, if you have that staffing available to you. An administrative person can sort of carry the bucket around the management of it, and the executive director is more of the leader. Sometimes we see board members and the executive director work together, not always, but in any event, it varies from organization to organization, but the constant benefit of having two people. From the beginning, from the very first day, Jared, you and I have the conversation with them, say, who's going to be able to co-lead this? Because if you can get that dialed in, all this other stuff becomes much more feasible. Right. And so are you thinking that it is, those co-champions are of the entire strategic plan, not just in terms of breaking it down? I mean, would you break it down further? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And in fact, sometimes we even work with maybe four or five people on the plan creation process, but those two people that are the co-champions are going to see it over the next several years, ideally. That's the fantasy, assuming that they would stay on for that period of time. To your point, though, Julia, once you start getting, yeah, those are two overall, we call them the overall co-champions. As you start to break down into section two of the plan that we referenced earlier, the action section, you could have champions of different sections of that, too. And we do, in fact, have champions of focus areas and champions of goals, which gives it even more muscle. But this particular item is referencing the overall piece that you, and you could have co-champions of goals and things, too, the smaller parts. But this is really referencing, we need a leader of the overall process that all of us on our team, our board, we know, you know, Julie and Jared are responsible for making sure that we at our organization are kicking butt on strategic planning. And I've just never seen it work without that. I've seen it work occasionally with one person because they're just really dialed in, but I've always seen it work much, much more effectively with two. Well, in that way, it really helps to make sure that the strategy is worked, right? And that it doesn't become a paperweight or it doesn't become something on the shelf or on your desktop. It's really something that is brought up in conversation. There's accountability. And so I do like that, that co-champion. Yeah. And then we'll talk more about that in the next video around how to make that even more real. I love it. I'm so impressed. You know, I think that sometimes Eric and you and I talked about this off-camera, but sometimes we can become so overly sophisticated that we make things so much more complicated than they need to be. And by virtue of doing that, then we lose buy-in because it's, to your very first point, it's overwhelming. Yeah. There's a famous quote called simplicity is the ultimate in sophistication. Simplicity is the ultimate in sophistication. And I think that's a Renaissance quote that then Steve Jobs used at Apple and so on. But in any event, it's, you know, when I first came across that, I said bingo. That's what we're after here. And simple is hard. What did Mark Twain say? He said that I would have written you a short letter, except I didn't have enough time. I was going to say, please tell me that other quote that you also reference because that's a good one. Yeah. Yeah. So it's hard, but that's what you want your team when you have all these different distractions. We're focused on these three priorities for this year. These are big lifts that don't get distracted. We can capture that on a stinking page or two. We don't need to do everything. You know, this is anyhow. Yeah. I love it. I love it. Well, it's been, it's always something that the time flies by when we are with you. Oh, I know. I could talk about this for hours. Yeah. Because it's so it just, it's such an important part, Eric. And I know I'm preaching to the choir here, but it's such an important part of the success of our nonprofits. And if you think that we have 1.8 million, you know, nonprofits registered in the U.S., we have about 11 million people that work, that work for a nonprofit that are getting paid. It's just devastating to think that they can't navigate things properly when they don't have the right tools or they don't even have the right framework. Right. So strategic planning, man. Yeah. And doing it right, like doing it the right fit. That's my that's such a principal argument, like having the right fit for doing that at your organization. I think that's where people get turned off is sometimes it's the wrong fit that gets presented to them. And that's not realistic for their organization. I love that. I think that's amazing. Well, Eric mentioned this in the beginning. If you go to missionmet.com and look for the nonprofit show, you'll see they've taken a whole page and dedicated it to this series. So you'll be able to rewatch these these episodes and share that with board members or team members and your staff. But you also have some great articles. You have some really interesting thought provoking approaches that to me, Eric, when I look at them, they're very achievable. You know, they're very I can like, oh, yeah, I can see this. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I mean, our whole mission is a business is to help make strategic planning easier and more effective for nonprofits, easier, more effective. You've done a great job. So if you haven't checked out these resources, do check out missionmet.com, their entire website and then backslash the nonprofit show. And you will find not only the series that we're talking to you about right now, but Eric was on as a previous guest in addition to this series. And that is up on the website as well. So that's something that you'll want to check out. Yeah, absolutely. Just amazing. Well, again, this just speaks to the heart of so many successful stories that we have in our country when it comes to the nonprofit sector. And part of that are all these supporting sponsors that really are behind us and who are the reason that we are here. So we want to definitely show our gratitude and express our overwhelming. I just think support is the only thing. And so we want to make sure that everybody here is recognized. Amazing, amazing information. Jared Ransom, the nonprofit nerd. I know you're using this system. Yes. And so that's really, that's really exciting. And I'm really appreciative to get your feedback on this as well. Without our missions and understanding our causes, we can't move forward. And I think what makes this country great, because we do have such a robust nonprofit sector. And so it's really exciting, Eric, that that you're part of that mission and going forward with that. Hey, another great episode. We're so excited that you could join us today. Check out Eric's amazing information on the Mission Met website. And we have you back for a third segment. We have two more strategic planning killers that you won't want to miss because it'll really give you even more of a picture of how you can navigate this very, very important aspect of leading and working with a nonprofit. Again, I'm Julia Patrick. I've been joined by the nonprofit nerd herself, Jared Ransom. And we want to leave you today as we do every day, reminding you to stay well so you can do well. Thanks so much, everybody. Thanks, Eric.