 Let's get started because we have a lot to talk about. I mean, if you joined us a little a little bit early, you heard me chit chatting with Carol poor, president of poor and associate strategic planning. Carol has a new book out. I'm super excited to get into it and really talk about this. But before we get going, we definitely want to thank all of our sponsors without you. We would not be here with Dr. We're having yet another great discussion and strategic planning is where it's at for so many of our nonprofits. So thank you from the bottom of my heart and the bottom of Jared's heart for supporting the nonprofit show. Again, I'm Julia Patrick, CEO of the American nonprofit Academy. I have not been joined today by my co host, Jared ransom. She's traveling today and she'll be joining us shortly as we move forward. Okay, Carol poor. I've known you for a couple years now sister. Yes, yes, we have. And both of us have had very interesting career journeys leading us to the point that we are here today. It's really, you know, when we first chatted about this book, I remember it was several years ago. You had just sent out a pitch. It had been accepted. It was so exciting. And you were really on this journey of getting your thoughts down, presenting this new way of looking at something that is kind of an old concept. And so it's so exciting. Here's the copy of Carol's book strategic impact, a leader three step framework for the customized vital strategic plan, and published by fast company press. Yeah, very impressive. Very impressive my friend. Okay, I got to start with the beginning question because no one I've never heard anyone access or present this concept as you have. Tell us about the difference between strategic and strategy. Right well strategic and strategic planning means that we're looking out to the future. We're not just concerned about the year ahead but we're concerned about the next two or three years. And for some organizations like the pharmaceutical industry for example maybe it's a 18 to 24 month horizon where another company might be three to four years but so much change happens. I like to say roughly three years out. Because being strategic means looking into the future examining the trends, analyzing how what these external factors and the internal factors mean to our organization, and then making plans making strategic goals that span longer than just the year ahead. Another strategy on the other hand is, once you have the strategic goals. It's a matter now of just deciding choices. How are we going to get to those goals for example, a nonprofit might have a revenue goal, but there may be several ways to get at that revenue goal after a pandemic. Maybe, maybe in the arts for example, an arts nonprofit might have a revenue goal, but then make a strategic strategy choice to offer two for one tickets to have people come in and invite their friend for at no cost for maybe a period of a month just to prime the pump to get these back going after the pandemic. That's a choice that leads to the overarching strata strategic goal of revenue. So I hope that helps to differentiate. You know, and that to me is like a mindset issue Carol, and maybe for those of you watching, you know I almost when I saw this in your book. I almost thought this is the beginning of the conversation that if you could frame this notion up to those people in that room, right, the board members executive team C sweet whatever it is. Think how differently that strategic plan is going to look. It changes. It changes the way you approach these discussions and you and I have been in enough of these conversations to know they can get really die to see because you don't have a lot of time, and you're trying to cram everything down. You talk about the three step strategic strategic planning framework, and that I think is, again, it's, you've got the mindset but now you've got a structure talk to us about that. Absolutely. And just to build on what you said about the importance of being strategic, I think in the nonprofit world and I spent many years, helping nonprofits with strategic planning as as I do today. As well as serving as a CEO in the nonprofit world and I think one of the mistakes is thinking that I've got so much on my plate today I don't have the time to look ahead into the future. And I think what we're talking about here is creating an opportunity not just for the push of the future but the pull of the future creating creating your future, not just being a victim to the external environment and all of the pressures that we do see in our external world around us. So the three step framework is this. I truly believe that a strategic planning program needs to be vital and what I mean by vital is life giving for the organization and life changing believe it or not for the participants. Now, whoever thought that strategic planning and being involved in a strategic planning program could be life changing. But when you bring together great minds, including your board of directors, your top leadership team, maybe some other up leaders in your organization you want to mentor that can be such an engaging experience. So the three step framework is this. First and foremost the strategic planning workshop, or series of meetings to get the people together get the great minds to look at the external and internal trends to develop those strategic goals together. And I call that the shared experience. Second, the second part of the framework is the written strategic plan, and I call that the shared story. Now in the old days, many organizations and I came from a corporate environment where the strategic plan was kind of a large document. It might have been a shelf ornament or a doorstop, because nobody ever saw it outside of the executive team, right. So the written strategic plan today can be that shared story and digitized and put out on social media and all sorts of other things we'll talk about later. So I call that the shared story. And then the third part of the framework is actually two pieces put together the system for tracking results or those strategic goals so a tracking system, and communicating the results, both internally within the organization, so that we have cause for celebration, and externally to the, the, the public's that we want to reach. So I call that the shared outcomes. So we've got the shared experience the workshop, the shared story the written plan, and the shared outcomes the system for tracking and communicating results and that is my framework. I love that because when, when I first took a look at this in your book, I realized that it makes you accountable for working the plan, because I've been on, and you know this, we've shared this. I've been on too many boards or we did all this work we got all frost up. And then to your point that plan just sat somewhere, and it was like, who, and then it makes you hate the process for the next time, or for the next organization. So never see it fulfilled, you know. So I love this because for me that you know you get what you measure type of concept it puts a full force in front of everyone. And I think it also helps you to figure out where to course correct, and so that you're not just chasing the next shiny thing. So let me ask you about this because I thought this was another interesting aspect that you talk about the four key pillars of any organization. Let, let us understand how you came up with this and how this impacts what it is that we want to achieve. That's a great question Julia and it comes from my many years of working with a great variety of organizations from nonprofits to corporate to trade associations to government. There's a little exercise called brain brainstorm and bucket, and I keep asking the question what must we do to succeed on to in the future over the horizon, and I keep asking that question and it comes after taking a look of at the external department and understanding what's going on maybe having some a panel of experts that come in to talk about the topic of the organization. It could be after a number of different team exercises, but I asked this question, and I don't stop asking it until there are no responses. Can you feed those back on little sticky notes and you asked them to group them on the wall. According to the topic just start sorting these ideas that you had. Guess what they always always filter out into these four buckets and here are the four pillars. First, it's all organizations have programs products and services. So we know that we've got to offer programs products and services if we are a nonprofit. The second is financial wellness. So financial is the second pillar. The third is operational effectiveness. We have to have internal processes such as our billing, or our donor thank you process. Our human resources the internal processes. So I call that operational effectiveness and the fourth pillar is external outreach. That means communication, marketing and branding. And I find that many organizations use a program and it's a great program is called the balance scorecard and they have their four things right so you out there may be familiar with balance scorecard. But I want to suggest that the balance scorecard misses one very fundamental thing that always comes up in my workshop and it's the external outreach. There is no explicit piece of the balance scorecard that talks about the external outreach and for nonprofits especially that is a critical pillar. So those four pillars form the basis for developing strategic goals, three year goals for each of those pillars. You know, it's so interesting. We have a viewer from the Middle East to just ask a question and I'm going to reframe it a little bit, because it his question is all about the marketing aspect of this, and I agree with you when I look at nonprofits. They fall down on marketing in general. So I would imagine this fourth pillar is going to be somewhat of a challenge for some of them because they might not have outreach or marketing budgets. They might not have a developed team. I mean, it could seem a little perilous, but yet I believe if you don't have this, those other three pillars are just going to fall. Absolutely and I really want to turn this on its head Julia because you could be the CEO or an executive director of a small nonprofit with very little funds to go out and pay for advertising or marketing. The leader itself and the people on that leadership team, if they are externally oriented and not everybody's externally oriented, come on, there are people that really need to focus on the internal operational effectiveness. I remember when I was the CEO of a nonprofit health organization. I was offering my thought leadership to the state's major newspaper and we had two amazing op-ed pieces that were top of the fold in newspapers during my tenure there. That was never the case with this organization before but I personally was externally oriented. I do have a background in media that that certainly helps right. But the idea that you don't have to have a huge budget in order to target who you want to reach and then begin setting up meetings with these people or getting your thought leadership out. That's all about external communication as well. And I think that leads into the next thing I want to chat with you about and that's creating community and board buy-in. Because it seems to me that if your board members are seeing those op-ed pieces that you just talked about, investors, funders, even people that might have influence over municipal grants. That's going to impact their decisions. Absolutely. And I really want to turn this one on its head as well. I think that the shared experience, the workshop series or the series of meetings, if you're a larger organization, you might not be drawing people together for a day or two. It might take a series of meetings and during the virtual environment on Zoom, I really shortened those workshop sessions to an hour and a half with some of my nonprofits. And it would be a series of meetings that would be very scheduled so that we wouldn't lose the traction. The idea of community building through the workshop experience itself means that you should be including your board of directors. You could be including other community leaders. You want to bring in just for certain parts of your process. So this idea of community building has to start within the organization. Because in the old days, organizations just got a few people together in a room and they decided what the strategic direction was going to be. And then they wash their hands and nobody ever heard anything more about it. Today, people want to know what they're aligning with, especially this up and coming generation, the new generations of leaders, they want to align with causes they can believe in. And so for the nonprofit world, that means it would be best to have a participative process so that you can engage your employees, you can engage your board members. And believe me, you may have some skeptical board members that say, I don't have the time for this or I can't come I've got other meetings until halfway through the workshop. No, no, no, those people will miss important strategy conversations, maybe the opportunity to get to know some of their colleagues that they didn't really know before and that creates bonding and participation and engagement. So I say that engagement starts within, and that includes the board of directors. And then once you have that plan, find ways again to communicate to the public, whether it's putting it in a strategic direction high level summary putting it on your website. Influencers help you get the word out. So those are just a few little ideas to sprinkle in there that I also addressed in my book. You know, I think one of the things that's so prophetic about your book is that I know you wrote this pre pandemic. But what I have been charmed with or charmed by is that it's, it's almost like you knew this was coming, and that our work styles would be changed, because, and even to the point I give you a lot of credit for understanding how in a new society, we are looking at information and alignments in a more strategic way. And so I love what you just said because I can even see this factoring into HR, you know, where people are looking at what type of organization do they want to be a part of or do they want to grow with. What are those alignments that they can make. And I think this builds future leaders, you know it might be a little stressful for some of your older board members but I think what you've done here Carol is really give us a path to becoming you know more inclusionary so yay team. Now I want to it's hard to believe in our last, our last time together and I warned you this goes fast. But I want to talk to you about the notion of impacting participants that are maybe not in the nonprofit, or that you serve but they don't necessarily have a voice, and it seems to me. We're not doing a very good job of working with our, our actual participants. Well I think one of the keys and this goes back to the inclusion and participation of constituents is inviting them into the process, whether it is having a session and listening session, where you're inviting your constituents and others that are not necessarily directly involved with the nonprofit but they are part of your constituent base, or they're underserved and they don't have necessarily a day to day voice in the operations but they are somehow connected to the nonprofit. So I invite these colleagues in and have a series of dialogue, discussion points or questions that you'd like to, to, to vet, and get that inclusion. That's my first and number one thought with this question. Just fundamentally people need to know why I wrote this book. I wrote this book because there are so many other strategic planning theory books that were very difficult to understand. I mean they're great books based on strategic planning, you know, academic theories and this kind of thing but a nonprofit can't pick up a book like that and understand what a thorough framework where you're not leaving anything out what it looks like. And so this is a very easy to understand model but it's not a templatized model, you could never templatize strategic planning because strategic planning needs to be really customized, customized to fit the organization. And so with this idea of drawing in participants from outside of the nonprofit, this is one way to customize your process. Whoever those constituents are that you might not be listening to, figure out a way to bring them in through that process and keep them engaged after the process. Now let me ask you this, when you know and you and I know truth to power is a really tough thing to get beyond. Do you see that this type of process is best done with an outside facilitator, like a focus group kind of concept where you have an intermediary. What, what's your experience look like for if we're trying to set this process up ourselves. Well that's a great question and I think that it's very contextual so it depends on the organization and the organization's resources, but the reason I wrote this book was to empower those within an organization to be able to facilitate their own if they need to and we know there are so many nonprofits. They don't have an extra $5000 or whatever it might take $10,000 or more to draw in a facilitator or a consultant to help them shape the program. With this framework somebody can can go in and shape their workshop, figure out what the written plans going to look like and I have a table of contents that again you're not templatizing it necessarily but it's a framework where you're not starting from scratch. And then the idea of ideas of ongoing communication and how to track the plan. I even have a grid a basic tracking grid. Even though there are these cloud based tools. So I, my hope is that nonprofit leaders can look at this and then they can decide, well we could really benefit from a facilitator to come in and facilitate parts of the conversation but here's the basic framework. I have seen too many consultants and there are some good consultants out there so please I'm one of them, but I know that Carol, but I have seen consulting organizations come in and they charge six figure stipends for corporate situations for example, and they come in and they put a wizard behind the curtain, no one really knows what's going on, and there's no tangible result and I've heard that time and time again, which really compelled me to put everything I know about good strategic planning into a book that can actually be used by organizations including smaller nonprofits. Yeah, and I love that and one of the things that I'm so, I just love your book, I really, really do I mean I think it's just so masterful, but I also think that in the name of your book is that magic word impact. And this is the thing that we need to be looking at and so for me, when I go through your book and I look, and I keep that word impact, you know, front and center. I see how this does help us drill down to what is it that we're trying to do. Absolutely. And I'll just say this briefly, and that is the tracking system can be simple and focused on those four pillars and the strategic goals and then strategic goals get annualized they get annualized what are we going to get done in the next 12 months. But my recommendation is that a leader gets together with their top senior team, your executives, and you go through that as a team. Once a month, at least you go through your tracking grid, and then you report back to your board at least once a quarter with an annual summary of what we got done the first year. And that carries over to the next year, and you can make tweaks in the plan. And there's I really get into this in the book but the tracking part of it needs to be systemized so that it's doable for the leader, and it's accountable to the board, because that really protects the organization, it shows the board where we're going and it creates alignment around where we're going. Yeah, and I love that you talked about that because I think especially right now, with dealing with this pandemic, talking about a recovery rebound, whatever words you want to use. You know, we're still at the core dealing with what our original mission problem was what we identified. So how we took that strategy might have changed. But to your point, what is the impact and how are we measuring it. Wow, I'm so, I'm so proud of you Carol. I love love love this book. I've got to say, you know, if you're the magic of how you approach this topic is that you've come from the corporate world you've come from the corporate world you've looked at nonprofit leadership in the from the inside from the outside I mean it is really a masterful journey that you've been able to apply to this concept. So, Bravo. Well, thank you, Julian if I could be a resource to any of your listeners, the book is available worldwide online, and people can find more strategic planning resources connected to strategic impact on my website Carol poor dot com. Right so here's Carol's contact information. I also want to you talked about this right at the beginning in our shitty chat chat. But I want to have you explain about your Friday need ups because I think this could be a really cool thing for a lot of our viewers to talk briefly about that Carol. Well thanks for asking and, and I found that strategic planning consultant best practice sharing is very rare. There's one organization I can't say speak highly enough about the Association for strategic planning which I'm a member of and by the way the book is endorsed by that is a global organization the only one associated with strategic planning. But I decided to do weekly meetups on Friday at 11am PT and Arizona time. And the zoom information is on my website, where anyone interested in strategic planning and we have a global audience now can come, and we have a weekly topic for 20 minutes 30 minutes and we open it up. We blow it open to share and compare questions, experiences, and then we, we cut it at a tight hour or less if we're done with the conversation. So I invite any of your viewers that want to join us for strategic impact Friday to jump on in. And these are recorded programs that are also posted on my website. Great. I love it because you know it is a journey. And I think that's like one of the things a great, what a great resource to have a community that you could kind of get some support, as you move through, because that's one of the other things I like about your, your whole approach is that a lot of the, the strategic planning process is such a beat down for the organization. It's, it's not always helpful I mean it creates unhappiness and so you know division and so understanding how you can do it and make it work better is I think such a magical thing Carol. Absolutely. And I do want to say if there's enough time that one of my strongest pieces of advice that I mentioned in the book is that you should never start with your vision statement and your mission statement. Your group won't be prepared to just jump right in from the start, but after the external analysis and really strategy setting and goal setting. There's the appropriate time to revisit the mission and vision, if it needs to be changed at all. So I've seen brawls like you said earlier you know can be very stressful. There are brawls break out when it when vision and mission were brought up from the get go. And that would not be my approach, but I do think the importance of collegial sharing from a consultant's point of view that will be my strategic impact as a, as a leader and as a thought and author. I can't be in all places at once. No consultant can be. So the idea of trying to hold what I know tightly to the vest is, is not what I want. I want to share what I know, so that others can go out and replicate a vital vibrant strategic planning program in their organization. I love it. I'm, again, I'm so proud of you I think it's such a cool thing. So desperately needed in the nonprofit sector we have 1.8 million non registered nonprofits in this country. And there's not a one of them that cannot benefit from this approach in this mindset. So Carol Port, thank you, thank you ever so much. Here is the book strategic impact. I want everyone to know I'll put it in the frame. I want everyone to know that this is part of the American nonprofit Academy book club. You can go on to American nonprofit Academy calm and see it there, because it is just an amazing opportunity for everyone. Again, I'm Julia Patrick CEO of the American nonprofit Academy. I'm Julia, nonprofit nerd who serves me. My co host Jared ransom is going to be off for the next couple of days she'll be joining us next week. And so we look forward to finding out what she's been doing in the south. Again, we want to thank all of our presenting sponsors. Without you, we would not be here having this robust discussion today with Dr Carol poor. We also want to let everyone know that fundraising TV fundraising events dot TV. That is launched. So if you are involved in the process of putting on fundraising events. We like to say from ballrooms to Barnes from golf to gala's, we got you covered to check out fundraising events TV. Wow, Carol, you got me going for the day. I love this conversation. This book, I can't recommend it enough. And I think this is going to be the game changer for so many nonprofits serving our country. Thank you Julia, it's been a pleasure. It's been a lot of fun as we like to end every show we want to remind everyone and ourselves. Stay well. So you can do well. We'll see you back here tomorrow everyone.