Whether you run a small business or a nonprofit, it is important to evaluate your activities as they relate to your established goals within your strategic plan.

A solid strategic plan is a great tool that will help for-profit and nonprofit leaders optimize their performance and results, and ultimately the bottom line. Resources are always limited. All leaders need to be especially careful when making financial decisions. When done well this ensures maximum and most efficient impact for each dollar spent.

There are generally three overarching questions leaders should be asking at any point,

• What results are we trying to accomplish?
• What goals and activities will help us get there?
• What are we doing to evaluate our efforts to know if we are on track (Carttar, 2023)?

When you have answers to these questions, you will know if your efforts are paying off for the long-term results that you want.

Your action plan should reflect the goals and metrics laid out in your strategic plan. This measurement data should be clear and concise, not ambiguous or vague. There are many ways to capture this information and each can have advantages and disadvantages. Consider your audience, the type of data you are seeking, the ethical and legal implications (if any) of obtaining this, who would collect this, and how you plan to analyze and interpret and report this information.

Hope is not a plan. Evaluations help you to decipher if things are working! If the data are not what you had expected or hoped for, you can use this information to make more informed decisions to get you back on track.

Evaluations are an important part of your business or nonprofit, however this is only one part of your overall strategy. At Woodland Strategies, we can assist you in all aspects of your strategic planning and marketing, as well as business development, customer and client relationships, fundraising strategy, and much more. Our strategic planning agency works with many kinds of organizations to help leaders and teams develop a plan to meet goals and achieve success. Please contact us by filling out our contact form or giving us a call today at 952-303-4594.