Best Practices for Creating Your Nonprofit’s Annual Plan

At the core of every nonprofit is a mission that drives everything it does. However, no nonprofit would fulfill its mission without creating an annual plan.

“A nonprofit is a tax status, not a management style, so it’s a business and you have to run it like a business,” Pamela Landwirth, president and CEO of Give Kids the World Village, said. “So, to that end, you have to have a strategic plan.”

While the annual plan is, intuitively, the plan for a nonprofit’s year of operations, the creation of the plan starts long before the year itself begins.

“I planned for ’24 probably two years ago,” Molly Gezella-Baranczyk, executive director of the National Wildlife Rehabilitators Association, told NonProfit PRO. “You begin looking ahead, looking at program goals and objectives. We take into account user feedback and suggestions from the community about what they’re looking for, and we try to plan those out. Most of the things we execute in a given year have been planned for several years in advance.”

Here is some guidance on what to do and what not do when creating an annual plan for your nonprofit.