Many community benefit organizations include members. Keeping members engaged in meaningful ways can be challenging, especially as organizations mature.

Acquiring new members is just the first step. Member engagement is a crucial part of the member retention phase. To keep them involved and invested, your organization needs a strategic plan that fosters ongoing connections and maximizes their value as members. This plan, known as a membership engagement strategy, outlines proactive tactics to keep members engaged in meaningful ways.

Read more: Five Proven Strategies to Boost Member Engagement in Your Organization

January is the ideal time to align your company’s strategy with your employees’ to help them achieve their goals while supporting the company's vision. Almost all industry segments are experiencing workforce shortages, so it makes sense for leaders to focus on retaining employees.

Read more: Align Your Company Strategy With Employee Goals for Better Retention

A strategic plan is a document that establishes the direction of an organization. It can be a single page or fill up a binder, depending on the size and complexity of the business and work.

Most managers can benefit from having a strategic plan. The process of developing a plan helps the manager (and the team) step back and examine where they are, where they want to go, and how they are most likely to get there. In the absence of a plan, work still gets done on a day-to-day basis but often lacks a sense of purpose and priority.

There are seven basic elements of a strategic plan. While much more is often included in the plan, these seven elements will help you get started.

Read more: Seven Elements of a Strategic Plan

The "peaceful transition of power" has been much in the news lately. Transitions happen every day in business and in the not-for-profit sector. In government, decisions are made by the voters. Among nonprofits, the responsibility falls to the Board of Directors.

Read more: Succession Planning for Nonprofits

SWB Consulting Services was honored to present at the Nonprofit Lifecycles Institute Winter Meeting with Helen Stepowany of HPR Consulting. Helen and I had co-facilitated a complex strategic plan during 2020 that was presented at the conference.

Read more: Strategic Planning Case Presentation

Social Start Up Success:

How the best Nonprofits launch, scale up and make a difference

In the Beginning

The first thing is an IDEA. It begins with one person but is quickly shared with a core group, and then presented to a larger group of stakeholders. Feedback is rapidly integrated to revise the IDEA. Initial failures are perceived as opportunities for learning; initial successes are perceived as best practices to build upon.

 Measure Impact

Successful Nonprofits have developed a compelling ‘theory of change’ that they can easily articulate to stakeholders. Mechanisms are developed to collect data to support outcome measurement. Staff resources are deployed to help the data ‘tell a story’. It is valuable to select just a few data points that are easy for people to understand.

Read more: Social Start Up Success

The health care landscape is shifting from traditional fee-for-service models that incentivize volume of care toward value-based payment (VBP) models. VBP models create incentives for providers to improve health care quality and demonstrate better health outcomes at lower costs. Initially focused on physical health care, VBP models are becoming more prevalent in behavioral health, in part, because of the high costs associated with behavioral health conditions.

Recent research provides greater insight into this complex issue. A Milliman Research reportexamined the potential economic impact of integrating medical and behavioral health care and the cost of serving people with co-morbid conditions and a U.S. Government Accountability Office report prepared for Congress looked at behavioral health conditions as cost drivers in Medicaid.

Read more: Value Based Payment - Are you ready?