Before You Plan 2027, Decide What 2030 Looks Like
It's planning season.
Somewhere in your shared drive sits a fresh template provided by your executive director or chief financial officer asking for details on your organization's 2027 goals, budget lines, initiatives, and metrics.
Here's a bet on what won't be included in the template: a description of what your community looks like if you succeed.
For more than a decade, we’ve heard anecdotes from social good leaders — many of whom work at community foundations — about the disconnect between their day-to-day work and their missions. This spring, we decided to test whether these anecdotes are real.
We interviewed senior communications and marketing leaders at community foundations — different regions, sizes, and points in their planning cycles. Each confirmed the same gap (some called it a chasm) between strategic vision and daily execution.
None had found a way to close it.
This gap doesn't announce itself as a strategy problem. It shows up as a Tuesday problem.
Strategic plans get built at altitude by boards, executive teams, and consultants who speak in Socratic pillars and long-range goals. The people expected to deliver those plans work at ground level, where the language is deadlines and staffing gaps and where inboxes are littered with messages from donors and community members who have never read the plan and don't intend to.
The leaders we spoke with described communications that tell lovely stories but offer no clear call to action.
They are frustrated by metrics determined by one team that are rendered impossible by another department's decision.
They spend months reverse-engineering operational frameworks after consultants delivered beautiful documents and big invoices.
They face questions from the board — "How is our strategy driving impact this year?” — that no one can clearly answer.
If these sound like the conditions at your organization, you are not alone and you are not behind. You are in the overwhelming majority of a field of smart, committed people carrying too many priorities with too few hands and without a clear understanding of where you’re going.
A shared destination changes that. If your board, your staff, and your donors can all picture 2030 via an imaginary news story about how your foundation helped a nonprofit positively impact the community, then they can make choices based on that vision. Ask yourself:
Does cutting this item from our list move us toward that picture or away from it? For organizations without a meaningful endowment to lean on, the destination does double duty.
“Why should we give to or through your organization?" That is the question every current and prospective donor is silently asking. A list of activities doesn’t answer it. What can is a vivid, credible picture of what that gift will accomplish in the community.
So before you open the 2027 template, try this: Write the 2030 headline and one paragraph that tells the story about your community in 2030. No pillars, no jargon.
What is true in your community three years from now because your foundation existed? Make it specific enough to steer a budget and human enough that the answer is clear. Then plan every element of that template backwards from your paragraph.
After years serving on foundation boards, sitting in their budget meetings, and working alongside more than 175 community foundations as consultants, we can tell you the foundations that thrive in hard years aren't the ones with the most detailed plans. They're the ones where everyone can see the stories those plans are building toward.
If you can't yet describe 2030, set aside your 2027 plan and start imagining.
For more social-good strategy and communications advice, check out our On Message blog.
