Strategic Goals for Nonprofit Organizations: Setting Priorities and Deciding What to Stop

Two versions of one goal, from a sample plan for a fictional family services nonprofit: “Strengthen support for families,” and “By June 2028, 150 families a year finish the parenting program, up from 60, and the evening drop-in group closes to free its two staff.” Only the second tells staff what changes, and what ends.

Writing goals that way means choosing. Strategic planning is a coaching need in 20% of CNPC’s intake applications (30 of 152), and those leaders want help carrying plans out. This page is part of a nonprofit strategy guide.

What Are Strategic Goals for a Nonprofit?

A strategic goal is a result the whole organization commits to for three to five years. It sits between the mission, which rarely changes, and the objectives and activities that change every year. Good nonprofit strategic goals describe what will be different for the people you serve, or for the organization, in terms someone could check.

First drafts often mix levels, listing “run a spring gala” beside “end family homelessness in our county.”

Sorting each line onto the ladder below, built for the same fictional nonprofit, shows which lines are goals.

Activities belong in the annual plan. What stays in the goal row is your list of strategic goals, and it is usually too long.

How Many Strategic Goals Should You Set?

As a working rule, set three strategic goals and treat five as the ceiling. The limit is capacity: the hours the executive director and staff have left after running today’s programs. Every goal needs an owner with time to move it, and in a small organization the same few people own all of them.

The pressure runs the other way. In the Nonprofit Finance Fund’s 2025 State of the Nonprofit Sector Survey of 2,206 organizations, 85% expected demand to rise in 2025, 36% ended 2024 with an operating deficit (the highest share in ten years of the survey) and 63% had expanded programs during 2024.

Under that pressure every new idea feels urgent, and plans grow to nine goals. Three goals with time behind them move further. With one or two staff, one goal may be enough.

What Do Strong Strategic Goals Look Like?

A strong strategic goal names a result, a number and a date, so an outsider could tell whether it happened, and one person owns it. A weak one names a direction, such as “grow” or “strengthen,” that any plan could hold. The samples below cover programs, money, people, the board and systems.

The numbers are illustrative: set yours from last year’s program records and the staff hours you have. The stronger versions describe outcomes where the vague ones describe effort. Owners sit beside the goals in the plan: the program director for the first row, the executive director and treasurer for the second. A goal nobody owns is a wish.

How Do You Choose Which Priorities Make the Cut?

Run every candidate goal through the same four questions, in one meeting with the board and senior staff, and keep the three that hold up best. Write down the reasons with the verdicts, because you will repeat them when someone asks why their program missed the list.

1. Does it serve the mission? Read the mission aloud and test each goal against the mission. If the link needs a paragraph, the goal is drifting.
2. Is there evidence it works? Program records or participant feedback should show it helps people.
3. Can you pay the full cost? Count staff time, space and supervision, beyond what one grant covers.
4. Who will carry it, and what will they stop? Name the owner and the work that leaves their week.

The first three questions echo the three circles in Jim Collins’s Good to Great: “what you are deeply passionate about,” “what you can be the best in the world at” and “what best drives your economic or resource engine.” A SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) surfaces material for questions two and three, so consider running the SWOT with the board first. Program records and a full-cost budget settle them.

Mixed results are common. In the sample plan, home visiting passes the mission and evidence questions, but nobody can own it this year, so it waits for the annual review as a named candidate.

The questions rank the candidates. Settle who decides before the meeting, because strong board and executive director partnerships can say where governance ends and management begins. The executive director drafts the goals with staff, the board decides on the goals and the stop-doing list, and staff own the yearly objectives.

A list of nine goals is a decision nobody made.

How Do You Decide What to Stop Doing?

Decide what to stop at the same meeting where you choose the goals, and write it on one page. A plan that adds three goals and removes nothing asks the same staff to do more, and the new goals lose. Michael Porter put it in What Is Strategy?: “the essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

In a column on his own stop doing list, Jim Collins wrote that his research team was struck by “how many of the big decisions were not what to do, but what to stop doing.”

For a nonprofit, the Stop-Doing List is one page of three to five items, reviewed each quarter beside the goals. Good candidates:

• A program that costs far more per person served than the rest and fits no goal.
• A restricted grant for work the mission would not choose, which is how mission drift starts.
• An event that nets little once staff hours are counted.
• A report or meeting no decision depends on.

End a program with care. Tell the people you serve early and help them find another provider. Talk to the funder first, since grant agreements often set terms. Tell staff what their work becomes before they hear it elsewhere.

How Do You Keep Work Tied to the Goals?

Strategic alignment means the budget and staff time follow the goals after the vote. Give each goal a budget line and check new opportunities against the goals before saying yes. If staff cannot say which goal their work serves, the plan has drifted.

Daily operations pull the other way, so protect the strategic versus operational split on your calendar. For the steps after approval, see keeping the plan moving after the board approves it. If the overload is your own week rather than the organization’s plan, start with managing your own priorities.

If next year’s budget looks like this year’s, the plan changed nothing.

Where Should You Start This Week?

Book 45 minutes with your board chair and bring one question: which program would we stop if we had to stop one? Write the answer down, even if it is “none.” That sentence starts your stop-doing list, and the conversation shows how ready the board is to choose.

A coach helps you hold those choices. Unlike the board or a funder, a coach has no organizational agenda. In six sessions of nonprofit executive coaching, you test hard calls and your own assumptions before you defend them. The coach will not pick your goals or write the plan.

CNPC has 35+ volunteer coaches, every one credentialed by the International Coaching Federation. Six sessions cost $300 to $600 depending on your organization’s operating expenses, because volunteer coaches donate their time. Apply Now.

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