In our last blog post we talked about strategic planning and how AssociationSphere can help you with this long range planning process. In this post, we will focus on annual planning. Your annual plan:
- Uses the strategic plan as a guide to give you overall focus
- Is limited to just the calendar or fiscal year
- Creates action steps to accomplish goals
- Assigns responsibilities to perform those actions
- Measures definitive results on a regular basis
Your annual plan will include a financial goal for the year, and it will be broken down into sub-goals for different revenue streams. For example, your revenue sources might include a couple of events, a membership program, corporate sponsorship solicitations and donations to a scholarship fund. Within each of these revenue streams, you will make a smaller goal to feed into your overall annual goal.
You can compare previous performance in these areas by producing reports from AssociationSphere. If your conference event last year took in $300,000 in revenue, but cost $100,000 to produce, you can look at opportunities to either reduce costs or increase revenue. Can you increase ticket prices? Can you invite more people? Can you get more sponsors? Can you change venues to something lower cost? All of these details are worked into your plan. If you plan to get more sponsors, who is responsible for this activity and when is this action due? If you had $25,000 in sponsorships last year, is it reasonable to increase this by 10% or 20%?
You will also want to set up a few Key Performance Indicators (KPIs.) Your KPIs should be a mix of leading and lagging indicators. Lagging KPIs measure things that have already happened like number of transactions, year-to-date revenue, and event attendance. They are historical in nature. Leading KPIs are rates or percentages that can help indicate what direction you are going. Things like member renewal rate, average member growth rate, and event revenue growth year over year can help you predict if you will be increasing your revenue or might see shortfalls.
Your annual plan will also need a reporting schedule. Depending on the KPIs you are tracking, some items might need to be evaluated monthly, while some might be able to be reviewed quarterly. Performing a regular evaluation on progress towards your goals will allow you to make adjustments as needed in case you are not reaching your desired targets. Adjustments are part of the overall planning process, and we know that what gets measured gets managed. Adjustments might include assigning more resources to get important activities accomplished or it might mean that some activity gets abandoned because the results did not materialize despite a lot of effort.
Your annual plan might include goals beyond revenue, too. Maybe you want to start a more regular communication plan with constituents, and you want to utilize the email marketing module to track open rates. Or you plan to start a member engagement program and will start to use the interactions feature to track those activities. You might even intend to formalize your volunteer program with applications in the Surveys/Forms module, volunteer events, and volunteer scheduling features. Whatever the activities you want to undertake to move you closer to your organization’s ultimate vision, be sure to think about how you can utilize the features already available in AssociationSphere to help you get there.