The Nonprofit Business Plan: The Leader's Guide to Creating a Successful Business Model
To Purchase:
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Nonprofits often use the terms “strategic planning” and “business planning” interchangeably, but a good business plan goes beyond the traditional strategic plan, testing the economic logic and operational feasibility of the proposed strategy and detailing how and why it will succeed.
The Nonprofit Business Plan helps your organization understand what a business plan is and when you need one, and outlines a practical approach to creating a successful, sustainable business model.
A detailed case study is interwoven throughout the text, demonstrating how a nonprofit can move through the process in way that creates value for internal and external stakeholders alike. Readers may download and work with a sample financial model based on the case study.
Free previews of the worksheets and discussion guides are available below. Let us know what you think!
The Importance of Testing Assumptions
Testing assumptions – financial, operational, and market-related – is a critical part of the business planning process. In this podcast, Lester Olmstead-Rose and Heather Gowdy talk about why it is so important, and offer several examples of organizations that did that examination and made changes based on what they learned.
Length 9:05
Assessing the Need for a Business Plan
Which comes first, the strategy or the business plan? In this podcast, David La Piana, Heather Gowdy, and Amari Romero-Thomas talk about why and when organizations may need a business plan - or not.
Length 4:41
Beth's Blog
CausePlanet
CommonGood Vermont
Foundation Center
Foundation Center Atlanta
MassNonprofit.org
National Council of Nonprofits
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
Are nonprofit business plans just "strategic plans, with numbers?" We don't think so. This article explores how strategic planning and business planning are two related – but distinct – tools in the nonprofit toolbox.
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Written by Liza Culick, Kristen Godard, and Natasha Terk and published by Grantmakers for Effective Organizations in November 2004, this tool provides grantmakers with a complete guide to the pre-grant due diligence process. The Due Diligence Tool includes worksheets and interview questions grantmakers can use to create or refine their own due diligence process.
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