One way to support your strategic planning process is to utilize a rough financial framework that looks at Impact, Revenue, and
Cost across each of your programs. This may be a helpful starting point for strategic planning, particularly given you’re making
difficult tradeoff decisions on where to spend your organization’s time and resources.
Below, I’ve sketched out a template you can use to organize the impact, revenue, and cost of your programs and general
operations into a rough financial framework. You can outline this for specific years to support the planning process, for example,
2022 and 2025. Note that impact may be a mix of qualitative and quantitative estimates, while revenue and cost should sum up to
specific dollar amounts. Once you’ve developed your estimates, you’ll be able to see how various programs contribute to impact,
revenue and cost, which can help you make decisions about where to lever up or down resources.
Additionally, the comparison between years (e.g., 2022 vs. 2025) is helpful, because there’s certain programs which may not yield the
ideal impact / revenue / cost profile today, but could be very valuable to grow in the future. As with most projections of this nature, it
will be based on your best judgment call and is an art rather than a science (though can be supported via analysis to improve its rigor).
The framework is meant as a starting point to then help you narrow down the strategic priorities for the organization. It takes you
through a process of:
1. Looking at the impact and mission goals of the organization
2. Confronting the constraints of revenue needs and costs given your available resources
3. Enabling you to prioritize the key activities based on 1 & 2
I’ve listed out the ones I recall from our call, and this table doesn’t need to be completely filled out, only where there’s applicable
information. I’ve also included in the far left “operations”, which, while not a program, is very important as a cost center, and the
revenues of the organization need to sustain both the programs and operations:
2022 snapshot
River Patrol, Water
Quality Monitoring, &
Pollution Response
Community
Education &
Engagement
Scientific & Legal
Advocacy
Operations
Total
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the lines to the
left
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the lines to the
left
Impact
Impact on mission
Impact on ability to
secure future
revenue (whether
through
contributions,
grants, or service
generated revenue)
Revenue
Contribution &
grants
Program / service
revenue
Other revenue
Cost
Staff cost (this can
be a description at
first, like 10 hours
weekly of X staff’s
time; you can then
use this estimate to
arrive at a $ cost)
Additional costs
2025 snapshot
River Patrol, Water
Quality Monitoring, &
Pollution Response
Community
Education &
Engagement
Scientific & Legal
Advocacy
Operations
Total
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the 3 lines below
Sum the lines to the
left
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the 2 lines below
Sum the lines to the
left
Impact
Impact on mission
Impact on ability to
secure future
revenue (whether
through
contributions,
grants, or service
generated revenue)
Revenue
Contribution &
grants
Program / service
revenue
Other revenue
Cost
Staff cost (this can
be a description at
first, like 10 hours
weekly of X staff’s
time; you can then
use this estimate to
arrive at a $ cost)
Additional costs