Covid-19 and Adaptive Planning – Seeking a New Normal

The nonprofit sector continues to amaze and perform.  Through these incredibly difficult times, nonprofit organizations have turned on a dime, pivoted programs, applied for new funding, and kept working towards mission against huge odds. 

In a lot of ways, the momentum and urgency of the immediate change may have kept you going.  But now that you’re through that first and biggest change, what’s next? You haven’t reached a new equilibrium – none of us have.   And no one has enough data to make reasonable forecasts.

Stanford Social Innovation Review published one of the best articles we’ve seen on Three Things Nonprofits Should Prioritize in the Wake of COVID-19 arguing that you should take a three pronged approach in the following order:

• What’s our social impact?

• What’s our financial situation?

• How do we deliver that impact?

We strongly believe that the first question – why do we exist? – needs to lead and inform all other decisions and actions.   This is the time for organizations to boil down their purpose to its most basic form.  And it’s the time to question those basics in terms of a changing society with needs that will be different.  

Adaptive planning is a great approach for today - it is iterative and uses scenarios to think about ways to react to possible and unknown futures. 

To focus on the impact question in an adaptive way, we particularly like working with an Identity Statement that we’ve adapted from LaPiana Consulting.    The trick to this simple looking document is to really concentrate on what it is that you do with the acknowledgement that anything not included here is something that you do not do.

Financial situations have deservedly gotten a lot of immediate attention and will continue to need ongoing attention.  Two financial tools that we have recently seen that are useful are SE4N’s Financial Health Assessment and Propel Nonprofit’s Scenario Planning Template.

Tools like these provide structure to your iterative discussions on what comes next and what that new normal might be.   They also inform the third question of how to deliver your mission.

None of us know what a new normal might be or when we’ll get there.  We’re all going to have to continue to adapt and iterate … for everyday life and to move our missions forward.