Setting Goals in Your Nonprofit Annual Report—Everything You Need to Know
While showing off your yearly accomplishments is one of the best parts of writing your annual report, setting goals in your report is also essential.
In this blog post, we’ll cover:
- Why including future goals in your nonprofit annual report is important
- 3 best practices for determining and setting goals
- How to identify what yearly goals to include in your annual report
- How to include those goals in your reporting
Why is including future goals in your nonprofit annual report important?
Goal setting is essential for the success of any nonprofit organization—no matter how large or small.
Including goals…
Reinforces your mission and brand. Listing future initiatives and benchmarks for success is crucial for branding. Including goals lets supporters know that you’re striving to fulfill your mission. You remind supporters of the cause they’re contributing to, and why.
Inspires future action from supporters. Without goals, your nonprofit can lack clarity. Without clarity, supporters can be confused about how they can get involved. By outlining future goals in your annual report, your organization encourages stakeholders to take part.
Provides transparency. One of the fundamental pillars of nonprofit success is transparency. Supporters don’t want to contribute to a cause they have questions about. To avoid this, use clear communication around goals. This allows supporters to feel more in control of where their money or time will be going.
Sets expectations. Supporters should always know what’s around the corner. Setting expectations allows them to feel confident about their contributions and your work. Both of which are key to donor retention.
Aside from the external benefits of goal setting, understanding and communicating goals is great for internal staff morale, too. By determining future benchmarks, you and your staff can better measure your KPIs and year-over-year growth. No matter what you’re measuring, goal setting ensures that everyone is on the same page. They allow everyone to work together towards the same goal.
That just about covers why goal setting and including those goals in your annual report is important. Now, let’s dive into more of the details.
Best practices for determining and setting goals
Your nonprofit’s goals can be financially focused, impact-related, or something else entirely. And, they can be qualitative and quantitive goals. Regardless of the focus or type, the following best practices are perfect for helping anyone set goals.
1. Make it measurable
All great goals are measurable. Whether you’re measuring fundraising ROI or volunteer retention rate, it’s crucial to provide specific metrics around your goals. Assigning metrics also promotes accountability and transparency.
2. Make it specific
Supporters what to know exactly why and how you’ll achieve your goals. By including details around your initiatives—the who, what, where, when, and why—they’ll feel more at ease contributing.
3. Make it realistic
Of course, every nonprofit wants to receive a million dollars in donations. Or, they want to end poverty completely. While these goals are aspirational, they’re not realistic. More realistic goals—like alleviating poverty in Baltimore by 20%, for example—will make supporters feel like the goal is actually attainable.
Indeed, like many other companies, also abide by the SMART model. Like the above mentioned best practices, the SMART model helps to ensure that your goals are strategic and effective.
Now that we’ve covered how to identify and set goals, we’ll dig into the annual report. Mainly, how to determine which future goals to include in your yearly review.
How to determine what future goals to include in your nonprofit annual report
Every year at a nonprofit organization is different. So much can happen in such a short amount of time. That’s why it can be hard to know what goals your organization should include in your annual report.
To help you determine what goals to include and what to exclude, follow these steps.
1. Assess the successes and failures of the year
Conducting an internal assessment of both your success and setbacks of the year is a great place to start your goal setting. In reviewing your work from the previous year, consider these questions:
- Did you lack consistent volunteers?
- Were you short on funding for a particular initiative?
- Was there a low attendance at your fundraisers or galas?
- Did your program lack in impact?
In assessing what went wrong, you might have a clear guide for the future. Let’s say, for example, that your funding was low this year. In response, consider making your goal centered around donor retention. Or, new fundraising initiatives.
Once you’ve reviewed the pitfalls, take a look at your successes:
- What were your most successful events?
- Was there a particular impact from this year that stands out from the rest?
- Did an initiative prove more successful than you anticipated?
- Did you successfully partner with new stakeholders?
Take a look at what went right, and consider how you might build on it in the future. Let’s say, for example, one of your initiatives proved successful. How might you capitalize on that in the future and make it a sustainable practice?
2. Evaluate purpose
Once you and your team have a sense of your goals, consider how each of these goals does or does not support your organization’s mission and values. And consider whether it fits in well with your annual report theme.
While it’s important to include a solid 3-5 goals for the upcoming year, you don’t want to include too many. Choose the ones that best align with your organization and the trends of the year.
3. Prioritize goals
After evaluating the need and purpose of each goal, rank the goals that are most urgent. For example, securing funding from major donors might take precedence over volunteer retention. While both are important, one might be more immediately crucial to the mission. When prioritizing, also consider what goals are best suited to be stakeholder facing. While you might want to increase your marketing budget and get better website conversion, that goal might not be as interesting or relevant to your audience. Consider what they care about, and they want to see you accomplish.
Once you’ve determined your goals, (i.e. “we want to secure more funding for “x” initiatives), it’s time to put them into your report in a digestible way.
How to include goals in your nonprofit annual report
While it’s easy to list out future goals in paragraph format, or in bulleted lists, it’s much more effective to integrate these goals with creativity and make them interactive and inviting. The follow are great examples goals within a nonprofit annual report. Each intrigues readers and inspires them.
Video
Infographics
Digestible statistics
Social media
