Ep 277 | How to Execute Your 2025 Strategy

We all love a good planning session, but putting that plan into action can be a whole different beast. This has always been our biggest struggle. Consistency is key and creating excitement around the plan goes. along way. Learn ways to keep the team (and yourself) motivated  by keeping your eye on the prize and not forgetting to celebrate!

You'll get strategies for taking the big picture and breaking it down into chunks you can manage. Remember to take on what you can and delegate to the team. Build up the entire team to work together. Increase consistency and increase your impact!

What you'll learn:

→ How to set clear expectations and delegate responsibilities within your team
→ Strategies for managing deadlines and workflows using project management tools
→ The importance of building in wins and celebrating milestones
→ Techniques for over-communicating the big picture to your team
→ The art of letting go of ineffective strategies and pivoting when needed
→ A step-by-step approach to quarterly planning and detailed execution

Want to skip ahead? Here are key takeaways:

[02:35] Set clear expectations for yourself and your team. Clearly define roles and responsibilities within your team, especially as your organization grows. Roles may change over time so don't skip this step. Also, other team members may not have clarity, even if you don't know it.
[06:22] Manage deadlines and workflows. Utilize project management tools to keep your team on track and ensure everyone understands the deadlines and steps involved in each task.
[08:48] Build in wins and celebrate milestones. Don't forget to recognize your team's progress and celebrate successes, even if you don't hit your targets exactly as planned. Create rewards for hitting those goals to keep everyone motivated.
[10:31] Over-communicate the big picture. Ensure your team understands how their individual contributions impact the overall mission and goals of your organization. This will help keep consistency. Understanding your role towards the big picture is so important.
[12:05] Let go of ineffective strategies. Be open to adjusting your plans based on data and performance, and don't be afraid to pivot when something isn't working.

Resources

EP 276 | Creating your 2025 Marketing Plan
Ep 232 | Breaking Down Your Annual Plan Into Manageable Chunks
ClickUp*
Trello
Asana

*This page contains affiliate links. That means should you choose to purchase we may receive a small commission. We are only affiliates of products and services we use ourselves.

Full Transcript

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
Now listen, I love a good strategy session, a good planning session, a good time to sit together and really kind of come up with the ideas. I love, to think creatively and think big and think about all of the things that would be super fun to do. The execution piece is sometimes the trickier one. And it's not just about executing for myself, but executing for the team at large, for the organization at large, keeping the board on track, keeping your team on track, and making sure that everybody's aware of why we're doing what we're doing. The other hardest piece is the consistency. How do we make sure that we show up regularly in the ways that we've committed to? Show up for our community, show up for our donors, show up for people who haven't even heard of us before. So that is what we are going to tackle in today's episode. You have a plan. You've started to put your plan together. How can we keep the train on the tracks? So if that's something that you're struggling with, this episode is for you now, believe me, I love a great spreadsheet, I love a great plan, I love a great calendar, but it doesn't really do anything if we don't do the work. So what I want you to do is to be able to put this plan on paper. Get ready to go blast through your year end campaign like the boss that you are, and get ready to jump into 2025 in January right away, because you know you've got your plan in place. So let's dive into that episode. But before we do it is brought to you by our October freebie. This is for you, if you just need to know how to even get started. How do we start to even figure out what we want to do this year? I recorded a quick little video that walks you through how I start to put my plans together for the year, and it starts with just a blank printed calendar. Got them all over my desk right now because I'm currently in my planning process as well. So go to thefirstclick.net/resources, you can grab that freebie. Watch the short little video. Get some extra tips from me, and get going on your planning. Then come back to this episode and go back to last week's episode where we talk about all of marketing planning, setting up your marketing strategy for 2025 that's episode 276. For now, let's jump into this episode and get to executing.

Intro
You're listening to the digital marketing therapy podcast. I'm your host, Sami Bedell-Mulhern. Each month we dive deep into a digital marketing or fundraising strategy that you can implement in your organization. Each week, you'll hear from guest experts, nonprofits, and myself on best practices, tips and resources to help you raise more money online and reach your organizational goals.

Sami Bedell-Mulhern
So hopefully by now, you sort of have a plan in place. You know your goals, you know your revenue, your fundraising goals. You kind of know the buckets for where things are going to things are going to happen. You kind of know how you're going to get to that goal. So the first thing that I want to make sure we're doing as we're putting our goals together is really setting clear expectations. Who's doing what? Who's ultimately responsible for what? It doesn't mean that they're the ones that are doing all of the work, but we want to make sure that everybody on the team knows, and that they know this is what you're responsible for, because at some point we have to kind of pass that baton right, especially if we're in a growing phase in our organization. Maybe you have been the one wearing all the hats, but maybe this year, in 2025 you're hiring a development director, or you're hiring a program manager, or you're hiring an administrative assistant, right? People need to know who to go to for what, because they can't always be coming to you. That's going to bog you down. That's going to keep you from doing the strategic things that you are best at. So I like to think about who is the only person that can do this thing, right? So it might be you're the one who teaches the courses, or you're the one who books the entertainment, or you're the one who writes the grants, right? So it might be that you need to lean on your program team to provide you impact reports and your fundraising team to give you reports on how they use the funds, or your financial team whatever, but you are the one who's ultimately responsible for the grants, right? So really making sure we set clear expectations and in the fast pace that is nonprofit, the always changing. That's happening. It changes all the time. And so we might think that everybody kind of knows who to go to for what that might not be the case. Maybe you had a board member or a volunteer who was originally writing all your blog posts and managing all that, but now you're going to manage it in house. Same people are going to be writing it. So who do we go to for that information? Right? Who's handling our website now, who's dealing with our emails, all of the things?

So set clear expectations and revisit the tasks and the job descriptions that each individual into each individual person has. I don't know why that was so hard to say. That's really going to go a long way in efficiency and making sure that people kind of know what to do. And then we want to manage deadlines. This is a big one when it comes. Comes to consistency, especially in marketing. So you have your whole game plan for the year. Now it's time to backtrack on those especially bigger ticket things. So we want to backtrack and say, Okay, well, then what's going to happen if the event is on March 1? Then we need to have this done by this date. This done by this date, this done by this date. Now you do not have to be the one to do all of that, right? You just set the expectations of who's responsible for what. So, for example, if I'm responsible for making sure we have a new blog post that comes out every two weeks, then I need to make sure I understand all of the steps that need to happen before that it's published. Because it's not just about writing it on the day of and hitting publish. So if I have other people that are involved, and I need to be responsible for that deadline that I know. Okay? I need to have it to our proof editor or the person who's editing it the week before. That means I need to get to the person who's writing it two weeks before. That means that I need to have my concepts and my ideas a week before that, right? You can kind of create those templates for those workflows, but making sure you know what those deadlines are, so you can set again the expectation for everybody else that's on your team or anybody else that has something to do with that process. I always say in marketing, we're the ones who kind of get everything at the end, and then we're still expected to kind of deliver. So if you're not on that end point of your marketing, please be nice to your marketing people or whoever's helping you with those tasks, because that's how we can get better quality stuff out there.

That's just my little. PSA, okay, so we want to manage our deadlines and understand kind of what we have coming up. And the best way that I know to do that is through project management tool. So I love a good project management tool. We use clickup. I love when my clients use clickup, it's just super robust. But you can do whatever. You can use a spreadsheet. You can use your CRM, if it has those capabilities. You can use Trello or Asana or, I mean, there's so many that are out there, so pick one, but have your whole team use it, because then again, what it's going to do is allow you, as a leader, to see big picture, all of the things that are happening, but it's going to allow the people that are on the team to really kind of understand what they're doing, what needs to be done, where they're at in the process. And that's really important, just to kind of keep everybody on track. And also, there's just some things about people kind of knowing what other people are working on, and being able to kind of get information and understand I love clickup because of their clickup brain. I can get more information, it will help me write things based off of the content that's in the platform. So the more stuff that's in there, the better I get, the better quality I get from from my AI tool. Okay, so then the next thing is that we want to make sure we're building in wins and celebrating. That's something that we don't do often enough, and so we're continuing to work. We're working, we're working, we're busy, we're doing all these things, and we don't celebrate that we've hit milestones. So plan those milestones and plan celebration, and don't just do some of them may be smaller. You want to like, surprise and delight your team, but have goals together as a team. Say, hey, when we hit $10,000 in grants, or when we hit 50 monthly donors, or when we hit, you know, 50% of our budget, whatever numbers make sense, right? We're going to have a pizza party, we're going to go roller skating, we're going to take a half day off on a Friday. We're going to bring in lunch, whatever it might be. But set those goals as a team so that you can motivate the team together. We want to know what we're working on, big picture. We want to see that big picture goal that sometimes it can feel overwhelming and so understanding, okay, yeah, we're taking steps. We're getting there. And even if you get there late, still celebrate if you're supposed to raise $100,000 by June, and you've only raised 75

Okay, then that's time to re pivot and work on the strategy and pay attention to what's what's happening. Why is it happening? And reassess, but still celebrate when you hit that $100,000 mark, right? Don't lose that just because you didn't hit it on the day. So there's two things we want to be paying attention to there, right? How are we getting the benchmarks, the milestones? What do we need to pivot and tweak, but we still want to celebrate and then always over communicate, what's the big picture? So different people are working on different things, and this could be if you have a huge team, or even if you have a huge team of volunteers, right? It doesn't mean you have a whole bunch of paid people, but what is, what is what they're doing? How is what they're doing contributing to the big picture goal? So my job is to write 10 blog posts this year. Great. Okay, fine, whatever. Who cares? Why is that important to what we're doing for the cause? Right? It's important because it's helping to build us as a subject matter expert. It's helping to build trust with people. It's helping to increase our organic SEO so that people are going to be able to find us on their own. It's helping our development team to be able to answer commonly asked questions when they're out in. About it's helping our program staff save time, because it's asking, answering commonly asked questions that people are putting out there let people know at whatever level they are, whatever they're you know, from intern all the way up to Executive Director, what I'm doing today is helping impact this, which is helping impact this, which is ultimately getting ultimately getting us to this big picture goal. We're all here for the service, for the mission, for the cause. So I want to know that what I'm doing is increasing impact.

So take some time, either at the end of the year or the beginning of the year, to sit down with everyone, or sit down as a team, and say, These are the strategies that we're implementing. This is how you are impacting this top thing. You might not be the one out there, boots on the ground, planting the trees or rescuing the dogs, but because you're doing this, it's allowing these people to do that right, tying them back to the mission. It's going to help increase productivity. It's going to help increase efficiency. It's going to increase stability and retention of your employees, because they know why they're there and that what they're doing has a purpose. It's also going to force you, in your leadership role, whether you're a leader of a team or leader of the whole organization, to really make decisions based off of okay, is this going to help us get there? If the answer is no, then tweak it. Do something different, you have the right to change your mind. Typically, we want to change our mind based off what the data is telling us, but just pay attention to how we're talking to our team as a whole, and not just saying, top down, this is what we're doing. Get on board. Let's go. It doesn't work as well. And then again, like I said, we don't want to be afraid to let things go. So my example earlier was okay. Maybe it's June and we're 50% behind where we're supposed to be. Okay. Well now it's time to evaluate. It's time to take a look and see where we're missing the mark. What does that look like? Was there a reason? Did something just get pushed into July? Maybe there was a big gift that got pushed in and so we actually don't need to worry that much. Or maybe we didn't get that big grant that we thought we were going to get. So now we got to pivot and find those funds somewhere else, right?

So letting things go that aren't working or aren't servicing us, so that we can focus on the things that are working, that are helping us move forward, that are helping us do what we need to do, is really important. So with all that mindset stuff and conversation stuff in peace. I'm a huge fan of quarterly planning, so I have my annual plan, and then I have my quarterly plan, and then from there, there's kind of two rules of thumb, do you want to do? Like a 60 day, I'm sorry, and six week or a 12 week plan. And so that is really just about your preference. What is it that you want to do to kind of keep your team motivated? So we take our big plan and then we're going to chunk it down into a much more detailed plan, going into q1 right? So you should be having that all pulled together in q1 or for q1 by the end of this year. So you can start January right away. And then we want to really make sure that we have kind of our key buckets, and then breaking it down by activity per week. So what are we going to get done this week? These are the three things we know. We know we want to do in q1 we want to get ready to launch our fundraising event. We want to open up enrollment for our winter programs. We want to, I don't know it might be it is going to be different for each department, right? So you could have each department kind of do their own thing, and then you break it down into Okay? So then that means, if this is my goal, I'm going to get 20 new home, new monthly donors in q1 so then that means, in week one and two, these are the activities I need to do. Week three and four, week five and six, right? And then maybe you do two six week plans, or you do 112 week plan. So whatever that looks like for you, however, that's going to make you more effective, but now you kind of have your roadmap. So now when you sit down to work, you're like, Okay, let's look at the plan done. Okay, I need to increase my donor retention rate in q1 by 25% so my plan to do that is, I'm going to make phone calls, I'm going to send some handwritten cards. Yeah, yeah. And so instead of just having that big thing in my brain, I know. Okay, week one, I need to pull all the data from everybody who gave in q1 for the last two years. And then in week two, I'm going to call 15 people in q3 or week three, I'm going to write my cards, right? You just break it down into chunks, so now you know what actions you're doing. It's all done. It's all set to go easy button. It also makes it easier then for you to let go of things.

If somebody comes to you and says, Hey, I really need to do this, or we're really going to do that, nope, this is the plan that we said we were going to do. Let's take a look at what that looks like in q2 or, you know what? I have some capacity to do that right now. Let's go ahead and add that in. And then when we're taking a look and reviewing how we're doing each quarter, to plan for the next quarter. Here, it makes it much easier to pivot to say, Okay, we're missing the mark here. We didn't execute these things like we wanted to, so let's just keep on the same track and keep doing that and do better. Or we executed everything like we said we were going to. It's not working. Here's why we're going to kind of update, pivot and change. So by having those detailed plans, you have data to track from you know it's working. You know it's not. You can continue to move forward, and then you don't find yourself October, and I'm not saying you're in this situation, then you don't find yourself October 2025 saying, Oh, crap, we have a huge shortfall in panicking going into year end giving. I mentioned in the video training that I did in our freebie that I love to put a financial goal on each month, because we also know that things ebb and flow right. Our fundraising cycles shift. So making sure that we really know that this is how much money we expect to raise this month, and it's not going to be exactly the same each month, because maybe we have a huge monthly giving campaign like recruitment campaign in July. So our goal is 100 new donors. Well, that's when we do our marketing effort is in July. So we don't need to be panicking. We can be focusing on other things for the first half of the year, knowing that we've got this spot in July for that to happen. So I hope that makes sense. We want a quarterly plan, and then continue to keep doing that, working the plan paying attention. It's going to help us avoid the shiny objects. It's going to help us pivot. It's going to help our team understand what we're supposed to be doing. And I have another podcast episode from last year's goal prep, which is episode 232 which is breaking down your annual plan into manageable chunks. I go a little bit more in detail to that episode, so you could check that out as well. So I hope that this is helpful for you. As you start to think about, how do I execute what it is that I'm working on, how do I put this plan into motion, and how do I start strong on January 1? If you have any questions, reach out to us. Hello@thefirstclick.net. But thank you so much for listening to this episode. So much fun to put together. I love goal setting, but gotta get into the execution, otherwise it's all for nothing. Thank you for listening. Please hit subscribe wherever you are on YouTube or wherever you're streaming this episode. Leave us a review. It goes a long way to help us getting more visibility for nonprofits that could use this support as well. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate you. You are the best, and I wish you all the best with the rest of your year and gearing up into 2025 for now, I'll see you in the next one.