By Sophia Shaw and Adam Wolford
Strategic planning matters. Without it, nonprofits risk focusing only on the week ahead instead of the years ahead. We are so easily pulled into the daily cycle of emails, grant deadlines, last-minute board preparations, and a calendar full of meetings, making it hard to reflect, step back, and ask the kinds of questions that shape the future. But these moments of goal-setting are the most valuable allotments of time a board and staff can make—as long as not too much time, nor too much effort or money is spent on them!
When it’s working, strategic planning surfaces deeper questions: Where are we going? What needs to change? What matters most now? How do we bring our staff, board, and broader community along with us in a way that builds momentum and impact?
Unfortunately, the process of planning too often becomes one more overwhelming task, despite how well-intentioned we are. It can turn into another expensive and hard-to-organize retreat, another shared document, another note pile that never quite makes it into action. While retreats and shared documents are indeed important, they are better used judiciously and not to the point where board members are looking at their phones or wondering why they joined the board in the first place.
That’s why we believe it’s worth reconsidering not only what strategic planning looks like, but how it gets done. We’ve seen that by integrating a few thoughtfully selected technology tools—some powered by artificial intelligence—nonprofits can remove the friction that usually slows down planning and instead bring more focus, clarity, and momentum to the work itself.
This is where human partnership with smart tools can make a real difference. Think of these technology partners as kitchen tools, like an eggbeater or blender, that automate parts of the process but aren’t taking away from the authenticity of your “special sauce.” They aren’t cooking for you, just making your work easier.
Here are a few examples of how we’ve seen this work in practice:
1. Language Tools for Drafting and Brainstorming
ChatGPT (or Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc.) can help you generate early drafts and identify themes across different sources of input. You might prompt it to summarize a recent board discussion, or to create a first draft of a staff survey, or to brainstorm ways to frame your organizational priorities for an external audience. The key is to be clear in your instructions, provide context, and always read what it gives you with a critical and careful eye.
Our clients UpStart and the Children’s Museum of Naples both used PlanPerfect’s AI-enriched survey tools to gather staff, board, and community perspectives. They generated structured input that clarified priorities and highlighted what stakeholders valued most. This gave their planning process a stronger foundation from the start.
2. Note-Taking and Meeting Intelligence
Tools like Fathom and Fireflies (and many others like Otter.ai and Sembly) record, transcribe, and summarize virtual meetings. This is especially useful for capturing themes from board discussions, partner check-ins, or internal strategy sessions without needing someone to take notes manually. Many of these tools offer free accounts as well!
3. Grant Writing Support
Many software tools can let you feed in past language or proposal outlines and receive back a structured draft that reflects your organization’s core voice and messaging. This can be especially helpful when you’re juggling multiple deadlines and want a consistent base to refine.
4. Marketing and Outreach Tools
Once you have your strategy in words, planning tools can also support outreach and communication.
The Reef Institute used these tools to help build a marketing roadmap that translated internal planning into clear next steps for external engagement. What could have remained an internal exercise became a plan for reaching and mobilizing their wider community.
5. Dashboarding and Alignment
Teachers Supporting Teachers and Balumu have both used dashboarding tools to streamline work across teams. For TST, what used to take hours of manual updates is now tracked in minutes, freeing the team to focus on priorities. For Balumu, which coordinates across the U.S. and Uganda, dashboards created a common picture of progress so staff and partners could stay aligned despite distance and time zone challenges.
6. Writing and Tone Consistency
While most people know Grammarly as a grammar checker, it also helps shape tone, improve clarity, and maintain a consistent writing style—something especially helpful when multiple people are contributing to a planning document or a stakeholder communication. Hemingway Editor and ProWritingAid are also helpful, depending on your style and goals.
7. Strategy Management Platforms
Some platforms are built specifically to help organize planning itself. These tools, like PlanPerfect’s, break the process into manageable parts, make feedback easier to gather, and help you keep momentum without overwhelming anyone with a separate, complicated system.
Prairieland Adaptive used a strategy platform to translate broad ambitions into a plan with concrete goals and timelines. Instead of a static document, they now have a living plan that guides decisions and keeps their team on track.
In the end, the tools matter less than your mindset. Strategic plans aren’t effective because they use the latest software—they work because the people involved stayed close to their mission, were open to testing new approaches, and made time, however imperfectly, to think about the future they wanted to build.
An Organization Without a Plan:
- Has a vision but lacks definable immediate or long-term goals
- Takes months, or even years, to gain buy-in and consensus from stakeholders
- May create a static plan that becomes irrelevant when circumstances change
- Lacks a strategy to engage board members and donors
An Organization With the Right Support:
- Has easy-to-communicate goals and objectives that allow it to fulfill its vision
- Has a streamlined approval process, giving leaders more time to focus on results
- Adjusts the plan when necessary to reflect evolving needs and goals
- Can rely on a clearly defined donor-engagement strategy
You don’t have to do everything perfectly, and you don’t have to do it all at once. Just begin. Stay in motion. And whenever possible, remove the friction that makes planning harder than it needs to be.
If you want to attend a free live demo of how PlanPerfect can help your nonprofit develop clear, funder-ready strategies in weeks (not months), align staff and boards from the start, and keep plans alive as priorities evolve with their AI solution – register for free below!
About the Presenters:
Adam Wolford is the co-founder of PlanPerfect, the strategic planning platform that helps nonprofits build, track, and adapt living plans that drive real impact. With a background in strategy and innovation at Deloitte and Accenture, Adam brings deep expertise in aligning teams and accelerating results. At PlanPerfect, he focuses on making strategic planning simpler, more collaborative, and powered by AI, enabling nonprofit leaders to achieve clarity and measurable outcomes.
Sophia Shaw is the co-founder of PlanPerfect and a seasoned nonprofit leader with over 30 years of experience. As former CEO of the Chicago Botanic Garden, she guided one of the nation’s largest cultural nonprofits through transformative growth, and she now helps organizations of all sizes bring clarity and momentum to their planning. At PlanPerfect, Sophia combines her leadership expertise with innovative AI tools to help nonprofit executives and boards simplify strategy, strengthen alignment, and advance their missions with confidence.
