<aside> What’s this about? Your organization’s business plan helps your team and funders understand your vision. It establishes the high-level plan for things like organizational structure, activities, budget, fundraising, and marketing.

What do I need to do? Draft the “business plan” for your organization at a high level.

Contents

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Further reading

• Fitzroy Academy: Business model canvas for non-profits
• Spring Impact: Scaling mindsets
• SBA: Traditional business plan example
• Mulago: Design for Scalable Solutions
• Mulago: Strategy for Scale

Templates

• Business plan </aside>

Key concepts

Business plan

• A business plan helps your team and funders understand your vision for the organization.

• Before filing anything at the state or federal level, consider preparing a business plan.

• In order to prepare your business plan, you’ll want to understand your beneficiaries and/or donors, find a market advantage, and use a Business Model Canvas (more information below) to understand your “business model.”

• Once you’ve understood your business model, you’ll be in a position to write up your business plan as a document for potential hires and donors.

• Don’t worry about making these perfect or comprehensive. These sections can and will be refined in subsequent steps; there’s nothing wrong with completing the operational setup of the entity before, or alongside, setting up foundational values and preparing organizational documents.

• See our template business plan for an idea of how the elements of your business plan can be concisely communicated. You might consider using a large language model (LLM) to draft your business plan’s structure, before updating it with concrete facts and figures.

• Elements of a business plan

Market research & competitive analysis

• Market research helps you find beneficiaries and donors for your organization. Competitive analysis helps you make your organization unique.
• Combine them to find a competitive advantage for your organization.
• Gather demographic information to better understand opportunities and limitations for gaining beneficiaries and donors. This could include population data on age, wealth, family, interests, or anything else that’s relevant for your organization.

Business Model Canvas

• A Business Model Canvas is a strategic management template used for developing new business models.
• It focuses on nine elements of a business model, and is typically used by for-profits, but can support strategic planning for a nonprofit, too.
• These elements interrelate and are therefore worth drafting in tandem with one another — rather than, say, finalizing key partners before moving on to key activities.
• Once you’ve conducted market research & competitive analysis, consider using a Business Model Canvas to better understand your organization’s value proposition, beneficiaries and donors, and finances.
• Your Business Model Canvas can itself serve as a “lean” business plan, but we generally recommend writing it out in a more traditional format.

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