Your Strategic Plan Needs a Contingency Plan. Here's Why.

One of the first questions I ask when I start a strategic planning or fundraising strategy engagement is this: what happens if this assumption turns out to be wrong?

That question makes some people uncomfortable. It shouldn't. According to the Urban Institute's 2025 National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts, one in three nonprofits experienced government funding disruptions in the first half of 2025 alone. Twenty-one percent reported an outright funding loss. 27% experienced a delay, pause, or freeze. The organizations that navigated those disruptions most steadily were not the ones with the most detailed plans. They were the ones whose plans had been built to flex.

I think there is a version of strategic planning and fundraising strategy that gets sold to nonprofits as a finished product. You do the process, you get the document, and then you execute. The problem is that the world does not cooperate with that model. Funders shift priorities. Federal grants get frozen. A key board member leaves. A new political landscape reshapes your operating environment before the plan can be implemented. And when that happens, a plan that was not designed to flex tends to get closed rather than consulted.

A strategy is not a document. It's a pattern of decisions.

EquiVant Strategies makes a distinction that I often return to in this work. A strategic plan is not a strategy. A strategy is a pattern of decisions made consistently over time in pursuit of a shared direction. When organizations conflate a strategic plan with the thinking behind it, they lose the capacity to adapt. The plan becomes something to preserve rather than something to use.

That distinction has real consequences. Research published in the American Journal of Industrial and Business Management estimates that between 50 and 90 percent of strategic initiatives fail to achieve their intended outcomes during implementation, not because the ideas were wrong, but because the bridge between planning and doing was never fully built. For nonprofits navigating the current funding environment, that gap is not just an efficiency problem. It is a mission problem.

What contingency planning actually looks like in practice

Bridgespan describes an adaptive strategy as one that enables nonprofit leaders to make progress toward long-term goals while remaining flexible in the short term. Strategic plans, they note, need to be "both directional and flexible, able to provide structure without becoming a constraint." That is not a disclaimer. That is a design principle, and it should shape the plan from the start.

In practice, this means doing a few specific things differently.

First, every strategic plan and fundraising strategy I build includes an explicit identification of the two or three assumptions on which the whole strategy depends. Maybe that is continued foundation funding in a particular area, or the retention of a key staff member, or a projected growth in individual donor revenue. Whatever those assumptions are, they need to be named, not buried in an appendix. And the plan needs to map out what changes, if any, these shifts entail.

Second, we build decision triggers into the plan itself. A decision trigger is a pre-agreed signal that indicates it is time to revisit a specific element of the strategy. It might be a funding threshold, a milestone in the timeline, or a change in the external environment. The point is that the team has already thought through what that signal means and what they would do about it, so when it arrives, there is already a shared basis for making the next decision rather than starting from scratch in the middle of a crisis.

Third, and this is something I think gets undervalued, the contingency thinking needs to happen with the team, not for them. Bridgespan's research on scenario and contingency planning notes that this kind of analysis allows leaders to begin adjusting plans earlier, rather than waiting until a crisis is upon the organization. But that only works if the people who will need to act on those contingencies were part of building them. A plan that the ED understands but the staff does not is not an adaptive plan. It is a document.

The organizations navigating disruption most effectively share something in common

EquiVant Strategies describes it as an "organizational compass," a clear, shared basis for decision-making that enables leaders to respond to disruption without losing organizational coherence. That compass is not the plan document. It comes from the process of building the plan together, which is exactly why co-design is central to how I work. When the team builds the strategy together, including the contingencies, they carry the thinking with them. They do not need to go back to the document every time something changes, because the logic is already theirs.

If your organization is in a planning process right now, or thinking about starting one, the question worth sitting with is whether your plan would tell you what to do if a major funding source disappeared tomorrow. If the answer is no, that is not a failure of your leadership. It is a gap in how the plan was built, and it is worth closing before the next wave of change arrives.

If you want to talk through what adaptive strategic planning or fundraising strategy looks like for your organization specifically, I would welcome the conversation. You can schedule a virtual chat directly at https://calendar.app.google/9hSuzrho2Z4kzNTv9 or reach me at ellie@browncatalystconsulting.com.

Sources

Urban Institute. (2025). How government funding disruptions affected nonprofits in early 2025. Urban Institute National Survey of Nonprofit Trends and Impacts. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/how-government-funding-disruptions-affected-nonprofits-early-2025

Matthews, G. (2025, March 10). Strategy in a storm: What separates nonprofits that adapt from those that stall. EquiVant Strategies. https://www.evantstrategies.com/insightshub/strategy-in-a-storm-what-separates-nonprofits-that-adapt-from-those-that-stall

Mousa, K. M., Ali, K. A. A., & Gurier, S. (2024). Strategic planning and organizational performance: An empirical study on the manufacturing sector. Sustainability, 16(15), 6690. https://doi.org/10.3390/su16156690

Bridgespan Group. (2023, March 24). Make your organization more resilient with adaptive strategic planning. https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/nonprofit-strategy/make-your-organization-more-resilient-with-adaptive-strategic-planning

Bridgespan Group. Scenario and contingency planning. https://www.bridgespan.org/insights/library/nonprofit-management-tools-and-trends/scenario-and-contingency-planning