Leverage Your Nonprofit’s DNA to Prioritize and Align Your Projects

This article is part of our Organizational DNA series and is tailored for nonprofits. For an overview across all sectors, read the main article here.

Nonprofit leaders often face a familiar challenge: too many worthy initiatives competing for too few resources, pressure from funders and boards, and annual planning processes that default to last year’s projects or the loudest voices in the room. The result is a portfolio of projects that may not clearly support your mission or the outcomes your members and beneficiaries care about most.

There is a better way.

Instead of starting with what you are already doing, start with your nonprofit’s DNA. When you start with your organizational DNA, you choose and prioritize projects that directly support your strategy. A focus on organizational DNA identifies strategic performance measures, strengthens project tracking, focuses corrective actions where needed, and improves alignment of people, processes, technology, and budgets to mission and goals.

What is Organizational DNA?

By “organizational DNA,” I mean the strategic objectives that describe your nonprofit’s strategy. ​Just like human DNA, each organization’s strategy is unique. These powerful building blocks of uniqueness form the core of your strategy and drive your selection and prioritization process.

Strategic objectives are specific, actionable statements of intent. Examples for nonprofits include:

• “Reduce wait times for key services”
• “Improve the cost-effectiveness of member or client services”
• “Increase international or community outreach”
• “Reduce operating costs”

Why Strategic DNA Matters for Nonprofits

Collectively, a dozen or so well-crafted strategic objectives, when linked together in a strategy map, tell the story of how your nonprofit creates value for members, donors, and beneficiaries. The strategy map uses cause–effect logic to visually show how value is created and sustained.

When nonprofits prioritize projects based on strategic DNA, they achieve:

• Stronger alignment between funded projects and mission
• Clearer focus on the outcomes that matter to members, clients, and donors
• More compelling cases for support and budget decisions
• Improved communication across programs, operations, and leadership
• Better staff and volunteer understanding of how their work contributes to mission and vision

Government agencies and private companies benefit from the same logic, but for nonprofits the stakes often feel even higher: every misaligned project pulls scarce time and funding away from mission-critical work.

Start With the End in Mind

Drawing on Stephen Covey’s principle “Start with the end in mind,” the approach is straightforward but requires discipline, a “connect the dots” mindset, and the willingness to move beyond incremental, grant-by-grant decisions.

For nonprofits, that means beginning with mission and vision, not with “What grants or projects are we already funding?”

• Translate mission and vision into three or four high-level strategic themes and results (goals), such as “Expand impact,” “Strengthen financial sustainability,” or “Enhance stakeholder engagement”
• Develop approximately a dozen strategic objectives – the actionable components of those themes
• Link the objectives in a strategy map to show how investments in people, processes, and technology drive better outcomes for your community

These objectives form your nonprofit’s DNA – the structural blueprint of your strategy.

Once that structure is in place, strategic performance measures, project selection and prioritization, and program, process, technology, and workforce alignment become much easier and more defensible. A concise, one-page balanced strategic plan clearly communicates goals, direction, priorities, and accountability to internal and external stakeholders.

The example shown above is a nonprofit international organization. If you work in a government or private business, see the government and business editions of this article for sector-specific examples.

The Strategic Prioritization Process

In the figure above, the rightmost column is the result of a disciplined prioritization process, with initiatives linked directly to nonprofit strategy. The steps are:

• Identify potential projects (initiatives) – create the starting list of potential investments
• Develop strategy-supporting selection criteria and a project proposal template – create a level playing field for evaluation
• Describe candidate projects using the template – understand project benefits, costs, and strategic impact
• Select a prioritization ranking framework – promote consistency and build consensus
• Consider additional influencing factors – apply informed judgement (for example, political priorities or regulatory requirements) to analytical results
• Rank projects against the selection criteria – create A list, B list, and C list project portfolios for budget discussions
• Fund prioritized projects based on available resources – build the STRATEX, CAPEX, and OPEX budgets

Improving Strategy Execution in Nonprofits

We have used this strategic prioritization approach successfully with nonprofit clients in many countries over the past 25 years. Organizations that adopt this approach build more defensible portfolios of projects – with a logical way of saying “yes” to initiatives that support strategy and a clear, evidence-based way of saying “no” to those that do not.

If you want to start with the end in mind, use strategy DNA to improve project selection and prioritization and to improve outcomes for your members and beneficiaries, consider attending one of our facilitation workshops or our professional certification programs, offered worldwide in conjunction with George Washington University College of Professional Studies:

Strategy Execution Professional
Key Performance Indicator Professional
Balanced Scorecard Professional
OKR Professional