If you’re leading a nonprofit, you might feel like strategic sprawl falls into the category of good problems.
You’ve got a number of initiatives and funded programs that largely popped up because of grants or funder requests, so there’s plenty of work to go around. Come to think of it, there’s too much work.
Actually, your staff is stretched thin.
You start to ask yourself, are we really making the biggest impact or just keeping ourselves busy?
And then all of a sudden, what once was a good problem turns into, well…a not so good one. This is strategic sprawl.
What is strategic sprawl?
Strategic sprawl is what happens when a nonprofit’s programs and initiatives multiply faster than its strategy. Funding opportunities and funder requests, rather than a deliberate choice about where you can make the most difference, end up deciding what you take on.
More programs doesn’t mean more impact
Before we get into it, here’s a myth worth busting: more programs means more impact. Often it works the other way around.
Take a mental health nonprofit I worked with recently. It landed a grant to run a significant state program. It was already running another large state program, in addition to community support groups, education, advocacy and more. And there were other funding opportunities on the horizon.
That’s a good problem to have. But the funding is restricted to specific program areas.
The result was a nonprofit that was well funded in some areas and in a drought in others. And with staff stretched thin running programs like support groups, there was no capacity left to even think about the underfunded areas.
This scenario, and others like it, leads to hard questions. Are we doing the most impactful work, or the work that happens to be funded? Are there programs we need to stop doing to deepen our impact? When the next fundable opportunity or donor request comes in, do we say yes or no? How do we know?
If you’ve asked yourself questions like those, you’re ready to refocus, realign and make sure you’re putting your energy where it matters most. Plenty of tools can help you evaluate sprawl and get serious about the conversation, but a strong, research-based strategy screen is a good place to start.
A strategy screen tests every opportunity against your mission
A strategy screen is a simple framework you can use to test for mission alignment. Before you say yes to a new program, grant or donor request, you hold it up against a short set of questions and see whether it fits.
The screen comes from the culmination of the answers to four questions:
- Why do we exist?
- What are our nonprofit’s unique strengths and assets?
- What do our stakeholders, particularly the people we serve, value most about us?
- How is our nonprofit different from others in our comparative set?
The answer to the first question is your reason for being, the thing only your nonprofit can claim. The answers to the other three explain why only you can claim it.
Boil those answers down, add your mission and vision, and you have the screen. You might also hear this called a strategic house: your vision and mission at the top, your reason for being beneath them, and the few things only your nonprofit is positioned to do holding it all up.
The answers have to come from research, not from what leadership assumes. Your own strengths come from looking honestly at your organization. How you’re different comes from looking at your comparative set. What people value most comes from your stakeholders, and always most centrally from the people you serve. That’s the heart of our Shared Power Strategy™ approach: the people closest to the work help build the framework. They don’t need to review the screen itself, but their input is what makes it trustworthy.
Your strategy screen in practice
Here’s how it came together for the mental health nonprofit.
Their reason for being is to make sure people impacted by mental health challenges aren’t left to navigate a fragmented system alone. When we dug into what only they can claim, three things rose to the top. They meet people where the system falls short. They bridge a fragmented ecosystem. They elevate voices for systems change.
Those three things became the screen. Each one turns into a question you can ask of any opportunity:
- Does it meet people where they are? Is this reaching people who have nowhere else to turn, or does it duplicate what other providers already do well?
- Does it build connection? Does this bring together partners, systems or communities who wouldn’t otherwise be connected?
- Does it elevate for change? Does it turn lived experience and data into action that advocates for change and influences systems?
The screen: if an opportunity doesn’t speak to all three, it probably shouldn’t be part of what you’re doing.
For example, say a funder offers a grant to run a service that several other providers in the city already do well, for people who already have options. The money might be welcome. But it fails the first question, it doesn’t connect anyone who wasn’t already connected, and it won’t change a system.
The screen gives you something better than a gut feeling. It’s a reason to say no, to point the funder toward a better fit, or to reshape the proposal until it passes. It also gives staff a shared way to talk about the decision, so it doesn’t land as one person’s opinion.
It’s worth holding your existing programs up to the same screen, too. Sprawl rarely starts with one big decision. It builds up from a lot of small yeses, and the screen shows you where the capacity went.
The strategy screen and strategic house aren’t new ideas
A strategic house is a framework you’ll find in many strategy toolkits. Like many of our tools, we’ve taken it and adapted it for the nonprofit sector, layering in your mission, vision and reason for being. In practice, we use the house as the screen.
Here’s another example of the house working as a screen, this time with a global network of local programs serving children.
The network’s long-term goal was for all of those children to have access to positive childhood experiences, and the outcomes it wanted for them were opportunity, belonging, confidence and self-sufficiency.
The hard question was the role of the central office versus the role of the network. Local members run the programs and serve the children, so what is the central office there to do? Used as a screen, the house helped answer that. Its reason for being fed four answers: expand capacity, build partnerships, gather research across the network and uphold program excellence.
Getting clear on those four things made it easier to see what belonged to the central office and what belonged to the network. A central office that drifts into work its members are better placed to do is a form of sprawl, too.
The screen is the house put to work. Instead of describing who you are, it gives you questions to ask before you say yes.
Other frameworks can help you work through sprawl
A strategy screen is an entry-level test. It’s a good place to start the conversation, and you can pair it with other tools as the work gets more detailed:
- The Matrix Map. Created by Steve Zimmerman and Jeanne Bell, it plots each program by mission impact and financial profitability. Programs land in one of four groups: invest in them, keep them but cap the subsidy, sustain them because they fund other work, or close them or hand them to another organization. Read more at Nonprofit Quarterly.
- A strategic questions brainstorm and an Eisenhower Matrix. In our retreats, leadership teams brainstorm the strategic questions the nonprofit has to answer, then sort them by urgency and importance so the group can see what to tackle first.
- OKRs. Once your strategic plan has pillars, objectives and key results, new work has to connect to one of them. Work that doesn’t connect has nowhere to live.
The screen and the Matrix Map answer different questions. The screen asks whether the work fits your mission. The Matrix Map asks whether you can afford it. A program can pass one and fail the other, and you’ll want to know which before you decide.
If your team is stuck between two seemingly opposing options, Polarity Management is worth a look. Drawing on the work of Barry Johnson, it treats some tensions as something to manage over time rather than solve, and it helps your group weigh the upsides and downsides of each side to find a balance. Deeper or wider isn’t always an either/or.
Your mission gets a vote
Funding showing up at your door is a sign you’re doing good work. It doesn’t mean every opportunity belongs in your portfolio.
No one can be all things to all people, and your nonprofit doesn’t have to try. The ones that get to go deeper where it counts are willing to turn down money that pulls them away from what only they can do.
Frequently asked questions
What is strategic sprawl in a nonprofit?
Strategic sprawl is what happens when programs and initiatives multiply faster than strategy, usually because grants and funder requests drove the decisions. Staff end up stretched thin, and the nonprofit loses sight of where it makes the biggest impact.
What is a strategy screen?
A strategy screen is a simple framework for testing whether a new program, grant or request fits your mission. It comes from your reason for being, which is the answer to why you exist, plus the few things only your nonprofit is positioned to do. Those become the questions you ask of every opportunity.
How is a strategy screen different from a strategic plan?
A strategic plan sets your priorities for the next few years, usually as three or four pillars with objectives and key results. A strategy screen is the everyday filter for decisions, including the ones that arrive between planning cycles, like a funder offering money for something new.
When should we use a strategy screen?
Use it whenever a funding opportunity, donor request or partnership proposal comes in. It’s also worth running your existing programs through it, since sprawl usually builds up from a lot of small yeses over time.
