{"id":557714,"date":"2026-10-29T02:39:16","date_gmt":"2026-10-29T02:39:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newjerseyheadlines.com\/news\/story\/557714\/jodie-kluver-says-the-fiveyear-strategic-plan-is-bad-advice-for-most-nonprofits.html"},"modified":"2026-10-29T02:39:16","modified_gmt":"2026-10-29T02:39:16","slug":"jodie-kluver-says-the-fiveyear-strategic-plan-is-bad-advice-for-most-nonprofits","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.northcarolinaheadlines.com\/news\/story\/557714\/jodie-kluver-says-the-fiveyear-strategic-plan-is-bad-advice-for-most-nonprofits.html","title":{"rendered":"Jodie Kluver Says the Five-Year Strategic Plan Is Bad Advice for Most Nonprofits"},"content":{"rendered":"
Jodie Kluver, a professor of public and nonprofit management at Bridgewater State University, says the standard advice to lock a nonprofit into a long-range strategic plan often works against the organization it is meant to help.<\/div>\n

Westerly, RI, United States – October 28, 2026 –<\/strong> Boards love a five-year plan. It gives them a document to point to, a set of goals to measure, and a story to tell funders. Kluver has spent years studying how public and nonprofit organizations build resiliency and adaptive capacity, and she says that comfort comes at a cost.<\/p>\n

A plan written for conditions that existed two years ago can quietly become the wrong plan. Staff keep working toward goals that no longer fit, because changing the plan feels like admitting failure.<\/p>\n

“The plan was never supposed to be the point,” Kluver says. “The point was the mission. Somewhere along the way, a lot of organizations started treating the paperwork as the goal itself.”<\/p>\n

Why Adaptive Capacity Is a Different Skill<\/p>\n

Kluver’s research looks at how organizations stay resilient through difficult conditions, including her work on how choral arts and other arts organizations kept raising money and building capacity during hard economic stretches. The organizations that held up were not the ones with the thickest planning binders. They were the ones that could read a change in conditions and adjust without losing their footing.<\/p>\n

That is a different skill than writing a plan. It means building in regular check-ins where a board asks a plain question: is this still true? It means treating a strategic plan as a working draft instead of a finished product.<\/p>\n

“A five-year plan written in a boardroom in January can be out of date by June,” Kluver says. “Small and mid-sized nonprofits especially need to build in room to notice that and respond, instead of waiting for the next planning cycle to catch up.”<\/p>\n

What This Looks Like for Smaller Organizations<\/p>\n

Kluver has worked inside nonprofits of different sizes over nearly three decades, from arts organizations to a children’s literacy nonprofit, and she teaches current and future nonprofit managers through Bridgewater State’s program and through the Massachusetts Certified Public Manager Program. She says smaller organizations often feel the most pressure to produce an impressive planning document, because it is what funders expect to see.<\/p>\n

But a thinner, more honest plan that gets revisited regularly does more for an organization than a polished plan that sits in a drawer. Kluver tells the managers and students she works with to build adaptive capacity into how they govern, not just into what they write down.<\/p>\n

“Citizen engagement and voice matter here too,” Kluver says. “A plan built once, from the top, without ongoing input from the people the organization actually serves, is already starting to go stale the day it’s approved.”<\/p>\n

Why She Raises This Now<\/p>\n

Kluver’s academic work has focused on how organizations sustain themselves through pressure, including research published in Public Administration Review and Administrative Theory & Praxis. She says the instinct to over-plan is understandable. Funders ask for plans. Boards want certainty. But certainty is not something a nonprofit can promise its community, especially in a sector where conditions shift from one budget cycle to the next.<\/p>\n

Her advice to the managers she trains is not to abandon planning altogether, but to build it differently: shorter time horizons, built-in review points, and a willingness to say a goal no longer fits before it quietly stops being met.<\/p>\n

“The organizations I’ve watched hold up best are the ones that stayed honest about what was actually happening,” Kluver says. “That’s harder to do than filling out a template, but it’s the work that actually matters.”<\/p>\n

To read more, visit the website here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

About Jodie Kluver<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jodie Kluver is a professor at Bridgewater State University, where she has taught public and nonprofit management since 2006 and served as Program Director for the Massachusetts Certified Public Manager program. Her research covers organizational resiliency, adaptive capacity, and citizen engagement in public and nonprofit organizations, with work published in Public Administration Review and Administrative Theory & Praxis. She is also the founder of The Black Crow Publishing and the author of A Woman Remembers (everything). She lives in Westerly, Rhode Island.<\/p>\n

Contact:<\/p>\n

Info@jodiekluveredu.com<\/p>\n

Media Contact<\/span>
Company Name:<\/strong> Jodie Kluver
Contact Person:<\/strong> Media Relations
Email:<\/strong> Send Email<\/a>
Country:<\/strong> United States
Website:<\/strong> jodiekluveredu.com<\/a><\/p>\n

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