community group business plan

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Community Center Business Plan

If you are planning to start a new community center, the first thing you will need is a business plan. Use our Northern Park – Community center business plan example created using Upmetrics business plan software to start writing your business plan in no time.

Before you start writing a business plan for your new community center, spend as much time as you can reading through some samples of the community center or nonprofit business plans.

Reading some sample business plans will give you a good idea of what you’re aiming for, and also it will show you the different sections that different entrepreneurs include and the language they use to write about themselves and their business plans.

We have created this sample community center business plan for you to get a good idea about how perfect a community center business plan should look and what details you will need to include in your stunning business plan.

Community Center Business Plan Outline

This is the standard community center business plan outline which will cover all important sections that you should include in your business plan.

• Mission Statement
• NPCC Theory & Overview
• History of NPCC
• Moving forward: The Future of NPCC
• Accomplishments
• Etienne Wenger-Trayner
• Proposed Location & Service Area
• Hours of Operation & Staffing
• Key Strategies
• Research & Development
• Asset Development
• Why now and why NPCC?
• Why we need a youth & Community center
• How local youth & the Community will Benefit from the Center
• Youth Target Market
• Target population
• Advertising & Promotions
• Weekend Events
• Outdoor & Recreation Space
• Creative & Expressive Arts
• Experiential Learning Opportunities
• A Hub for Services
• Check-in Policy
• Youth Center Rules & Agreements
• Social & Environmental Responsibility
• Lynn Skrukrud
• Halli Ellis
• Staffing Matrix
• Assumptions & Projections
• Sustainability
• Projected Profit and Loss
• Projected Cash Flow
• Projected Balance Sheet

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After  getting started with upmetrics , you can copy this community center business plan example into your business plan and modify the required information and download your community center business plan pdf and doc file . It’s the fastest and easiest way to start writing your business plan.

Download a sample community center business plan

Need help writing your business plan from scratch? Here you go;  download our free community center business plan pdf  to start.

It’s a modern business plan template specifically designed for your community center business. Use the example business plan as a guide for writing your own.

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Upmetrics Team

Upmetrics is the #1 business planning software that helps entrepreneurs and business owners create investment-ready business plans using AI. We regularly share business planning insights on our blog. Check out the Upmetrics blog for such interesting reads. Read more

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How to Set Up a Community Group Successfully

Starting a community group from scratch can be a daunting prospect. ThirdSectorProtect have put together a handy guide to help you start, advertise and run a successful group that makes a real difference on the future of our communities. Read on to find out how to set up a community group.

What is a Community Group

A community group is a group of people who work for the benefit of the public. Community groups may follow a set structure and adopt principles and codes of conduct which it wishes the community to follow.

Why are they good for the community?

Community groups offer a home to people with like-minded interests. They offer a code of conduct which will benefit both the immediate and future community, be it social, economic, environmental, spiritual or something else.

Things to consider before setting up a community group

Before attempting to set up your community group ask yourself: are there other groups which match what your group wants to do? If so, can you work in partnership with them? Look to complement these groups and other services in your area, such as charities and voluntary organisations. Before starting a community group you should think about:

• Is the group necessary?
• What will you offer?
• What will you stand for?
• What do you need to implement this?
• Who will your members be?
• Where will you meet with members?

How do you set up a community group?

There are usually three to four people who set up an initial group. This then becomes a management committee and forms the core of your group. This could evolve into more people, and responsibility for the group should be shared between several members. These will ensure the community group:

• Plans and acts in the interests of its goals
• Has the right resources to do this
• Has the right funding in place

Before you do this, however, you should also think about drafting a Governing Document .

What is a Governing Document?

A Governing Document is like a constitution for the group. It tells members and the public exactly what it aims to do, how it seeks to reach those aims and its overall code of conduct. What’s more, it should also include the legal information for your group including responsibilities.

This allows you to apply for money. Businesses and organisations will only give you money if they can see what the money is being used for. Once signed, the committee, not the members, is responsible for ensuring its terms are followed.

Where do community groups get funding from?

Depending on the nature and frequency of your groups activities, funding can be essential to ensure the successful running of a community group. Funding for community groups can come from many places. This includes:

• Central and local government
• Funding Central
• Big Lottery programmes
• Funding trusts such as Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) and Community Development Foundation (CDF).

You can find more funding opportunities here .

What meeting places can you use?

Its worth considering where to hold meetings prior to starting a community group. General meetings help bring group members together and can encourage other members of the community to get involved. Where meetings are held might be difficult, but many groups use local village halls and community centres. These are often at the heart of the community and can be rented cheaply.

D o community groups need a bank account?

Almost all community groups have a bank account. This acts as a useful central area for funds and legitimises your group to funding foundations and organisations. High street banks offer specialist not-for-profit bank accounts as well as other ethical accounts. Do your homework and find the right bank account which suits your group.

How to set up community group insurance?

Insuring your community group is extremely important and shows that you act responsibly to cover your group, people and the wider community. The process can be burdensome but ThirdSectorProtect are here to help. Policies can include public liability, trustee indemnity and fidelity insurance, covering buildings, contents, loss of cash and more. Whilst some covers are optional others are mandatory when running a community group so it’s always worth checking. Click here to find out more.

How do you attract members to your community group?

Once you begin running a community group and have the logistics and technical aspects of your group set up, you’ll want to attract the public. Your advertising or marketing depends on the type of people you want to attract. Consider the following:

• What age are your target audience?
• Are they active online?
• Do you want them to call, email or attend one of your meetings?

Digital advertising can give your group great scope. You may want a website which showcases your goals and mission. You may want to target people who use social media while paid advertising can help people learn about your group.

More traditional advertising such as distributing leaflets, flyers, brochures and speaking with local press is also a great way to spread the word.

How do you organise events for community groups?

Running events and activities for your community group can be a great way to get members of the public involved. If you need equipment, why not ask local organisations or businesses and explain why you need them? You should bear in mind the requirements of the activity. Do your team have the skill/expertise to manage the event? Training may be required for some of your group or any volunteers you use.

Additionally, your event may require specialist event insurance. This covers any accidents at the event as well as event cancellation. This can be added to an existing community group insurance policy. You can contact us regarding this here .

What risks do community groups face?

Aside from obvious risks including injury to members and the public, loss of money and information, fraudulent activity and damage to equipment and buildings you meet in, community groups need to be wary of the dangers of cybercrime.

Community groups are a good target for hackers because (a) they often store sensitive information for community residents and organisations and (b) they are usually not protected adequately.

A cyber attack could have serious consequences for your group and, if successful, a single hack may spell the end of your group regardless of how large or established your group is.

A relatively new insurance option, ThirdSectorProtect equips groups with Cyber Liability insurance which covers malware, ransomware, loss of funds and data as well as any legal fees and compensation. You can chat with us to find out more about this here .

How to maintain a successful community group?

Not-for-profit organisations rely on teamwork and are clear and focused in what they want to achieve and how. A focused committee goes a long way in securing this, as does the passion from every member. Protecting the work you do through insurance acts as your group’s backbone, enabling you to focus on getting the most out of your resources.

Are you planning on starting a community group? Perhaps you already have but are looking for it to grow? ThirdSectorProtect can support your group on whatever journey it takes, including liability, protection for equipment, buildings and more.

Can’t get enough? Check out another of our charity trustee posts:

• Insurance for Community Groups, are You Suitably Covered
• Volunteering Statistics, the Most Likely Volunteers in the UK
• Not-For-Profit raffles, Do You Need a Lottery License

Stay In Touch

To stay up to date with the latest tips and tricks on all things related to charities, not-for-profits and community groups,  follow us on  Facebook ,  Twitter  &  LinkedIn . 

Other stories

Yorkshire charities act in aid of homelessness, are you guilty of polluting the ocean without realising, taking your fundraising strategy to new levels, child protection policy for charities & not-for-profit's, multiple sclerosis charity selected as charity of the year, what you need to do if your charity is changing.

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How to Write a Business Plan: Step-by-Step Guide + Examples

Noah Parsons

24 min. read

Updated May 7, 2024

Writing a business plan doesn’t have to be complicated. 

In this step-by-step guide, you’ll learn how to write a business plan that’s detailed enough to impress bankers and potential investors, while giving you the tools to start, run, and grow a successful business.

• The basics of business planning

If you’re reading this guide, then you already know why you need a business plan . 

You understand that planning helps you: 

• Raise money
• Grow strategically
• Keep your business on the right track 

As you start to write your plan, it’s useful to zoom out and remember what a business plan is .

At its core, a business plan is an overview of the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy: how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

Most business plans also include financial forecasts for the future. These set sales goals, budget for expenses, and predict profits and cash flow. 

A good business plan is much more than just a document that you write once and forget about. It’s also a guide that helps you outline and achieve your goals. 

After completing your plan, you can use it as a management tool to track your progress toward your goals. Updating and adjusting your forecasts and budgets as you go is one of the most important steps you can take to run a healthier, smarter business. 

We’ll dive into how to use your plan later in this article.

There are many different types of plans , but we’ll go over the most common type here, which includes everything you need for an investor-ready plan. However, if you’re just starting out and are looking for something simpler—I recommend starting with a one-page business plan . It’s faster and easier to create. 

It’s also the perfect place to start if you’re just figuring out your idea, or need a simple strategic plan to use inside your business.

Dig deeper : How to write a one-page business plan

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• What to include in your business plan

Executive summary

The executive summary is an overview of your business and your plans. It comes first in your plan and is ideally just one to two pages. Most people write it last because it’s a summary of the complete business plan.

Ideally, the executive summary can act as a stand-alone document that covers the highlights of your detailed plan. 

In fact, it’s common for investors to ask only for the executive summary when evaluating your business. If they like what they see in the executive summary, they’ll often follow up with a request for a complete plan, a pitch presentation , or more in-depth financial forecasts .

Your executive summary should include:

• A summary of the problem you are solving
• A description of your product or service
• An overview of your target market
• A brief description of your team
• A summary of your financials
• Your funding requirements (if you are raising money)

Dig Deeper: How to write an effective executive summary

Products and services description

This is where you describe exactly what you’re selling, and how it solves a problem for your target market. The best way to organize this part of your plan is to start by describing the problem that exists for your customers. After that, you can describe how you plan to solve that problem with your product or service. 

This is usually called a problem and solution statement .

To truly showcase the value of your products and services, you need to craft a compelling narrative around your offerings. How will your product or service transform your customers’ lives or jobs? A strong narrative will draw in your readers.

This is also the part of the business plan to discuss any competitive advantages you may have, like specific intellectual property or patents that protect your product. If you have any initial sales, contracts, or other evidence that your product or service is likely to sell, include that information as well. It will show that your idea has traction , which can help convince readers that your plan has a high chance of success.

Market analysis

Your target market is a description of the type of people that you plan to sell to. You might even have multiple target markets, depending on your business. 

A market analysis is the part of your plan where you bring together all of the information you know about your target market. Basically, it’s a thorough description of who your customers are and why they need what you’re selling. You’ll also include information about the growth of your market and your industry .

Try to be as specific as possible when you describe your market. 

Include information such as age, income level, and location—these are what’s called “demographics.” If you can, also describe your market’s interests and habits as they relate to your business—these are “psychographics.” 

Related: Target market examples

Essentially, you want to include any knowledge you have about your customers that is relevant to how your product or service is right for them. With a solid target market, it will be easier to create a sales and marketing plan that will reach your customers. That’s because you know who they are, what they like to do, and the best ways to reach them.

Next, provide any additional information you have about your market. 

What is the size of your market ? Is the market growing or shrinking? Ideally, you’ll want to demonstrate that your market is growing over time, and also explain how your business is positioned to take advantage of any expected changes in your industry.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write a market analysis

Competitive analysis

Part of defining your business opportunity is determining what your competitive advantage is. To do this effectively, you need to know as much about your competitors as your target customers. 

Every business has some form of competition. If you don’t think you have competitors, then explore what alternatives there are in the market for your product or service. 

For example: In the early years of cars, their main competition was horses. For social media, the early competition was reading books, watching TV, and talking on the phone.

A good competitive analysis fully lays out the competitive landscape and then explains how your business is different. Maybe your products are better made, or cheaper, or your customer service is superior. Maybe your competitive advantage is your location – a wide variety of factors can ultimately give you an advantage.

Dig Deeper: How to write a competitive analysis for your business plan

Marketing and sales plan

The marketing and sales plan covers how you will position your product or service in the market, the marketing channels and messaging you will use, and your sales tactics. 

The best place to start with a marketing plan is with a positioning statement . 

This explains how your business fits into the overall market, and how you will explain the advantages of your product or service to customers. You’ll use the information from your competitive analysis to help you with your positioning. 

For example: You might position your company as the premium, most expensive but the highest quality option in the market. Or your positioning might focus on being locally owned and that shoppers support the local economy by buying your products.

Once you understand your positioning, you’ll bring this together with the information about your target market to create your marketing strategy . 

This is how you plan to communicate your message to potential customers. Depending on who your customers are and how they purchase products like yours, you might use many different strategies, from social media advertising to creating a podcast. Your marketing plan is all about how your customers discover who you are and why they should consider your products and services. 

While your marketing plan is about reaching your customers—your sales plan will describe the actual sales process once a customer has decided that they’re interested in what you have to offer. 

If your business requires salespeople and a long sales process, describe that in this section. If your customers can “self-serve” and just make purchases quickly on your website, describe that process. 

A good sales plan picks up where your marketing plan leaves off. The marketing plan brings customers in the door and the sales plan is how you close the deal.

Together, these specific plans paint a picture of how you will connect with your target audience, and how you will turn them into paying customers.

Dig deeper: What to include in your sales and marketing plan

Business operations

The operations section describes the necessary requirements for your business to run smoothly. It’s where you talk about how your business works and what day-to-day operations look like. 

Depending on how your business is structured, your operations plan may include elements of the business like:

• Supply chain management
• Manufacturing processes
• Equipment and technology
• Distribution

Some businesses distribute their products and reach their customers through large retailers like Amazon.com, Walmart, Target, and grocery store chains. 

These businesses should review how this part of their business works. The plan should discuss the logistics and costs of getting products onto store shelves and any potential hurdles the business may have to overcome.

If your business is much simpler than this, that’s OK. This section of your business plan can be either extremely short or more detailed, depending on the type of business you are building.

For businesses selling services, such as physical therapy or online software, you can use this section to describe the technology you’ll leverage, what goes into your service, and who you will partner with to deliver your services.

Dig Deeper: Learn how to write the operations chapter of your plan

Key milestones and metrics

Although it’s not required to complete your business plan, mapping out key business milestones and the metrics can be incredibly useful for measuring your success.

Good milestones clearly lay out the parameters of the task and set expectations for their execution. You’ll want to include:

• A description of each task
• The proposed due date
• Who is responsible for each task

If you have a budget, you can include projected costs to hit each milestone. You don’t need extensive project planning in this section—just list key milestones you want to hit and when you plan to hit them. This is your overall business roadmap. 

Possible milestones might be:

• Website launch date
• Store or office opening date
• First significant sales
• Break even date
• Business licenses and approvals

You should also discuss the key numbers you will track to determine your success. Some common metrics worth tracking include:

• Conversion rates
• Customer acquisition costs
• Profit per customer
• Repeat purchases

It’s perfectly fine to start with just a few metrics and grow the number you are tracking over time. You also may find that some metrics simply aren’t relevant to your business and can narrow down what you’re tracking.

Dig Deeper: How to use milestones in your business plan

Organization and management team

Investors don’t just look for great ideas—they want to find great teams. Use this chapter to describe your current team and who you need to hire . You should also provide a quick overview of your location and history if you’re already up and running.

Briefly highlight the relevant experiences of each key team member in the company. It’s important to make the case for why yours is the right team to turn an idea into a reality. 

Do they have the right industry experience and background? Have members of the team had entrepreneurial successes before? 

If you still need to hire key team members, that’s OK. Just note those gaps in this section.

Your company overview should also include a summary of your company’s current business structure . The most common business structures include:

• Sole proprietor
• Partnership

Be sure to provide an overview of how the business is owned as well. Does each business partner own an equal portion of the business? How is ownership divided? 

Potential lenders and investors will want to know the structure of the business before they will consider a loan or investment.

Dig Deeper: How to write about your company structure and team

Financial plan

Last, but certainly not least, is your financial plan chapter. 

Entrepreneurs often find this section the most daunting. But, business financials for most startups are less complicated than you think, and a business degree is certainly not required to build a solid financial forecast. 

A typical financial forecast in a business plan includes the following:

• Sales forecast : An estimate of the sales expected over a given period. You’ll break down your forecast into the key revenue streams that you expect to have.
• Expense budget : Your planned spending such as personnel costs , marketing expenses, and taxes.
• Profit & Loss : Brings together your sales and expenses and helps you calculate planned profits.
• Cash Flow : Shows how cash moves into and out of your business. It can predict how much cash you’ll have on hand at any given point in the future.
• Balance Sheet : A list of the assets, liabilities, and equity in your company. In short, it provides an overview of the financial health of your business. 

A strong business plan will include a description of assumptions about the future, and potential risks that could impact the financial plan. Including those will be especially important if you’re writing a business plan to pursue a loan or other investment.

Dig Deeper: How to create financial forecasts and budgets

This is the place for additional data, charts, or other information that supports your plan.

Including an appendix can significantly enhance the credibility of your plan by showing readers that you’ve thoroughly considered the details of your business idea, and are backing your ideas up with solid data.

Just remember that the information in the appendix is meant to be supplementary. Your business plan should stand on its own, even if the reader skips this section.

Dig Deeper : What to include in your business plan appendix

Optional: Business plan cover page

Adding a business plan cover page can make your plan, and by extension your business, seem more professional in the eyes of potential investors, lenders, and partners. It serves as the introduction to your document and provides necessary contact information for stakeholders to reference.

Your cover page should be simple and include:

• Company logo
• Business name
• Value proposition (optional)
• Business plan title
• Completion and/or update date
• Address and contact information
• Confidentiality statement

Just remember, the cover page is optional. If you decide to include it, keep it very simple and only spend a short amount of time putting it together.

Dig Deeper: How to create a business plan cover page

How to use AI to help write your business plan

Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT can speed up the business plan writing process and help you think through concepts like market segmentation and competition. These tools are especially useful for taking ideas that you provide and converting them into polished text for your business plan.

The best way to use AI for your business plan is to leverage it as a collaborator , not a replacement for human creative thinking and ingenuity. 

AI can come up with lots of ideas and act as a brainstorming partner. It’s up to you to filter through those ideas and figure out which ones are realistic enough to resonate with your customers. 

There are pros and cons of using AI to help with your business plan . So, spend some time understanding how it can be most helpful before just outsourcing the job to AI.

Learn more: 10 AI prompts you need to write a business plan

• Writing tips and strategies

To help streamline the business plan writing process, here are a few tips and key questions to answer to make sure you get the most out of your plan and avoid common mistakes .  

Determine why you are writing a business plan

Knowing why you are writing a business plan will determine your approach to your planning project. 

For example: If you are writing a business plan for yourself, or just to use inside your own business , you can probably skip the section about your team and organizational structure. 

If you’re raising money, you’ll want to spend more time explaining why you’re looking to raise the funds and exactly how you will use them.

Regardless of how you intend to use your business plan , think about why you are writing and what you’re trying to get out of the process before you begin.

Keep things concise

Probably the most important tip is to keep your business plan short and simple. There are no prizes for long business plans . The longer your plan is, the less likely people are to read it. 

So focus on trimming things down to the essentials your readers need to know. Skip the extended, wordy descriptions and instead focus on creating a plan that is easy to read —using bullets and short sentences whenever possible.

Have someone review your business plan

Writing a business plan in a vacuum is never a good idea. Sometimes it’s helpful to zoom out and check if your plan makes sense to someone else. You also want to make sure that it’s easy to read and understand.

Don’t wait until your plan is “done” to get a second look. Start sharing your plan early, and find out from readers what questions your plan leaves unanswered. This early review cycle will help you spot shortcomings in your plan and address them quickly, rather than finding out about them right before you present your plan to a lender or investor.

If you need a more detailed review, you may want to explore hiring a professional plan writer to thoroughly examine it.

Use a free business plan template and business plan examples to get started

Knowing what information to include in a business plan is sometimes not quite enough. If you’re struggling to get started or need additional guidance, it may be worth using a business plan template. 

There are plenty of great options available (we’ve rounded up our 8 favorites to streamline your search).

But, if you’re looking for a free downloadable business plan template , you can get one right now; download the template used by more than 1 million businesses. 

Or, if you just want to see what a completed business plan looks like, check out our library of over 550 free business plan examples . 

We even have a growing list of industry business planning guides with tips for what to focus on depending on your business type.

Common pitfalls and how to avoid them

It’s easy to make mistakes when you’re writing your business plan. Some entrepreneurs get sucked into the writing and research process, and don’t focus enough on actually getting their business started. 

Here are a few common mistakes and how to avoid them:

Not talking to your customers : This is one of the most common mistakes. It’s easy to assume that your product or service is something that people want. Before you invest too much in your business and too much in the planning process, make sure you talk to your prospective customers and have a good understanding of their needs.

• Overly optimistic sales and profit forecasts: By nature, entrepreneurs are optimistic about the future. But it’s good to temper that optimism a little when you’re planning, and make sure your forecasts are grounded in reality. 
• Spending too much time planning: Yes, planning is crucial. But you also need to get out and talk to customers, build prototypes of your product and figure out if there’s a market for your idea. Make sure to balance planning with building.
• Not revising the plan: Planning is useful, but nothing ever goes exactly as planned. As you learn more about what’s working and what’s not—revise your plan, your budgets, and your revenue forecast. Doing so will provide a more realistic picture of where your business is going, and what your financial needs will be moving forward.
• Not using the plan to manage your business: A good business plan is a management tool. Don’t just write it and put it on the shelf to collect dust – use it to track your progress and help you reach your goals.
• Presenting your business plan

The planning process forces you to think through every aspect of your business and answer questions that you may not have thought of. That’s the real benefit of writing a business plan – the knowledge you gain about your business that you may not have been able to discover otherwise.

With all of this knowledge, you’re well prepared to convert your business plan into a pitch presentation to present your ideas. 

A pitch presentation is a summary of your plan, just hitting the highlights and key points. It’s the best way to present your business plan to investors and team members.

Dig Deeper: Learn what key slides should be included in your pitch deck

Use your business plan to manage your business

One of the biggest benefits of planning is that it gives you a tool to manage your business better. With a revenue forecast, expense budget, and projected cash flow, you know your targets and where you are headed.

And yet, nothing ever goes exactly as planned – it’s the nature of business.

That’s where using your plan as a management tool comes in. The key to leveraging it for your business is to review it periodically and compare your forecasts and projections to your actual results.

Start by setting up a regular time to review the plan – a monthly review is a good starting point. During this review, answer questions like:

• Did you meet your sales goals?
• Is spending following your budget?
• Has anything gone differently than what you expected?

Now that you see whether you’re meeting your goals or are off track, you can make adjustments and set new targets. 

Maybe you’re exceeding your sales goals and should set new, more aggressive goals. In that case, maybe you should also explore more spending or hiring more employees. 

Or maybe expenses are rising faster than you projected. If that’s the case, you would need to look at where you can cut costs.

A plan, and a method for comparing your plan to your actual results , is the tool you need to steer your business toward success.

Learn More: How to run a regular plan review

Free business plan templates and examples

Kickstart your business plan writing with one of our free business plan templates or recommended tools.

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Sample business plan library

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How to write a business plan FAQ

What is a business plan?

A document that describes your business , the products and services you sell, and the customers that you sell to. It explains your business strategy, how you’re going to build and grow your business, what your marketing strategy is, and who your competitors are.

What are the benefits of a business plan?

A business plan helps you understand where you want to go with your business and what it will take to get there. It reduces your overall risk, helps you uncover your business’s potential, attracts investors, and identifies areas for growth.

Having a business plan ultimately makes you more confident as a business owner and more likely to succeed for a longer period of time.

What are the 7 steps of a business plan?

The seven steps to writing a business plan include:

• Write a brief executive summary
• Describe your products and services.
• Conduct market research and compile data into a cohesive market analysis.
• Describe your marketing and sales strategy.
• Outline your organizational structure and management team.
• Develop financial projections for sales, revenue, and cash flow.
• Add any additional documents to your appendix.

What are the 5 most common business plan mistakes?

There are plenty of mistakes that can be made when writing a business plan. However, these are the 5 most common that you should do your best to avoid:

• 1. Not taking the planning process seriously.
• Having unrealistic financial projections or incomplete financial information.
• Inconsistent information or simple mistakes.
• Failing to establish a sound business model.
• Not having a defined purpose for your business plan.

What questions should be answered in a business plan?

Writing a business plan is all about asking yourself questions about your business and being able to answer them through the planning process. You’ll likely be asking dozens and dozens of questions for each section of your plan.

However, these are the key questions you should ask and answer with your business plan:

• How will your business make money?
• Is there a need for your product or service?
• Who are your customers?
• How are you different from the competition?
• How will you reach your customers?
• How will you measure success?

How long should a business plan be?

The length of your business plan fully depends on what you intend to do with it. From the SBA and traditional lender point of view, a business plan needs to be whatever length necessary to fully explain your business. This means that you prove the viability of your business, show that you understand the market, and have a detailed strategy in place.

If you intend to use your business plan for internal management purposes, you don’t necessarily need a full 25-50 page business plan. Instead, you can start with a one-page plan to get all of the necessary information in place.

What are the different types of business plans?

While all business plans cover similar categories, the style and function fully depend on how you intend to use your plan. Here are a few common business plan types worth considering.

Traditional business plan: The tried-and-true traditional business plan is a formal document meant to be used when applying for funding or pitching to investors. This type of business plan follows the outline above and can be anywhere from 10-50 pages depending on the amount of detail included, the complexity of your business, and what you include in your appendix.

Business model canvas: The business model canvas is a one-page template designed to demystify the business planning process. It removes the need for a traditional, copy-heavy business plan, in favor of a single-page outline that can help you and outside parties better explore your business idea.

One-page business plan: This format is a simplified version of the traditional plan that focuses on the core aspects of your business. You’ll typically stick with bullet points and single sentences. It’s most useful for those exploring ideas, needing to validate their business model, or who need an internal plan to help them run and manage their business.

Lean Plan: The Lean Plan is less of a specific document type and more of a methodology. It takes the simplicity and styling of the one-page business plan and turns it into a process for you to continuously plan, test, review, refine, and take action based on performance. It’s faster, keeps your plan concise, and ensures that your plan is always up-to-date.

What’s the difference between a business plan and a strategic plan?

A business plan covers the “who” and “what” of your business. It explains what your business is doing right now and how it functions. The strategic plan explores long-term goals and explains “how” the business will get there. It encourages you to look more intently toward the future and how you will achieve your vision.

However, when approached correctly, your business plan can actually function as a strategic plan as well. If kept lean, you can define your business, outline strategic steps, and track ongoing operations all with a single plan.

See why 1.2 million entrepreneurs have written their business plans with LivePlan

Noah is the COO at Palo Alto Software, makers of the online business plan app LivePlan. He started his career at Yahoo! and then helped start the user review site Epinions.com. From there he started a software distribution business in the UK before coming to Palo Alto Software to run the marketing and product teams.

Table of Contents

• Use AI to help write your plan
• Common planning mistakes
• Manage with your business plan
• Templates and examples

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How to Build Partnerships with Community Organizations

• December 11, 2020
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Community partnerships are a powerful force for good when it comes to social change and impact. Building new connections with community organizations provides new ideas, resources and ways of thinking that can help you make the world a better place, whether you’re working to improve education, healthcare, the environment, or something else. If you want to know how to build partnerships with community organizations, it’s important to start from the right place, with the right frame of mind. That means starting with an overall strategy for your network of community partners. Once you have that strategy in place, you can begin doing the leg work of partnership development. Here’s how it works.

Before You Build Partnerships, You Need To Build a Strategy.

If you plan to build community partnerships to advance your work, you need to make a plan about how  you will manage and work with your network of partners. Often times, organizations begin outreach with a single goal in mind: More is Better. They try to develop more partnerships, hold more meetings and zoom calls, and become more integrated with community organizations. However, this strategy just isn’t sustainable – it quickly saps time and resources without producing much in terms of outcomes. The key is to build the least number of connections, and maintain with the least amount of work necessary to reach shared goals. Shifting your mindset to think in this way will help you build more effective, strategic community partnerships.

How to Build Partnerships with Community Organizations: Key Factors to Consider

Every network of partners has a unique history, context and goals – but many of the same categories to consider when building partnerships. Thinking through each of these questions in relation to your community partnership work will help you devise a strategy that fits your specific needs. That will in turn help you better understand how to build partnerships with community organizations.

What are your goals and their goals?

Goals are the glue that hold collaboratives together, providing a shared sense of vision across organizational boundaries to drive collaborative action and resource-sharing. Goals should be co-created whenever possible; coming to a community organization with pre-defined goals makes it unlikely they’ll feel ownership of the process, driving down engagement. You should have a general idea of what your partnerships will accomplish, with flexibility to accomodate partner ideas. 

What kind of value are you looking for?

There are many different forms of value when it comes to collaboration. Some partners provide more traditional forms of value, like funding or staff support. Others provide information, including lived experiences and data. Sometimes, a partner’s value comes from their leadership ability, facilitation skills, power or influence with decision-makers. Consider all the various types of value that align with your goals, and look for partners best-suited to provide it.

Where are there existing trusted relationships?

Every organization has existing partnerships and relationships with community organizations. Depending on your history, some of these contacts are likely more trusted than others: They’re open to communication and easy to reach, share your mission strongly and are reliable and easy to count on. These are natural places to start, leveraging your ties with these strong partners to identify those in their network that may be suited to work with too. Be sure you look beyond your existing network too though, or you risk missing out on diversity that makes a network strong.

What role will this partner play in your network?

Every partnership should serve a specific purpose in your network – a relationship that exists for its own sake takes up precious time and resources to maintain. Considering the value you’re looking for from your community partners, try to assign each partner a role to play, and only make them responsible for attending meetings relevant to that role. This helps ensure you aren’t asking too much of your partners. Some examples of partner roles include:

• Providing expert knowledge, lived experience, data, or other information.
• Supporting your work with funding, staff or volunteer time, or other in-kind donations.
• Serving as an influential leader who can attract additional attention & support for your cause.
• Helping facilitate group discussions, calls and meetings.

How can you diversify your partnerships?

We tend to build partnerships with the individuals and organizations we already know the best. As a result, even when networks are built with diversity in mind, they often end up silo’d from other fields and ways of thinking. Try to consider unlikely partners you wouldn’t ordinarily work with, along with other stakeholders that impact or are affected by the issue being dealt with but haven’t been involved in the past. A diverse network provides more diverse forms of value, key to your shared success as a network of community organizations.

Identify the Community Organizations That Fit Your Strategy and Plans

Once you have thought through the above areas, you should have a better idea of how to build partnerships with community organizations, starting with your network strategy. With those factors in mind, you can turn to considering which organizations are best positioned for a community partnership in terms of their goals and mission, resources and capacity. For example, a small nonprofit may have experience with your program focus, but lack the required time and staff to participate. Community Gatekeepers can help in your search for community organizations.

Look for Community Gatekeepers and Other Key Stakeholders

Community Gatekeepers are influential and well connected leaders in the community you seek to connect with. They are usually well trusted by other leaders, and can help connect you with other community organizations to build partnerships with. Reach out first to those you have a connection with to identify any gatekeepers or other stakeholders before you try researching online to identify groups you have no connections with. Here are a few other categories to consider as you learn how to build partnerships with community organizations.

Local & Regional Nonprofits

A good place to start are the nonprofits in your local and regional area. This includes both topical groups working in your same area of focus, along with organizations with a broad focus like the United Way and YMCA. Often these groups have contacts with more potential partners and can help broker connections as well.

City, County & State Government Agencies

Local, county and state government agencies are all embedded in networks of community organizations and partners. They are often overtaxed, and you may have a better chance connecting with them successfully through a mutual contact, like a local nonprofit mentioned above.

Educational & Research Institutions

Local universities, community colleges and research institutions maintain practice-oriented partnerships with the community. Look for an Office of Community Engagement or partnership to connect with and get started.

Healthcare Providers & Institutions

Similar to universities, healthcare providers like hospitals and clinics take part in many partnerships with the community, especially as a part of new Community-Health assessments established by the Affordable Care Act.

Tips for Reaching Out to Community Organizations to Build Partnerships

When it coms time to make your outreach, keep a few tips in mind. First, approach with an open-mind about what the partnership can accomplish. Starting the conversation as if you know exactly what the partnership will accomplish, or focusing on your own goals can turn people off from working with you. Focus on what the collaboration can accomplish for you both, ask questions, and engage in active listening. 

Second, try to find a specific role for partners to play. Vague, open-ended requests for collaboration often lead to a lack of sustained engagement. Do your homework and ask questions to find the unique types of value this partner provides, and work with them to find a role where they can provide this value and benefit themselves.

Network Data Can Teach You How to Build Partnerships with Community Organizations.

Partnership-building feels intuitive so us, just as natural as building friendships or relationships. However, as you can see, there is a real science and art to it as well. For the most robust community partnership programs, data and evidence about your collaboration is essential for building effective, efficient networks of partners. We’ve been building network science tools to do just that for more than a decade, providing networks and partners an evidence-based way to learn how to build partnerships with community organizations. Click here to learn more about our community partner relationship management system, PARTNER.

More Resources: How To Build Partnerships with Community Organizations

Still looking for more resources to help with your partnership-building efforts? Here are a few additional tools and resources to help you get started:

• Blog: Who Should I Send My Network Survey To?
• Identifying & Engaging with Community Partners
• Infographic: How to Measure Trust in a Network
• Blog: An Intro to PARTNER’s Validated Metrics & Measures
• Identify & Engage Potential Partnerships

Get Started Building your own partnerships today!

Hopefully you now understand how to build partnerships with community organizations. Starting with a strategy instead of rushing to build as many partnerships can help you build a stronger overall network that helps you reach your goals effectively. Looking for even more help with your partnership-building efforts? Contact our team to learn about our consulting options and see if we can help you with a custom network science solution.

About the Author: Alex Derr, M.P.A.

Director of marketing & communications.

Alex joined VNL in 2017, originally supporting our events. He now helps manages our communications and marketing strategy and content development work. Alex creates blogs, infographics, reports, and other content while managing our web and social media presence. He also runs our email marketing campaigns, tracks analytics, and conducts market research to drive our strategy. He supports our entire team with copywriting, graphic design and research, and helps with events, webinars, demos, and other online learning. When he isn’t at work Alex spends his time climbing 14ers (30 done, 28 to go!) and blogging on his own website,  The Next Summit Blog .

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6 Steps to Building Your Community Strategy for 2023

A comprehensive, systematic approach to building a community strategy.

Community is universal. We've all been part of one in some shape or form — which is likely why so many communities are started without a strategy.

We all have experience with communities in the cultural sense. Even those who aren’t professional community builders will assume that communities can be run based on good intuition alone, or may even feel that being strategic about community is 'inauthentic'.

This isn’t the case. Strategies are absolutely necessary to help Community Managers run communities effectively at inception and while they grow. Strong strategies empower Community Managers to infuse the community’s authenticity into other parts of the business.

What is a community strategy, and why do Community Managers need one?

A community strategy is a detailed, long-range plan for how to support and evolve a healthy community in order to achieve the organization's business objectives.

Building a community strategy is essential for CMs because:

• It forces you to choose a tactic — even if it's the wrong one — which lets you measure what works and what doesn't.
• It also forces you to actively de-prioritize out-of-scope ideas, even good ones.
• It ensures your actions in the community align with your organization’s goals.
• It makes you consider best practices in context, instead of relying on boilerplate tactics that may not work for your community.

With that in mind, here's my systematic approach to developing a community strategy. We teach this process in our C School Foundations and Essentials level courses, and dozens of students have successfully used it to produce community strategies for their organizations.

Whether you're building an entirely new community, you're new to managing this particular one, or you're looking to refresh your community — it's never too late to develop or revisit your strategy.

How to build a community strategy

1. set a purpose and measure of success.

This initial planning phase involves outlining your community's why — the reasons it does or will exist. You’ll look at how the community will serve both its members and your company’s goals. To kick-start this process, ask yourself the following questions:

Who, outside of the company, am I building this community for? What do they get out of it?

Your answer could look like this: I’m building this community for project managers, who will have a space where they can connect with other professionals in the same field.

If your community serves a group that is different from your company’s core customer base, it's worth taking time to define your target audience and build personas . 

Be as specific as possible when doing this. Include demographics, psychographics, and personal details. Humanize your persona(s) with details about their goals, motivations, and frustrations.

Who inside the company is this community for? What do they get out of it?

It’s likely that most, if not all, of the company’s departments will reap the benefits of community. You could, then, have multiple answers to these questions.

Are there any conflicts between what the company and what members want from this community?

In other words, do your answers to the first two questions above align? For example, if everything the company wants is transactional (i.e. get survey results, answer tickets), but you think the most valuable community for customers will be about best practice sharing, that could be an issue. 

If the wants are at odds, you may have to develop a more comprehensive plan to meet both or de-prioritize one while you focus on the other for a time.

What are the main metrics my company already tracks? Which ones does this community have the biggest potential to impact?

Your organization will already be collecting and reporting top-level business metrics — things like monthly recurring revenue, customer lifetime value, new subscribers, etc. Make a list of the metrics your community can positively impact, which can help when you plan content and events for the community. 

There is no ‘right’ answer for this. Each community’s potential impact on metrics will depend on a combination of factors such as your product, company goals, and community purpose.

How will I measure success at launch, in the first six months, in the first year?

This is true with many projects, but in a community context, what's important (and possible) to measure will vary at different phases of maturity.

For example, within your first six months, it'll probably be meaningful to track new members and community adoption. After two years, you might find it more insightful to focus on how existing community members perform on company health metrics (like lifetime value) vs. non-community members. Defining what success means at different stages of your community’s lifetime will help you set realistic expectations within your company.

2. Research, research, research

This is something many community pros miss. The idea (or myth) that community is nebulous and un-trackable means even experienced CMs seem to default to hypothesizing about their community in the dark. 

It doesn't have to be that way. In this research phase, you will:

Speak to users and potential community members

If you do one thing in your research phase, it should be this: get feedback from members who fall into your target community persona to validate what you're considering offering. This should include questions on everything from your big-picture plans to platform to the kind of content you hope to produce. You could also run some of your ideas by users/prospective community members to see which ones are feasible.

Audit and analyze your company’s existing community efforts

Your company may not have a full-fledged community, but they may already be bringing people together in some way or another. You can look at things like in-person and virtual events , customer counsels, or ambassador programs to see what resonates with your community and what you can improve or do away with. You can also analyze this against your user interviews to see if there are gaps to fill.

Check out the competition

Look at your direct competitors' community efforts to determine what your members expect and how you can expand on what already exists. This is un-skippable for CMs working at big brands who want leadership buy-in. Nothing convinces people more than "our competitors are already doing it and we're behind".

You might also want to look at exemplar or model communities that fall outside your industry and see if there’s anything you can borrow from them. For example, if one of your goals is to help members make using your product a habit, you could look at fitness communities to see they support building habits and skills.

3. Plan content types and frequency

The next step in your community strategy is to create a plan for the types of community content you’ll produce , and how often you’ll share it.

Some of this work can and should happen during the research phase. As you get a clearer picture of what content you might offer in your community, you can run these ideas by interviewees or look for where your ideas overlap and exceed competitors' communities.

In this phase you will:

Determine how often you’ll share content

You should create content for your community at the day-to-day, weekly, monthly, and annual level. Not all this content will be equal — day-to-day content should consist of things you can create often and with minimal effort (such as simple engagement prompts or questions), while annual content (such as summits ) will require months of planning and has the potential to reap high rewards for both you and your members.

Decide access levels and what content to gate

Your community may have access levels (free and paid , or based on skill or experience), and your content plan should map the different types of content based on these access levels.

If your community has a paid member level, creating exclusive content or learning opportunities can add extra value for paid members. In addition to this gated content, your plan should also include content that will be available to all community members, including those who are on a free member level. 

You can also create content that’s open to a wider audience or customer base who aren’t community members to spread awareness about your community and help draw in more members or customers.

Draft a content plan

While your high-quality content pieces are best staggered (for consistency, and your own sanity) it’s worth making sure that you launch with at least one piece of highly desired exclusive content. This will give your members a look at the quality of content they can expect and the value the community will bring to them.

4. Share your strategy with key stakeholders

I like to call this phase, known in the industry as a ‘roadshow’, socializing your strategy — how you communicate and share these ideas internally within your organization and, in some cases, externally with your highly engaged members or advocates. 

Once you've waded into the strategizing process (and have some research and recommendations to show for it), this phase will take place continuously throughout the rest of the process.

This will require you to:

Find your champion

Spend some time talking to people in your organization about your community. Is there someone with power in your organization — preferably an executive — who is bought in from the beginning? Having them in your corner from the get-go can be invaluable if you need to convince leadership. 

Get buy-in from other departments

Choose one or two stakeholders from each department and meet with them to get department-specific feedback. Don't pull them in too early, or you'll risk your project snowballing out of scope. Be clear about what's already decided and what you're looking for feedback on — don't ask teammates to share feedback on project elements you’re sure you won't change.

Share your research and recommendations with leadership

Don't jump the gun on this one — the last thing you want to be doing is pulling higher-ups into the weeds with you. Your strategy needn’t be set in stone, but you will be more likely to get approval if you can back up your recommendations with concrete data and a solid direction forward.

Ask to present at a company all-hands or team-wide meetings

This will add gravitas to your work and help your colleagues understand how big of a deal a community project is. It's also a great opportunity to make sure everyone has the opportunity to weigh in and give feedback, even if they won't necessarily do so.

Make your strategy documents available to the company

However you choose to present your research and plans (a document, a slide deck, an internal wiki...), make sure it's easily accessible for anyone in your company, organized in a way that they can easily navigate and you can easily reference.

5. Choose and test your community tech stack

A large part of this phase will depend on your organization and how much technical support you have (or don't have). For many CMs, the below will be fait accompli. But if you do have the opportunity to get your hands dirty on the technical side, this phase requires you to:

Pick the main software platform for your community

You have many platform options to choose where to run your community . Again, there is no correct answer for this and differs for every community based on your purpose and needs.

In his talk at the 2021 Community Club Summit, Senior Product Manager (then-Senior Community Manager) at GoDaddy Andrew Claremont goes into detail on how to choose the right platform for your community by asking three questions: What do you need? What are your options? What do you, as the expert, recommend to stakeholders?

Decide what other software your community might need

Your content plan might require you to also engage with members outside of the main platform. You’ll need other tools or software to make this happen. For example, if you plan on hosting virtual workshops, you'll need a video calling software like a pro Zoom account or similar. If you have a newsletter just for your community, you’ll need a MailerLite or Mailchimp (or other email marketing tool) account to build your mailing list.

Check in with the tech team

For any flows outside your wheelhouse, you may need help from your company’s technical team. It's worth identifying these needs as soon as possible and pushing to make sure you have access to the project owner if you need ongoing tech support to help you resolve problems as (and when) they come up.

Test login flows

Step into your members' shoes — what does it actually feel like to log in to this community for the first time? Things might work perfectly in the admin view (i.e. your view) but be a confusing or frustrating experience for your members. Testing this before launch will give you a chance to eliminate bugs and create a smooth user experience. I'd also recommend having several coworkers create accounts and giving them a small checklist of things to try (log in, create a post, reply to a post, etc.) as a quality assurance process.

6. Launch your community

This phase is effectively creating a roadmap that lays out all the decisions you've made in the steps above, outlining what is going to happen when.

In this phase, you may need to:

Zero in on marketing channels (if any)

For most people, this will likely involve tapping into the main mode of communication between your company and your customers/prospective members, like a newsletter or social media.

You may also want to target a small group of people you'd love to have in your community and give them a personal invitation. A little one-to-one communication can go a long way. ‍

Decide whom to invite to the community and when

It's never a bad idea to start small. In fact, many community pros will recommend you intentionally limit the speed at which a new community grows. However, this is not always possible in practice, and if that's the case, it's OK — it just means you need to make an effort to layer relationship-building on top of an "open the floodgates" moment.

Develop an onboarding sequence for new members

A well-thought-out onboarding sequence can go a long way in making new members feel welcome and involved in your community. You can do this in multiple ways, such as sending a series of emails, encouraging them to engage in the community by introducing themselves, making a post, sending a personal welcome message , and so on.

Develop a plan to help new members become active

Welcoming new members is the first step to engaging them. Build some engagement plays into your content calendar (like rituals or a tagging strategy) to ignite the spark with new members and ease them into becoming active community members.

👉 Looking for engagement ideas for your community? Check out The Community Engagement Playbook that's jam-packed with over 50 tried-and-tested engagement initiatives and projects shared by CMs.

Last, but not least.

Your community strategizing isn't over once you've completed these steps. Strategies aren't a one-time thing to develop and deliver. That slide deck, wiki, or document you created should be constantly dusted off and built upon as you continue to learn about your community and your members.

Even if you have an existing community, you should continue to re-evaluate elements of strategy as you grow — so that you're always acting with purpose.

Related content

3 Sample Nonprofit Business Plans For Inspiration

Download our Ultimate Nonprofit Business Plan Template here

Below are sample plans to help guide you in writing a nonprofit business plan.

• Example #1 – Kids Are Our First Priority (KAOFP) – a Nonprofit Youth Organization based in Chicago, IL
• Example #2 – Church of the Sacred Heart – a Nonprofit Church based in St. Louis, MO
• Example #3 – Finally Home – a Nonprofit Homeless Shelter in Los Angeles, CA

Sample Nonprofit Business Plan #1 – Kids Are Our First Priority (KAOFP) – a Nonprofit Youth Organization based in Chicago, IL

Executive summary.

Kids Are Our First Priority (KAOFP) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit youth organization that seeks to provide opportunities for students who might otherwise not have access to the arts and humanities. We believe all students should have the opportunity to discover and develop their interests and talents, regardless of socioeconomic status or geographic location. We offer completely free after-school programming in music production, digital photography, creative writing, and leadership development to 12-18-year-olds at risk of dropping out of high school.

Our organization has been active for over five years and has run highly successful programs at two schools in the city of Chicago. We have been awarded an active grant from a local foundation for this coming year, but we will need to cover all costs on our own after that point. Nonprofit administrators have seen a lot of turnovers, leaving the organization without a sustainable plan for reaching its goals.

Organization Overview

The Kids Are Our First Priority (KAOFP) is a 501(c)3 nonprofit youth organization with a mission to provide opportunities for development and self-expression to students who might otherwise not have access. Audiences include at-risk, low-income students from elementary through high school in the Chicago area.

Our programs are built around creative learning with two goals: firstly, creating a space for learning and growth; secondly, encouraging students to share their work with the world.

KAOFP runs three different programs in partnership with closely related nonprofit organizations, providing after-school programming for elementary, middle, and high school-aged children. Programs take place twice a week at different schools around Chicago. While each program is unique in its goals and activities, all programs focus on creative development in the arts and humanities.

Products, Programs, and Services

The three programs offered by KAOFP are Leadership Development (LD), Creative Writing (CW), and Music Production (MP). Students learn in small groups led by skilled instructors. All activities are designed to encourage student engagement, creativity, expression, and community building. Instructors encourage students to share their work with the world through presentations on- and off-site.

Leadership Development (LD)

The Leadership Development program is designed to provide leadership opportunities for high school students who might not otherwise have access to these experiences. Students learn about facilitation, collaboration, communication, and organizational skills as they plan and run projects of their own design. The program’s goal is to provide a structured environment that encourages students to become more confident and comfortable being leaders in their schools, communities, and future careers.

Creative Writing (CW)

Students learn how to use writing creatively as a tool for expression, discovery, and communication. In small groups led by skilled instructors, students write poetry, short stories, and essays of their own design. They also learn about the publishing industry, read each others’ work, and share their writing with the community.

Music Production (MP)

Students learn how to use digital media as a tool for expression, discovery, and communication. In weekly sessions led by skilled instructors, students explore music production through computer software and recording equipment. Students produce their own music and write about their experiences in weekly journals. Industry professionals in the community often volunteer to lead special workshops and seminars.

Industry Analysis

The youth arts and humanities field is extremely competitive. There are many different types of nonprofit organizations doing similar work, but few credible providers with long-term commitments to their communities. KAOFP’s greatest strengths and competitive advantages are our stable and qualified staff, a strong foundation of funding and community support, and a diverse set of programs.

Our biggest competitors include national non-profits with large budgets for advertising and marketing as well as commercial programs that offer music lessons and creative writing courses which may be more cost-effective than our programs. We feel that by focusing on specific areas of creative expression, KAOFP can better serve its communities and differentiate itself from other nonprofit organizations effectively.

Customer Analysis

KAOFP serves elementary, middle, and high school-aged students with programs that include both after-school and summer programming.

Our focus is on low-income neighborhoods with a high population of at-risk youth. In these areas, KAOFP fills a void in the education system by providing opportunities for creative expression and leadership development to students who would not otherwise have access to these resources.

The demographics of our current students are as follows:

• 91% African-American/Black
• 6% Hispanic/Latino
• 5% Multiracial
• 3.9% Low Income
• 4.9% Not Identified

Our main target is low-income African American and Latino youth in Chicago Public Schools. We would like to expand our outreach to include other communities in need of creative enrichment opportunities.

Marketing Plan

KAOFP’s marketing program is designed to support student, parent, and staff recruitment by promoting the organization’s goals and programs. Our main target audience consists of parents seeking after-school enrichment opportunities for their children that emphasize creativity and the arts.

To reach this audience, we advertise in public schools as well as on social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. We intend to begin marketing online through a company-sponsored blog, which will feature regular updates about KAOFP events and activities. We also intend to use word of mouth as a form of marketing.

Strategic partnerships with local schools and community centers will provide us with additional exposure as well as additional resources to secure funding.  

Operations Plan

KAOFP’s day-to-day operation is structured around its programs on Tuesdays from 4 pm to 8 pm.

Administrative offices are located in the same space as each program, allowing instructors to closely monitor their students and provide support as needed. The administrative offices serve the essential function of fundraising, communications, record-keeping, and volunteer coordination. KAOFP’s Board of Directors meets bi-monthly to provide further leadership, guidance, and oversight to our board members and volunteers.

Customer service is conducted by phone and email during our regular business hours of Monday – Friday 9 am to 12 pm.  We are not open on weekends or holidays.

Management Team

KAOFP’s organizational structure includes a Board of Directors, an Executive Director, and Program Directors. The Board of Directors provides guidance and oversight to the organization, while the Executive Director manages day-to-day operations. The Program Directors oversee each of KAOFP’s programs.

KAOFP has a small but dedicated staff that is committed to our students and our mission. Our team has a wide range of experience in the arts, education, and nonprofit sector.

Executive Director

The Executive Director is responsible for the overall management of KAOFP. This includes supervising staff, developing and implementing programs, overseeing finances, and representing the organization to the public.

Our Executive Director, Susie Brown, has been with KAOFP since its inception in 2010. She has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia College Chicago. Susie is responsible for the overall management of KAOFP, including supervising staff, developing and implementing programs, overseeing finances, and representing the organization to the public.

Program Directors

Each of KAOFP’s programs is overseen by a Program Director. The Program Directors are responsible for developing and implementing the program curricula, recruiting and training program instructors, and evaluating student progress.

Art Program Director

The Art Program Director, Rachel Smith, has a B.A. in Fine Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is responsible for developing and implementing the program curricula, recruiting and training program instructors, and evaluating student progress.

Music Program Director

The Music Program Director, John Jones, has a B.A. in Music Education from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is responsible for developing and implementing the program curricula, recruiting and training program instructors, and evaluating student progress.

Theatre Program Director

The Theatre Program Director, Jane Doe, has a B.A. in Theatre Arts from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She is responsible for developing and implementing the program curricula, recruiting and training program instructors, and evaluating student progress.

Board of Directors

KAOFP’s Board of Directors provides guidance and oversight to the organization. The Board consists of community leaders, educators, artists, and parents. Board members serve three-year terms and can be renewed for one additional term.

Financial Plan

KAOFP’s annual operating budget is approximately $60,000 per year, with an additional one-time cost of about $10,000 for the purchase of equipment and materials. The agency makes very efficient use of its resources by maintaining low overhead costs. Our biggest expense is instructor salaries, which are approximately 75% of total expenses.

Pro Forma Income Statement

Pro forma balance sheet, pro forma cash flow statement, nonprofit business plan example #2 – church of the sacred heart – a nonprofit church based in st. louis, mo.

The Church of Sacred Heart is a nonprofit organization located in St. Louis, Missouri that provides educational opportunities for low-income families. We provide the best quality of education for young children with tuition rates significantly lower than public schools. It has been voted Best Catholic Elementary School by the St Louis Post Dispatch for four years running, and it has maintained consistently high ratings of 4.5 out of 5 stars on Google Reviews since its opening in 1914.

The Church of Sacred Heart strives to build strong relationships with our community by making an impact locally but not forgetting that we operate on global principles. As such, our school commits 10% of its profits to charitable organizations throughout the world every year, while also conducting fundraisers throughout the year to keep tuition rates affordable.

We are currently transitioning from a safe, high-quality learning environment to an even more attractive facility with state-of-the-art technology and modern materials that will appeal to young students and their families. New facilities, such as additional classrooms and teachers’ lounges would allow us not only to accommodate new students but also attract current families by having more places within the school where they can spend time between classes.

By taking full advantage of available opportunities to invest in our teachers, students, and facilities, we will be able to achieve steady revenue growth at 4% per year until 20XX.

The Church of Sacred Heart provides a safe learning environment with an emphasis on strong academics and a nurturing environment that meets the needs of its young students and their families. Investing in new facilities will allow us to provide even better care for our children as we continue to grow as a school.

Mission Statement: “We will strive diligently to create a safe, respectful environment where students are encouraged and inspired to learn through faith.”

Vision Statement: “Sacred Heart believes education gives every child the opportunity to achieve their full potential.”

The Church of the Sacred Heart was built in 1914 and is located in the Old North St. Louis neighborhood, an area with a high concentration of poverty, crime, unemployment, and abandoned buildings.

The church houses the only Catholic school for low-income families in the north city; together they formed Sacred Heart’s educational center (SCE). SCE has strived to provide academic excellence to children from low-income families by providing a small, nurturing environment as well as high academic standards.

The facility is in need of renovations and new equipment to continue its mission.

The Church of the Sacred Heart is a small nonprofit organization that provides a variety of educational and community services.

The services provided by Sacred Heart represent a $5 billion industry, with nonprofit organizations accounting for $258.8 billion of that total.

The health care and social assistance sector is the largest among nonprofits, representing 32 percent of revenues, followed by educational services (18 percent), and human and other social service providers (16 percent).

The key customers for the Church of the Sacred Heart are families in need of affordable education. The number of students in the school has increased from 500 when it opened in 1914 to 1,100 at its peak during 20XX-20XX but has since declined due to various reasons.

The children at Sacred Heart are from low-income families and 91 percent qualify for free or reduced lunches. Most parents work or have a family member who works full-time, while others don’t work due to child care restraints. The number of children enrolled in Sacred Heart is stable at 1,075 students because there is a lack of affordable alternatives to Catholic education in the area.

SCE offers K-5th grade students a unique learning experience in small groups with individualized instruction.

Sacred Heart has an established brand and is well known for its high standards of academic excellence, which include a 100 percent graduation rate.

Sacred Heart attracts prospective students through promotional materials such as weekly bulletins, mailers to homes that are located in the area served, and local churches.

Parents and guardians of children enrolled in Sacred Heart are mainly referrals from current families, word-of-mouth, and parishioners who learn about the school by attending Mass at Sacred Heart.

The Church of Sacred Heart does not currently advertise; however, it is one of the few Catholic schools that serve low-income families in St. Louis, MO, and therefore uses word of mouth to attract new students to its school.

The Church of Sacred Heart has an established brand awareness within the target audience despite not having direct marketing plans or materials.

The operations section for the Church of the Sacred Heart consists of expanding its after-school program as well as revamping its facility to meet the growing demand for affordable educational services.

Sacred Heart is located in an area where more than one-third of children live below the poverty line, which helps Sacred Heart stand out among other schools that are more upscale. Expansion into after-school programs will allow it to capture a larger market share by providing additional services to its target audience.

In order to expand, Sacred Heart will have to hire additional personnel as well as invest in new equipment and supplies for both the school and the after-school program.

The Church of Sacred Heart’s financial plan includes a fundraising plan that would help renovate the building as well as acquire new equipment and supplies for the school.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, Catholic elementary schools across all grade levels spend an average of $6,910 per pupil on operating expenses. A fundraising initiative would help Sacred Heart acquire additional revenue while expanding its services to low-income families in St Louis, MO.

Financial Overview

The Church of the Sacred Heart expects to generate revenues of about $1.2 million in fiscal year 20XX, representing a growth rate of 2 percent from its 20XX revenue level. For 20XX, the church expects revenues to decrease by 4 percent due to a decline in enrollment and the lack of new students. The Church of Sacred Heart has experienced steady revenue growth since its opening in 1914.

• Revenue stream 1: Tuition – 22%
• Revenue stream 2: Investment income – 1%

Despite being located in a poverty-stricken area, the Church of Sacred Heart has a stable revenue growth at 4 percent per year. Therefore, Sacred Heart should be able to attain its 20XX revenue goal of $1.2 million by investing in new facilities and increasing tuition fees for students enrolled in its after-school program.

Income Statement f or the fiscal year ending December 31, 20XX

Revenue: $1.2 million

Total Expenses: $910,000

Net Income Before Taxes: $302,000

Statement of Financial Position as of December 31, 20XX 

Cash and Cash Equivalents: $25,000

Receivables: $335,000

Property and Equipment: $1.2 million

Intangible Assets: $0

Total Assets: $1.5 million

Balance Statement

The board of directors has approved the 20XX fiscal year budget for Sacred Heart Catholic Church, which is estimated at $1.3 million in revenues and $920,000 in expenditures.

Cash Flow Statement f or the Fiscal Year Ending December 31, 20XX

Operating Activities: Income Before Taxes -$302,000

Investing Activities: New equipment and supplies -$100,000

Financing Activities: Fundraising campaign $200,000

Net Change in Cash: $25,000

According to the 20XX fiscal year financial statements for Sacred Heart Catholic Church, it expects its investments to decrease by 4 percent and expects to generate $1.3 million in revenues. Its total assets are valued at $1.5 million, which consists of equipment and property worth approximately 1.2 million dollars.

The Church of Sacred Heart’s financial statements demonstrate its long-term potential for strong revenue growth due to its steady market share held with low-income families in St. Louis, MO.

Nonprofit Business Plan Example #3 – Finally Home – a Nonprofit Homeless Shelter in Los Angeles, CA

Finally Home is a nonprofit organization that aims to provide low-income single-parent families with affordable housing. The management team has a strong background in the social service industry and deep ties in the communities they plan to serve. In addition, Finally Home’s CEO has a background in real estate development, which will help the organization as they begin developing its operations.

Finally Home’s mission is to reinvent affordable housing for low-income single-parent families and make it more sustainable and accessible. They will accomplish this by buying homes from families and renting them out at an affordable price. Finally Home expects its model of affordable housing to become more sustainable and accessible than any other model currently available on the market today. Finally Home’s competitive advantage over similar organizations is that it will purchase land and buildings from which to build affordable housing. This gives them a greater amount of ownership over their communities and the properties in which the homes are located, as well as freedom when financing these projects.

Finally Home plans on accomplishing this by buying real estate in areas with high concentrations of low-income families who are ready to become homeowners. These homes will be used as affordable housing units until they are purchased by Finally Home’s target demographic, at which point the organizations will begin renting them out at a base rate of 30% of the family’s monthly household income.

Finally Home plans on financing its operations through both private donations and contributions from foundations, corporations, and government organizations.

Finally Home’s management team has strong backgrounds in the social service industry, with deep ties to families that will be prepared to take advantage of Finally Home’s affordable housing opportunities. The CEO of Finally Home also brings extensive real estate development experience to the organization, an asset that will be especially helpful as Finally Home begins its operations.

Finally Home is a nonprofit organization, incorporated in the State of California, whose mission is to help homeless families by providing them with housing and support services. The centerpiece of our program, which will be replicated nationwide if successful, is an apartment complex that offers supportive living for single parents and their children.

The apartments are fully furnished, and all utilities are paid.

All the single parents have jobs, but they don’t earn enough to pay market-rate rent while still paying for other necessities such as food and transportation.

The organization was founded in 20XX by Henry Cisneros, a former U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development who served under President Bill Clinton. Cisneros is the chairman of Finally Home’s board of directors, which includes leaders with experience in banking, nonprofit management, and housing professions.

The core values are family unity, compassion for the poor, and respect for our clients. They are the values that guide our employees and volunteers at Finally Home from start to finish.

According to the United States Conference of Mayors’ Task Force on Hunger and Homelessness 20XX Report, “Hunger & Homelessness Survey: A Status Report on Hunger & Homelessness in America’s Cities,” almost half (48%) of all homeless people are members of families with children. Of this number, over one quarter (26%) are under the age of 18.

In 20XX, there were 9.5 million poor adults living in poverty in a family with children and no spouse present. The majority of these families (63%) have only one earner, while 44% have zero earners because the person is not old enough or does not work for other reasons.

The total number of people in poverty in 20XX was 46.5 million, the largest number since Census began publishing these statistics 52 years ago.

Finally Home’s goal is to help single parents escape this cycle of poverty through providing affordable housing and case management services to support them long term.

Unique Market Position

Finally Home creates unique value for its potential customers by creating housing where it does not yet exist.

By helping single parents escape poverty and become self-sufficient, Finally Home will drive demand among low-income families nationwide who are experiencing homelessness. The high level of need among this demographic is significant nationwide. However, there are no other organizations with the same market position as Finally Home.

Finally Home’s target customers are low-income families who are experiencing homelessness in the Los Angeles area. The organization will actively seek out these families through national networks of other social service providers to whom they refer their clients regularly.

Finally Home expects to have a waiting list of families that are interested in the program before they even open their doors.

This customer analysis is based on the assumption that these particular demographic groups are already active users of other social service programs, so referrals will be natural and easy for Finally Home.

Industry Capacity

This information is based on the assumption that these particular demographic groups are already active users of other social service programs, so referrals will be natural and easy for Finally Home.

There is a growing demand for low-income single-parent housing nationwide, yet there is no one organization currently providing these services on a national level like Finally Home.

Thus, Finally Home has a competitive advantage and market niche here because it will be the only nonprofit organization of its kind in the country.

Finally Home’s marketing strategies will focus on attracting potential customers through national networks of other social service providers. They will advertise to their referral sources using materials developed by the organization.  Finally Home will also advertise its services online, targeting low-income families using Google AdWords.

Finally Home will be reinventing affordable housing to make it more accessible and sustainable for low-income single parents. In this new model, Finally Home will own the land and buildings on which its housing units are built, as well as the properties in which they are located.

When a family is ready to move into an affordable housing unit, Finally Home will buy the home they currently live in. This way, families can take advantage of homeownership services like property tax assistance and financial literacy courses that help them manage their newfound wealth.

Finally Home has already partnered with local real estate agents to identify properties for purchase. The organization expects this to result in homes that are at least 30% cheaper than market value.

Finally Home will finance its operational plan through the use of private contributions and donations from public and private foundations, as well as corporate sponsorships.

Finally Home’s management team consists of:

• Veronica Jones, CEO, and Founder
• Mark MacDonald, COO
• Scott Bader, CFO

Management Summary

The management team has a strong history of social service advocacy and deep ties in the communities they plan to serve. In addition, the organization’s CEO has a background in real estate development that will be helpful as Finally Home begins operations.

• Year 1: Operation startup costs to launch first five houses ($621,865)
• Year 2: Deliver on market offer and complete first capital raise ($4,753,000)
• Year 3: Deliver on market offer and complete $5 million capital raise ($7,950,000)
• Year 4+: Continue to grow market share with a national network of social services providers ($15,350,000).

This nonprofit business plan will serve as an effective road map for Finally Home in its efforts to create a new model for affordable housing.

Nonprofit Business Plan Example PDF

Download our non-profit business plan pdf here. This is a free nonprofit business plan example to help you get started on your own nonprofit plan.

How to Finish Your Nonprofit Business Plan in 1 Day!

Don’t you wish there was a faster, easier way to finish your nonprofit business plan?

With Growthink’s Ultimate Nonprofit Business Plan Template you can finish your plan in just 8 hours or less!

Other Helpful Nonprofit Business Planning Articles

• Non-Profit Business Plan
• How to Write a Nonprofit Business Plan
• 10 Tips to Make Your Nonprofit’s Business Plan Stand Out
• How to Write a Mission Statement for Your Nonprofit Organization
• Strategic Planning for a Nonprofit Organization
• How to Write a Marketing Plan for Your Nonprofit Business
• 4 Top Funding Sources for a Nonprofit Organization
• What is a Nonprofit Organization?
• 20 Nonprofit Organization Ideas For Your Community

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• Good Practice Guidance

Business plan good practice guidance

By reading this guidance you'll get help with how to develop a business plan, including basic headings and prompts on how to review your plan as it develops. It also includes a list of further resources and a glossary of terms to do with business planning.

Please note: if you already have a business plan, you don’t need to produce a new one.

Writing your plan

Before producing your business plan, consider:

• if you need expertise in areas such as market analysis, taxation or legal matters
• who will be involved in writing the plan, including staff and trustees
• the timelines for the business plan to be approved

The headings below give a basic framework for developing a business plan, but every organisation is different so you may want to use different headings or additional content that better explains how your organisation works:

• executive summary
• about the organisation   
• governance and management structures
• market appraisal and current approach
• financial appraisal
• risk register
• monitoring and evaluating the organisation
• organisational impact assessment
• contact details for the organisation

Once you have a draft it’s a good idea to review it to assess its strengths and weaknesses, tackle any gaps and ensure it’s as clear, concise and logical as possible.

Your business plan will be a document you refer back to continually and update in the general course of running your organisation, so ask yourself:

• Does your business plan present a strategy for achieving your aims and your mission?
• Does your business plan align with our Heritage 2033 investment principles ?

Executive summary

Your plan should start with a concise overview (no more than two pages) highlighting the most important information in the document, including:

• an overview of your organisation including your mission statement and what you want to achieve
• the organisation’s key aims for the period of the plan (usually 3–5 years)
• key elements of your strategy including how you will assure the longer-term financial future of the organisation
• the main risks facing your organisation and how you plan to manage these in the short, medium and long term
• an explanation of how your organisation is resilient enough to meet challenges: likely including financial information, how you will ensure governance and management structures are fit for purpose, and the monitoring and evaluation processes you have in place
• any additional key information

Review this section by asking:

• Is it a well-structured summary highlighting key points from the plan?
• If someone with no prior knowledge of your organisation read this summary on its own, would it make sense?

About the organisation

This should provide information on the structure, objectives and activities of your organisation, including:

• when and why it was started
• its purpose, aims and key successes
• the key areas of activity, products and/or services that you deliver, how they are distinctive and how will they be developed over the course of the plan
• details of the targets you have set for each area of activity
• Legal status, eg: unincorporated association or trust, or incorporated by Act of Parliament, Royal Charter, as a company limited by shares/guarantee, (Scottish) Charitable Incorporated Organisation or Industrial and Provident Society. Indicate whether it is a Community Interest Company or is registered or recognised as a charity.
• whether it has a membership of individuals, and if so the number of members
• the names of any other entities with which it has a formal association (eg: any bodies with which there are funding agreements or that have the right to nominate multiple board members)
• Whether it is a partnership of different organisations with a shared interest, identifying the other organisations/stakeholders you will be working with, the basis of the arrangement and whether it is formal or informal. Summarise any partnership agreements.
• the number and roles of paid staff (in total and full-time equivalents) and explain the tasks they perform within the organisation
• the role of volunteers (give estimates of the number of regular volunteers, the tasks they do within the organisation and the total number of hours they work on each task every year)
• describe how you fund your organisation’s activities, noting any sources that account for a particularly large proportion of your income and, if these come from a funding body, when this funding will be subject to review
• Have you accurately described your organisation’s purpose and main areas of activity and how you are distinctive?
• Do you highlight key successes?
• Is it clear what services or products you offer and how you intend to develop them?
• Have you set clear targets?
• Is the structure of your organisation clearly set out in a way that is easy to understand?
• Have you included key information about your legal set up and how you staff and fund core activities?

Governance and management structures

This should explain your organisation’s management structure, decision-making processes, lines of communication and reporting. It can include simple organograms/network diagrams to show your governance, management and staffing structures.

Governance summary

This should provide an overview of the governance in place within your organisation to ensure that business plans and strategies are approved and monitored.

Describe the size and composition of the governing body (eg: council, board of trustees, board of directors) and, where appropriate, arrangements in place for succession planning and board development training. List the roles covered by your senior management team.

You should explain the make-up of your board. This includes how the board provides a diversity of perspective and skills. You should also explain their engagement with the organisation, particularly in relation to:

• business planning, pricing policies and marketing strategies
• financial management and administration
• fundraising
• approving potential projects and maintaining oversight
• commissioning advisers and consultants

Summarise the functions of any sub-groups, describing their membership, roles and responsibilities, and specifying any delegated powers they are authorised to use. Indicate how frequently such groups meet.

Management structure

You should include simple organigrams or network diagrams. These should show each job title. There’s no need to include individuals’ names.

Show how many post-holders are employed in each position and whether they are full-time, part-time or volunteers. 

An accompanying schedule should list each role, summarising its purpose and function, and the name of the post-holder (so we can see if there are vacancies in key roles).

You should provide information on your recruitment policies for core staff. If you use external advisors regularly, you should give details of their company and role and how they relate to the positions on the organogram.

If volunteers are a key part of your organisation, you should explain:

• the roles volunteers play in the organisation, including the types of responsibilities they have
• how many volunteers the organisation works with
• the number of volunteer hours
• the role within your organisation responsible for managing volunteering and how this is monitored
• Have you covered how your organisation is managed and governed in a clear way? Is there any information missing?
• Have you included the main challenges you face in running your business?
• Is it clear what skills and experience are needed going forward? Have you included information on how you develop skills within the organisation?
• Have you included plans for developing your structure and processes in the future?

This should include a more detailed overview of the aims of your organisation for the period of the plan and how they relate to your overall mission, setting out the key activities you will undertake to achieve them.

Include any projects you plan to take on, demonstrating how they will work together to achieve your organisation’s aims. You should include information on the impact additional projects will have on your organisation and how you plan to deal with those impacts.

Include dates and a timetable for reviewing and updating your strategy.

Market appraisal and current approach

A market appraisal looks at your offer within the context of the marketplace. You should assess your market, your competition and your marketing strategy. Market analysis should be proportionate to the scope and size of your organisation.

Describe your current market:

• Is the profile of your heritage attraction or place of local or national interest? Is it well known?
• Is it valued by a wide cross-section of the public or a more limited special-interest group?
• How many customers have you had each year over the past 10 years?
• What are the demographics of your current customers and visitors – their age, gender, income, education, and occupation? What proportion are family groups/schools?
• Where do they live – very locally, from the surrounding region, from the UK or overseas?
• What proportion of customer contacts are repeats?

Show you know your market:

• On a national or regional basis, is your market growing, falling or stable?
• How does this relate to your organisation’s experience?
• Are there any national socio-economic trends or policies that will have an impact on your market?
• How might foreseeable political, economic, social and/or technological changes affect your market?

Consider your potential/target audience:

• Who are the people most likely to access your service?
• Are they single or repeat customers?
• What are their needs, behaviours, tastes and preferences?
• What has research shown you so far?

Review the competition

All organisations have competition of some sort. Find out what organisations are in competition with yours. Look at how they price their activities, their business strategy, strengths and weaknesses.

Develop a competitive strategy for your organisation

Do a ‘SWOT’ analysis looking at the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats to your organisation.

Use evidence-based information and remember to include internal and external factors. Describe what is unique and special to your organisation and include the disadvantages you have.

Outline your marketing strategy

A marketing strategy is how you will reach new audiences. It will likely be based on evidence from:

• data you have collected, over as long a period of time as is achievable
• national data, for example, the Taking Part survey (in England), national tourism surveys, national and local authority statistics
• existing market research
• market research commissioned to estimate potential markets and the potential popularity of the business with your target market
• reviewing operations that are similar to those you propose in your own area and further afield, using annual accounts available online from the Charity Commission (England) or Companies House

Your marketing strategy should clearly set out:

• people:  who your target audiences are, including the size of these audiences
• product:  what you’re offering people
• price:  your pricing strategy and the rationale behind it
• promotion:  the communication channels and messages you will use to reach your target audiences

Financial appraisal

This should include a general financial assessment of your organisation, an overview of your total financial need to support your day-to-day operations and details of your financial model, including your main sources of funding.

Provide supporting documents in an appendix at the end of your business plan, detailing:

• a forecast income and expenditure account
• a cashflow forecast showing the expected monthly cashflow
• statements of assumptions underlying the forecasts

Detail the assumptions made in your calculations. An assumption is anything you are relying on to make forecasts. For example, the average number of visitors you are expecting based on the previous year, or any unknown costs of materials. Make sure you also include details of any reserves.

You may want to undertake a sensitivity analysis to show what your finances would look like if your projections fall short by various amounts, for example between 5% and 20%. What would the risk to your operation be if either of these scenarios were to occur and what action might you need to take?

• Have you described how your organisation operates financially in a way that is easy to understand?
• Have you included an overview of your total financial needs, what your main sources of funding are and how your main activities contribute to achieving this?
• Have you included an expected cashflow forecast and income and expenditure forecast?

Risk register

A risk assessment identifies your organisation’s internal weaknesses and external threats. A risk register, usually set out as a table, lists all the identified risks prioritised in order of importance.

For each risk, outline:

• the nature of the risk, eg: technical, market, financial, economic, management, legal
• a description of the risk
• the probability of the risk happening: low, medium, high or as a percentage
• the effect the risk could have, eg: on cost, time, performance
• the level of effect: low, medium, high, or as a percentage
• how you would prepare for and lessen the risk’s effect
• Have you listed the key potential problems that your organisation faces?
• On reflection, are they your main risks or can the list be reduced?
• Have the risks been properly calculated?
• Do you need to do any further thinking about how risks will be mitigated?
• Are there any alternative courses of action that have not been considered?

Monitoring and evaluating your organisation

In this section you should set out your plans for monitoring and evaluating your organisation's performance and impact to ensure you are meeting your aims and achieving your mission.

You will need to gather different kinds of information at various stages, starting at the earliest opportunity by benchmarking where you are to start with. You should set a series of milestones, financial targets and performance targets to track these.

Evaluation should be carried out regularly using the monitoring information. You should summarise your planned approach and include details of milestones. Your approach should show when you anticipate evaluating your achievements and specify the scope of the evaluation and whether your organisation plans to bring in any expertise to help you assess the extent to which you are meeting your aims.

• Have you included details of the changes you want your organisation to make? How does this link to your mission and aims?
• Have you set out how you intend to monitor progress? Will you need any external advice?
• Have you detailed what success looks like? How will you know if you have achieved your targets?
• Do you have a plan for linking your findings into future decision-making? How do you report back to your board of trustees?

Organisational impact assessment

Within your application we want to see how your proposed project will impact your organisation and its finances and continue to deliver against our investment principles for a period of five years from the end of the project, including:

How will any additional costs created by the project continue to be funded?

These can include additional staffing and housekeeping costs, business rates, maintenance obligations arising from implementing management and maintenance plans (and, if applicable, conservation plans ). Document these additional costs in a table.

Where the project is expected to lead to reduced expenditure (for example, reduced energy expenditure, productivity gains due to improved technology), include the costs of the savings in the table to give the planned net additional cost or saving. 

What additional volunteer input will be required?

Tell us about additional numbers of hours to be worked and the number of additional hours required. Indicate where these volunteers come from and the impact on your volunteer management and training arrangements. 

Are there any changes in governance or management that could affect the project?

Tell us about any relevant changes to board composition or committee structure, or variation in individual duties or responsibilities. If the structure will be different during different phases of your project, provide separate diagrams to explain the arrangements. Outline any other material change in how the organisation will be managed as a consequence of the project.

Provide the following financial projections:

A statement of unrestricted funds, or of income and expenditure where the organisation is a local authority, university or other large organisation and the scale of the project is immaterial to the organisation's total financial circumstances. Where the organisation has a trading subsidiary, its projections should be consolidated with those of its parent. Include:

• the organisation's balance sheet
• the assumptions on which the financial projections are based
• a sensitivity analysis

In carrying out this impact assessment you should:

• Use the market appraisal you have carried out in your overall business planning to give details of your market size and the income generated. The assumptions should clearly show the basis on which the numbers have been calculated.
• demonstrate that the general trend will be for the organisation to generate annual surpluses on its unrestricted funds
• Base your assessment on your latest completed financial year if you have been in existence for that length of time (or the current year budget). Use this as a starting point for your projections so you can clearly assess the net impact on your financial position from the incremental, on-going income and expenditure caused by the project you are proposing.
• Include in the sensitivity analysis the income items that are most critical to the organisation's success, are most uncertain or contain the greatest risk. By adjusting these by percentages between 5% and 20%, depending on their nature and risk, it is possible to see the impact on the reported surplus.

Contact details for your organisation

At the end of your business plan, include:

• head office address
• telephone number
• email address

If you need to include additional information to support your plan, for example, evidence or reports you have commissioned, external advice, financial information or visuals which support the plan, add these as appendices.

When you have completed the plan, review your appendices to make sure you haven’t missed any relevant detail. Check whether you have included information in the main business plan that should be listed in the appendix instead.

Additional resources

• Sample business plans for various industries.
• Business planning guidance for arts and cultural organisations   commissioned by   Arts Council England for the arts and cultural sector.
• The Sustainable Sun tool : 10 steps towards financial sustainability from the National Council for Voluntary Organisations.
• An introduction to benchmarking , developed by The Audience Agency.
• How to build a measurement and evaluation framework , developed by New Philanthropy Capital.
• Impact and evaluation resources from the Small Charities Coalition
• DIY toolkit on how to invent, adopt or adapt ideas that can deliver better results, created by Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency. It includes a template for  SWOT analysis .
• Various business planning resources from the Scottish Council for Voluntary Organisations.
• Various resources to help you run your organisation from the Wales Council for Voluntary Action.
• Resources and templates relating to business planning , including a template for developing a cashflow, from the Small Charities Programme. 

Glossary of terms to do with business planning

Aims:  a broad statement of intent.

Asset : an item of value owned and controlled by the organisation that has a useful life longer than a single accounting period.

Budget : a plan for future activity expressed in terms of incoming and outgoing resources.

Cashflow : the pattern of an organisation’s income and expenditure. Having surplus cash in hand after being able to meet all debts on the day they are due is a ‘positive’ cashflow, not having cash to meet debts as they fall due is a ‘negative’ cashflow.

Forecast : a   financial projection, based on performance to date, of where the organisation expects to be at the end of the current financial period. Revised forecasts are often prepared throughout the financial year.

Impact: the intended or unintended sustainable changes brought about by an initiative, project, programme or organisation.

Mission : the overall guiding direction of the organisation, which usually states your purpose, refers to what your organisation does, who it does it for and what is unique or different about what you do.

Objectives : achievements set out for a business to aim for, often within a certain timeframe. These should be ‘SMART’, ie: specific, measurable, achievable, realistic and time-based. They underpin planning and strategic activities and serve as the basis for performance monitoring and evaluation.

Trustee: a person who has independent control over, and legal responsibility for, an organisation’s (especially a charity’s) management and administration.  Find out more about trustees on the Government’s website .

Sensitivity analysis: tests different scenarios to see how they will affect your bottom line, for example by increasing and decreasing your financial projections by between 5% and 20%.

Unrestricted funds: money that can be spent on any activity that furthers the organisation’s purpose.

5 basics of a good communications plan for community engagement projects

Whether you’re looking to launch a project, are already running one, or have reached the report-out phase, a strong communications plan will help drive the success of your efforts. In this article, we discuss the five basic principles of a good communications plan for your community engagement efforts.

While a communications plan can drive participation, we know that the resources and bandwidth to create one are limited. But unlike what you might fear, an effective communication strategy for community engagement projects doesn’t require a huge budget, and even a small motivated team can achieve great results. You’ll see that just a little preparation, planning, and creativity will go a long way. 

1. Know your target audience(s) and tailor your messaging

If you know who you are trying to reach, you can gear your communications toward the values and messaging that will resonate most with them. If your project is aimed toward young people, you may define your target audience as youth between 12-18 and their parents or guardians. If your project concerns bike lane improvements throughout the city, you may need to cast a wider net to reach all potential stakeholders. Determine who would ultimately benefit from the project and have something to say about it when crafting your communications.

2. Include regular updates in your communications plan to build trust and excitement

Once you’ve launched your project, it’s essential to keep the momentum high. Don’t let your residents’ attention fizzle! Instead, keep them updated as soon as you have something to share. A quick follow-up on the initial messages keeps everything fresh in the public’s minds and drives more continuous engagement. It offers an opportunity for new arrivals in your city or county to get involved and also engages your community with the progress to show the participants that their voice matters.

Questions to ask yourself: What is the status of a project? Which ideas are the most popular? What are the newest ideas? And what does the timeline look like after the current phase? The answers to all of these questions are important elements to include in your communications plan.

3. Mix different channels

When communicating about projects online, it’s a good idea to combine different channels. If you successfully mix emailing, direct traffic, referrals and social media, you’ve struck gold. There are different ways to tap into each channel to broaden your reach. If you have the budget, you can invest in extensive campaigns with impressive visuals and ads campaigns on social media to reach a wider online audience. But also if your budget is more limited, you can create awareness and increase engagement on your platform through more organic methods such as non-sponsored posts from your social media accounts, a news update on your official website and an email campaign.

But don’t forget: some groups within your community might not always be easy to reach in the digital realm. To boost the impact of your communications plan, it’s best to spread the word offline as well. 

Get press involved, send physical introduction letters, or organize a local event. Combining online and offline channels is a surefire way to diversify the audience that hears about your project.

4. Find ambassadors – both internal and external

We’ve often seen local governments so focused on engaging their communities that they forget to bring their internal teams along. Involve and motivate your fellow elected officials and government officials to help amplify your message on their communication channels and even engage with other departments in the process.

A good way to draw attention to your platform is by motivating politicians to share personal messages about the project. This immediately gives the project extra importance. Messages from politicians’ personal accounts will lead to a broader online reach and prove to your community that their (elected) leaders support the project. 

Besides politicians, you can also approach (community) influencers or partners to share your message. The wider your network of ambassadors, the wider your reach will ultimately be. 

5. Take time for the report-out phase

Now that your engagement project has ended, you might feel relieved to be done… but not so fast. The report-out communications phase is arguably one of the most important if you want continued success. This phase is all about relationship building and helps you build trust to lay the groundwork for the next project you might lead. Closing the loop and letting people know how their feedback was – or was not – used is crucial. 

Preparation and continuity are vital for any good communications plan

By considering these guidelines while developing the communications plan for your engagement project, you will be able to maximize the reach of your platform and projects, and ultimately make more inclusive and representative decisions for your community. No more scrambling to get the word out, you’ll be ready from day one to maximize the engagement.

Guide: How to create a communications plan for community engagement projects 

From the 300+ local governments we’ve worked with, we’ve learned not everyone is familiar with the ins and outs of a communications plan. That’s why we’ve developed a guide to help you map out the most strategic elements of a communications plan for community engagement projects. It includes more details on developing a communications strategy for launching, running, and reporting on an engagement project, as well as examples of our client community. Download it now !

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MoSCoW Prioritization

What is moscow prioritization.

MoSCoW prioritization, also known as the MoSCoW method or MoSCoW analysis, is a popular prioritization technique for managing requirements. 

  The acronym MoSCoW represents four categories of initiatives: must-have, should-have, could-have, and won’t-have, or will not have right now. Some companies also use the “W” in MoSCoW to mean “wish.”

What is the History of the MoSCoW Method?

Software development expert Dai Clegg created the MoSCoW method while working at Oracle. He designed the framework to help his team prioritize tasks during development work on product releases.

You can find a detailed account of using MoSCoW prioritization in the Dynamic System Development Method (DSDM) handbook . But because MoSCoW can prioritize tasks within any time-boxed project, teams have adapted the method for a broad range of uses.

How Does MoSCoW Prioritization Work?

Before running a MoSCoW analysis, a few things need to happen. First, key stakeholders and the product team need to get aligned on objectives and prioritization factors. Then, all participants must agree on which initiatives to prioritize.

At this point, your team should also discuss how they will settle any disagreements in prioritization. If you can establish how to resolve disputes before they come up, you can help prevent those disagreements from holding up progress.

Finally, you’ll also want to reach a consensus on what percentage of resources you’d like to allocate to each category.

With the groundwork complete, you may begin determining which category is most appropriate for each initiative. But, first, let’s further break down each category in the MoSCoW method.

Start prioritizing your roadmap

Moscow prioritization categories.

1. Must-have initiatives

As the name suggests, this category consists of initiatives that are “musts” for your team. They represent non-negotiable needs for the project, product, or release in question. For example, if you’re releasing a healthcare application, a must-have initiative may be security functionalities that help maintain compliance.

The “must-have” category requires the team to complete a mandatory task. If you’re unsure about whether something belongs in this category, ask yourself the following.

If the product won’t work without an initiative, or the release becomes useless without it, the initiative is most likely a “must-have.”

2. Should-have initiatives

Should-have initiatives are just a step below must-haves. They are essential to the product, project, or release, but they are not vital. If left out, the product or project still functions. However, the initiatives may add significant value.

“Should-have” initiatives are different from “must-have” initiatives in that they can get scheduled for a future release without impacting the current one. For example, performance improvements, minor bug fixes, or new functionality may be “should-have” initiatives. Without them, the product still works.

3. Could-have initiatives

Another way of describing “could-have” initiatives is nice-to-haves. “Could-have” initiatives are not necessary to the core function of the product. However, compared with “should-have” initiatives, they have a much smaller impact on the outcome if left out.

So, initiatives placed in the “could-have” category are often the first to be deprioritized if a project in the “should-have” or “must-have” category ends up larger than expected.

4. Will not have (this time)

One benefit of the MoSCoW method is that it places several initiatives in the “will-not-have” category. The category can manage expectations about what the team will not include in a specific release (or another timeframe you’re prioritizing).

Placing initiatives in the “will-not-have” category is one way to help prevent scope creep . If initiatives are in this category, the team knows they are not a priority for this specific time frame. 

Some initiatives in the “will-not-have” group will be prioritized in the future, while others are not likely to happen. Some teams decide to differentiate between those by creating a subcategory within this group.

How Can Development Teams Use MoSCoW?

  Although Dai Clegg developed the approach to help prioritize tasks around his team’s limited time, the MoSCoW method also works when a development team faces limitations other than time. For example: 

Prioritize based on budgetary constraints.

What if a development team’s limiting factor is not a deadline but a tight budget imposed by the company? Working with the product managers, the team can use MoSCoW first to decide on the initiatives that represent must-haves and the should-haves. Then, using the development department’s budget as the guide, the team can figure out which items they can complete. 

Prioritize based on the team’s skillsets.

A cross-functional product team might also find itself constrained by the experience and expertise of its developers. If the product roadmap calls for functionality the team does not have the skills to build, this limiting factor will play into scoring those items in their MoSCoW analysis.

Prioritize based on competing needs at the company.

Cross-functional teams can also find themselves constrained by other company priorities. The team wants to make progress on a new product release, but the executive staff has created tight deadlines for further releases in the same timeframe. In this case, the team can use MoSCoW to determine which aspects of their desired release represent must-haves and temporarily backlog everything else.

What Are the Drawbacks of MoSCoW Prioritization?

  Although many product and development teams have prioritized MoSCoW, the approach has potential pitfalls. Here are a few examples.

1. An inconsistent scoring process can lead to tasks placed in the wrong categories.

  One common criticism against MoSCoW is that it does not include an objective methodology for ranking initiatives against each other. Your team will need to bring this methodology to your analysis. The MoSCoW approach works only to ensure that your team applies a consistent scoring system for all initiatives.

Pro tip: One proven method is weighted scoring, where your team measures each initiative on your backlog against a standard set of cost and benefit criteria. You can use the weighted scoring approach in ProductPlan’s roadmap app .

2. Not including all relevant stakeholders can lead to items placed in the wrong categories.

To know which of your team’s initiatives represent must-haves for your product and which are merely should-haves, you will need as much context as possible.

For example, you might need someone from your sales team to let you know how important (or unimportant) prospective buyers view a proposed new feature.

One pitfall of the MoSCoW method is that you could make poor decisions about where to slot each initiative unless your team receives input from all relevant stakeholders. 

3. Team bias for (or against) initiatives can undermine MoSCoW’s effectiveness.

Because MoSCoW does not include an objective scoring method, your team members can fall victim to their own opinions about certain initiatives. 

One risk of using MoSCoW prioritization is that a team can mistakenly think MoSCoW itself represents an objective way of measuring the items on their list. They discuss an initiative, agree that it is a “should have,” and move on to the next.

But your team will also need an objective and consistent framework for ranking all initiatives. That is the only way to minimize your team’s biases in favor of items or against them.

When Do You Use the MoSCoW Method for Prioritization?

MoSCoW prioritization is effective for teams that want to include representatives from the whole organization in their process. You can capture a broader perspective by involving participants from various functional departments.

Another reason you may want to use MoSCoW prioritization is it allows your team to determine how much effort goes into each category. Therefore, you can ensure you’re delivering a good variety of initiatives in each release.

What Are Best Practices for Using MoSCoW Prioritization?

If you’re considering giving MoSCoW prioritization a try, here are a few steps to keep in mind. Incorporating these into your process will help your team gain more value from the MoSCoW method.

1. Choose an objective ranking or scoring system.

Remember, MoSCoW helps your team group items into the appropriate buckets—from must-have items down to your longer-term wish list. But MoSCoW itself doesn’t help you determine which item belongs in which category.

You will need a separate ranking methodology. You can choose from many, such as:

• Weighted scoring
• Value vs. complexity
• Buy-a-feature
• Opportunity scoring

For help finding the best scoring methodology for your team, check out ProductPlan’s article: 7 strategies to choose the best features for your product .

2. Seek input from all key stakeholders.

To make sure you’re placing each initiative into the right bucket—must-have, should-have, could-have, or won’t-have—your team needs context. 

At the beginning of your MoSCoW method, your team should consider which stakeholders can provide valuable context and insights. Sales? Customer success? The executive staff? Product managers in another area of your business? Include them in your initiative scoring process if you think they can help you see opportunities or threats your team might miss. 

3. Share your MoSCoW process across your organization.

MoSCoW gives your team a tangible way to show your organization prioritizing initiatives for your products or projects. 

The method can help you build company-wide consensus for your work, or at least help you show stakeholders why you made the decisions you did.

Communicating your team’s prioritization strategy also helps you set expectations across the business. When they see your methodology for choosing one initiative over another, stakeholders in other departments will understand that your team has thought through and weighed all decisions you’ve made. 

If any stakeholders have an issue with one of your decisions, they will understand that they can’t simply complain—they’ll need to present you with evidence to alter your course of action.  

Related Terms

2×2 prioritization matrix / Eisenhower matrix / DACI decision-making framework / ICE scoring model / RICE scoring model

Prioritizing your roadmap using our guide

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This release is posted on behalf of Forbes Books (operated by Advantage Media Group under license).

NEW YORK (May 14, 2024) — The Four-Minute Retirement Plan: Preserve Your Past, Secure Your Future, Live for Today by wealth manager Michael Cannivet is published with Forbes Books, the exclusive business book publishing imprint of Forbes.

With The Four-Minute Retirement Plan, Michael Cannivet offers a revolutionary approach to retirement planning that points the way to financial freedom, security, and peace during your golden years.

Cannivet’s transformative method makes retirement planning accessible and manageable for everyone. Leveraging his expertise in all things finance and investment, Cannivet distills decades of wisdom into practical, actionable steps.

Whether you’re just starting to think about retirement or are refining your plan, this book is designed to fit seamlessly into your busy life, requiring no more than four minutes to set a course for success.

“Retirement is not the end of our story; it’s the beginning of a fresh new chapter,” Cannivet said. “If we plan it right, retirement can be the time of our lives. A time when we have maximum resources. A time of maximum freedom to do whatever we want, wherever we want, with whoever we want. The only limit is the boundary of our imagination.”

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[New Planner] Creating "Plan" for certain group members only

some preinformation - I'm working in a large corporate and I do not have full admin rights for MS365. Within the corporate our entity (of about 30 persons) has been assigned to one MS Team which is private. I am the owners of this team.

I would love to create some "plans" for the different departments within this entity now, though. I am able to create a Plan within the new Planner app in Teams or on the web version of Planner, but I need to assign it to a Group (in our case the MS Teams team). I am able to add and remove team members to the plan, which is what I want - but this automatically synchronizes with the MS Teams team as well. E.g. if I remove members, they will be kicked out of the Teams team.

How to avoid this? Would the idea be to create an extra Group (or MS Teams team) just to have an independent plan?

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• Microsoft Agent |

Thanks for posting in the community. We are happy to help you.

For "if I remove members, they will be kicked out of the Teams team.", this is normal behavior. I'm afraid there are no built-in features or ways to meet your needs when linking an existing group.

In this case, I suggest you create a plan and connect with a new group, not an existing group. Here are the steps.

1. In Planner for web ( https://tasks.office.com/ ), please click New plan, do not select the option "Add to existing group (optional)", and set it to "Private".

2. In the new Planner app in Teams, click "New pan" and do not select the option "Add to a group (optional)". Please note that at this time, this plan is a personal private plan, not a group plan. Please open the plan and click the Share button. In the "Invite members" dialog, create a new group to associate the plan.  

Appreciate your understanding and patience.

George | Microsoft Community Moderator

1 person found this reply helpful

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Thanks for your feedback.

Hej George,

thanks. Does a new group always come wiht a new MS Teams team or can the group be created independently from that?

Sorry for my late reply.

Based on my testing, no new team is automatically created. When you try one of the above methods to create a new group plan, the associated SharePoint site is automatically created, but not the team.

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Biden and oil companies like this climate tech. Many Americans do not.

Carbon dioxide pipelines and underground injection can cut greenhouse gas, but community opposition is fierce.

The remote stretch of public grazing land in southeastern Montana has hardly changed since homesteading days, but underneath this wind-swept expanse lies a hidden asset in high demand: thousands of acres of porous rock where oil company executives say greenhouse gas could be piped in from afar and stored forever.

ExxonMobil and the Biden administration see in the grassy 100,000 acres a launchpad for one of the world’s most audacious climate experiments, a plan to take emissions spewing from power plants and factories and trap them underground where they cannot contribute to global warming. The scheme is inching forward despite criticism it will permit polluters to keep polluting while slowing the transition to solar and wind energy. And now sponsors face the additional hurdle of intense local opposition.

In the ranching community of Carter County, Mont., the prospect of shipping in all that carbon pollution and injecting it underneath an area called Snowy River is about as popular as an outbreak of hoof-and-mouth disease.

“The question I keep hearing is, ‘Why are they making us the dumping ground for the rest of the country?’” said Rod Tauck, chairman of the Carter County Board of Commissioners and a descendant of homesteaders who more than a century ago settled his family ranch. “Not a single constituent I know wants this.”

Such tensions are emerging nationwide, throwing an industrial-size wrench into the quest by the White House and major energy companies to advance a vast network of “carbon capture” infrastructure across the country. It would involve tens of thousands of miles of new pipelines , and scores of remote storage sites on the scale of Snowy River, targeted because the porous rock underneath them can act like a carbon sponge.

This vision for using technology to reverse climate change was once viewed widely as far-fetched.

Now, proposals to divert carbon dioxide from smokestacks to vast subterranean wells are regarded by the White House , the United Nations and the International Energy Agency as crucial to preserving any hope of meeting the world’s climate goals. The Biden administration’s plan to zero out emissions from the power grid by 2035 increasingly hinges on the success of colossal carbon capture deployment. The government has made billions of dollars of incentives available to motivate companies like ExxonMobil and Chevron to rapidly develop it.

The urgency is only increasing as a surge in forecasted energy use — driven by the insatiable electricity appetite of artificial-intelligence developers and a national boom in manufacturing — is delaying retirement of old fossil-fuel power plants and pushing utilities to build new ones.

New clean energy like wind and solar is not coming online quickly enough to meet all the projected demand, prompting government to lean on plans to stow away carbon pollution.

“We have to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming before the world stops using fossil fuels,” Myles Allen, a climate scientist at the University of Oxford in England who has served on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said recently at CERAWeek, an energy conference sponsored by S&P Global. “This is the way to stop fossil fuels from causing global warming.”

But early carbon capture projects are floundering.

Hostile community reception is undermining plans from the Gulf Coast of Louisiana to the prairies of South Dakota. Energy companies racing ahead are facing tough questions around safety, environmental impact and technological viability.

In Montana, the federal Bureau of Land Management in 2022 identified the Snowy River site as one of the first stretches of public land that may be suitable for carbon sequestration. ExxonMobil wants to inject 450 million cubic feet of carbon dioxide per day into the ground. The company is not identifying where that gas would come from, but one likely source is a carbon dioxide pipeline currently used to support oil and gas extraction projects (the pressurized gas is used to force fossil fuels to the surface).

That pipeline is connected to a large ExxonMobil natural gas plant 500 miles away in Wyoming. ExxonMobil says Snowy River’s storage capacity is equal to a year’s worth of polluting greenhouse gas from 1.6 million cars.

Legacy energy companies like ExxonMobil are eager to deploy technologies that could extend the life of fossil fuels by mitigating their role in global warming. Plus, federal incentives are potentially lucrative. The single Montana project could generate as much as $12.7 billion in federal tax subsidies. ExxonMobil took it over when it acquired carbon capture and pipeline developer Denbury for $4.9 billion in November.

Company officials say they have not yet made a final decision to build in Montana. But assessing the project’s viability, they say, requires they get the BLM permit to store the carbon now, so they can do testing on-site. Montana Gov. Greg Gianforte (R) supports the company’s plan.

“We are fully committed to working with the community,” said Kathleen Ash, CEO of Denbury, now a fully owned ExxonMobil subsidiary. “This is a safe and proven technology.”

Many in the local community see something else: big corporations looking for a payday partnering with an administration turning a blind eye to a flawed technology. They point to problems that carbon capture projects are encountering around the world, such as Chevron’s sprawling Gorgon operation at a massive natural gas field in Australia. It is not trapping even half the carbon dioxide planned, amid persistent technological troubles.

BLM officials counter that carbon dioxide has been safely injected underground as part of the oil production process for decades. They call the projects an “important tool” for fighting climate change and advancing the administration’s agenda to erase emissions.

“They are presenting this as a climate solution and I don’t know that it is,” said Liz Barbour, who manages Cinch Buckle Ranch, an operation bordering Snowy River that uses low-impact, conservation-focused agricultural practices. “The only thing I do know is that it is part of their plan to continue producing oil and gas.” Barbour is among several ranchers working with a grass-roots group called the Northern Plains Resource Council to fight the project.

Local landowners with sharply contrasting politics and views on climate change are finding common cause in the battle. The council’s argument that carbon capture is “an unproven, government hand-out to large out of state corporations” was echoed repeatedly in interviews in this county of 1,415 people defined by wide-open spaces and dirt roads, where visiting a neighbor can involve an hour-long journey. Carter County cast 89 percent of its ballots for Donald Trump in 2020.

“Many of us are willing to accept the premise that this is a dangerous compound that needs to be gotten rid of,” said Jack Owen, a 72-year-old who ranches on land his ancestors homesteaded. “The question is, ‘Why here?’”

ExxonMobil’s assurances that the project would be almost entirely underground, with little noticeable impact on the landscape are met skeptically. Local landowners counter that upgrading the roads, drilling wells, and installing new pipelines would take a heavy toll on the landscape.

The scale of carbon that must be effectively stored nationwide to make a dent in global warming is enormous. Claude Letourneau, the CEO of Svante, one of North America’s leading carbon capture technology firms, said containing the emissions created by manufacturing processes like cement- and steel-making could require 10,000 plants to trap the gas, compress it and then pipe or truck it to places like Snowy River.

An ambitious proposal in the Midwest recently collapsed. The proposed 1,200-mile Heartland Greenway pipeline was supposed to span five states, bringing 15 million tons of carbon dioxide captured at ethanol plants each year to storage sites where it would be buried.

The project, proposed by Navigator CO2, appeared to have early advantages. Ethanol plants emit uncontaminated carbon dioxide that is less complicated to capture and compress than the gas from other industries. And many landowners along the proposed route already hosted oil and gas pipelines.

But community opposition was intense. Landowners and local regulators worried about safety and environmental fallout. The CEO of Williams, one of the biggest natural gas pipeline companies in the world, said in an interview that even his board chairman, who owns farmland in Iowa, wants nothing to do with the carbon dioxide pipelines.

“He said, ‘I don’t want it damaging this very valuable cropland,’” Williams CEO Alan Armstrong said.

Navigator CO2 canceled the Heartland Greenway project in October. It blamed “the unpredictable nature of the regulatory and government processes involved.”

Armstrong is one of many energy executives who said the project faltered because the developers spent too little time educating communities about the technology and talking through concerns. Companies more practiced in securing permits for pipelines, it was argued, would win local buy-in.

But it is not turning out that way for ExxonMobil in Montana.

Assurances from ExxonMobil that disruption would be minimal are met with worries that the project will disrupt the ecosystem, leave water tables vulnerable to the leaching of carbon dioxide, and create a safety hazard.

A rupture in the existing pipeline several years ago left one Carter County ranch looking as if a meteor had hit it. Pictures from 2018 show a deep, truck-size crater in the ground covered with what looks like dry ice residue, caused by the compressed carbon dioxide’s combustion.

Since that time, another major pipeline accident had dire consequences for the town of Satartia, Miss. The pipeline was also owned by Denbury, the ExxonMobil subsidiary.

The 2020 rupture filled the air above a section of the pipeline with dangerous amounts of carbon dioxide, resulting in a medical emergency that sent 45 people to the hospital with respiratory and other problems, according to a U.S. Department of Transportation investigation.

The gas caused three men driving through the area to pass out in their car and the engine to stop running. Fire department officials had to break the windows to pull them out, according to local 911 call tapes and public records obtained by the nonprofit Climate Investigations Center. Residents desperately called 911 for help — in one case, a mother reported that her child couldn’t breathe, and in another, a caller said her friend was on the ground shaking and drooling, as if suffering a seizure.

Denbury paid a $2.8 million fine as part of a settlement with the federal government in which it did “not admit to any of the alleged violations or risks identified.” Some of the residents injured in the incident — and their doctors — say they are still suffering serious ailments because of it.

ExxonMobil officials said new training protocols for emergency responders have been initiated since the incident. They say that there has never been a fatality associated with piping carbon dioxide and that accidents involving such pipelines are rare. The company said it also supports stepped-up federal safety regulations amid the planned expansion of carbon dioxide pipelines.

Energy companies say they are undeterred.

Among the projects inching forward is one on a 140,000-acre coastal stretch between Houston and the petrochemical facilities of Port Arthur, Tex., called Bayou Bend, where Chevron plans to store as much as 1 billion tons of carbon dioxide. The company is hoping the proximity to factories will make the project more palatable to regulators and landowners.

Chevron is also aiming to bury carbon in wells off the coast of Bayou Bend, a plan that alarms marine biologists but could prove less vulnerable to community protest.

A visit to Bayou Bend punctuates the immensity of it all. The site stretches for miles, with the flat, grassy landscape interrupted only by the occasional cow chomping on weeds or alligator sunning itself in a marsh.

Developers promoting the projects are adamant that most of the work will happen out of sight, with the carbon buried as deep as 10,000 feet and hardly any industrial activity above ground.

“This has to happen,” said Chris Powers, Chevron’s vice president for carbon capture, utilization and storage, pointing to the forecasting models showing that carbon capture is crucial to curbing global warming. “To make this grow at scale, it is going to take hundreds of projects.”

Back in Montana, rancher Mike Hansen says if it is all so harmless, project boosters in the nation’s capital should just start burying carbon pollution there.

“We asked them, ‘Why don’t you do this under Washington, D.C.?’” he said. “They told us, ‘We can’t do that. There are too many people there.’”

“That is not saying much for us.”

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Anglo American to sell famous diamond business De Beers in breakup plan

UK mining company reveals breakup plan in bid to avoid takeover by Australia-based BHP

• Nils Pratley: Anglo American’s breakup is overdue

South Africa has backed Anglo American’s plan to sell the famous diamond business De Beers as part of a historic corporate overhaul to defend the company against a £34bn takeover plot.

The embattled London-listed mining company set out a radical new strategy to dismantle parts of the 107-year-old company, including the sale of the world’s biggest diamond miner, after fending off a second unsolicited takeover offer from the Australian miner BHP.

The proposal has won support in South Africa , which is Anglo’s largest shareholder through its Public Investment Corporation (PIC) and the birthplace of Anglo and De Beers.

The South African mining minister, Gwede Mantashe, said that he would prefer Anglo’s restructuring plan over a takeover by BHP . The plan was also welcomed by the Congress of South African Trade Unions.

The Anglo chief executive, Duncan Wanblad, said the “most radical changes to Anglo American in decades” would create a simplified company with a focus on its remaining “world-class assets” in copper, iron ore and fertilisers.

The overhaul is designed to fend off further unsolicited advances from BHP, which sought to force Anglo to off-load its two Johannesburg-listed subsidiaries, the platinum miner Amplats and iron ore miner Kumba, before completing the deal.

Instead, Anglo’s overhaul would include letting go of De Beers alongside the “orderly” sale or demerger of its South African platinum business and its steel-making coal assets. Anglo also plans to slow its investment in the Woodsmith fertiliser mine in the North York Moors next year from £1bn a year to £200m before seeking strategic investors to restart full-scale work on the polyhalite project from 2026. Mantashe told the Financial Times: “I am happy with the rejection of the BHP deal and I hope it will continue, then Anglo can restructure itself to optimise value for shareholders.”

BHP’s chief executive, Mike Henry, urged Anglo investors to consider the merits of his company’s bid. He said: “They have to look at the plans, decide which one they believe is going to create the greatest value soonest.”

Anglo’s strategy raises questions over the future of De Beers, which has been linked to Anglo American for almost 100 years. The diamond miner was founded in South Africa by the British mining magnate Cecil Rhodes who began sending gems back from South Africa to London in 1889. It was part-owned by the Oppenheimer dynasty, which founded Anglo American, from the 1920s until the family sold its 40% stake to Anglo in 2011. Today, Anglo holds 85% of the company while the government of Botswana holds the remaining 15%.

A source close to the company said Anglo was considering an initial public offering of De Beers as “the default option” for the business. However, the idea has been dismissed as “unlikely” by another source owing to the difficulty in establishing the future value of diamonds after a volatile period for the market.

The diamond business has struggled with falling sales in recent years because of the sluggish global economy and rising competition from lab-created alternatives. The source said it would be easier to dismantle De Beer’s interests in South Africa, Namibia and Botswana as well as its synthetic diamond business to sell off separately.

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Wanblad said De Beers remained “a great business” which has already seen interest from prospective investors. “There’s no doubt in our mind that the structural issues that everyone talks about will pass,” he added.

The chief executive faces pressure from investors to prove that he can turn around Anglo’s flagging market value, which has left the company vulnerable to takeover by larger rivals. BHP’s takeover plans are expected to face competition from the Swiss mining company Glencore and the British-Australian miner Rio Tinto .

Wanblad dismissed BHP’s approaches as “highly unattractive” because they undervalue the company’s long-term potential value. He also criticised BHP for the “disrespectful” timing of the approach before what is expected to be a highly contested general election in South Africa at the end of the month.

Wanblad said BHP’s approach had forced him to set out a new strategic vision for the company at a critical time for South Africa’s government, which holds a 7% share of the company through the PIC. “I would have handled this in a very different sort of way – and a very private sort of way,” he said of BHP’s approach.

The governments of South Africa and Botswana were approached for comment.

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MLB, NHL, NBA all slam Bally RSN operator’s bankruptcy plan in court

Speaking in succession, lawyers for MLB , the NBA and NHL on Wednesday delivered the most pointed criticism Diamond Sports Group has taken since the bankrupt broadcaster introduced a plan to avoid liquidation in January. Yet, despite their loud misgivings, none of the leagues have filed a formal objection to the court, and it’s unknown if any will do so.

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Comcast Xfinity customers haven’t been able to watch Diamond’s Bally regional sports networks since last month as Diamond and Comcast haggle over dollars. A dozen MLB teams, more than one-third of the league, are carried on those channels, and Diamond carries 38 teams in total across the three leagues.

“We are coming into the middle of yet another season where Diamond is an undependable partner,” said a lawyer for MLB, James Bromley. “This is not a deal that Major League Baseball and its clubs have signed up for. … It’s been two full weeks since carriage has been dropped by Comcast, and there is not a word of when it might get picked up, and on what terms.”

While baseball’s season is ongoing, the NBA and NHL are concerned about carriage when their seasons start anew in the fall. But Diamond’s arrangement with Comcast, its third largest distributor, also has long-term implications for Diamond’s ability to operate beyond 2024 — and whether the court will rubber-stamp its plan to do so. A confirmation hearing is set for June 18.

“We have more questions than answers,” said Vincent Indelicato, a lawyer for the NBA, in court Wednesday. “At a minimum, we need to understand the economic reality for Diamond of being dropped by Comcast. We need to understand the implications of any Comcast deal that Diamond might possibly do.”

Said Shana Elberg, representing the NHL: “The day-to-day approach of whether or not a professional team’s games will be broadcast doesn’t work for us, and can’t continue.”

Among Diamond’s three partner leagues, MLB has consistently been the most critical. It was the only of the three to submit a written filing to the court on Tuesday, where it laid out many of the arguments that were elaborated on a day later. But once in front of the judge, the three leagues essentially linked arms.

Comcast-Diamond dispute 'profoundly harmful,' MLB argues

The Houston federal judge overseeing Diamond’s bankruptcy case, Chris Lopez, acknowledged the leagues’ complaints, but didn’t express any consternation himself.

“I get where we are,” Lopez said. “And I know the debtors understand where they are as well. We’ve got some work to do. We should all be hopefully a little smarter, (with) a little bit more information in the early June time period when we have our hearing.

“There’s been a lot of good work that’s done and I don’t want to lose sight of it. … There still are some serious questions that need to be answered.”

Diamond argued to Lopez that it was making progress overall, having reached deals with its top two distributors, Charter and DirecTV, as well as its fourth largest, Cox.

Diamond also said it is nearing a new naming rights deal with an unspecified sponsor. As part of the restructuring plan, the Bally branding is to disappear after this baseball season.

“I want your honor to know that the deal we offered Comcast, without getting into the specifics, is a similar deal that we got with Charter and with DirecTV, both of whom are larger than Comcast,” said Diamond lawyer Brian Hermann. “This is not the first time that a content provider and distributor have reached an impasse. … Those things happen from time to time, and they have often been resolved and we remain optimistic that we can resolve this as well.”

Bromley noted a deal isn’t guaranteed to follow, however.

“As a matter of public record, Comcast dropped other RSNs in the past and simply walked away from them,” the MLB counsel said.

While the June 18 confirmation hearing is so far unchanged, Diamond on Wednesday asked for and was granted an extension on an intermediate deadline, for objections to be filed. That date moved from May 22 to June 5.

MLB suggested that July might make more sense for the confirmation hearing.

“How in the world are we going to be able to have a hearing — which I think is going to be contested — and discovery … when we are just over 30 days (out) and we have simply no information?” Bromley asked. “Everything right now is up in the air.”

Comcast reported 13.6 million video subscribers in the first quarter this year. Bromley said that in some baseball markets, as many as 50 percent of fans are Comcast subscribers.

Diamond earlier this year appeared to be on a path to liquidation at the end of 2024. Amazon then stepped in as an investor in a plan that Diamond argues can keep the business viable beyond 2024.

The 12 MLB teams carried by Diamond are the Atlanta Braves , Cincinnati Reds , Cleveland Guardians , Detroit Tigers , Kansas City Royals , Los Angeles Angels , Miami Marlins , Milwaukee Brewers , Minnesota Twins , St. Louis Cardinals , Tampa Bay Rays and Texas Rangers .

In its 13-page filing Tuesday, MLB listed “memorable, exciting and historic performances and games” that Comcast subscribers missed out on this month — one for each team carried by Comcast.

Lopez on Wednesday made a reference to one of those items.

Wrote MLB regarding the Reds: “Elly De La Cruz (Reds) leading MLB in stolen bases and stealing two bases each game for three-straight games.”

“I read everything, including the Elly De La Cruz reference in there, Mr. Bromley,” Lopez said. “I get it all, I saw it all there, and let’s just continue down the path.”

(Top photo: Chris Coduto / Getty Images)

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Evan Drellich is a senior writer for The Athletic, covering baseball. He’s the author of the book Winning Fixes Everything: How Baseball’s Brightest Minds Created Sports’ Biggest Mess. Follow Evan on Twitter @ EvanDrellich