In their efforts to manage strategy, nonprofits struggle with coming up with the best way to measure results, which can make it difficult to demonstrate results to their philanthropic benefactors.  This measurement problem is often due to the nature of their work and the environment within which they operate. 

The missions of nonprofits tend to be hard to measure.  Things like increasing social justice or even improving development in impoverished neighborhoods or countries aren’t easy to quantify at all, never mind at regular, (non-glacial) frequencies.  Plus, there are usually multiple actors in any of the spaces in which they operate, so the problem of attribution arises:  Whose activities are causing the results?

This makes it difficult—at best—for nonprofits who want to manage their strategies with the Balanced Scorecard or any other strategy management system that uses strategic measures or key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure and demonstrate results.

One of the first, and most important, steps in implementing the Balanced Scorecard is to create a strategy map that tells the story of your strategy and is unique to your organization.  If you are the City of Minneapolis, the strategy map must tell the strategy story of Minneapolis, not just any city, and if you are St. Jude’s Children’s Hospital, it must tell the story of St. Jude’s, not any children’s hospital.

The tricky part is that most individual organizations—and their strategies—have a lot in common with those generic organizations, it is just the way it is.  There are steps, however, that you can take so that when your staff and other stakeholders view your strategy map, they see your organization. The top three steps, in my opinion, are what I’ll call branding, description, and customization.  Let’s discuss the last one first.

I say it to just about every client I work with—coming up with your strategy is the easy part, ensuring successful strategy execution, that’s the challenge.

Whether your organization executes its strategy using the Balanced Scorecard or some other strategy management framework, here are five New Years’ resolutions you should keep to ensure your strategy execution success.

With the recent release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens and the battle between the Light and Dark sides of the Force that it inevitably involves, I couldn’t help but come up with a list of 10 things to look out for to make sure your organization’s strategy management and execution efforts aren’t headed in the direction of Darth Vader and Kylo Ren. 

No matter how good your organization may be at managing and executing your strategy, there is always a few individuals who will try to lead a group of strategy execution Jedis down the path to the Dark Side.  Here’s a list of what to look out for: