Five Essential Steps to Align Your People Development Efforts with Your Nonprofit Strategy
Your nonprofit has a strong 2026 strategy. But is your team ready to bring it to life? If your team isn't fully equipped to deliver on your goals, you could be missing the bridge between strategy and success.
That's why, in this episode, I'm sharing a little of what it takes to align your L&D efforts and your nonprofit strategy by breaking down the five steps you can take to build a training plan that enables your organization and your people to achieve those 2026 goals.
▶️ Key Points:
01:20 The value of getting support to build the right training plan
04:38 Step 1: Review your organization's strategies
05:15 Step 2: Define what your people need to do
05:48 Step 3: Identify the gaps, roadblocks, or pain points
07:08 Step 4: Prioritize the needs
08:41 Step 5: Determine how to close the gaps
Your Nonprofit Has a Strategic Plan. Now What?
For mission-driven leaders, the pursuit of growth is constant. You work tirelessly to expand services, increase revenue, and deepen your community impact. Yet, as the organization grows, a critical friction point often emerges: the people who must execute the mission aren't always keeping pace. This disconnect leads to the frustrating experience of fixing the same problems repeatedly, and wondering how to build confident, capable staff who are ready to lead, not just execute.
That often leads us to create training, but traditional training approaches often fail to drive the necessary behavior and performance change.
That’s where an L&D expert can really help.
Imagine walking into a gym. If you pay for a service like CrossFit, you receive specific programming, group classes, and a coach—you know what to do. However, knowing the workout doesn't equate to knowing how your body builds strength or agility, or why specific exercises are programmed in sequence. To truly improve, you need to know your numbers (bench press, deadlift, run times) and understand your weaknesses (e.g., struggling with cycling). And, you need the expertise—the knowledge of anatomy and physiology—to combine that data into a solid training plan. Nonprofit executives often face the identical challenge: they know the strategic plan (the "what"), but lack the adult learning and behavior change expertise needed to translate that plan into actionable people development (the "how" and "why").
While nonprofit leaders know their strategic plan—the organizational what—they often lack the specific expertise required to build the tailored plan for developing their people—the how and the why. And that’s why we’ve created a methodical, five-step approach designed to leverage learning not just as an expense, but as a direct driver of performance, capacity, and mission impact. This focused diagnostic process identifies misalignment between strategy, systems, people, managers, and day-to-day work. The ultimate result is a clear, actionable roadmap that intrinsically links people development to organizational goals.
If you are setting strategies for 2026, it is time to build the training plan that enables your organization to achieve those goals. And, that’s what we explore on episode 159 of the Learning for Good podcast.
The 5-Step Framework to Align Learning Strategy with Organizational Strategy
The development of an effective training plan must be methodical. Rushing immediately to training solutions without diagnosis often results in addressing symptoms rather than root causes. The following five steps, when completed in sequence, ensure that every development effort is strategic and necessary.
Step 1: Review Your Nonprofit’s Strategies (Start with the End in Mind)
Everything begins and ends with the organization’s vision, mission, and goals. Before determining any training needs, leaders must be absolutely clear on where the organization is headed. This step involves reviewing high-level goals. For example, are you looking to increase revenue in a specific area? Are you planning to expand a particular program or service?
It is the clarity of these strategic goals that must drive the entire training plan. Without this foundation, development efforts risk becoming misaligned—addressing tangential needs rather than contributing directly to the core mission. This ensures that when the plan is built, every initiative is defensible as a strategic necessity.
Step 2: Consider What People Need to Be Able to Do (The Necessary Actions)
Once the organizational strategy is concrete, the focus shifts to translating that strategy into specific human behaviors and actions. This is the second crucial input for the training plan. If the organization is expanding a program, what specific actions must staff take to make that expansion successful?
This step requires defining necessary actions: Do team members need to create stronger partnerships in the community? Do they need to improve their ability to measure and communicate programmatic outcomes effectively? The ultimate goal here is ensuring that you have people who are motivated, capable, and confident in executing those critical behaviors.
Step 3: Identify the Gaps, Roadblocks, or Pain Points in Performance
Assuming the organization has hired good people who are motivated to help execute the strategies, the next logical question is: What is holding them back? This diagnostic step seeks to uncover the obstacles preventing people from performing the actions identified in Step 2.
The roadblocks identified often fall into several categories:
Knowledge/Skill Gaps: Do people simply not know how to do the necessary task, or lack the required skills?
Motivation: Are they not motivated to perform the action? (and if not, why not?)
Clarity: Is the expectation clear? Is the process defined? Do people know who needs to be involved in a task?
Organizational friction points often manifest through weak communication, high staff turnover, or processes that were never documented. It is essential to identify precisely what is preventing staff from being successful so that tailored solutions can be built into the training plan. This step is about removing impediments and closing measurable gaps.
Step 4: Prioritize the Learning Needs
After Steps 1 through 3, an organization will inevitably uncover several different areas of opportunity and growth. This is where many nonprofits, including internal learning and development professionals, get stuck. It is impossible and inefficient to try and address every gap simultaneously. Therefore, rigorous prioritization is essential.
Prioritization should be viewed through three distinct lenses:
What is the Most Strategic Thing You Can Do? The priority must be linked back to the strategic goals. Which intervention—whether it is creating training, removing a roadblock, or closing a specific gap—will have the biggest impact on the organization’s strategic objectives?
What is the Most Urgent Thing You Can Do? Urgency is usually defined by the biggest, most immediate gap, roadblock, or pain point related to those strategic goals. If people cannot follow through on critical tasks until a specific issue is resolved, that issue is urgent. Addressing these bottlenecks is necessary for immediate performance improvement.
What is Feasible? Any organizational effort requires resources, including time and money. Prioritization must be tempered by reality. Given the current constraints and resources available, what is currently the most feasible action to take?
By linking potential solutions back to what is strategic, urgent, and feasible, organizations can create a targeted plan that maximizes resource allocation and guarantees alignment with the mission.
Step 5: Determine How to Close the Gaps and Meet the Needs
Only after the strategic review, gap identification, and prioritization are complete can the organization move to determine the best solutions—the fun part. This step acknowledges that training is only one tool in a broad solution set. The goal is to uncover the needs and then identify the best solution for that specific need.
Nonprofits have many options available to them for closing gaps:
Training and Workshops: If a skill gap is the root cause, formal training courses, workshops, or even off-the-shelf training may be appropriate (with some tailoring).
Process Documentation: If clarity or process confusion is the issue, the solution may be as simple as documenting existing processes or communicating clearly that those processes exist.
Tools and Resources: Sometimes staff need practical supports, such as a specific checklist, a quick reference guide, or other tools they can refer to as they implement change.
Mentorship and Peer Learning: To build experience and confidence, people often benefit from opportunities to learn from their colleagues. This involves structuring opportunities for experienced staff to mentor those who have less experience in a particular area.
By utilizing this comprehensive array of solutions, the plan moves beyond traditional "one-size-fits-all" training to deliver targeted support precisely where the organization needs it most.
How Training Creates Nonprofit Sustainability
The journey from setting strategic goals to realizing them through capable and confident staff is complex. Just like a leader may be staring at their strategic plan, not knowing how to prepare their people to bring it to life, external expertise may be necessary to bridge the gap.
Traditional attempts to drive performance change by simply "telling people what to do" or relying on standard training approaches often prove ineffective. True, sustainable mission impact requires specialized knowledge in adult learning and behavior change. It means moving beyond execution to a deliberate, data-driven diagnostic process. By embracing the five-step framework—reviewing strategy, defining actions, identifying true gaps, prioritizing needs based on impact and feasibility, and selecting the best targeted solutions—nonprofits can stop fixing the same problems and finally build the high-performing teams necessary to sustain the organization and fulfill their critical missions.
If you need this outside expertise, complete this form and let’s explore if we might be a good fit to work together.
If you are in a nonprofit L&D role and you want to operate more strategically, join the Nonprofit L&D Collective and get access to a supportive network and opportunities for professional learning and growth.
To learn more about aligning strategy, systems, and people, tune into episode 159 of the Learning for Good podcast.
Additional Resources Just for You
Other Helpful Podcast Episodes:
Subscribe to the Nonprofit L&D Insiders.
Join the Nonprofit L&D Collective
Support the Learning for Good Podcast
Become a sponsor.
Ask a question or suggest a topic.
We love hearing from listeners!
Leave a review.
Reviews teach us what content resonates most and help us reach more people!