Business Plan
- Ideal for an acquired firm to lay out its annual business plan, or for the holding company’s overall strategy document. It’s a comprehensive narrative (could even be structured like an Amazon 6-page memo) including:
- Executive Summary: One-page overview of the strategy, key goals, and customer value proposition.
- Market/Donor Analysis: Facts and figures about the fundraising landscape, donor segments, trends (with data sources).
- Strategic Objectives: The major outcomes desired (likely mirrors top-level OKRs). Each objective can link to its OKR entry for consistency.
- Initiatives/Roadmap: List of key initiatives or projects to achieve those objectives, with timelines. Essentially, how you’ll get from here to the objectives.
- Resource Allocation: Budget, headcount, or other resources needed (link to budgets if needed).
- Risk and Mitigation: Identify big assumptions or risks and how to address them.
- Customer Impact: Explicitly state how donors or beneficiaries benefit if this strategy succeeds – keeps the plan grounded in customer obsession.
SWOT Analysis
A simple but structured page or table for analyzing Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats of a project, department, or the company as a whole. The template provides four quadrants to fill in, along with guidance to translate this into actions:
- Strengths (internal positives to leverage),
- Weaknesses (internal negatives to improve),
- Opportunities (external chances to pursue),
- Threats (external risks to mitigate).
It might include a section below the quadrants for “Strategic Implications” – e.g. how do we address weaknesses or capitalize on opportunities in our plan.
The template emphasizes actionable insight: not just listing items, but for each weakness or threat, there’s an associated action or decision.
Quarterly Planning
A standardized process page for planning cycles. For each quarter, a Notion page is created from this template for each team or department to fill in:
- Review of Last Period: short section to note how last quarter’s OKRs fared (link to an OKR scoreboard).
- Key Priorities This Period: 3-5 priorities (could be phrased as OKRs or just themes). Teams should align these with any top-down priorities from leadership.
- OKRs: Draft objectives and key results for the team for the quarter (again linking to the actual OKR database for tracking). The template reminds teams to ensure each objective ladders up to the company objectives (customer-focused or mission-focused) – effectively a cascade.
- Initiatives/Projects: List of major projects with a brief description, owner, and timeline, ensuring every key result has at least one initiative supporting it.
- Dependencies/Support Needed: If the team needs something from another (e.g. “We need IT to implement new donation form by Feb”), they note it here so leadership can resolve resource issues.
- Budget Allocations: How team budget is planned for their projects.
Using Notion for this means all team plans can be viewed side by side, and linked up to the master plan. There can be a master page that pulls excerpts from each team (via linked database or manual summary) to give executives a one-stop overview of the quarter plan.