You’ve spent months working on an ambitious strategic plan. You set your sights high. You surveyed staff. You engaged board members. You spent countless hours making difficult decisions—weighing how different goals and activities would impact your mission. And today, you have a beautiful written plan in hand: one that outlines your goals and tasks for the next three to five years.

Strategic planning—an essential activity for any nonprofit—is an opportunity to step back from everyday work and thoughtfully review: Where are we today? Where do we aspire to go? How will we get there?

Your strategic plan is complete! You’ve set your vision, planned how you will achieve it, and developed measures of success. Take a moment to celebrate because you just completed a significant task. It took a lot of time (and some money), you may have made some hard choices, there may have even been some drama. That was the easy part. Celebrate and then get to work.