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Tying Budgets to Strategic Plans

  • 1.  Tying Budgets to Strategic Plans

    Founding Member
    Posted 07-19-2022 18:53

    Hi everyone. I'm curious whether any of you have found effective ways to tie your budgets to your strategic plans (or another broad organizational initiative)? At Partners In Health, we've tried a few things over the years to show how our budgets are aligned with our strategic goals, but haven't quite gotten anything to stick for more than a year or two. We've tried things like rolling up certain codes to map onto a specific goal, but that raised questions about how to split costs that should be split across multiple goals. That then lead to a bit more modeling, assigning weights to how much something was in service to a specific goal, or if it was truly just overhead, then it was split evenly across the goals or marked as a stand alone overhead category. As a healthcare non-profit, we also tried applying drivers like patient counts (i.e. 25% of our patients are enrolled in a maternal health program, so 25% of shared overhead costs map to our maternal health goals). Eventually, it felt like to do this correctly, we needed to invest a lot of time and coding became quite tedious so we haven't explored it for a bit.

    Ultimately, we want to know more clearly whether we're putting our resources towards our strategic goals or not, and as a non-profit, we'd also like to use this to inform our fundraising efforts. Does anyone have any success stories or tips to share?

    #Analysis #StrategicGoals #Budgeting​​​​ #GiveAndGetHelp

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    Brendan Eger
    Assoc. Dir. of Information Systems and Analytics
    Partners In Health
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