Buying Strategy for Adoption, Not Just Outputs: A Procurement Guide for Nonprofit Executives and Boards

The Nonprofit Organizational Strategy Insight Series began with a question: Why do so many strategic plans stop governing decisions within a year? The answer can be traced to its origin upstream to what organizations buy and how those decisions shape long-term adoption. This article is the practical companion to that diagnosis. It is a guide to commissioning strategy in a way that avoids producing shelfware, written for the executives who scope the work, the procurement leads who run the process, and the boards that approve it.

Most strategy scopes ask for outputs and assume the disciplines, but a proposal can only answer what a scope asks. If the disciplines that make a plan stick are not in the request, they will not be in the response, and they will not be in the work.

The good news is that this is the most controllable part of the entire problem. Nonprofits cannot legislate a vendor's talent, but they can decide precisely what they ask them to deliver. Organizations can position themselves for success by making a few deliberate choices in how they commission the work. The principles below hold whether an organization issues a formal RFP or commissions the work directly.

Start by deciding which kind of plan the organization needs

The first move happens before any scope is drafted, and most organizations skip it. They decide they need a strategic plan and begin listing deliverables. Instead, nonprofits should evaluate which kind of plan they need. Some examples include:

• A plan meant to set fresh direction across a whole organization
• A plan meant to refresh priorities the leadership already agrees on
• A plan meant to align a single department

Each of these calls for a different set of operating disciplines. A refresh, for instance, leans on reinforcement and a working performance cadence, requiring far less of the heavy stakeholder and change apparatus that a first-time, organization-wide plan demands.

Identifying the type first tells the organization which disciplines belong in the scope. The request should follow the type rather than the reverse. Scoping disciplines before knowing the kind of plan to buy can lead to organizations paying for machinery they do not need, or omitting the machinery they do.

Name the disciplines in the request

An organization won’t receive what it doesn’t ask for. With the type of plan settled, the highest-leverage move is to name the operating disciplines in the scope, explicitly, as required work. These include change management, risk, governance, performance management, communications and training, and reinforcement. To these, a procurement scope should add the transition and knowledge transfer that hands the finished plan to the people who will run it. Most scopes name the outputs, the plan, the roadmap, and the goal framework, leaving the disciplines unstated on the assumption that any competent vendor will include them.

That assumption is the failure point. A scope is a list of what will be paid for, and disciplines that are not named are not priced, not staffed, and not delivered. Naming change management as a required deliverable, with its own scope and its own place in the timeline, is a different request from naming an implementation roadmap, and it produces a different engagement. The same holds for each discipline the plan's type requires.

Ask and score for adoption, not for the artifact

How a request is worded and how responses are scored together decide what vendors emphasize, and both are levers in an organization’s hands. Prioritize the wording of a request to work toward the desired outcome. A request that asks for an implementation roadmap invites a document. A request that asks how the vendor will promote the plan’s adoption and sustain it after handoff, what governance will keep it in front of leadership, and how progress will be measured on a real cadence are what it takes to make a plan stick.

The questions an organization asks shape the answers it will receive. For example, compare a request to deliver a three-year strategic plan with an implementation roadmap against a request to deliver that plan and describe the governance, change, and reinforcement that will keep it operating after the vendor's team leaves. The first scenario names a document. The second one names a result.

Scoring is the other half of the process. If price and a checklist of deliverables dominate the evaluation, the proposals that win will be the ones cheapest at producing the document. To get adoption, weight the evaluation toward it, and reward the responses that answer concretely:

• Survival after handoff: how the plan stays in force once the vendor's team leaves, and who owns it from there
• A working measurement cadence: how progress will be tracked over time, not simply which indicators get defined
• Reinforcement: how the plan is held in place after the initial attention fades
• Transition to the organization: how the engagement hands the work over rather than ending at delivery

Vendors optimize for the scorecard, so a scorecard that rewards discipline is the surest way to receive disciplined proposals.

Read proposals for what they leave out

Once responses from vendors arrive, the most useful reading is for absence. A few patterns reliably signal a plan headed for the shelf:

• Deliverables heavy, adoption light: Pages describe the document while a sentence or two gestures at what happens after it.
• A timeline that stops at delivery: Implementation is deferred to a vague later phase that carries no commitment, scope, or staffing.
• Change management named but not staffed: It appears as a reassuring word with no workstream, owner, or hours behind it.
• Governance and reinforcement missing: Nothing answers who keeps the plan alive once the engagement ends.
• Adoption as sentiment, not scope: It is promised throughout the narrative but attached to no specific person, deliverable, or date.

None of these means a vendor lacks capability, but rather that the engagement, as proposed, will produce an output and leave its adoption to chance. The proposal worth shortlisting is the one that treats the finished document as the start of the work, not the end of it.

The goal is to procure better, not just to procure cheaply

None of this makes strategy work materially more expensive. Procuring for adoption is not about buying more but about buying deliberately, asking for the disciplines that turn a plan into operating reality, and declining to pay for a polished document that will not survive its own handoff. The organizations that do this get more from the same investment because the plan they commission is the plan that still governs a year later. For a board, the same logic is a matter of stewardship: The disciplines an organization insists on at the moment of procurement are what later let leadership hold the organization to the plan they approved.

We write this as a firm that responds to these requests, which makes our interest plain enough that we will state it directly. We would rather help an organization procure well than win a procurement that was scoped to disappoint. The next installment in this series gives you the tool that makes the first move in this guide concrete: a way to name which kind of plan you are buying before you scope a single deliverable.

How BDO Can Help

BDO helps nonprofit executives and boards connect strategy development with execution. Our professionals can help organizations clarify the planning approach they need; design practical governance, change management, risk, performance management, communications, training, and reinforcement mechanisms; and establish a transition that equips internal teams to sustain the work. BDO’s nonprofit services include strategic assessments, program and project management, change management, and support for organizational resilience. 

Whether your organization is preparing to procure a strategic-planning partner, evaluating proposals, or determining why an existing plan has lost momentum, BDO can help identify the gap between the document you have and the operating structure you need.

Contact us to discuss how your organization can commission, and sustain, a strategic plan built for adoption