Are you starting to think about creating your volunteer plan for next year? The last few months of any year often revolve around mapping out strategies and setting goals for the one ahead. There’s a certain buzz that develops about now – webinars, courses and workshops all promising to help you refine your vision and sharpen your strategy for 2026. Planning is important. It gives direction, focus and purpose.
But here’s something to think about.
What happened with the plans you made at this time last year? If your well thought out strategy is sitting in a folder somewhere, quietly collecting digital dust, you’re not alone. Many leaders create impressive plans that end up being wish lists rather than driving progress. Not because the ideas were bad, but because the follow-through never quite happened.
A number of years ago, someone shared a formula with me that has always stuck in my mind. It goes like this:
P + R + K × A = Result
That’s Planning, plus Resources, plus Knowledge, multiplied by Action equals Result.
It’s the “multiplied by Action” that makes all the difference.
Suppose your planning is top-notch – a 10 out of 10. You’ve got all the resources you need (another 10), and the skills and knowledge to do the job well (another 10). Add those up and you’ve got 30. Very good. But if your level of action is zero, 30 times zero is still zero! No result. All the time in the world spent on planning, gathering resources and building knowledge won’t mean a thing if nothing is actually done.
Now, let’s take a different example. Your planning is a 4, your resources are a 1 (because, well, nonprofit budgets!), and your knowledge is a 7. That’s 12. Barely more than a third of the previous example. Now multiply that by 10 for action, and your result is 120. Much more impressive than 30 multiplied by zero!
That little formula captures something we tend to overlook: movement beats perfection.
It’s far better to take a few small, imperfect steps than to focus all our attention on developing the perfect plan and then expecting the plan itself to drive results. I once worked with a volunteer coordinator who showed me a brilliant plan she’d created six months earlier to revamp her organisation’s recognition program. She’d mapped out the stages, created a timeline and gathered the resources. But she’d never got around to actually starting the process. After she showed it to me, she sighed and said, “I guess I’ll just carry this over to next year.”
On my advice she didn’t. Instead, she made one concrete decision: to personally thank three volunteers for something specific every day. By the end of the year, with little planning and no resources, she’d built a robust culture of appreciation in her organisation, where her exciting and beautifully-created plan had gotten her nowhere.
That’s what “multiplied by Action” looks like.
It goes back to that quote by Joel Barker, “Vision without action is merely a dream.” So, as you start thinking about next year’s goals, approach your planning process a bit differently. For every objective you set, ask yourself:
- What specific actions need to happen to move this forward?
- Who will take those actions?
- When will they be done?
- How will we track progress?
These questions turn that wish list into tangible steps. And when you build accountability into your plan – naming who will do what, and by when – you dramatically increase the odds that your ideas will become reality.
It’s also important to schedule time throughout the year to revisit the plan, not just to check off tasks (though that’s fun and cause for celebration), but to re-energise yourself and your team around the actions that matter most. Even a brief quarterly review can help prevent that niggling, end-of-year guilt when you rediscover an untouched planning document. Be honest; we’ve all been there!
In the end, planning without taking action is like drawing a map but never setting out on the journey. You might know exactly where you want to go, but you’ll never arrive if you don’t take the first step.
So yes, make those plans!
They’re important. Set your vision, identify your goals, gather your resources and build your knowledge. But above all—take action. Because it’s your actions, not your plans, that drive results.
