Rosetta Thurman has a great blog post over at the Stanford Social Innovation Review where she's talking about the real risk to non-profits during an economic downturn. The issue, as she correctly points out, is that when funding dries up, staff gets cut back, and organizations that are making a real difference are at risk.

What can your organization to to prepare for the possibility of an economic downturn? One thing is to really step back and try to get a good understanding of the critical areas of your mission, and what it would take to deliver on those. Then, the "nice to haves," then the areas that are not supportive of your mission.

If you already have a Balanced Scorecard and Strategy Map in place, you already know the answers to these questions, and should be well equipped to make the difficult decisions that may be coming down the road. If not, you may want to consider developing a BSC -- if for no other reason than to get your leadership together to discuss the issues.

Of course, once you go through the process of creating a BSC, the next step is using it -- but I'll leave that to a future post.