Inside the New Five-Year Plan

From the President

Inside the New Five-Year Plan

By Brent Kemp, President and CEO

Among staff tasks we took on in 2025, one of the most important revolved around the new five-year plan – evaluating what we accomplished since 2020, and using the learnings to plot a course for the next half-decade.

We were very happy with the results of the current five-year plan – Create, Engage, and Grow – that wraps up at the end of the year. After consolidating the organization in 2020, the focus was on delivering implementable resources in a timely manner, making sure that our member volunteers were connected with each other and with relevant work, and that our organization was in a position to grow.

On the membership side, the original goal was a significant increase in the total ranks. Over the course of the last five years, consolidation and overall industry trends worked against achieving the kind of membership growth that had been our hope. We really swung for the fences.

Still, we did position the organization for financial sustainability over that time. And as we look to the next 5 years, we're really building on that model that positions the organization to meet the needs of its members, while at the same time allowing for flexibility in how it is implemented.

The watchwords that we have adopted, at least for this first year, are Implement, Impact, and Advocate. This translates into really focusing on making sure that the resources that we're developing are implementable and implemented by the working group participants. Then as implementations become reality, we will collect the stories of impact and share them with the industry. In this way, we want to show how participation in AgGateway is moving the industry forward and to take those stories of impact and enable member volunteers and leaders to tell the story on behalf of Ag Gateway.

The second part is really important, because one of the things we hear quite a bit is, “help me understand how my investment in AgGateway is helping my company.” We can tell those stories pretty successfully and pretty compellingly, and when we do we enable the recipient to go back and really advocate for the organization within peer networks, within executive forums, and things like that.

One of the things that we did do with this plan that we did not do with the previous one was to put together a series of focus areas. What are the strategic areas that we need to focus on in order for AgGateway to be successful over time?

The first of those areas is financial sustainability – what does it mean for us to be a financially successful non-profit organization? While we are not looking to be a for-profit organization, we do want to make sure that we are producing the services, convening working groups, creating resources, and hosting what we need to host for the benefit of our members at a very cost-effective level. And of course, we need to ensure that we're stewarding those resources that members contribute in a very effective way.

Finally, how do we find non-dues revenue opportunities that support the organization and potentially mitigate the need to raise dues and fees?

Some other focus areas are really on the member experience, both from a member company perspective and from the volunteer perspective. For example:

  • Are member companies getting what they need out of their investment in AgGateway?
  • Are member companies participating in working groups that are relevant to them?
  • Are we seeing a good variety of individuals participate in working groups?
  • Are the working groups hitting the metrics that we have as far as participation and end results?

Some of the other focus areas are staff-oriented. How do we operate the organization efficiently and effectively? Do we have the team that we need to take the organization into the future? Do we have the skills that we need to take the organization into the future, and how do we shore up that expertise within the staff?

And that leads into what future-proofing should look like at AgGateway. How do we promote and build succession planning for volunteer leaders? We must create “bench strength” within member organizations that prevent expertise and experience from vanishing from a single promotion or change of employer.

Lastly, I will note that we have built in a lot of flexibility as far as ongoing evaluation and recalibration. The industry is changing rapidly with many forces acting on the factors we care most about. Building in a regimen of evaluation every 12 to 18 months will ensure we are pacing with the rest of the industry and making the appropriate course adjustments.

I'm really excited about the new plan and the new approach. We are taking what we learned from the last five years and tuning it to ensure we are building on our two decades of achievement. If you have any questions on this or anything else headed into the new year, please reach out. Enjoy Thanksgiving with your families and friends and thank you for all you do!