When determining the desired outcome of your marketing plan I would recommend thinking in terms of a special event.  If the nonprofit wanted to put on a special event they first must determine what they hope the special event will accomplish.  The outcome of the special event could be a friendraiser/awareness builder, to raise money or to attract new donors and volunteers.  You hope that a successful special event would do all three, but you pick one and build the entire event and theme around that desired outcome.  For the marketing plan you are going to take the same approach and think of your plan as a yearlong special event.  Desired outcomes for a marketing plan could include the following: raise awareness; buildup the nonprofit in the community, region or state; attract new donors; attract new volunteers and/or new clients for the programs and services.
Remember you should have already identified your target audience and your desired outcome should match the audience.  However sometimes when a nonprofit goes through these steps they determine their desired outcome does not match and the target audience needs to be changed.  There is nothing wrong with that, in fact this is a great way of keeping the plan alive instead of it collecting dust on a shelf. Re-visit these two questions every year to see if either one has changed or needs to be changed.  Now that you have the target audience and desired outcome, we can move on to the next step in the marketing plan which we will talk about in the next article – the marketing materials.