Your Mission is Your Nonprofit's Most Important Asset - Make Sure It's a Good One
Here’s How to Make Sure Your Mission Is a Good One
Is your nonprofit’s mission statement effectively representing your organization? For every business, there’s high importance put on developing a concise and informative mission statement but for nonprofit organizations that mission statement is the reason you exist. Ensuring your nonprofit has an amazing statement is one of the top contributors to successfully surviving the 10-year mark (29% of nonprofits don’t).
When a for-profit company creates its mission statement, it can often get shrugged off and left as a paragraph on the website and nothing else. 61% of employees can’t tell you their company’s mission statement if you paid them.
An article on DonorBox informs us that “a mission statement is to an organization what a compass is to an explorer. If designed well, it will provide your nonprofit with a framework for making decisions throughout the organization. Your nonprofit mission statement can help you evaluate options and decide what’s best for your nonprofit according to your preferred future.”
Here’s how:
Make sure your organization’s stakeholders know it. At your next Board of Directors meeting have every member write down on a sheet of paper, without cheating, what they believe the mission statement to be. If they can’t write it down even 80% word for word, then your mission statement needs work. It’s important to have a mission that every person involved in your nonprofit, from you to each volunteer, is behind completely. Everyone needs to be on the same page. If each board member is giving the public something different, your community will get confused as to what it is you actually do.
Your mission statement needs to be powerful and purpose-driven. If you and everyone in your nonprofit organization aren’t motivated by your mission statement, then you should probably give it another look. It’s important for your mission to be more than a few sentences that answer what it is you want to achieve in your community. It needs to be thought-provoking, heart-squeezing, and purposefully pushing your organization to reach it. Ten years from now, if your nonprofit were to finally achieve its purpose, what do you think the newsstands would read when reporting on your success? Is it clever and inspiring? You want the public to see your non-profit as the organization that grew a garden that solves hunger, not just someone who planted some seeds.
Is it unique to you? When someone reads your mission statement do they pause and question whether this relates to your organization or could they name five others that it could relate to? Your mission is unique to you, whether it relates to unique services or a specific area, you define why you need to exist and why the world should care about your mission statement.
Having difficulty developing a strong mission statement? If you’re looking for temporary help creating an effective brand that will promote a strong sense of leadership in your community, reach out for a discussion today to info@nmblstrategies.com.
