When addressing the impact of your organization’s work, we often need to revisit what guides that desired impact… The mission statement. These important words state your intention to make a difference for a specific person, place or thing. Does your mission statement:
- Specify the difference you are committed to making
- Identify the persons, places or things you aim to impact
- Express your ultimate intrinsic desire for what you want most?
To answer these questions, your board and senior staff might want to reflect upon the following questions:
- What is our organization’s core purpose? What problem are we trying to solve or what new reality are we trying to create?
- If we were to be founded today, would it be to meet an unmet need? Are there new players that are making our work more (or less) relevant?
- How do our results and reputation compare to other organizations that are working in a space similar to ours? Do we have competitive advantages (or disadvantages) that should inform the way that we are thinking about the potential of a strategic alliance or restructuring?
- If we were to close our doors today, from whom would we hear and what would they say?
Your answers to these questions will help provide clarity and direction about your organization’s fundamental purpose as well as the larger community system in which you operate. For a brief refresher on Mission Statements, visit this BoardSource resource.
Once defined and refined, we now can look at the success we are having in accomplishing that mission = or impact.
Various research studies over the years have demonstrated that many or most nonprofits do not have reliable impact measures or performance metrics that tell them how well they are accomplishing their mission.
Your nonprofit can maximize its mission impact by:
- ensuring that its mission statement contains impact language
- setting mission accomplishment measures,
- articulating your mission gap and
- tying these actions into a strategy development process.
In many organizations that do have performance metrics, senior staff and board members often do not use the same metrics to judge performance. While more and more organizations are promoting the idea of measuring mission impact and progress is being made, we still have a long way to go. (Sheehan, Robert M. Academic Director of the Executive MBA Program with the University of Maryland.)
Sheehan recommends that we ask our boards and senior staff members the following question: What results, outcomes and specific evidence should we look at to tell us that we are actually making a difference- having a measurable impact, in accordance with our mission?
Join us on October 10th to dive headlong into the reason that talking about our impact is the best way to define our success. Check out the Sector Share of this edition to get some tools to assist with that data collection and measuring of results.