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All child welfare organizations are on a mission, whether it’s supporting children’s health, protecting them from violence, or reducing systemic inequities that cause them harm.
But developing an effective mission statement — one that builds support for the organization’s cause and helps it achieve its specific goals — isn’t as straightforward as it sounds.
“Nonprofits often completely mess this up,” organizational strategist Francis Pandolfi wrote in the Harvard Business Review.
Nonprofit mission statements are often too long and too complex, experts say. Sometimes, they’re out of date — and don’t reflect an organization’s current goals and activities. And sometimes they’re more like slogans than statements that distill an organization’s purpose, according to Pandolfi.
Poorly developed mission statements can, in fact, undermine the mission. If they fail to communicate what organizations do and why they do it, potential funders and supporters will be less likely to give their time and money to the cause. That can make it more difficult for organizations to win competitions for scarce resources and build large and loyal followings among key audiences.
Ultimately, organizations won’t be as strong and healthy as they could be — and will be less likely to achieve their goals. In the child welfare space, that means kids won’t get the help they need to thrive, whether it’s a laptop for school, a healthy breakfast in the morning, or access to a therapist.
To avoid this problem, established organizations with deep resources often devote significant time to the process of identifying their mission and developing an attendant statement that is reflected in internal and external communications and has the support of people involved with and impacted by the organization. But smaller and newer groups, such as many in the child welfare sector, may lack the resources to undertake what can be a time-consuming and labor-intensive process.
But that doesn’t mean they can’t develop effective mission statements on their own.
Why do you need them?
It’s helpful to understand what mission statements are and why they’re important.
Mission statements explain why an organization exists, how it works and whom it serves. They help organizations establish a “common answer” to questions about their fundamental purpose and reason for being, says Alyssa Singer, associate vice president at Fenton, a social change agency. Make A Wish America, for example, is on a mission to “create life-changing wishes for children with critical illnesses.” Its statement communicates what the organization does (grant wishes), why it does it (change lives), and whom it serves (children with critical illnesses).
Fenton
Alyssa Singer
Such statements have both external and internal implications, adds Michael Bellavia, CEO of HelpGood, a cause marketing agency. On the outside, they help key audiences understand the organization’s work; on the inside, they influence how people think about it, he says. They help “make sure everyone’s on the same page” — what they’re there for, what they’re doing, and what their driving purpose is.
For this reason, mission statements are often compared to a North Star that guides organizations on their journey toward change; they can help leaders and staff make strategic decisions about the organization’s direction, assess progress toward goals, and reorient if necessary.
To begin developing their statement, organizations should engage stakeholders early on, either through an internal workshop, or a questionnaire or survey about what inspires them the most and what they think the organization most wants to accomplish, Singer said. Leaders of the process should involve staff, volunteers, board members and ideally, people the organization serves, or a representative group in larger organizations. Then leaders should mine responses for words and phrases that overlap and align and use them to begin the drafting process.
Short and simple
Be sure to keep mission statements short and concise and ideally one sentence long, says Jade Graddy, a consultant with Campbell & Company, a group that supports nonprofits.
Mashing mission and vision statements, meanwhile, can lead to “Frankenstein” statements that are “almost always too long,” according to Top Nonprofits. Vision statements should articulate the change nonprofits hope to see, while mission statements should express how they work to realize that vision, says Erin Hart, chief innovation officer at Spitfire Strategies, a nonprofit consulting firm that offers a suite of free messaging tools. These statements can work well together for an organization’s target audiences if those audiences are carefully identified, she said.
Readability is also key. Mission statements should be simple, clear and easy to understand — and avoid jargon and acronyms. Resist the temptation to use longer, more specific words, which obscure meaning, Singer advises. “If folks can’t understand what we’re saying, we can’t inspire them.”
One top-rated example: the March of Dimes, which defines its mission as leading “the fight for the health of all moms and babies.” It gets high marks for its third-grade reading level. Invisible Children, on the other hand, gets a thumbs down for its statement — “to end the violence and exploitation facing our world’s most isolated and vulnerable communities” — at the college freshman reading level.
Organizations should put clear parameters around the process and establish a final arbiter to avoid a result that reflects “writing by committee,” Graddy said. They should also periodically review their mission statements in case their strategic direction has shifted.
Bellavia urges groups to avoid generic platitudes (pledges to “make the world a better place,” for example) and instead focus on their specific approach — their secret sauce — to change. That can help organizations differentiate themselves from their peers and articulate their “unique value proposition.”
At the same time, Singer warns against expecting too much from a single statement. “When you try to focus on everything, you end up focusing on nothing,” she said. Organizations shouldn’t overreach with regard to audiences either; trying to reach everyone ends up reaching no one, Hart said.
Ultimately, Singer says mission statements should communicate purpose in a way that conveys emotion and inspires people to take action. The “why” should be at the center, followed by the “how” and the “what.” “Establishing that hierarchy” is important, she says; messaging can be flexible, too. There “certainly isn’t one formula” that applies to all products and all organizations.
