Writing a mission statement
A free how-to on creating a mission statement
A mission statement should be more than a series of hokey buzz words strung together or a stiff, bland dictum. Instead, a mission statement’s purpose is to convey your organization’s reason for being to your staff, board, and members of the community. The statement should be clear, powerful, and broad enough to guide your decision-making and help explain your organization’s efforts to potential funders. Thus, the time you and your team spend on developing or revising your mission statement is well spent.
Collaborate
The first step in developing an effective mission statement is to seek input from staff and board members. Because a) large meetings tend to be inefficient, b) stronger voices may drown out better ideas, and c) no one enjoys sitting through a three-hour meeting without even agreeing on the wording of two sentences; it’s best to break the process up.
Develop a List
At smaller meetings over the course of weeks (or through emails, if that works best for your organizational culture), ask people to describe the organization's:
- Values
- Target Audience
- Core Services
- Unique Attributes
Note: There will be a certain amount of variation in responses, particularly if you seek input from people who fill diverse rolls in your organization. However, patterns should appear and when you share the results with the entire staff, the responses should be closer to “That’s right! We do do that!” than “What’s that doing on the list?” If your organization cannot come up with a cohesive picture of what it stands for and what it does, you are probably trying to do too much and/or not effectively communicating in-house.
Be Selective
Once you have captured the organization’s responses, the next step is to make sense of them. Select a committee of people who represent diverse facets of the organization to go through the list:
- Weed out ideas that do not describe your organization’s core services (for instance, fundraising and publicity probably do not belong in your mission statement, though they may be critical to your organization’s survival).
- Integrate like concepts (for instance, “finding creative solutions”, "being innovative”, “thinking outside the box” are all similar values that could be described with one phrase)
Be cohesive
Now it’s time to string the core concepts together. A straightforward boiler plate for a mission statement is The mission of [Organization Name] is to [verb] the [population served] of [location] through [core services].
- Think broadly. You do not want your mission statement to be an exhaustive list of what you do, but you do want it to fit in all the services that you currently do and foresee doing in the future. For instance “improve the lives of all domestic animals in XYZ County” is better than “provide an animal shelter, spay/neutering services, adoption services, obedience classes, and information about pet care in XYZ County”
- Give yourself options. Do you enhance or do you empower? Do you provide job training or career counseling (or both?) Play around with wording and write down two or five potential mission statements.
Vote on it
Depending on your organization’s bylaws, the board probably has final say on what the wording of the mission statement is. That shouldn’t stop you from polling staff and letting the board know what their preference is. Take the top ideas to the board and make it official through whatever decision-making process you use.
Voila! You now have a new mission statement. Live by it, advertise it liberally, and look it over every couple of years to make sure it is still as fresh and relevant as it was on the day you first adopted it.
Check out these free sample mission statements for concrete examples.
More on Starting a Non-profit Organization:
- Before You Start a Non-Profit
- Do I need a lawyer to start?
- How to write non-profit bylaws
- Choosing a bank account
