Have you ever been through one of those never-ending sessions to create or update your organization’s vision and mission statements? I find nonprofit leaders often break out in hives or a cold sweat at just the thought of it! It can be a painful process of wordsmithing and waxing poetic if you’re not careful.
Often groups will spend hours, days, and undertake multiple phases of mission and vision creation. I applaud their commitment and also think too much time can lead to analysis paralysis.
In that light, here’s how you can make the start of your brainstorming process more bearable:
1) Make sure you understand the difference between a vision and mission. Then actually define the differences at the beginning of your retreat. [Side note: examples of other organizations with strong mission and vision statements can be a life saver!]
Your mission statement is the reason your organization exists—why what you’re doing matters—your purpose. All mission statements have these three elements: Why your nonprofit exists, whom it serves, and how it serves them.
Your vision statement is your dream—the end outcome/ultimate impact if your mission is achieved.
2) Set ground rules around the process. Every group will have one naysayer who knocks down all suggestions—one person who serves as the grammar police—and one who chooses each word as if his life depended on it.
The solution? Don’t allow it. Put a time limit in place (60 minutes for your mission and 60 minutes for your vision) and let everyone know wordsmithing will come later. That time is not today. Other ground rules you might find helpful to set the stage:
- Every voice matters; don’t hold back
- Build on the ideas of others
- Suspend judgment, evaluation, and criticism (at least for now!)
3) Begin brainstorming for each of the three columns:
| The Why | The Whom | The How |
Find the commonalities and shared themes in each column and think how you could encapsulate that theme in just a few key words. Less is more! My rule of thumb– mission statements longer than 20 words are too long and vision statements longer than 15 words are too long.
From there, you should at the very least have a sense of your key themes to include in your mission and vision statements. Then the crafting and wordsmithing begins. Ask for volunteers (no more than 3) to work on crafting a couple of different versions of each statement to bring back to the group.
And voila! You’ll move this important step of the planning process forward. Better yet, you won’t be tempted to kill anyone in the process.
Hat tip to your success,
