If you’re starting or running a business or nonprofit organization, you need a mission statement. Mission statements help you set goals and make decisions. They attract your ideal customers and clients, and set the tone for your marketing. They bring your staff together with clarity of vision and common purpose. They can help you find investors or get donations and sponsors. In fact, they’re such a powerful tool that some people even write them for their personal lives.
If you’re operating without a mission statement, you should write one ASAP. If you already have one, revisit it periodically to make sure it still matches your values and goals. Whether you’re revamping or starting from scratch, here are five steps to writing the perfect mission statement.
- Be prepared to start big, but end small. It’s important to write down whatever comes to mind while you’re brainstorming, but it’s equally important to weed out superfluous information. It’s not a mission essay, after all. And when you’re editing things out, actually take them out. Some people hear that it should be a couple of sentences, so they try to squeeze everything into those couple of (horrible run-on) sentences. The end result should be concise and compelling. Keep going until you find something that encapsulates the essence of what you do.
- Brainstorm and pre-write freely. Really let yourself go wild here. You never know what associations you’ll make between ideas as you go. Write out answers to the questions of why you do what you do, how you do it, and who you do it for. What separates you from your competitors? What are your values and goals? Once when I was taking a class at Maryland Nonprofits, the speaker told us that our mission was what we would do even if we had no money to do it. It’s important to identify your passion. What is your actual reason for doing what you do?
- Write out several choices and combine their best parts. The final product should be short, simple, and meaningful. Pick out the parts that really speak to your company’s identity and delete the rest. Keep it simple, but don’t simplify to the point of restricting your future growth. Use plain language as much as possible. Mission statements full of jargon might be popular, but people hate them.
- Narrow it down to the best three and set them aside for at least a day. Give yourself time to sit with and revisit your statement. Like any piece of writing, it will benefit from your ability to see it with fresh eyes.
- Finally, don’t be afraid to change it if it no longer serves you. Ideally, your mission statement will last forever or a really long time, but don’t stay married to it if it starts to take you in the wrong direction.
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