mission: critical

A growing non-profit recently reached out to engage us in developing a framework around telling their expansion story.  To start, I asked them to send me their current communications strategy.  What I got was a tactical template listing out the tools they use to communicate (web, social media, face to face, etc.) and their current audience divided by assumed level of engagement.

I applaud their effort to create a strategy.  It tells me they know they need one.  But they were missing the most important element of any strategy: a mission or a purpose.

To create a strategy you have to start at the very beginning and ask the simple question, why are we all here?

Then every single decision you make bounces off of that purpose; if it doesn’t stick, it doesn’t stay.  Your mission informs your tactics.  Simple but not easy.  As you begin to connect your purpose to the outflowing to-do lists taking up your day, you and your teams will also begin to feel differently. Connecting to your mission revs up your “get-er-done.”

Your mission is not WHAT you do; it’s WHY you do it.

by Jesse Ihde