But understanding a nonprofit’s mission can be challenging. Too often what an organization actually does—its mission—diverges from what it says it does in its written, public-facing mission statement. This leads to confusion when comparing the statement with the actual work.

So, in this chapter, I’ll explain what we mean by mission and how it relates to an organization’s purpose and vision. We will then look at how mission shapes a nonprofit’s impact. And finally, we’ll look at how to ensure the mission statement properly reflects your nonprofit’s purpose and mission.

HOW VISION, PURPOSE, AND MISSION RELATE TO EACH OTHER

An organization’s vision is invariably aspirational, such as “a world free of poverty.” Some organizations define and publish their vision, but many don’t.^* A nonprofit’s purpose is a broad statement of how it intends to contribute to the world it envisions.^† Its mission is more specific, setting out what the organization does, and for whom; i.e., the action it takes to achieve its purpose.

KEY TERMS

Vision: the desired future state, usually aspirational, e.g., “a world free of poverty”

Purpose: the organization’s reason for being; how it intends to contribute to the world it envisions, e.g., “to empower the poor to realize their potential and to break out of the vicious cycle of poverty”^*

Mission: the action an organization takes to fulfill its purpose, e.g., “providing comprehensive financial services” to the poor⁵

Mission statement: a succinct written statement of the organization’s purpose and mission

Strategy: the set of decisions and trade-offs a nonprofit needs to make to achieve the greatest impact in pursuit of its purpose

Strategic plan: the written strategy; it may be a short framework for decision-making, a long document with detailed multi-year plans for every aspect of the organization’s work over the next three to five years or longer, or something in between

Purpose and mission are often used interchangeably in written mission statements, but it helps to understand the difference when defining what your organization does.

The purpose of the Girl Scouts of the USA is to “build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place.” Its mission is to empower girls to “discover the fun, friendship, and power of girls together. Girls grow courageous and strong through a wide variety of enriching experiences, such as field trips, skill-building sports clinics, community service projects, cultural exchanges, and environmental stewardships.”⁶

EDWINS Leadership & Restaurant Institute’s purpose is to “change the face of re-entry for formerly incarcerated prisoners” in the US. Its approach to doing this “is three-fold: to teach a skilled and in-demand trade in the culinary arts, empower willing minds through a passion for hospitality management, and prepare students for a successful transition home.”⁷

The purpose of More in Common, an impressive community-building organization working in the US and Europe, is “to understand the forces driving us apart, to find common ground and help to bring people together to tackle our shared challenges.” And its mission? “We draw from groundbreaking research to test and find solutions, working with partners that have the capacity to make a real difference at scale. And we help build the larger field of efforts to strengthen democratic societies against the threats of polarization and division.”⁸

So what about the Freedom Fund? My very first task as the newly appointed CEO of the newly launched organization was to identify what its purpose and mission would be. The three founders, all philanthropic foundations whose representatives were members of our board, agreed on the purpose of the organization and the key challenges but had diverging views on how to address them. They all agreed that the global anti-slavery sector was chronically underresourced; that it was fragmented and needed more collaboration, particularly in countries with the highest burden of slavery; and that the sector was desperately short of robust evidence of which interventions worked best to tackle this hidden crime. Contending with these challenges would be the new organization’s purpose.

But the founders differed on the most effective way to do so. One believed the priority was to work on the ground with clusters of local organizations to combat slavery in affected communities in low-income countries. Another thought we could best add value by focusing on industries (such as fishing or fast fashion) that were rife with extreme exploitation. And the third wanted us to link local-level impact and research with its work to influence global and national policymakers.

I was in full agreement on the challenges and comfortable with the diverging views on ways forward. To my mind, we were a start-up. We had to identify two or three potentially powerful ways of working, then test and refine them, and scale those we identified as the most impactful, based on robust evidence.

To reflect all of this in our mission statement, I drafted it in two parts. The first part set out our purpose, the reason the Freedom Fund had been brought into existence and what differentiated it from other anti-slavery organizations. I identified this to be “to mobilize the knowledge, capital and will needed to end slavery.”

The second part, setting out the action we would take to achieve this, was expressed as follows:

We identify and invest in the most effective frontline efforts to eradicate modern slavery in the countries and sectors where it is most prevalent. Partnering with visionary investors, governments, anti-slavery organizations and those at risk of exploitation, we tackle the systems that allow slavery to persist and thrive. Working together, we protect vulnerable populations, liberate and reintegrate those enslaved and prosecute those responsible.

There is school of thought that mission statements need to be short and terse—a few words or a single sentence. This second paragraph was maybe a little longer than is ideal, but I valued being specific about our priorities, so that we could align board members, funders, staff, and partner organizations. Our board agreed and approved this mission statement.

Looking back at the statement many years later, I believe it’s still a good reflection of what we do and the impact we are held accountable for achieving, with one key exception. The exception is the leadership of survivors of slavery, which now plays a much more central role in our work and our plans for the future. So, while that is already part of our mission (in that we are already doing it), survivor leadership is not yet included in our mission statement. Given that it’s such an important part of the Freedom Fund, it needs to be incorporated, not least because the statement is the public-facing expression of what we do. We’ll revise the mission statement when we embark on our next strategic planning process.^*

DEFINING A POWERFUL MISSION

Unless you are starting a nonprofit from scratch, your nonprofit is already implementing its mission. By definition, whatever your organization is doing is its mission. If that’s a powerful mission—one that is designed to deliver maximum impact in pursuit of your organization’s purpose— all is well. As the management guru Peter Drucker stated in his book Managing the Non-Profit Organization: “The first thing to talk about is what missions work and what missions don’t work and how to define the mission. For the ultimate test is not the beauty of the mission statement. The ultimate test is right action [my emphasis] . . . the first job of the leader is to think through and define the mission of the institution.”⁹

A powerful mission ensures that your organization has distinctive and intentional impact as it pursues its purpose. It should be credibly ambitious relative to the resources you can reasonably expect to mobilize.

If your mission is modest for the resources you have available, you’ll most likely succeed in your mission, but not in achieving the impact you should, given your purpose and resources. Let’s assume you run a nonprofit committed to tackling homelessness in San Francisco [purpose] by running a high-quality twenty-person shelter for the homeless in a rapidly gentrifying part of the city [mission], and you have an endowment of millions of dollars. You may well run the shelter very effectively, at full capacity, and provide world-class services to the twenty people who can access your shelter at any one time. Strictly speaking, this would amount to success given your mission to run the shelter. But it’s not a powerful mission. Your nonprofit won’t be having the impact on homelessness in San Francisco that its purpose and funding suggest it should. It won’t be delivering the scale of change it should be capable of delivering.

If your mission is overly ambitious, you may fail to achieve it while still having a great deal of impact, or you could just end up being demoralized by your failure to carry it out. Take the same San Francisco–based nonprofit. Assume its mission is now to tackle homelessness by opening shelters across the city, working with the homeless it serves to develop ambitious policy recommendations to the state and local governments and advocate for change, with $1 million in annual income. Chances are it will struggle to achieve this mission, at least in the short term, given its big ambitions and limited resources. That could be demoralizing, or it could be a powerful motivation to raise more money and support to make a real difference to homelessness in that city. Your leadership and strategy will help determine that.

If your mission is not defined in a way to deliver maximum impact for the resources you can expect to mobilize, you should revise it. It may be that the organization started with a strong mission and clarity about what it was doing, but over time has engaged in mission creep, taking on projects not because they aligned closely to the mission, but because there was a willing funder or an interesting opportunity (as illustrated by the opening story in this chapter). To take another example, imagine that a donor came to the San Francisco homelessness nonprofit and offered it funding to run a shelter in neighboring Oakland. Taking that on would be a classic example of mission creep—unless the nonprofit decided to revise and expand its mission and strategy to run shelters in, say, the wider Bay Area (including Oakland), with a credible plan to do this well. Mission creep is a constant threat for nonprofits. Only strong leadership and a commitment to the core mission can resist the forces trying to pull you off course.

There are other reasons your organization may have drifted from its mission. You may have started initiatives and realized they were not closely aligned to what you wanted to do or to the key populations you want to serve but kept on with them because of opposition from donors and staff to pulling out. Or your board is divided and pulling you in different directions. Or you started with a very modest mission, and haven’t revisited it even though it clearly wasn’t designed to achieve the change you are aiming for. The end result will likely be that your organization is unfocused and distracted and not having the impact it should.

How do you assess if your current mission is fit for purpose? Start with the fundamentals. Picture what you would do if you were starting the organization from scratch, with current resources, and a blank sheet for your mission. Knowing what you know, how can you have maximum impact in pursuit of your purpose? Ask staff, the people and communities you serve, and other stakeholders. Do they have a clear and shared idea of what the organization should be doing? Do they think you are making the best use of the resources available to you? Is the organization focused or scattershot? Is it making a meaningful difference?

If your conclusion is that your existing mission is significantly off track, then you need to do some serious work to get the organization back on track. That may require a major review of your strategy, and some painful course correction—but good leaders will lean into this if they determine the mission is not fit for purpose, as it’s the only way to position the organization for maximum impact. We’ll look at this more deeply in the chapter on strategy.

THE MISSION SETS EXPECTATIONS FOR IMPACT

One consequence of measuring nonprofit impact against mission is that it is difficult to compare the performance of one nonprofit with that of another. This is one key way in which nonprofits differ from businesses. Since success for a business is largely determined by its financial returns, performance can be compared much more easily. Hence, Google’s performance can be readily compared against that of peers, such as Facebook or Microsoft, or even against companies in a completely different sector of the global economy, such as Walmart or Goldman Sachs or Ford. While fundamental differences between these organizations exist, the companies can all be broadly compared, based on their financial returns to shareholders. This is what drives their decision-making and accountability to their shareholders.

But nonprofits don’t have a sole, simple metric by which their performance can be compared. For a start, they don’t have owners or shareholders as such. And their outcomes range from lives saved, children educated, justice advanced, arts promoted, ideas generated—all of which are difficult to measure, let alone compare. Even between two organizations working on similar issues, say, addressing child poverty in Houston, it can be very difficult to compare impact and performance, as the organizations may have divergent views on the ways they want to tackle poverty and the outcomes they seek. For example, one may focus on school meals and the other on advocacy to local officials. Usually, the best we can do is ensure our nonprofit has a powerful and clearly defined mission and that it is executing successfully against it. At worst, it means ineffective or badly led nonprofits can operate for many years without being held accountable for their lack of performance.

But, whether or not we can robustly compare the performance of nonprofits, committed leaders must always be seeking ways to assess how effective their organization is. They cannot hold themselves accountable to their stakeholders—first, the people they serve, but funders, board members, and staff too—if they cannot credibly assess what progress their organization has made. We’ll explore this in the next chapter, on impact.

THE MISSION STATEMENT COMES LAST

Once you are clear on your purpose and mission, you can communicate them through your mission statement. A mission statement is usually drafted when an organization is first founded, and then reviewed periodically, usually every few years when your organization embarks on a new strategic planning process. You’ll often find the statement in an organization’s strategic plan, and perhaps on its website.

Many experts place a lot of weight on the mission statement. They say things like: “A clear and well-focused mission statement can serve to guide all major decisions that a nonprofit organization must make— especially decisions about which new programs and projects to undertake, which to avoid, and which to exit.”^*

While that may be aspirational, I don’t think it reflects the reality of most nonprofits. For my part, I’m more interested in “right action” than what the mission statement says the organization does. Missions often evolve more quickly than the mission statement. Of course, ideally, the two align, but frequently the mission statement gets left behind, particularly with rapidly growing nonprofits. In fact, in most organizations, you will probably find that it’s only the CEO who regularly reviews the mission statement (and perhaps not even the CEO). For most staff, it is also the CEO who will have shaped their understanding of the mission, by talking about it and making clear what is and what isn’t part of the mission. Their understanding will also be molded by the day-to-day work of the organization, by decisions on which programs to start or not, and by how impact is measured—not just by what is set out in the statement. All of this underscores the importance of the CEO intentionally shaping the organization’s understanding of the evolving mission and ensuring that it is internalized by staff. The CEO has the primary responsibility to hold and expound on the vision, purpose, and mission of an organization.

CASE STUDY

Drumming Home the Mission

Crisis Group provides a clear example of how a leader can make the mission real to staff. When I joined the organization, and for many years after, we didn’t have a written strategic plan. But staff at Crisis Group had a clearer understanding of its purpose and mission than any I have come across before or since. And that was because the then CEO, Gareth Evans, was relentless about explaining what the organization did, and, just as importantly, what it did not do. Its purpose was to prevent and resolve deadly conflict, and its mission was to carry out field-based research, publish nuanced analysis and reports, and engage in high-level advocacy to policymakers and those who influenced them. That’s all quite wordy, but Gareth would repeatedly highlight that we had analysts based on the ground in conflict-affected countries, not on the other side of the world in Washington, DC, or London. He would constantly hammer home the need for expert analysis, with clear and practical recommendations, not idealistic statements of what might be nice to happen. And he would make it very clear what Crisis Group would not do, such as big “documentation” exercises to record atrocities, for example, as those were better left to organizations that specialized in that work. He would talk about our mission internally at staff meetings and retreats and externally at public events. As a result, there was a clear and shared understanding by staff and key external actors about what Crisis Group did and didn’t do, and that gave great focus to our work. And when we occasionally strayed, as with the Enough Project, we quickly course-corrected.^*

None of this is to say you shouldn’t have a mission statement. A written statement is helpful, provided it accurately reflects your purpose and mission, and it can play a key role in fundraising and communications efforts. But, to my mind, your first priority is to engage in doing what needs to be done to advance your purpose, rather than get unduly focused on whether a proposed activity fits your statement or not. The statement should reflect the actual mission, not vice versa. If there is a mismatch, you need to work out whether you’ve drifted from what you should be doing—so your mission needs to be revised—or you have evolved from what your mission statement says you do, in which case the statement needs to be updated.

When you draft or redraft the mission statement, you should succinctly express the organization’s purpose and mission.^* The statement should set out the problem the organization exists to address or the change it wants to bring about (purpose), and who it serves and how it will achieve the desired change (mission). Ideally it is no more than two or three sentences. The mission statements of Girl Scouts, EDWINS, and More in Common are all good examples.^†

An up-to-date statement can be used by the CEO to ensure that all key stakeholders, including your staff, board, and funders, have a shared understanding of the mission.^‡ It can also be used to market your organization to potential funders and other external audiences. If your mission statement is well crafted, anyone reading it will know what your nonprofit does and doesn’t do and why. If your nonprofit has a powerful mission, reflected in a well-crafted mission statement, and holds itself accountable for its impact against that mission, it will have a strong foundation on which to deliver positive change, as we will see in the next chapter on impact.

MISSION ACTION POINTS

Be Clear About the Work

Review your organization’s purpose and mission.

Assess whether the mission is credibly ambitious relative to your organization’s purpose and the resources you can reasonably expect to mobilize.