Taking stock at year end: Mission envy versus mission impact

The year-end mental score sheet has begun. How did we do? Did we meet our own goals? How do we stack up now compared to others? I call it Mission Envy. Think of another organization in your community that you think has it made. They have the right board members, the easy-to-sell mission, the broad base of community support, the beautiful building(s), a smart and outgoing executive director, a strong development staff. In short—they clearly have it all together.

Perhaps there is another side to that story. If you were to talk to their board members or staff or executive director, you might find that they have another set of challenges—how to keep board members engaged, how to convey their needs to the community so that people will see they have more of their mission to fulfill, a few "normal" issues with funding sources pulling back or programs being restructured.

But even if the illusion of that perfect organization were true, so what? What does that have to do with your organization? Rather than spending time trying to compare your group or use your less-sexy mission to justify your current predicament, take stock of what you have. In fact, the sooner you can get everyone on your team to tell the truth about your unique challenges and successes—and most of all, your unique mission—the sooner you can get on with the real work of engaging your community. In fact, I would assert, that the very reason those "perfect" nonprofits (the ones you envy and are seeking to emulate) got where they are is because they did this very same thing: told the truth about where they were at and made a realistic plan for getting to where they wanted to be.

In other words, it's time to take the fantasy and daydreaming out of the picture. Those are merely distractions to keep you from buckling down and focusing on the challenges your group is facing right now. It's so much easier to spend time comparing yourselves to the other nonprofits in town. That same valuable time could be spent working with a group of dedicated people to take stock of where you really stand, setting your goals, and getting on with fulfilling them. Those SWOT analyses and strategic planning processes really do work—if you are willing to tell the truth about every single aspect of your organization's current status.

Although the SWOT analysis starts with "S" for your strengths as an organization, I think most people naturally default to their "W" for weaknesses, so why not start there? Make your own list of the true weaknesses you see right now in your organization, never mind how you stack up to the other nonprofits in your community. Where are you really weak? Is your executive director a solid leader? Does he or she love what they do, have the respect of the rest of the team, engage the staff in the process of growing the organization, delegate and provide clear pathways for staff to see their future here?

What about your board? Rather than pointing fingers and falling prey to envying other boards in town—without really knowing the truth about their board—focus on your own board. Aiming to become a high-level corporate board could be absolutely the wrong thing for your group. What type of board makes sense for your group's mission and its evolutionary state as an organization? What would the ideal board look like for you? Now contrast that with your current board. I say if you have 40% of your board members who are truly passionate about your work and willing to devote real time to the organization, you're way ahead of most nonprofits. Rather than wasting time criticizing your board—which accomplishes nothing—why not create a picture of the ideal board for you? Boards evolve. It takes time. They won't suddenly become your perfect board. But they will never become your perfect board if you are merely trying to emulate another group's board.

There is no substitute for an honest assessment of the good, bad, and the ugly of where you are at. Make the long list. What is working and not working about each of these areas of your organization:

• Executive director
• Development department
• Finance
• Board
• Programs
• Facilities
• Staff

So often we find that the groups we work with are so busy comparing themselves to the other nonprofits in their community, they don't even see how far they've come. Starting and growing a strong nonprofit takes an enormous amount of work. Sustaining it is even more challenging.

Look back at how far you've come. Do you benchmark certain key variables each year?
What metrics do you want to track? Which metrics matter to your group? It may not be number of people served or size of your audience if you are an arts group. What are the bigger measures of success? Which metrics, if fulfilled, would lead to the fulfillment of your mission?

Mission envy is usually a smokescreen for not knowing where to focus to fulfill your mission impact.

Mission impact answers this question: what specific variables in the world would be altered if our mission were to be fulfilled? Which of these variables will we use to track and measure our success? On each of those variables, what is our current baseline? How far do we want to move the needle and by when?

I used to run marathons. Slowly. I was constantly comparing myself to the faster runners. I got to know some of them and they all shared the same secret for their success: they ran strictly to beat their personal best time. As soon as I adopted that approach, I got way faster and blew through my own personal bests, marathon after marathon.

My recommendation: stop looking left, right, and ahead of yourself and focus on your organization's own race. What will emerge very naturally is a list of your organization's strengths. And when you take stock of those strengths, I think you'll see it's been a great year!