[Dalya’s Note: This is an excerpt from my award-winning book, Writing to Make a Difference: 25 Powerful Techniques to Boost Your Community Impact.]

Have you advanced your organization’s mission today? Your readers are eager to know about it!

Every marketing or fundraising piece you write needs to speak to the advancement of your organization’s reason for existing in the first place. That is, every page should remind your readers that you never forget what you set out to do in your community.

Every values-driven organization has a specific mission to make a positive difference in the world. My guess is that you already know what yours is. You may not have memorized your official mission statement, but you are clear on the essence of your organization. Your mission, after all, is a key part of your organization’s brand..

To each of your readers, your mission, or perhaps some particular aspect of it, is the heart of the matter. They want to hear that it is central to everything you do. They want to know that your work continues to be relevant to their lives and the life of their community, even as times and circumstances change.

There is no shame in reminding yourself of your organization’s mission statement once in a while. Some people I know even plaster it on the wall or make it their screensaver to keep it at the top of the mind and on the tip of the tongue.

Your mission should inspire and motivate support and commitment from those who share your concerns. Your organization’s name alone should cause your mission to spring to mind.
However, if you—and your colleagues—do not revisit your mission statement regularly, and ideally fine-tune or update it on occasion, you can get stuck in out-of-date patterns of branding. This is true for both start-up organizations (whose missions are usually still evolving) and more established groups. For instance, a client organization of mine had focused for decades on the needs of all low-income families, but recent demographic changes in their county compelled them to focus on new immigrants, with their associated cultural and linguistic challenges.

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