[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not revisit your mission statement regularly, and ideally fine-tune or update it on occasion, you can get stuck in out-of-date patterns of branding.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.

Even more dangerously, if you are not careful to monitor your work in light of your mission, your organization could easily lose its sense of direction. The Cheshire Cat in Alice in Wonderland summarized why you need a strong, relevant mission: “If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go.”

Of course, your readers might not come out and say, “What is your mission?” Instead, they might want to know what you do (how you benefit your customers and the community), how you do it (products and services featured in your work), and why you exist at all (why you are needed).

Help them out by frequently reminding them of your goals, and how you are consistently making progress toward them. You cannot assume that your readers will instantly recall who you are or exactly what you do—and that includes die-hard supporters/patrons as well as casual online surfers who may have stumbled across your website. But repetition will certainly help!

Personally speaking

I have often found it interesting and useful to write up a personal mission statement, and then check if my activities align with it. The New Year, birthdays, anniversaries, and other milestones make fine times for this kind of “taking stock.” Politicians’ publicists do this all the time because they must continuously re-brand their clients. Check out your favorite public figure’s website to find her or his personal mission statement.