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Defining Your Goals

Having a clearly defined, targeted, measurable and deadline-oriented set of goals is the number one thing you can do to make yourself and your organization successful.  You may think we just typed the most obvious sentence in the world, but trust us when we say that most organizations we work with struggle with understanding of how to formulate useful goals and how to use them.

To kick off the new year of 3 Things, we offer up the three things we’ve found helpful for organizations working on setting goals to guide strategic decision-making.

1)  Goals are made up of 3 parts:  Objectives, Metrics, & Targets. For example, your field director might have a goal of increasing the number of volunteers.  That sounds great, but really that is a very vague goal and you have no idea what type of volunteers, what value recruiting them will add to your larger objectives and how you will measure success (one new volunteer is an increase – is that what you were looking for?).  A better way to formulate this goal would be:  Increasing the number of City Captains (meaning they lead our local volunteer recruiting efforts, can deliver our message points and can be called upon to attend meetings & events so staff doesn’t have to) in major metropolitan areas in the Northeast from 12 to 24 by June of this year.

2)  Goals are SMART*. This means they are:  Strategic, Measurable, Ambitious, Realistic and Time-Bound.  Without these five characteristics, a goal is just words on a page.  We think the best way to illustrate this point is again with a tangible example.

Bad Goal: Get More Media Coverage

Good Goal: Get at least one article, Editorial or OpEd and 2 Letters to the Editor placed in the hometown newspapers of our 6 top congressional targets prior to the August recess.

Bad Goal: Pass Comprehensive Universal Healthcare

Good Goal: Working with partner organizations, we will leverage our relationships with 3 top Senators with a goal of getting 2 signed on as public supporters of a bill that includes X, Y & Z before the Holiday break.

3)  Goals are properly assigned. Often, the key element to a good goal is the accountability piece.  A goal needs to have a specific person or department tied to it’s success or it simply won’t get done.  That’s not to say that more than one person or department will be working toward that goal, but there needs to be one person in charge of rolling the ball forward and keeping everyone else on task.

Setting tangible, accomplish-able and strategic goals is really, really hard and there are so many sand traps the unwary and under-informed can fall into.  We all have the best intentions, and with so many fires to put out every day it can be difficult to take the step back and evaluate whether or not what you are doing is actually what you should be doing.  But not taking this valuable step – both as an individual and as an organization can have an unfortunate effect on your ability to effect the change you are working so hard for.

*For more information on setting SMART goals, we highly recommend the book “Managing to Save the World: The Nonprofit Leader’s Guide to Getting Results” by Alison Green & Jerry Hauser of The Management Center.