Читать книгу Nonprofit Kit For Dummies - Stan Hutton, Beverly A. Browning - Страница 95

Whether you’re working with a newly formed nonprofit or a long-running institution, everyone in your stakeholder’s group needs to agree on the mission and vision statements. We recommend holding a meeting to solicit their input. The biggest advantage to this kind of group activity is achieving full buy-in from everyone involved. After all, you want people to believe in and accept the organization’s mission and vision statements. If they don’t, they likely won’t stick around to help uphold that mission and help you achieve your long-term vision statement (or they won’t do a good job of upholding it while they’re there).

For groups who are working to establish mission and vision statements for a new nonprofit organization, we recommend that you find an outside facilitator to guide the group through the inevitable discussions about priorities and the direction of the new organization. Finding a neutral person who can bring an outsider’s perspective to the group’s deliberations is extremely helpful. A facilitator also takes responsibility for managing the group so that you and your colleagues can be full participants in the meeting. If you aren’t geographically near a nonprofit support organization (a nonprofit that helps other nonprofits with technical assistance), ask other nearby organizations for suggestions.

Bring a few prewritten suggestions to the group meeting. Present them as drafts and ask for feedback. Also, be open-minded to their input and suggested changes to your prewritten suggestions. After an initial discussion among the group, give each member index cards or sticky pads and have all of them write down three ideas they feel strongly about keeping as a part of the mission and vision statements.

After you collect everyone’s written ideas, read them all aloud and — as a group — organize them so that similar ideas are grouped together. These notes should identify the key ideas that belong in your mission and vision statements. Also be sure to ask whether anyone thinks an important idea is missing. If not, you’re ready to assign someone to draft the mission and vision statements.