Setting Goals for your Organization
Creating S.M.A.R.T. goals will help your organization measure results and improve long-term planning
Goal Setting
When you set goals for your organizations it provides direction and focus. There are always more things to do than there is capacity, so goal setting helps prioritize what tasks you are going to focus on which help you meet your goals. Goals also can be used to inspire staff and volunteers, as it can create team unity and common purpose. When goals are not clear it causes confusion and will typically cause people to lose motivation. Making your goals clear and defined means they will be effective both in the short and long term.
Clearly communicate your goals to potential volunteers - this will help ensure cultural alignment as people volunter for your organization because volunteers will self-screen and not work with your organization if their goals do not align with yours. This also ensure that the volunteers you do recruit will be more invested in your cause and in a position where they are more likely to excel.
SMART Goals
One of the ways successful organizations and individuals can evaluate their goals is by using the SMART goals model. This model is an acronym that breaks goal setting down into five parts:
- Specific - Keep your goals clear, focused and simple.
- Measurable - How can you tell when you have made progress? Do you have a timeline and set deliverables to quantify success?
- Achievable - Given all internal and external circumstances (you might wish to complete a S.W.O.T. analysis to discern there), are your goals actually possible in a given time frame?
- Relevant (sometimes also listed as Realistic) - Do your goals reflect your organization's overall purpose, vision and values? Are the goals going to be useful given external factors and timelines?
- Time-based- Set a timeframe for your goals so you can measure successes and challenges in segments of time, such as 30-60-90 days, 6 months and 1 year.
Keeping your goals centered around this model helps ensure that they are effective and serve to motivate staff and volunteers. You should also take the time to evaluate and review your goals periodically to ensure that they are still effective and reflecting the SMART model.
Achieving & Reflecting on Goals
Once you have set your goals, the next step is to determine how to achieve them. One way to do this is to break it down into four components:
|
Goal |
Activity |
Indicator |
Measurement |
|
The goal you initially set |
Tasks involved in attaining that goal |
Short-term outcome from activity |
Ways of determining whether the goal has been successful |
Being able to set and achieve goals as an organization can have extremely positive results on the staff, volunteers and organization as a whole. This can serve as an effective way of retaining volunteers as well, because if they are happy and feel fulfilled with your organization, they are more likely to continue to be a part of it.
When your organization is able to achieve goals it's important to make sure you recognize the efforts that went in to it. This is where staff and volunteer recognition are key in keeping a positive momentum. Part of goal setting to is also learning and reflecting on things when they don't work. SMART goals provide a framework to reflect equally on successes and failures and reformulate new goals based on that feedback. Organizations which use this model and are more likely to succeed and thrive in the long-term.
