The Importance of Setting Goals for Your Nonprofit
A new year is upon us, and it’s the perfect time to start setting goals for your nonprofit’s future; which is a challenging step to take if you don’t know which direction you’re heading in. Think of goal setting as an opportunity to create a plan or a map of the year ahead. When it comes to achieving goals, clarity is key. During goal-setting meetings, you will learn about everything you missed in the past year and identify everything you are going to achieve in 2022.
Here are 4 benefits of setting goals for your nonprofit:
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It helps everyone get on the same page
It’s important to remember that even though you may have a select set of goals in mind, other team members might think a bit differently. In order to get everyone back on the same page and driving towards the same company goals, it’s important to touch base at least once every six to 12 months, to reassess intentions and to remind your team what they are aiming for. You want every member of your team to be looking in the same direction and be excited about the same prospective future.
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It protects your company from future disasters
No one could have predicted the Covid-19 pandemic, but imagine if, at your goal-setting meeting, you discussed all the threats toward your company’s growth (no matter how far-fetched) and what you would do to counteract it? You would have had a plan in place to proceed through a pandemic without losing precious capital. By filtering your organization’s goals through disaster scenarios, you will be able to gain insight about what is realistic to achieve.
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It will tell you right away, whether your company is thriving or failing
Something interesting happens when you start setting goals for your nonprofit for the upcoming year: your team begins to realize where they have fallen short in the organization’s current goals and how they can avoid doing it again. Setting goals on an annual basis will help ensure that any ideas or intentions that have been set aside, are incorporated in your nonprofit’s new set of targets.
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It will provide a roadmap of action steps
Once you and your team have drafted out your goals, you will be able to delegate action steps for tackling 2022. This will include all the ways your team will work toward these goals over the next year. It could be small actions or big actions, either way, it should be moving you closer to your long-term goals.
As you can see, setting goals for your nonprofit is important; it could mean the difference between a successful future and getting stuck in stagnation. As long as you take the time to set goals, you and your team will always know what to do next.
