How to Write a Community Mission and Vision Statement
You’ve likely seen vision and mission statements plastered to the walls of offices, in libraries and museums, and even on the entrances to shopping malls.
But creating a strategic (and useful!) vision and mission for your community can be a complex process involving many voices and a lot of feedback. To create something more powerful than a framed document that gathers dust somewhere, you can’t do it alone. To be most effective, you have to gather deep insights, research, and perspectives through a collaborative process.
Definitions: Vision, Mission
First, let's clarify the meanings of “vision” and “mission.” Although these terms are often used interchangeably, they actually have distinct meanings. A mission is a statement outlining a specific goal you want your community to achieve. It should be realistic and measurable and should describe the change you want to enable for members. On the other hand, a vision statement outlines how the world will look different once your mission has been achieved over the long term. It should be imaginative and ambitious, as building communities requires thinking big.
Example 1: An association gathering employees to change work culture
Our mission is to empower our 1,000+ members to transform every one of their work cultures, one by one. We envision a world where everyone belongs and feels valued at work.
Example 2: A skincare company that makes products for athletes and gathers their coaches in an online community.
Our mission is to empower over 2,000 female-identifying fitness coaches to grow their businesses and support the growth of female farmers (our suppliers) in developing nations.
We envision a world where wellness and economic opportunity are accessible to all.
You can read even more in-depth about these definitions in the Mission, Vision, Values & Voice toolkit.
When Should You Create Your Vision and Mission?
It is ideal to start your community with a clear vision and mission, as they serve as the foundation for all your other work. But if you're already building a community, and you find yourself struggling to make decisions on how to move forward, then it's time to step back and create a vision and mission statement. This will help you ground your work and provide clarity on the direction you should take.
Community managers often wonder if they should use tactics such as contests, meetups, and influencer strategies within their communities. To determine if a tactic is worth pursuing, it's important to test it against the community's mission and vision. Ask yourself if the tactic serves the community's mission and if it helps create the vision of the world that the community is working towards. If the answer is yes, then go ahead with the tactic. If the answer is no, then you've just saved yourself a lot of time. Without a clear vision and mission, all the work done will be random at best and ineffective at worst.
Facilitating Community Mission and Vision Statement Creation
The best way to develop vision and mission statements is to come together as a team through a facilitated or series of sessions. Here’s the work that should go into this:
1. Map Out Stakeholders
Who should be involved in creating your community vision and mission statements? This is the first crucial question to answer. The best way to answer it is to begin a light stakeholder map. To begin, you might want to use a RACI chart or other similar stakeholder mapping tool.
Typically, you will want to involve at least the following people:
Your boss
Any/all of your immediate reports whose work impacts or touches the community
User researchers or designers with qualitative insights from members
Marketing or content stakeholders whose work funnels into or is served by the community (depending on the use case of your community, this can extend or change to product, support, communications, content, or other stakeholders)
BI or data analyst who can help you gather quantitative insights
At least one executive sponsor
2. Gather Early Insights
Before you bring everyone into one room, you should speak with them separately about how they want to be involved or how best to involve them in the process. Yes, this takes time. But it also puts your work on their radar if it’s not already.
Early insights to gather include:
Awareness of how these stakeholders believe community currently functions within your organization
Independent ideas for how different stakeholders could see the community developing
The challenges/pain points of stakeholders, whether related to community or not
What beliefs they have about the community and its mission and vision today
Their priorities (especially from leadership)
Typically, we recommend this information-gathering informally. With clients, we will typically schedule informal chats with each internal stakeholder and ask simple questions over 45-minute interviews, such as:
What challenges are you facing today?
What would be incredible if it were solved tomorrow?
How do you utilize the community today?
3. Organize YOUR INSIGHTS
Once you have completed the information-gathering process, it’s time to organize the insights you’ve gleaned into something digestible for your team to review before brainstorming. This can take many forms, from presentations to videos to reports. The ideal scenario would be one in which you can present these findings to the team and help them prioritize the needs of your business and community members before your brainstorming session. Then, you will engage them actively in this conversation before they start to collaborate.
4. Facilitate a Brainstorming Session
Brainstorming, when done well, can illuminate ideas and gather insights from the loudest to the quietest voices in the room. As you prepare to gather your stakeholders together, consider this brainstorming toolkit from IDEO to help set parameters for your own brainstorming sessions.
Mission Brainstorming
Remember, a mission statement is an achievable outcome that you can work toward in your community. You should not only ask, “What outcomes are relevant to our company’s purpose?” but also, “What outcomes are relevant to our community members?” Why should your community care about being part of what you’re creating?
Brainstorming Discussion Points and Facilitation Questions:
Who do we serve?
Why do we serve them? What do they need from us and from each other? (Dig into the 5 Why’s here)
Who do we explicitly NOT serve, and why?
With what spirit do we serve them and care for our internal team along the way?
What change will be significant enough to matter to our community?
From here, you can to distill the keywords, phrases, experiences, and qualities of your community’s mission and how you hope to accomplish it together with your members.
When you’re done, step back and ask: Would our members agree that this is what we do? Would employees across the organization be able to identify this if it were shown to them among a handful of other community mission statements? If the answer is yes, you’re ready to move ahead.
Vision Brainstorming
Remember, the vision statement answers the question: What would the world look like if our community had achieved its mission? You can begin brainstorming your vision just by asking this question and digging in deeper (again, with the five whys), or try these:
Brainstorming Ideas:
What will the world look like when we’ve accomplished our mission with the common underlying purpose we share?
Once you have a bunch of ideas here, rank the most impactful vision
Go through each word of the vision and vet it -- is it the right word that most deeply conveys your purpose?
Complete the sentence: When we accomplish our mission, we will live in a world where…”
Bring It Together
Once you have your purpose, vision, and mission statement, you can use these to vet all future content, programming, marketing language, and other critical strategic decisions you make about your community. You should wrap up the facilitation with the mission and vision statements and run these by your stakeholders -- including key community members and leaders.
From here, you can develop values (try Brand Cards) or begin to plan quarterly actions per team member and even audit your existing programs. Make sure to schedule time with the key stakeholders to review the ways in which you moved toward your mission statement. If your organization isn’t moving in that direction, how can you shift your work or shift your statements in order to get the two to align?
Creating strategic foundations is an opportunity to bring together your organization's and community's leaders to cement the way forward. Many community managers struggle to gather internal excitement and support for their work. If this is something you find challenging, facilitating mission and vision statements will be vital for getting the support you need.
Want Help Writing Your Community Mission and Vision Statement?
We can assist your team's creative process by bringing together stakeholders, guiding insights, and leading workshops to provide clarity and confidence to move forward.
