How to write your charity mission statement

How should you write your charity mission statement?

In order to write your mission statement you should absolutely be including everyone involved in the organisation and all of your stakeholders. You'll want to start by not just having your staff involved but also your trustee board and those who are benefiting from your service - whether that’s the people that you serve or those who are affected by the environment that you're working to support. 

It’s a really good idea to get everybody involved. People will have slightly different views of what they think it is. It's really helpful to make sure everyone’s on the same page. People will have really good ways of expressing it that you may not have thought of.

However I would really advise that one person and one person only takes all those ideas away and does the wordsmithing and then sends it out for feedback.

In terms of where your mission statement should live, asbolustly it should be on your website. You may well want to have it on documents you send out etcetera, etcetera. 

But the most important thing is that your mission is felt, held and owned by the people who are delivering it. The mission statement is not meant to be something that exists on a shelf or is up on all of your walls but doesn’t exist in terms of how people work.

The most important thing about your mission is that it is owned and understood by everybody who works there, and by your volunteers. If the staff don’t see how their role links into the mission that’s a big issue.