Let’s discuss what goals you might use to assess the health of your organisation’s identity & communications.
Your organisation likely sets goals every year that it hopes to achieve in order to further its mission impact. These goals might include having a certain number of people engage with your services, growing your staff or volunteer count, giving everyone who engages with your organisation a positive experience, receiving a certain amount of donations, etc. Your brand/identity and communications should be identified as strategies to support one or more of these goals.
Let’s look at the fictional ministry, Renew Ministries, as an example. Renew Ministries’ mission is to be the hands and feet of Jesus by serving impoverished communities throughout Southeast Asia. It has 2 medical clinics, each with 2 locations, that offer free services to impoverished families. It also has a sub-brand called Like New, which is a thrift store that helps raise money for the clinics.
Here are what Renew Ministries’ annual goals may be:
- Provide care for new patients
- Share the gospel of Christ Jesus with families served
- Increase the revenue of Like New
- Receive enough donations to cover the services of all families served
- Provide an uplifting experience for everyone who interacts with the ministry (families served, customers of Like New, donors, staff, and volunteers)
After setting these goals, Renew Ministries must define a KPI (Key Performance Indicator) for each of the goals so that they are measurable. Then, in order to reach these goals, Renew Ministries needs to implement strategies for each goal. How will it reach new patients? Or raise money from donors? Many of the strategies will include communications efforts. The following chart exemplifies the goals, KPIs, and strategies Renew Ministries might choose to support its mission.
Communications will be used to support most of these strategies in some way. For example, emails can be sent to current patients to encourage them to share about Renew Ministries with their friends. A survey can be sent via email and print mail to find out Renew Ministries’ NPS (Net Promoter Score) for each audience group (i.e. “How likely are you to recommend Renew Ministries to a friend?”). Communications can also be used to build more church partnerships, such as by presenting case studies or reaching out to churches via an email campaign.
By establishing goals, KPIs, and strategies to reach those goals, communications efforts can become more focused and specific communications goals can be established. To support the strategies listed in the chart above, Renew Ministries might identify the following goals specifically for its communications:
- Email current and past families 1x/month in addition to appointment reminders
- Increase social media follower counts
- Post on social media 2-3x/week
- Email donors 2x/month
- Develop a case study to send to churches
- Send print mail to donors 2x/month
- Advertising campaign 1x/quarter to reach new patients
- New blogpost 1x/month
After doing so, more specific KPIs can be established for each communications goal to measure the effectiveness of these efforts. For example:
This is just one example of the process your organisation might follow to set communications goals. The most important factor is that your communications goals support your overall organisational goals. In the next activity, you’ll have the opportunity to set communications goals for your organisation and establish the process you’ll use for measuring success against those goals.