If your nonprofit achieved all of its goals, what would that look like? What kind of world would be created as a result? Answers to these questions will form the foundations for what will ultimately become your nonprofit vision statement. This comprehensive guide will take you through the entire process of writing a good vision statement, with examples and resources to help along the way.
A nonprofit vision statement is the anchor point of any organization’s strategic plan. It outlines what a nonprofit aims to accomplish and gives it purpose. Your vision statement is a short phrase describing the future you are ultimately working towards. It draws a picture of what the world will look like once your organization’s mission is fulfilled.
A vision statement is not the same as a vision, though the two are closely related. A vision is a shared belief about the future your nonprofit will create when it achieves all its goals. But a vision statement is a concise, clear, well-articulated set of words that describe your organization’s vision to internal and external stakeholders.
Essentially, a vision is defined as a concept or idea of how the world should be, and a vision statement is the expression of that idea. A good vision statement should be short, simple, specific to your nonprofit, and should also have some ambition.
The statement should not take into consideration future funding, obstacles of any kind, or present availability of resources. Let’s start by reminding ourselves of the differences between vision statements, mission statements, values, goals, and strategies.
Mission and vision statements capture the essence of your nonprofit organization.
Sometimes, a nonprofit mission statement, vision statement, values, and goals can get mixed up. Let’s see how they are different.
Your vision is the future you intend to create. It’s how you’re going to change the world. Essentially, your vision is the destination. A good vision statement answers the following questions:
Vision statements are usually prefaced with the phrases “A world where…” or “We exist so that…”
Your mission is the journey towards your vision. It’s your core work. A good mission statement answers the following questions:
Put another way, your mission is a short, direct, and compelling way to state your theory of change or the core strategy for your organization. It provides a link between your every day goals and activities and what you hope to achieve long-term.
Your values are the guiding principles for which you stand. They are the ideals you refuse to compromise as you conduct your mission in pursuit of your vision. Nonprofit organizational values are the highest values that guide your organization’s actions, unite your employees, and define your brand. They are ideally set as part of strategic planning when an organization is just being set up (alongside mission and vision statements).
Your goals are the handful of achievements towards which you will work over the next one to five years. Often, they are outlined in your business plan. They’re an essential planning tool, as they provide focus for your efforts and you can use them to measure results. Set specific, realistic goals for your organization that will help you improve, grow, and accomplish your mission.
Your strategies are the broad courses of action you will take to achieve your goals. Strategies typically include a clear description of what your organization is going to do to achieve your targets. They’re usually very specific and focused. Goals and strategies work together to help you achieve your mission and vision. Strategies are often reviewed quite regularly to see if they’re paying off.
Essentially, an effective nonprofit vision statement ensures that you and your staff, board members, donors, program participants, volunteers, and other supporters are working toward the same shared ideals. A vision statement enables everyone in your nonprofit to drive forward with the same destination in mind.
A good nonprofit vision statement is also a ‘limiter’, helping rule out certain opportunities which do not ultimately contribute to the organizational vision.
In addition to creating some clarity, great vision statements also inspire and motivate. If you nail your vision statement, your stakeholders will be clear about your organization’s raison d’être and inspired to advance your aims.
Vision statements help everyone who has a stake in your nonprofit see and feel like they’re working towards something greater than themselves, that there’s a higher meaning to their (sometimes tedious) everyday tasks.
The big “why” also motivates Gen Y and Z in the workplace. Many of us in the modern workforce are seeking a purpose and meaning behind the work that we do. A well-articulated vision statement will help you attract and retain great talent
Vision statements fill a vital need for a nonprofit organization. For instance, when setting a broader strategic plan for the organization, one can get bogged down in the day-to-day details of running an organization.
The vision statement helps you zoom out and think of the big picture, allowing you to more easily set long-term goals. Vision statements are the pinnacle of the funnel, meaning that ideally, everything else should be contributing towards them (goals, strategies, tactics, etc.).
People don’t want to give money away with a sense of sadness, guilt, and pity. They want to invest in bold, exciting, and inspiring ventures. Donors love to give to exciting and audacious dreams and to feel like what they do helps change and save lives. Donors want to know:
Use simple and concrete language. Avoid elaborate words and lots of buzzwords and jargon. Your statement must be clear and focused enough to help shape future decision-making. At the same time, a vision statement should still be general enough to encompass changing possibilities. Finally, a vision statement shouldn’t be so abstract and lofty as to never be attainable.
The key to a concise vision statement is to focus on the need your nonprofit will address or the problem it will solve. You can pull ideas from your mission statement, but be careful not to mix them up. Some suggest to:
Or to put it simply, write two sentences at an absolute maximum. It’s fine to expand on your vision statement with more detail, but what you write should be memorable.
Vision statements are, in a way, dreams encapsulated into words. So, they shouldn’t be too descriptive, professional, or dry. Vision statements, when harnessed properly, can be powerful inspirational forces that can motivate everyone involved with your organization’s work to make that dream a reality.
Your vision represents a dream that’s beyond what you think is possible. It represents the mountaintop your organization is striving to reach. This is why great vision statements are audacious! A great nonprofit vision statement is ambitious enough to be exciting but not so ambitious that it seems unachievable.
Pro tip: You can choose to time-frame your vision. This works for some nonprofits and doesn’t for some. Time-framing can add the often desirable urgency to the vision, but there can be consequences to the staff morale for example if it’s not achieved within the specified time frame.
Avoid generic vision statements (e.g. “A world where people are well”). While this can sometimes be hard to do with only a sentence or two, try to be specific and describe a unique outcome that only you can provide. While your vision statement needs to be audacious and inspiring, it should also build on what you’ve already established: your organization’s history, supporter base, strengths, unique capabilities, resources, and assets.
Once you have your vision statement, relentlessly communicate it internally and externally. Your vision statement won’t do any good if no one knows what it is. Ideally, you’d also implement a strategic framework to help track progress in achieving the key aspects of your vision.
Your framework should hold and track your goals, and break them down into manageable pieces with initiatives and action items. Although the visioning process can take some time, the benefits are worth it.
Like your mission statement and organizational values, your vision statement is part of your organization’s foundation.
Organizations with strong and lived visions, missions, and values usually perform better than those without. Good luck!
Choose Donorbox as your donation system and check out our Nonprofit blog for more nonprofit resources and tips.
Once you have developed your vision statement, your next step might be to learn what community members think of it before you use the statement publicly. To do this, you could talk to the same community leaders or focus group members you spoke to originally. This can help you ensure that they don’t find the statements offensive.
You will also ensure that community members agree that the statements capture the spirit of what they believe and desire. A vision statement cannot possibly perfectly resonate with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s important, however, that nothing crucial has been omitted and that everyone can broadly find themselves in the vision statement. It’s advisable to create a document (or a blog post to make the details of your vision public) that goes more in detail.
Be transparent about the process. Let people know why the final vision statement looks the way it does. Then… it’s time to celebrate! Developing a vision statement is a huge step for your organization and it’s worth celebrating.
You might even want to organize a party or an event! Circulate your vision statement by adding it to stationary, t-shirts, bookmarks, or other small items, and then give those away. You might also want to use it on your website, write a blog article, create a video, paint it on a wall… …and so on. This is the time to get creative!
Pro tip: If you want to take your vision to the next level, we recommend not only creating your vision as a written vision statement but also trying to paint a more detailed, vivid picture of your future in the form of an image collage, presentation, or organizational manual.
Donorbox has developed a free worksheet to help you create an effective organizational vision statement for your nonprofit. Click here to download it from Donorbox Library, the hub of numerous free resources for nonprofit organizations!
Here are even more nonprofit vision statement examples. Pro tip: Sometimes, it’s okay to use the term “mission statement” externally if that makes more sense to your audience. Internally, however, you must define and separate your mission from your vision statement.
You’ve crafted your vision statement. Good job! But, how do you know your vision statement is compelling? Ask yourself these seven questions:
Once you have your vision statement, relentlessly communicate it internally and externally. Your vision statement won’t do any good if no one knows what it is. Ideally, you’d also implement a strategic framework to help track progress in achieving the key aspects of your vision.
Your framework should hold and track your goals, and break them down into manageable pieces with initiatives and action items. Although the visioning process can take some time, the benefits are worth it.
Like your mission statement and organizational values, your vision statement is part of your organization’s foundation.
Organizations with strong and lived visions, missions, and values usually perform better than those without. Good luck!
Choose Donorbox as your donation system and check out our Nonprofit blog for more nonprofit resources and tips.
Whether your nonprofit is creating its first vision statement, needs to rework its vision statement to better reflect current strategic direction, or simply needs to better articulate a vision that already exists, here’s how to get started developing a nonprofit vision statement to guide your future.
A vision is ideally born as part of a strategic planning process when an organization is just being set up (alongside a mission statement, values, and goals). Don’t make the mistake of trying to shape your vision statement before your organization is clear about its mission and vision on a more conceptual level.
If you haven’t gone through mission and vision development already, now is the time. If you’ve already gone through a solid mission and vision development process, revisit the material before diving into formulating a vision statement.
To start:
Often, nonprofit leaders task marketing and communications staff with finding the right language to express the organization’s vision alone. However, for a vision statement to be truly powerful, the vision statement development should be a collaborative process that involves not just leadership and communications staff, but rather a wide array of other internal and external stakeholders.
Consider conducting interviews or focus groups with your program participants, your volunteers, donors, board members, and anyone else who has a stake in the future your organization is working to create.
Engaging diverse internal and external stakeholders is more time-consuming than simply having the three people from Comms come up with ‘something’, but it’s well worth it for something that encapsulates what your nonprofit is hoping to achieve in the world. The process you choose will depend on the size and structure of your organization, but you should aim for it to be comprehensive and realistic.
Asking the right questions will help you uncover what you need to craft a great vision statement. Here are some questions you might want to ask:
For a vision statement to be sound, it must be well-grounded in community beliefs and values. Awareness of the important issues in your community and amongst your beneficiaries is critical for the development of a strong, effective, and enduring vision statement. Take the questions from Step 3 and use them to define the issue(s) that matter most to people in your community.
There are many different ways you can gather this information, including:
Pro tip: Once you have a rough vision statement, you might again hold a focus group for feedback.
Someone typically records these meetings, and a transcript of what is said provides a basis for subsequent steps of the visioning process.
Pro tip: It’s important to realize that these different ways of gathering information from your community are not mutually exclusive. If you have the resources, it is recommended to do all of them.
After gathering a wealth of insights and feedback in Step 4, it’s time to organize the data and prepare for the brainstorming session. This information is gold—it’s the collective wisdom of your beneficiaries and community members. To get your team ready, condense the data into digestible formats like presentations, videos, or reports.
You want everyone to have a clear understanding of the key themes and patterns that emerged from your conversations. Now, here’s where the fun begins: brainstorming!
Your board, staff, and volunteers are all vital contributors to this process. How you brainstorm is entirely up to your organizational culture—whether you prefer analytical and rational methods or creative and divergent approaches. Consider your organizational culture and decide on a brainstorming method that suits it best. Some nonprofits thrive on structured group activities, while others prefer more free-form discussions.
You could even mix it up with a combination of techniques. If you’re looking for a simple approach, gather your team for a few hours of small-group work. Use the questions from Step 3 as prompts and let the ideas flow. Then, bring it all together and start crafting your vision statement. But if you’re up for a more elaborate journey, why not try a visualization exercise? This immersive experience can ignite your group’s imagination and take the pressure off creating a vision statement from scratch.
Pro Tip: Retreat settings are perfect for visioning exercises. Picture this: your team envisions the organization’s accomplishments in 30 years. What does success look like in the year 20XX? Small groups brainstorm separately, jotting down ideas. Later, a facilitator can help you refine these ideas into actionable statements. Here are some brainstorming tips for you.
Visualization exercises can get your group’s wheels turning and can take the pressure off of coming up with a vision statement out of thin air. The visualization exercise should present the participants with a scenario in which they can visualize the organization as successful without the facilitators dictating what the success looks like.
Here’s a visualization exercise developed by Michael Wilkinson of Leadership Strategies:
Imagine that you look up from your desk and you find yourself in an auditorium in which someone is speaking and announcing an award. You realize that the person speaking is _____________ and the award is the _______________ which goes to the organization which has __________________. The presenter says, ‘At no time in the history of the award until now has the judges been in unanimous agreement of the organization most deserving of this award. And this year the award goes to (this organization).’ There is a standing ovation, as people get out of their chairs to applaud. When the applause dies down, the presenter goes on to list all the accomplishments that made this organization deserving. Listen to what the presenter is saying (brief silence) Fill it in…what was it that the organization accomplished? (brief silence).
Read through the full visioning exercise here. Participants should be grouped but should write down answers and notes individually to start with. All the ideas are then recorded on a flipchart, whiteboard, or on post-its. At this stage, there is no discussion among the participants, only questions of clarification if necessary. All ideas are welcomed, without value or judgment.
In this step, participants are invited to share, discuss with others, and consolidate their ideas. Ask each group to end up with one or a few positive, declarative one-sentence statements that will then be shared with the rest of the participants (other groups).
Whether the groups only worked with questions or you also organized the visioning exercise, participants should start by sharing their answers and ideas with the rest of their group. Then, discussion should be encouraged amongst the group members. Instruct the groups to find the areas of consensus, and identify any areas of disagreement. Everyone should focus on the areas of some consensus.
If it suits your organizational culture, you could also encourage the groups to draw, create collages, draw symbols, and more. Once the smaller groups have reached some consensus and come up with their statements, proceed to construct a common vision among all the participants. Ask each group to report to the plenary the contents of its group discussion and to present any drawings/symbols.
Encourage the merging of the group visions into a common statement summarizing the vision for the organization. This statement can, at this stage, be longer than ideal or you might even have a few of them. That’s okay. This can be refined in the next step.
Pro tip 1: Consider having an external conduct this session as it can be helpful to have someone without a stake in the future organizational design.
Bonus tip: Be alert to statements that may have cultural, ethnic, or even gender roots. The goal is not to find the majority opinion but to arrive at a vision that reflects the thinking of the diverse groups in your community.
This process needs one person — ideally a founder or a long-standing member of the leadership team, someone with your organization in their gut — to be an all-absorbing sponge and to take time out alone to reflect and apply a bit of creativity. This really is a process of one person staring at a bunch of sentences for a while until something clicks.
The distilling and drafting process will not be easily done by multiple people, although some organizations find success by appointing a team/committee. Make sure this work is done within a reasonable time frame and that the results are reported back quickly to the rest of the team. Get any last feedback before proceeding to work on the final draft.
Get wordsmithing help to come up with a final draft. While vision statements are short and simple, great writing is a skill that’s difficult to master — especially when so much needs to be consolidated in one or two sentences.
You may need to do this process a few times — draft, meet, discuss, modify, redraft, and repeat — before landing on an interpretation everyone can stand behind.
When you have your final version nailed, pause your efforts and revisit it later.
Evaluate if it adequately describes the desired outcome and inspires you on the same level as when you left off. These iterations will ensure a lasting quality to your vision because as with all things built to last, your vision statement will undergo subtle revisions as your organization grows.
Once you have developed your vision statement, your next step might be to learn what community members think of it before you use the statement publicly. To do this, you could talk to the same community leaders or focus group members you spoke to originally. This can help you ensure that they don’t find the statements offensive.
You will also ensure that community members agree that the statements capture the spirit of what they believe and desire. A vision statement cannot possibly perfectly resonate with hundreds or thousands of people. It’s important, however, that nothing crucial has been omitted and that everyone can broadly find themselves in the vision statement. It’s advisable to create a document (or a blog post to make the details of your vision public) that goes more in detail.
Be transparent about the process. Let people know why the final vision statement looks the way it does. Then… it’s time to celebrate! Developing a vision statement is a huge step for your organization and it’s worth celebrating.
You might even want to organize a party or an event! Circulate your vision statement by adding it to stationary, t-shirts, bookmarks, or other small items, and then give those away. You might also want to use it on your website, write a blog article, create a video, paint it on a wall… …and so on. This is the time to get creative!
Pro tip: If you want to take your vision to the next level, we recommend not only creating your vision as a written vision statement but also trying to paint a more detailed, vivid picture of your future in the form of an image collage, presentation, or organizational manual.
Donorbox has developed a free worksheet to help you create an effective organizational vision statement for your nonprofit. Click here to download it from Donorbox Library, the hub of numerous free resources for nonprofit organizations!
Here are even more nonprofit vision statement examples. Pro tip: Sometimes, it’s okay to use the term “mission statement” externally if that makes more sense to your audience. Internally, however, you must define and separate your mission from your vision statement.
You’ve crafted your vision statement. Good job! But, how do you know your vision statement is compelling? Ask yourself these seven questions:
Once you have your vision statement, relentlessly communicate it internally and externally. Your vision statement won’t do any good if no one knows what it is. Ideally, you’d also implement a strategic framework to help track progress in achieving the key aspects of your vision.
Your framework should hold and track your goals, and break them down into manageable pieces with initiatives and action items. Although the visioning process can take some time, the benefits are worth it.
Like your mission statement and organizational values, your vision statement is part of your organization’s foundation.
Organizations with strong and lived visions, missions, and values usually perform better than those without. Good luck!
Choose Donorbox as your donation system and check out our Nonprofit blog for more nonprofit resources and tips.
Raviraj heads the sales and marketing team at Donorbox. His growth-hacking abilities have helped Donorbox boost fundraising efforts for thousands of nonprofit organizations.
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