Your NFP’s core mission should inform and drive all your nonprofit’s activities, from the services that you, your staff and volunteers provide, to how your nonprofit approaches and interacts with donors and other stakeholders. To prevent distractions that can diminish your results, it’s important to keep yourself and each member of your team fully focused on your core mission.

The following are a few strategies to help you and your supporters keep your eyes on “the why.”

Measure and Track Your Impact

No matter the mission, each NFP ultimately hopes that the services that it provides will make an impact. Measuring and tracking impact can help your team and other supporters learn more about just what is at stake, and how important their actions are to achieving the mission.

For many NFPs, the only time they attempt to measure and track their impact is when it’s a requirement for continued funding from an endowment or grant. So, at best, most NFPs only measure impact quarterly or annually. However, measuring and monitoring all your NFP’s activities on a regular basis helps you to ensure that your NFP’s actions and activities are actually advancing your mission forward.

Measuring your NFP’s impact throughout the year also gives you the opportunity to make adjustments to strategy and performance. It’s also one of the best ways to keep your team motivated on achieving your mission and its supporting goals.

Avoid Mission Creep

Most folks connected with the nonprofit sector have an innate desire to do good, and solve problems. While these natural instincts help drive these individuals to achieve results during difficult times of inadequate funding and challenging circumstances, these same traits can lead nonprofits to overcommit and stretch themselves too thin. Mission creep is especially tempting when individual donors and other funders offer to make significant contributions to the organisation if they will only take on a few additional duties and projects.

Eventually, everyone connected with the organisation becomes so distracted with providing these additional services that aren’t connected to the NFP’s core mission that the nonprofit is soon operating at an unsustainable level.

In order to conserve and wisely use their resources, NFP boards, directors and other leaders of nonprofit’s must remain resolute and learn to say no. Ideally, NFPs will provide only those services that they can do well, that advance the core mission and that aren’t duplicated by other organisations.

Use Metrics to Connect Overhead with Mission in the Mind of Supporters and Inform NFP Storytelling

One area where many nonprofits receive pushback is the percentage of every donation that goes to covering overhead. Many donors and other supporters mistakenly view overhead costs as an area of waste, which can demoralise volunteers and others and pull away donations and other forms of support.

If you want your NFP to be able to receive all of the funds that it needs to operate at a sustainable level, you need to allow your metrics to inform your internal and external communications. Don’t just break out the cost of overhead, from the direct costs to provide services, but show how overhead directly supports your mission and your NFP’s ability to make an impact. Doing so helps donors and other supporters to be able to visually see and understand that the cost of overhead is an essential part of accomplishing your NFP’s mission. Knowing that your NFP’s supporters back their work and efforts will energise your team and improve their morale so that they remain fully committed and “all in” on supporting the mission.