Episcopal Church Foundation Vital Practices - Blogs - Will your Goals Make a Difference?

April 17, 2012

Will your Goals Make a Difference?

The large whiteboard in my office is full of goals.

At some point in January, my colleagues and I thought it would be a great idea to write down in large scrawl ECF's yearly goals on that whiteboard. As the months have gone by, we've been able to check off a few of the easier ones. They were low hanging fruit. Now that we are in the middle of April, it's getting harder to add checkmarks to the list.

Yesterday I realized that it's going to take a lot of time, energy, and perhaps a bit of luck to achieve every goal on that list. There are one or two that are just plain tough. Thinking about this, I found myself wondering about the difference those goals will actually make.

Goals are important. As individuals and as organizations, they help us stretch toward new heights. But there's a real difference between “goals” and “impacts.”

Generally speaking, goals are self-referential. They reflect the fact that organizations speak to and about themselves. An example of a goal for a congregation is that the congregation increases its Average Sunday Attendance (ASA) by 10 percent per year. A real goal for ECF Vital Practices is that we increase readership by 20 percent in 2012.

Impacts, on the other hand, are coming from an altogether different point of view. They begin with the constituents you seek to serve and describe the effect you wish to have on them over time. As many have pointed out, Average Sunday Attendance says little about how and whether congregants’ lives are transformed. For ECF Vital Practices, we are deeply conscious of the fact that simply increasing readership doesn’t necessarily mean we’re effecting change. Articulating the impacts you wish to make over the short-, medium-, and long-term gets at the subtler question of the transformative effect you wish to have on those you're serving.

Ultimately, I think it’s important that we consider both goals and impacts. All too often, our goals become detached from what difference it makes. When this happens, goals can begin to feel arbitrary and draining.

At the Episcopal Church Foundation, we are beginning to realize how important it is to integrate the two. Recently, while designing a new initiative, we began by first describing the change we’d like the initiative to effect over the short-, medium-, and long-term. Only afterward did we start to talk about organizational goals that would help us get there. This struck me as a minor revolution in our own thinking, and it has helped me to better understand the ‘why’ behind all the hard work we're taking on.

Are there goals in your congregation that feel arbitrary? How will they make a difference in the lives of your congregants?