Have You Designed Your Common Purpose? Here’s Why You Should

By: Adam Luecking, CEO, Clear Impact

Two of my sons play on a basketball team together, which I have the great joy of coaching. The team’s goal in early 2022 was to win the championship, and we knew that if we were going to chart a course to that goal, we needed a way to measure our success. The metric we chose was to win a target number of games early on… and then we ended up losing three games in a month. If there was no championship agenda, the kids may have been OK with losing a few games. But they had all signed on to that Common Purpose, and the losses frustrated the heck out of them. The shared goal — and the lack of measurable progress — developed a hunger in them to take corrective action through practice and training. Sure enough, they worked hard at the process and came back strong to win the championship.

Whether or not you enjoy sports, the same team-based approach works for government and philanthropic funders — and in this analogy, you’re the coach. Your organization and your funded partners must have a Common Purpose, consisting of a goal and an accompanying form of measurement, around which you design your journey map to social impact. Without this, your funded partners won’t know where to focus their talents and resources. Everyone will be running in different directions, and there are bound to be collisions, duplications of effort, and a general sense of frustration.

A Common Purpose is like a compass for your organization, partners, and grantees. It helps simplify your decision-making and creates alignment toward your collective mission. A Common Purpose also helps you ensure your investments and programming make sense for your particular strategy or set of strategies. But it’s not just important to have a Common Purpose. You must ensure that everyone is aware of, understands, and aligns with the Common Purpose.

If you identify with any of the following, it may be time to take an intentional pause and consider how you can create/ improve/ better communicate your Common Purpose:

You don’t understand what a Common Purpose is
You do understand what a Common Purpose is, but you can’t immediately recite it while you’re sitting here reading
You’re unsure if all your partners and grantees could recite your Common Purpose when asked

In my upcoming book, Social Sector Hero, I discuss eight strategies that government and philanthropic funders can use to improve their performance and invest for impact. In the second chapter, I define and explain how organizations can design their “Common Purpose.”

I define Common Purpose as a Result(s) and Indicator(s) that are shared among partners and utilized to guide all strategies and activities. A Result is like a goal – it describes what conditions of well-being you’d like to achieve for the children, adults, families, and/or communities that you serve (if you’re an environmental organization, you could even think about conditions of well-being for waterways, flora, fauna, etc.). A Result is something like “All babies in our county are born healthy.” An Indicator, on the other hand, is a metric that helps you understand if you’re achieving the Result. An Indicator is something like “% of babies born in our county with low birth weights.”

Why did I have to make things complicated and give you a two-part definition? Well…in the long run, you’ll actually be making things less complicated for yourself if you design and enforce a Common Purpose among your organization and funded partners. You’ll be creating specificity – instead of just vague goals and mission statements. A Common Purpose isn’t just about Results. It’s also about measuring those Results. You must understand how you will measure progress towards your Result from the beginning in order to achieve alignment and create impact with any expediency. This is why it is vital for each Result to have an Indicator tied to it.

Including metrics in your Common Purpose — in the form of Indicators — can also help you and your partners create more targeted improvement strategies with a higher potential for impact. For example, if you’re going to use “% of low birth-weight babies” to measure your achievement of “All babies are born healthy,” then this will keep you on track in developing strategies and programs in alignment with reducing the “% of low birth-weight babies.”

Of course, most funders will have several Results and Indicators as part of their Common Purpose. The important thing is that you have at least one Result and one to three accompanying Indicators per Result. No matter what your goals are, who you serve, or where your organization is based, the first step to achieving measurable social impacts is designing a Common Purpose and striving for complete alignment with that Common Purpose across your partnership.

Overall, designing a Common Purpose, clearly communicating that Common Purpose with your current and potential funded partners, and then ensuring alignment over time will simplify your investment decisions. Your strategies and actions will be more likely to lead to better results and enhanced well-being for your community. When every funded partner is laser-focused on a Common Purpose, amazing things happen.

If you’re interested in learning more about how to design and sustain a Common Purpose, consider joining me and my colleagues, Jason Green and Dr. JaNay Queen Nazaire, for the launch of Social Sector Hero on July 26th, 2022 (this event has ended, but you can watch the recording here). Listen to our virtual roundtable discussion about the eight core strategies in my book. All attendees will also be able to download the book for free We hope to see you there!