Moving on to new frontiers:
Understanding goal succession
Sometimes a social enterprise changes one or
more of its basic goals. When this happens, it’s
known as goal succession. Goal succession
can occur when an enterprise has achieved
one of its original goals, or it can occur because
a goal has been made irrelevant by changes in
the surrounding social or physical environment
of the enterprise.
Goal succession becomes more likely as the
group ages. Changes in the social or physical
environment can take place any time, raising
the possibility that certain goals may become
obsolete.
Here’s an example of goal succession in a
social enterprise: The Marching Mothers of
Ontario conducted their Canadian campaign in
the 1950s and 1960s. It was part of the larger
North American March of Dimes, whose fund-
raising mission was to collect money to be used
to find a cure for polio — a highly contagious,
disabling, and sometimes fatal disease. The
money raised went toward research on polio.
The Marching Mothers and their counterparts
elsewhere in Canada and the United States
went door to door in their neighborhoods,
collecting donations (often much larger than
a dime) for the March of Dimes. These funds
supported the research of Dr. Jonas Salk, who
eventually developed a polio vaccine, which
brought a halt to the polio epidemics that
had been plaguing North America. Suddenly,
the volunteer work of the Marching Mothers
was no longer needed; their goals had been
reached. If their enterprise were to continue, it
would need to find a new goal — or arrange
for goal succession, which is what they did. Still
marching, the Mothers now collect donations
that support a wide range of vital services for
adults and children with physical disabilities.
Look to the future to anticipate which, if any,
of your present goals are soon likely to be
reached. As you engage in initial planning for
your social enterprise, you can’t anticipate all
the possible developments that may happen
down the road. Besides, your time and energy
are better spent dealing with the immediate and
diverse challenges of reaching goals, conduct-
ing evaluations, and carrying out many of the
other aspects of strategic planning. Still, it’s
good to be mindful that the world can change,
sometimes suddenly, and successful goal suc-
cession requires a lot of advance planning if the
transition is to be smooth and effective.
On the other hand, many nonprofit social entre-
preneurs, when they’ve reached their goals,
are quite content to call it a day. They set out
to solve a finite problem — for example, to
clean up a river, build a shelter for the home-
less, or establish a set of summer recreational
programs for children with physical handicaps.
After your goal is reached, you may decide to
move on to another social problem requiring a
new enterprise for its solution. After aA glimpse of your future:
Writing a vision statement
Unlike a mission statement, a vision statement is future oriented. Your vision
statement presents your enterprise’s ideal picture of itself in the future, as an
entity that’s already successfully carrying out its mission. It provides an ideal
toward which you’re striving.
The same criteria that guide your construction of a mission statement (see
the preceding section) also apply here: You want a vision statement that’s
short, simply worded, unambiguous, and interesting. However, your vision
statement will undoubtedly be longer than your mission statement.
Your mission statement and vision statement will most often be presented in
tandem on your marketing materials, your Web site, your grant applications,
and so on. For this reason, you don’t want the two to overlap significantly.
As with your mission statement, we suggest that you draft a vision statement
or two as an exercise in forming such a document.
Vision statements center on already realized goals. Therefore, your draft
should portray this outcome, while also saying something (quite general)
about the actions you took to reach them. Here, too, practice makes perfect.