We help mission-minded organizations align messaging and marketing with their mission. As we serve our clients, we come face-to-face with the consequences of misalignment as we journey with them. Even a small amount of misalignment in messaging and marketing can impact an entire organization’s ability to accomplish their mission. It might seem trivial, but getting out of alignment has serious consequences. Here are a few:
- Lack of Clarity
When your messaging and marketing is not completely aligned with your mission, your audience experiences a lack of clarity about what it is you do and what you have to offer them. When you send mixed signals through your messaging, and your marketing strategy isn’t completely coherent, people become confused about your value, how to engage with you, and how you can be a benefit. When they have to burn too many mental calories to figure you out, they often will not make the effort.
- Decreased Impact
Lack of clarity and confusion will cause a decrease in your impact. Nearly every mission-driven organization exists to have an impact on your community. However, if your target audience—the people who have the potential to receive the biggest impact from what you offer—doesn’t know about you or is confused about how you can help them, your impact will be reduced.
- Ineffectiveness
If your impact is reduced enough, it could render you and your organization completely ineffective. In other words, if your messaging isn’t on point and if your marketing isn’t strategic and sequential, you could look back at the end of your journey and find that you were completely ineffective in your efforts.
The greatest fear of most leaders of mission-minded organizations is to look back at life and find that they left no legacy, or that their legacy wasn’t as impactful as it could’ve been.
- Decreased Productivity
Even if you don’t find your organization’s impact and effectiveness to be completely damaged, misalignment will certainly impact the organization’s productivity. By having an aligned blueprint or playbook from which to operate, you can accomplish your mission much more quickly, with much less effort, and with much higher levels of enjoyment.
- The Hamster Wheel Effect
Most leaders of smaller mission-minded organizations find themself rushing to put out one fire after another. They’re constantly thinking about the next book to write, the next product to produce, the next consulting opportunity, or the next marketing task in order to keep the momentum of the organization going.
It can be exhausting. It can feel like running on a hamster wheel…always in motion but never getting anywhere.
If this is something that you are feeling, it’s probably an indication of misalignment in one or more areas of your organization. Consider getting some help and bringing things back into alignment.
- Mission Drift
One of the biggest results of misalignment is mission drift. Since the organization is having to constantly pivot to keep the doors open and try to get new people into the pipeline, there is an ongoing expansion or shifting of the mission.
By operating with a strategic roadmap, however, every decision and action can be aligned through the lens of the mission to avoid mission drift.
- Mission Failure
The ultimate consequence of misalignment is mission failure. Sure, you might be productive and effective at getting a few things done, but if those activities fail to accomplish the mission because you’ve drifted out of alignment, it was all folly.
Even one percent misalignment can result in being seriously off-mission over time. If not corrected, within a short period of time your organization can transform either into complete dysfunction or into an organization with an ulterior mission altogether.
Fortunately, from a marketing and communications perspective, we’ve found it’s not complicated to achieve realignment. To be clear, it’s hard work—it’s not easy—but it’s also not complicated.
The first step is adjusting your messaging to be cohesive, clear, and to focus on the problems you solve and the benefits your organization provides. Then, the message needs to be skillfully carried out in every corner of the organization: internally in staff publications, internal communications, etc., and externally in all marketing channels including website, print, social media, etc.
After you clarify the message, it’s critical to develop a strategic and sequential marketing plan to help put the value of your organization in front of people.
Once you have a platform in front of your ideal-fit audience, the remainder of accomplishing your mission should flow pretty naturally. You simply do your thing!
But if there is misalignment with the first two critical pieces—messaging and marketing—your organization will likely experience one of the seven consequences above. We’d love to leverage our experience to help you avoid those unnecessary consequences. Contact us if that seems like something you’d like to explore.