Spring is a season of growth and renewal. Spring provides the perfect opportunity to revisit and re-establish goals for the remainder of the year ahead. Revisiting your organization’s goals on a regular basis ensures that team members and stakeholders don’t lose sight of the long-term goals of the organization. In this blog post, we review how revisiting strategic goals can help your organization evaluate progress and empower accountability.
Evaluate Goal Progress
Revisiting your organization’s strategic goals can help you to evaluate goal progress. Evaluating goal progress frequently on a monthly, quarterly, and annual basis will help you to remain agile and adjust based on the immediate needs of your organization.
The steps to evaluating goal progress are similar to setting clear and achievable goals.
Reflect on Your Mission
Your organization's mission serves as the foundation for your goals. Your mission helps you to align your organization around a shared vision. Consider if your goals remain in alignment with the core purpose of your organization and how they contribute to long-term impact.
Assess Your Strategic Plan
Your organization's strategic plan, developed by your team and stakeholders, provides a roadmap of how your organization will achieve its long-term goals. Your strategic plan can help you to re-establish expectations with stakeholders about where the organization is headed and where support is needed.
Review Your SMART Goals
SMART stands for Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. SMART goals are easy to evaluate, because of the specific criteria they require to develop. This framework may also be used in your strategic plan, outlining how you will achieve your goals, including timelines, responsibilities, and key performance indicators.
Specific: Are your goals clearly defined for team members and stakeholders to understand? Are they actionable?
Measurable: Did you determine effective measurements for success?
Achievable: Do you need to scale back your goals or did you set the bar too low?
Relevant: Are your goals still relevant to your organization?
Time-bound: Did you set a realistic timeline to achieve your goals?
Establish Regular Goal Check-Ins & Reporting
SMART provides an excellent framework for goal setting, but it’s important to regularly monitor progress. Consider how you track, measure, and communicate goal progress across your organization, from internal teams to external reporting to funders. Establishing regular check-ins and reporting structures can help to keep team members and stakeholders accountable and provide an opportunity to voice concerns and share successes. Additionally, regular check-ins can encourage opportunities for collaboration helping to tackle roadblocks along the way.
Re-evaluate Funding Needs & Grant Calendar
Once you have an understanding of your organization’s goal progress, it’s important to re-evaluate your funding needs for the year ahead. If your priorities have changed, you may need to identify new sources of funding to meet the needs of the organization. Similarly, if funding opportunities have fallen through, you may need complete grant research and prioritize proposal writing to fill gaps in funding.
A grant writer can assist in identifying potential sources of funding, including researching grant opportunities and crafting compelling proposals. Bloom can help your organization to complete prospect research and develop a grant calendar.
Empower Accountability
Revisiting your organization’s goals and evaluating progress will help to empower organizational accountability by encouraging:
Effective Communication with team members and stakeholders about the goals of the organization and the steps to reach them.
Collaboration with team members and stakeholders to effectively and efficiently reach the goals of the organization.
Celebration when the team achieves the goals of the organization.
In conclusion, revisiting your organization’s strategic goals can help your organization to evaluate goal progress through reflection on the mission, strategic plan, and SMART goals. This can help you to re-evaluate the immediate needs of the organization. Opening a dialogue around goal progress will help your team and stakeholders understand the goals of the organization, become engaged in the process, and feel valued along the way.