Define “Success” Clearly…and Early
April 3, 2025 | By David M. Wagner
The next time you embark on anything new, be sure not to skip one essential step: setting clear goals.
Knowing your goals will change how you approach the design of a new program, how you organize an event, how you approach partnerships (and who with), and just about any other kind of undertaking.
Yet many time-strapped leaders skip or short-change this step.
I count myself among them.
Missing the Point
Last year, I was part of a nonprofit team planning a public event. And frankly, we skimped on defining success first.
Our cursory discussions yielded obvious metrics like “maximize turnout” and “raise money.”
By many measures (including those), the event was successful.
Yet one of the nonprofit’s founders was upset: participants at the event were overwhelmingly from just one small part of the population they served.
Building connection across the communities they serve is core to the organization’s mission. And the event had largely failed to do so.
Take Two
We learned our lesson.
This year, the organizing team for that event had an intentional conversation about what “success” would look like for the 2025 iteration – before diving into planning.
We identified broad community connection as an explicit goal.
The conversation that followed was starkly different from the previous year:
We identified ways to make activities more accessible for groups who did not participate strongly last year.
We set bigger, broader targets for community involvement.
We discussed totally new approaches to making the event appealing for a diverse group of participants.
Setting clear goals had an immediate impact on how we approached our plans.
Key Questions for Effective Goals
Based on the experiences of that team and several clients I have worked with, here are questions about your goals to consider before making new plans:
How will this work support our organization’s identity? Be sure that what you do in public aligns with your organization’s values, vision, and mission.
How will this work support our strategic goals? Your strategy sets out both what you will do and what you won’t do. Keep your plans aligned with your organizational goals – or make an explicit choice to update those targets.
What kinds of goals make sense to track? You can set goals to measure what you’ll do, what results you expect from those efforts, or the impact you hope to have – or some combination of the three.
For the nonprofit community event, we decided to set goals both for who we invite to attend (what we’ll do) and for the resulting participation (an expected result).
The former is entirely under our control, the latter is something we can only influence. Tracking both will change how we approach our work and tell us if we need to change our approach in the future.
Set clear goals before planning initiatives to have the most impact on your organization’s mission. If you need help defining success for your work, set a time to talk with me about facilitating your plans.