Developing a Vision Statement with 8 Easy Starting Points

We’ve been working with a non-profit client. Our objective is developing its new vision statement to authentically guide organizational transformation under a new CEO. 

In the engagement’s early days, we performed secondary research into comparable non-profits and the ways they were making significant, innovative impacts in their communities.

8 Easy Starting Points for Developing a Vision Statement

While grouping the potential starting points for delivering vision statement possibilities, eight themes emerged. If you are exploring ways to update or develop a new vision statement to guide your organization, consider one or more of these possibilities starting points:

1. Audiences / Targets - Start by listing exciting possibilities for what your organization can represent among those you serve or are trying to reach in impactful ways.
2. Product or Service Offerings - You can build the vision statement around expanding the distinctiveness of what your organization provides to audiences.
3. Impacts and Results - Link the effects your brand delivers from its activities to audience benefits and an overarching direction.
4. Making Connections - The organization vision can emerge from focusing on the people and parties you can bring together in new, meaningful ways.
5. Resource Availability - The vision could revolve around access to or the availability of unique resources of any type.
6. Capabilities - Organizational talents and abilities can form the core of the going-forward direction, more fully leveraging them to benefit audiences.
7. People and Expertise - More specific than capabilities, the people that make up the team gives the brand life can be the basis for ongoing advantage and value delivery.
8. Responsiveness - The brand’s ability to address routine and extraordinary situations for its audiences can direct the vision.

You can build your vision statement around a combination of these themes, too. 

For more ideas on fashioning the overarching strategic vision for your organization, please download our free eBook, Big Strategy Statements - A Collaborative Way to Shape Your Strategic Direction. 

Special Note: It’s been some time since I last shared new content. There have been multiple issues beyond the pandemic, including long-term technical challenges and even my own vision struggles. Following the first of two eye surgeries, I can once again see well enough to easily write! We will try to get back on a regular schedule of sharing Brainzooming tools to help you develop personally, professionally, and organizationally as a creative, strategic leader. – Mike Brown