J. Bacon

[Karvovskaya]

When you have completed the statement, you should run it through three rigorous tests:

Test 1

Put yourself in the position of a potential community member. If you had no knowledge
of the community or its goals, would the mission statement explain it all within a minute?
With every sentence, you risk the reader getting bored and wandering off for a love affair
with his PlayStation. If your mission doesn’t deliver your aims quickly, efficiently, and
compactly, go and improve it.

Test 2

Get someone else to read it. Ask her to tell you what she thinks and how she perceives
the aims of your community. Typically this person may be a friend, but friends often skirt
around criticism. Make sure your reader is encouraged to criticize where needed, and tell
her you won’t get in a huff if she says something sucks. If she says something is unclear,
fix it.

Test 3

Is this mission statement going to inspire you and your members through the toughest
times of the community? In Organizational Vision, Values and Mission (Crisp Learning),
Cynthia D. Scott et al. describe this perfectly: “A mission evokes a personal response. Work
on it until it gets to be so clear that reminding yourself of it will keep you, on a really bad
day, from walking out and quitting.” Is your mission going to stop you from quitting when
the world has climbed onto your shoulders? One day this is going to happen, and you
need to be able to look at your mission statement and have “a moment.”
When you have successfully navigated through these three tests, you should have