Open Forum

There are three key parts to any mission statement: 1) What you want to accomplish, 2) How you're going to accomplish it, and 3) Who you're accomplishing it for. 

Thinking about mission statements in this way may help you narrow down and define what your mission is. Hope this helps a little!

I agree with Elizabeth's response and this is what we teach in our museum studies courses. Some begin with those three key elements, and then may wordsmith it to streamline and heighten its eloquence, but those elements are usually still obvious. Maybe check out other mission statements for similar institutions for sources of inspiration. Answering those three key elements for yourself and then having brainstorming sessions with other board members is helpful, too. Good luck! Working on mission and vision statements is often challenging and sometimes onerous, but satisfying in the end!

Along the lines of the previous responses -- we often conduct an exercise with board members to help refine a mission statement. We gather them into small teams of 4-5 and ask each team to answer the following three questions: whose needs do you serve? which of their needs do you serve? toward what end? Then each group shares their responses, we identify common themes, and reach consensus on the essential ideas. The wordsmithing can then be assigned to one or two people.

I have another approach to crafting a focused mission statement. It may  help to read the following first, as it provides both context and an example:

Villeneuve, P. (2013). Building museum sustainability through visitor-centered exhibition practices. The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum, 5(4), 37-50.

And I'm attaching a worksheet. We used this to develop the mission statement for our Arts Administration program.

Arts Administration - Change Your World!

Attachment(s)

Hedgehog worksheet.pptx   314 KB 1 version

This is an area of interest of mine and there are a lot of great sources out there. As a board member, I would recommend you check out Boardsource.org. They have some great 1-2 page resources explaining the basics of a mission statement. A point that I would disagree with the other respondents is that you should not incorporate HOW into a mission statement. It should focus on the WHAT and WHY. Nonprofit Hub has a resource called "A step-by-step exercise for creating a mission statement" that is a great place to start. When you get to the wordsmithing stage, this might be an interesting article. 

I would reinforce Rachel's idea that the mission should focus on the what and particularly the why of your organization. The resources she links to are excellent.

I would add Simon Sinek's Ted talk called "Start with Why." He makes an excellent case for why "why?" matters to any organization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sioZd3AxmnE  

One question I like to ask in getting to why for museums is "How will people see the world differently because of our museum?"

I do not believe that "focused mission statements" serve today's community service museums that depend on multiple revenues and audiences who have multiple needs.  Instead, a carefully prioritized list of intentional purposes, reigned in by the museum's guiding principles, is a more useful and meaningful planning and evaluation framework. Museums are more like the US Coast Guard that proudly claims multiple missions but unites all their operations under their value statement, Semper Paratus. Contrary to popular nineties business guru Jim Collins, museums should not try to be like a hedgehog and do just one thing well, we should embrace that today's museums must be more like the canny fox that is good at many things.

Additionally, focused  missions often carry a covert agenda of trying to stop a museum from activities that some staff or leadership find distasteful but that the community values such as traveling exhibitions, function rentals, tourism and economic development, and helping businesses provide community services. 

I respectfully disagree, John.  I think rather than limiting a museum, a good mission statement focuses our actions and provides a compass for what we collect.  If a mission isn't allowing a museum to do what a community expects, it's time to revise the mission to adjust to the community's needs while maintaining professional standards and ethics.  It shouldn't be set in stone and, in my opinion, should be re-examined regularly to ensure we're serving our communities and doing what we set out to do.

 I think of a mission statement as a lens rather than as a set of blinders and I think it's an essential part of the picture.