Frequently Asked Questions about Setting and Using Goals

Last updated: April 25, 2021
Estimated reading time: 4 min

Here are some questions you might have about setting and using goals.

1. How many goals should a person have? How many goals are too many?

一般来说，我们建议每个人或部门的主要目标不要超过3到5个。稍微回顾一下这一点(比如说，8个)并不是一场灾难，但如果有太多的目标——我们曾见过这样的组织，一个人可能在一年内有32个重要的目标——这意味着你不能真正关注其中的许多目标。

Having just a single, clear, overriding goal can be incredibly powerful. For instance, your development director might have several goals around adding new major donors, raising a certain amount from an event, and so forth. Still, ultimately you want them to focus on a single bottom-line goal for total dollars raised during the year.

In cases where a person does have multiple goals, consider indicating their relative weight. For instance, you might decide that while broadly educating the public on your issue is a goal, it represents only 10% of success for the year, and getting your curriculum adopted by a majority of school districts in your state is worth 60%.

2. How should the process of setting goals work?

This depends on context. The following chart can help you decide what process to use:

3. What if goals need to change part-way through the year?

In an ideal world, your goals wouldn’t change after you set them because you aimed for a target that isrealistic, ambitious, and gets you the results you needto advance your organization’s mission. But, life happens, and extraordinary circumstances may make reaching a goal simply impossible. An organization’s advocacy director might have a practical but ambitious plan this year—until a disaster dramatically shifts the public’s focus. In response, they might shift to focus on laying the groundwork for the future, like building a network of committed grasstops leaders to speak on behalf of the issue next year.

3. What happens if we don’t meet goals (especially stretch goals)?

There is a delicate balance between rewarding risk on the one hand and ensuring that staff members take goals seriously on the other. When a staff member sets a goal representing dramatic progress, acknowledge that it’s a stretch goal. You may even want to specify what a minimum level of success would be like, so it’ll be clear if they made reasonable progress even if they don’t meet the stretch goal. For example, if an organizer has a goal to conduct 50 one-on-ones within the first quarter, with a minimum of 30, achieving 40 should merit celebration, not rebuke.

Failure to meet a non-stretch goal should warrant reflection on what they could have done differently and what might need to change moving forward. A pattern of consistently failing to meet goals should be cause for concern.

5. Is it realistic to set longer-term goals during a very fast-moving campaign where things are constantly changing?

If you’re operating in an environment that’s changing quickly and you’re still sorting out how you’ll make the biggest impact, consider modifying your approach to goal-setting in the following ways:

• Set and review progress on a shorter cycle (every 3-6 months—or even every month, depending on your context). Establish regular review meetings and tracking systems to support this faster cycle.
• Since you’re operating with greater uncertainty, embrace subjective criteria for goals, such as “Maximize opportunities that come at us to …”
• If you’re in an intensive building stage, your goals might focus more on activities than outcomes for the first year or two (“get the website up and running by November” versus “build website into a hub that generates 20,000 hits a month”).
• 要认识到目标可能会发生变化，但要明确!不要让它们自己发生——确保区分分心和需要调整目标的方向上的真正变化。

Check out some other important resources for setting goals:

• 7 Tips For Getting Started With Goal-Setting
• From SMART to SMARTIE: How to Embed Inclusion and Equity in Your Goals
• SMARTIE Goals Worksheet
• Goal-Setting Worksheet
• Goals Stepback Worksheet
• Red Light/Green Light Goal Tracking Tool
• Goals Bank
• Five Tips for Goal-Setting in Chaos

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