When Your Purpose Becomes a Problem

This article is a summary of our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 13. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. 
 

We can easily fall into the trap of dogmatic and reactionary thinking, particularly in the political sphere. But does this also happen in social impact work? We think the answer is yes. Your purpose can become a problem, and it's essential for leaders to know how to pay attention when this is happening.

There are four ways that your purpose can become a problem, and also four ways to notice when that’s happening. 

1. You’re Driven by Wishful Thinking, Not Brutal Facts

There are probably two cases where you might get stuck in the trap of relying on wishful thinking. The first is when you're buoyed by one or a few donors or a big foundation that believes in a problem or a mission that may not exist any longer. They’re funding a problem that used to exist and doesn't to the same degree today.

We really want to see social impact organizations develop resiliency in their fundraising. One way to ensure that is to not over-rely on any one donor or a single donation or funding pathway. 

If you rely too much on one channel of funding and donor priorities change, you're stuck with a huge revenue hole. This usually means you have to spin programs down, lay staff off, reduce your impact, and it really just disrupts the entire flow.

We’ve seen organizations that are basically built on a house of cards — where a single donor or foundation props up the entire organization because that donor personally believes so much in the mission or supports the executive director or board chair. This is even more dangerous, as there’s not actual broader support for that cause or organization. 

Wishful Thinking Among the Executive Team or Your Board

People join boards for a bunch of reasons. Sometimes there are one or a few loud and powerful voices that may believe in a problem or a purpose that is no longer quite valid in the same way. So they grasp onto this pattern of wishful thinking instead of stopping and evaluating, “Are we solving the right problem? Are we solving it for the right people?” And going through that exercise regularly.

This is something that we come up against when we're doing discovery work for bringing a new client on. We hear how they're describing the problem or the issue area, and then we do our own independent analysis of the space and the ecosystem. We have to really look at a gap in the analysis of what they are saying and what we are seeing — or what they’re saying the issues are and what we’re hearing from their community. 

The beauty of looking at things more broadly — and seeing how a broader set of organizations, individuals, and the public at large is responding — is that you have less reliance on any one individual perspective. This is a really important thing to consider as a social impact leader: “Is my personal passion, my board’s passion, or an individual donor’s passion overriding what the larger market signals are telling us?”

2. Your Process Becomes Your Purpose

This is something that we notice happening in social impact brands that have existed for some time — let’s say 10 years or more. They may have started for a really good reason, solving a problem in a very particular way. That was their unique solution at a particular time and made a big impact. Problems change, the world changes, and the solutions themselves need improvement.

This can be a small problem that becomes a larger one, or it can be a deal-ending problem if an organization becomes so stubborn that it’s unwilling to change in the face of new evidence, new facts, or a changing world. It can essentially become irrelevant, forcing other organizations in the ecosystem to serve that particular part of the problem, or new organizations come in.

Beware a Dogmatic Board, Leadership, or Staff 

They get their identity tied into how things have always been done and how their organization shows up. They become unwilling to change because change is, frankly, hard. Some people are more open to change and excited by it, while others are very uncomfortable with it. They just want to do what they’re comfortable doing and do it well.

3. Your Organization Becomes Dogmatic and You Begin to Crusade

Speaking of dogmatism, this type of thinking can be a real problem in the social impact space. We’ve talked before about false urgency and transactional marketing and the language that we use. The signals for a crusading social impact organization are pretty clear. If you look at your messaging and marketing and realize that you care so deeply about your purpose that you’ve made it into a you're either with us or you're against us mentality. 

When you’re causing guilt to your audience for not participating or believing with the same intensity that you do — that dogma surrounding your purpose can become a real problem — even though it often stems from genuine passion.

We see this most commonly in political campaigns and political movements of course, but this is starting to bleed into the broader social impact space — because it can work. This type of language and sense of urgency can activate and motivate people. But we need to be careful about the long-term implications of that kind of strategy. when it comes to your brand values and your communications and your content strategy. You might also be repelling other people. 

Maybe that’s okay for advocacy or political brands, where you need to rally your troops and repel people who are not aligned with your philosophy. Sometimes that's the best strategy. But we should always be looking at our cause and asking, “Does it serve us strategically to approach our work this way?”

In most cases, an us-versus-them mentality is lazy marketing. It’s lazy messaging. Sometimes it comes from a place of frustration, “Why don't people believe in this thing as much as I do?” That impulse is natural because you care about something so deeply. But if that's where it ends, that's just lazy social impact work. 

Make a Case for Why Your Work Matters

This case for support should be a core of your marketing and communications. Determining your case for support is something that often happens through the lens of a big fundraising campaign where you're writing a two-page letter and dropping off a packet to a major donor. 

But your case for support should be a core of your marketing and communications. As you do your day-to-day work as a leader, a staffer, or a board member — or even as a donor — you have lived experience around how and why this work matters and the impact it has. But you can’t assume that everyone has that same intuitive understanding. You have to make a case and invite people to experience the importance of your issue.

There's another danger of this dogmatic thinking or dogmatic messaging that stems again from the sense of wondering, “Why don't more people care about this?” In many cases, that’s a precursor to your audience becoming less focused. Because once you get into this space, that can be a slippery slope too — just trying to get everybody to believe in it the same way you do. And if we could just get everybody to believe in this, imagine the impact that we could have. And that's an intoxicating thought. It's also a really dangerous thought, and it can start with dogmatic thinking.

4. When Hiring, You Over-index on Belief in Your Purpose

When we’re hiring, we want to surround ourselves with people who believe in the cause — in the sense that this is going to add energy to the cause and that theoretically — especially in a marketing or fundraising or sales position — that's going to energize the audience too. Sometimes, we over-index on belief in our purpose when we’re hiring and under-index on the skill set that the candidate has to deliver on the job.

Belief, passion, and energy are helpful and can spread positive energy throughout the organization. But if a candidate doesn’t have the skills needed for the job, that’s not helpful. Think about building a high-performance sports team. 

There are organizations and opportunities where people need on-the-job training. They have the passion and potential, but they just lack the experience. As a leader, you have to look at whether the role is a junior or entry-level role where that lack of experience is okay and expected, and you have a plan to nurture and train that person. Or are you expecting this person to be self-managed and come in with a certain amount of capacity and expertise. 

One of the most brilliant hiring criteria we’ve come across was from an Executive Director who was specifically looking for people who did not feel welcome in museums. She was looking for people who were historically excluded from these spaces because the energy that they brought to the table was, “How do I make a museum more welcoming for people like me?” That combination of people made for something magical. There are some dangers to hiring a homogenous group of people who care so passionately that it has the risk of becoming dogmatic or even cultish at times.

At Cosmic, we do our best to bring on folks who have a background and inherent passion for social impact. But we’ve also brought on team members who are highly skilled at the positions we need, and over time, they’ve developed that passion that didn’t come as strongly as we might have wanted at first. You don’t want to over-index on passion to the point that you’re putting aside some really important, critical skill sets that are needed for the role.

Saying One Thing and Doing Another

There’s one more signal that your purpose is becoming a problem — you say one thing and execute on something differently. Your purpose can become a problem if you break your audience’s trust with what you’re actually delivering.

The most egregious example of this is cause marketing or corporate social responsibility campaigns that are not rooted in authentic action, where it’s essentially just virtue signaling. At the end of the day, you’re trying to appeal to conscious consumers and tie into their identity to increase profits — not because you actually care about what you're doing.

But there are also more insidious, subtle versions where you're trumpeting the importance of your mission to drive support, but that’s not actually showing up in your actions or in a measurable way. You might be putting out a good message, and you may be authentically trying to do good work, but for one reason or another, your impact is not coming through at the level that it needs to. That can be an equally difficult problem that you need to spend more time looking at and evaluating.

The Antidote to a Problematic Purpose

As a social impact leader, you should be constantly asking yourself, “Is our purpose becoming a problem?” Ask yourself some questions to make sure the answer is no:

• Are we solving a real problem?
• Are we solving that problem for the right people?
• Does solving this problem matter for this community?

As long as the answers to those questions are clear and you can back it up with the work your organization is doing, that is the antidote to making sure your purpose is not getting in the way. It’s not a problem — it’s fueling the impact that you’re doing.

Your Purpose as a Superpower

On a more positive note, if you are being intentional around purpose, it can be a superpower. It can motivate people in ways that non-social impact work just never will. 

The idea of calibrating how you’re using your purpose skillfully and authentically, and using that as a superpower to motivate your team and your supporters to actually drive impact, can be amazing. But if you take it the wrong way, or you’re doing it inauthentically, then it can absolutely also become a problem.

Stay Vigilant

By staying on the lookout for these four warning signs;

• Wishful thinking,
• Process-purpose confusion,
• Dogmatism,
• And over-index on belief in our purpose when hiring,

social impact leaders and organizations can harness their purpose as the superpower it's meant to be while avoiding the pitfalls that can derail their mission.

Your goal should be to keep purpose aligned with present realities — and use your purpose to power the best version of your impact — and your organization.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.