Goals and Anti-Goals?

It’s important to have values, goals, and budgets: the things you are striving for.??

It’s also important to be aware that when you set these, you are also setting your anti-values and anti-goals: the things you will throw overboard to reach your goals.?

It’s true in the big things. When you set a growth goal with no guardrails, you have Enron, where ethics and laws are the anti-goals to becoming the earth’s largest energy company. And congratulations, you’ll even achieve it before your perp walk.?

Or on the nonprofit side, if you focus on only what can be done to help the mission, what do you do if there’s an effective CEO harassing their employees? Do you throw the human values out to serve the mission??

Perhaps the ultimate example of this is an AI thought experiment: if you had a machine whose one goal is to make paper clips, after exhausting the supply of clip-viable metals on earth, it would think, “hey, human beings have small amounts of metal in them…” and the rest, as they say, is history.?

And it’s true in the small things. When you set a response rate goal in acquisition mail, you’ll likely see it go up — and average gift, net per package, and lifetime value go down.?

When you set an open rate goal, you’ll see that list size becomes the anti-goal, with people sending to smaller and smaller audiences to hit that goal.?

We’re big believers in total donor lifetime value — the net sum of all the value you can expect from your entire file. But not even we advocate for investment in acquisition and donor experience if you need that money to make payroll next week.?

Thus, we need to have value and goal pairing (or at least guardrails):?

• Increase response rate and hold the decreases in average gift to less than the increases in response rate
• Increase total donor lifetime value while providing enough for the organization to continue at the present funding level
• Value the mission and the dignity of each employee

Each challenges the other and sets the parameters by which the other is to be achieved. And you can mentally append “consistent with our values” to every goal so that what we aim for doesn’t impact how we behave.?

How do you check your goals? Imagine if a person worked on those — just those — with a singular focus. If you have done well, you will see a trade-off you can live with.?

Those trade-offs are different for each organization. A three-Michelin star restaurant and a Mcdonald’s will both value consistent quality — they just set that quality bar in different places. Mcdonald’s will have locally sourced organic ingredients as an anti-value, as they get in the way of speed and consistency. Le Pamplemousse de la Fromage will use those ingredients. They have speed as an anti-value, willing to refire a meal that does not meet their standards.?

When you have goals and anti-goals, values, and anti-values, your organization can make more decisions quickly. When a crisis hits, as we’ve seen so often of late, you know what efforts get a spot in the lifeboat.?