How to Bring Purpose and Meaning into Goal Setting

The corporate Social Impact sector is obsessed with purpose. Does the company have a purpose? Do employees know the purpose of the company? Do they buy into it? Do our “insides match our outsides”? These questions became more prevalent at the outset of the global pandemic in 2020 and have continued to be a focal point in a churning economic and sociopolitical environment.

Let’s throw in another question: what about meaning? Purpose helps companies define their culture and their business – it’s also the “why” that many CSR teams use to guide programmatic goal setting. But meaning – how we make sense of something – tends to get left behind, often getting lost in the sometimes-myopic pursuit of purpose. It’s not enough to just strive towards purpose; we should also be asking ourselves how programs help participants make sense of their role in the Social Impact ecosystem. Programs couched in purpose with mechanisms and materials to encourage and track the role of personal responsibility and individual experience with social issues have great potential to:

• Show the value of what’s happening “on the ground” (volunteering, giving, civic action/advocacy) and how it contributes to company purpose.
• Deepen intrinsic motivation in participants to act in prosocial ways – those who understand the significance of their role in the Social Impact ecosystem and can connect personal meaning to corporate purpose are more likely to pursue prosocial efforts in all parts of their lives.
• Demonstrate how individual action contributes to collective action at a company and societal level.
• Develop skills and transfer knowledge to program participants that help deliver against not only the goals for the “S” in ESG[1] but for “E” and “G” as well. A company’s impact on all three areas relies heavily on the human beings driving these initiatives. And, as is true for many social issues, these areas are very much connected – a victory in one area is a victory in the others.

Purpose and ESG: The ‘S’ is running to catch up

The Purpose Under Pressure report defines purpose as, “An organization’s aspirational reason for being, beyond profits — grounded in humanity.” While this is a compelling definition, there are certainly large corporations out there that do not have a purpose statement grounded in humanity. But it’s what purpose should be. If we ground purpose in humanity, it means going beyond maximizing shareholder value, which is still the way many companies operate. It is a stringent capitalist approach to business that is going the way of the dinosaur as societal values and the demographics of the working world shift. Purpose Under Pressure also states that to activate purpose, companies need an effective ESG strategy. This is true, but while the indicators and tracking mechanisms for environment and governance have been in place and standardized for years, our little ‘S’ has gotten left behind. Social Impact is notoriously difficult to both standardize and track – and it can be expensive, depending on what you want to measure. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth measuring.

“It can be done, but it requires a longer time horizon and an effort to understand the contributions of many organizations working in the same place at the same time, […] Delivering emergency relief and basic services in sanitation, water, and housing is easier to measure than impacts on public policy or on good governance, freedoms, and rights. Societal transformations—such as improving human rights or democratic conditions—involve multiple actors and causal mechanisms that are still poorly understood.[2].”

Putting the necessity of cross-sector partnerships and their complexity aside, if we’re going to get to a point where we’re measuring what matters, the initial hurdle persists: getting the right level of support and investment from leadership. As much as we’d all like to say we’re totally happy with our company’s leadership support and investment in Social Impact, the reality is that most companies are still prioritizing the investment in and importance of environment and governance over social. However, the current dialogue is zeroing in on impact measurement in a way it never has. If ESG (really including the ‘S’) has become central to the strategic effectiveness of a business, how do we measure all three areas and provide those results to shareholders and key stakeholders? How do we standardize it? These very big questions are a good starting point to begin thinking about what you can do – starting now – to bring purpose and meaning more intentionally into your goal setting and impact measurement.

What to consider when you’re thinking “purpose” and “meaning” for goal setting

Here are some starting points as you move into goal setting – you’re not going to save the world all at once, but you can begin calibrating your programs to be more purpose and meaning-oriented. Try to become more aware of how “purpose” looks at your company, and how to start thinking about where meaning can play a role in advancing and enhancing the experience of program participants. How are your team goals laddering up to company purpose, and how are your programs providing opportunities for sensemaking, learning, and meaningful connection to causes and the business? Benevity’s State of Corporate Purpose report outlines five top trends shaping the future of corporate purpose – we’ve added some questions under each trend to get you thinking about purpose and meaning: