Focus on Your Mission
Most of our respective missions are predominately philanthropic, perhaps leavened with volunteerism and by occasional advocacy.
The Friends of Acadia mission is "to preserve and protect the outstanding natural beauty, ecological vitality, and cultural distinctiveness and the surrounding communities." We work both inside and outside the park. This is because of politics and geography: town and private lands are intermixed within and around the park boundary.
Friends of Acadia's fundraising emphasizes the creation of endowments,2 but we also do project fundraising. We make some grants from our operating budget. You can read our ten-point operating philosophy in the Friends of Acadia Journal.
Each successful friends leader has customized his or her organization to a particular way of doing business, reflecting the unique park context.
- Focus on mission above all else, yours and the park's, especially when relations with your park turn tender at times. This reduces personality-driven decisions and tangles.
- Make your mission statement a single declarative sentence with plump nouns and active verbs.
- Remember you are in the natural and cultural conservation business. Your mission should reasonably track the National Park Service mission contained in the 1916 Organic Act.
- Make sure your staff and board use the "mission sieve" to evaluate what new projects to undertake or reject. I retreat to our mission virtually every day to decide issues.
- Don't be married to the NPS Project Management Information System (PMIS). The list of park projects to be to be funded wholly or in part by private funds must be negotiated. Select PMIS priorities that will appeal to donors. Government and philanthropic interests must intersect. New restrooms may top the PMIS list, but they probably hold no interest for most donors.
- Help the Park Service understand that a friends group is itself a donor--just as John D. Rockefeller, Jr. was a donor--not just an intermediary in the charitable cash flow.
2 These are program endowments that produce sustainable annual grants of up to four percent to Acadia National Park. They are not operating endowments, although Friends of Acadia pays itself up to one percent annually as management fee.