Tighten your mission statement
A friend was tapped to help craft his company’s mission statement. After months at the table — arguing over arcane jargon; taking out commas, then putting them back in; and debating whether “that” or “which” was the right word to use in the sixth sentence — the job was finally done.
Weeks later, after the credo was printed in six-point type, laminated on a business card and safely stored in wallets and the backs of desk drawers, management held a surprise. Employees in team meetings were “invited” to stand up in front of their colleagues and recite the mission statement from memory.
My friend recited Hamlet’s soliloquy.
He had no idea what the mission statement said — and he’d been on the team that wrote it.
Make it short
As with so much in life, less in a mission statement is actually more. Short credos stick in people’s minds. Long ones just fade away.
“A mission statement should be both brief and global,” says communication consultant David P. Seifert, ABC. “It’s a concise statement about [your] overriding purpose.”
How concise?
- Make it an elevator pitch. Could you sell your idea, your team or your communication vehicle to your CEO in the time it takes the elevator to get from the first floor to the third?
- Keep it to eight words or less. Eight words is the length of sentence a reader can understand fully at a glance, according to research by the American Press Institute.
- Put it on a bumper sticker. If you can’t convey your purpose on a bumper sticker, says Gil Maurer, former president of Hearst Publishing, it’ll never fly.
Make it shorter
But shorter’s better.
Condé Nast Traveler condenses its aim into a three-word mission statement-cum-tagline:
“Truth in Travel”
And the International Association of Business Communicators does Condé Nast Traveler one letter shorter/better. Its credo:
“Be Heard™”
That’s a mission statement I could recite from memory.
Get to the point faster
Because web visitors spend 80% of their time above the fold
Consider the numbers:
- Web visitors spend 80% of the time above the fold, or on the first screen of a webpage, and just 20% below the fold.
- Material near the top of a webpage gets 17x the attention of that near the bottom.
- The average difference in how users treat information above vs. below the fold is 84%.
But where’s the fold? Content that shows up above the fold on a 30-inch monitor can take as many as five screens on a smartphone.
Reach readers where their eyes are.
So how can you reach your readers where their eyes are?
At Writing for the Web and Mobile — our two-day hands-on web-writing master class on June 12-13 in Chicago — you’ll learn how to:
- Pass the 1-2-3-4 test to put your message where web visitors' eyes are. Tip: Try this simple test on your smartphone for best results.
- Make it a mullet — and 4 more steps for writing effective web heads. (No. 5 is the most important thing you can do to improve the ROI of your site.)
- Optimize webpages for Google and humans with our three-part test. Note: If you're still using SEO tricks you learned in the 'oughts, Google may be penalizing your pages.
- Don't drop the deck. Learn to make the most of the best-read element on your webpage.
- Steal headline-writing tips from the BBC — the source of the best news heads on the web, according to Nielsen.
Learn more about our
Chicago master class.
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Sources: Ann Wylie, Planning Powerful Publications, IABC, 2002
Abe Peck, “The Mission Position,” Folio:, Nov. 1, 2002
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