Mission statements are a post-war business phenomenon now considered a must.
A 1994 Wall Street Journal story reported “fifty percent of big companies have mission statements now, twice as many as five years ago,” saying they are “fast becoming the latest management mania.”
Update: I wrote about how to put mission into action here, and we’ve covered the importance here too.
What must have first been our closest attempt at a mission statement was “Covering the community of people who use technology in Philadelphia,” which we sometimes shortened as a tagline to “A better Philadelphia through technology.”
When we expanded to Baltimore in 2012, we widened our scope to “Better cities through technology,” which adorned our site for the next several years. It also spoke to the very wide scope we took in those early days, when there was limited formal engagement between fledgling tech communities and wider cities. We hosted computer trainings and coding bootcamps; We facilitated early city council hearings in both Philadelphia and Baltimore on the issues of entrepreneurial engagement, and we hosted early civic hacking and tech, data and innovation policy events. We were very deep in the subject matter.
Over time then our lean mission statement got bulky. Here’s language we used by 2015, when we hosted a big team onsite about the topic:
Technical.ly is a sustainable community acceleration organization focused on how technology makes cities better. We value entrepreneurship, creativity, inclusion, flexibility, transparency and those who do, act and create, whom we highlight through news and events. Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers. We use communication as a means for conflict resolution and community betterment. We have high standards for ourselves and others and consider professional goals to be personal ones as well.
That resulted in this mission statement we used for Technically Media, as we were publishing both Techncial.ly and Generocity: We convene the smartest people and organizations in industries that matter to help local communities thrive in the future.
We updated it in 2017 with this:
- Mission: Technical.ly grows local technology communities by connecting organizations and people through reporting, events and services.
- What we do: We provide original editorial, expert programming and tools which improve recruitment, marketing, community cultivation and economic development. We serve technologists, entrepreneurs and people who care about technology’s local impact.
- Company: Our team members are public community leaders who pursue new thinking, cherish local communities and are willing to ask challenging questions in order to get better answers.
In 2018, we fashioned a mission statement for our event series Philly Tech Week, and that resulted in tweaking our vision: “We believe in better workplaces that create more equitable communities.”
Then following pandemic disruption and refinement in our first strategic vision in 2021, we came to this:
- Mission: Technical.ly is a news organization that connects and challenges a community of technologists and entrepreneurs invested in where they live.
- Vision: We believe innovation should come from anyone anywhere — to ensure all communities thrive.
- Values: Welcoming, Connective and Challenging
