Creating Results-Oriented Goals to Own Their Future
How online fundraising platform Givebutter raised their own level of team alignment, buy-in, and ownership over their work.
Problem
Givebutter is an online fundraising platform that’s powered more than $300 million in donations to good causes.
Founded by three college friends, the company experienced such rapid growth that soon, their top-down, loosely articulated vision wasn’t holding up. They had their to-do lists, job titles, and a mission statement—but not a shared understanding of where the company should go. To maintain their growth, they needed better team alignment and buy-in, and a full sense of ownership over the work.
Solution
We used the Objectives and Key Results (OKR) framework to refine Givebutter’s loose collection of goals and action items
starting with a workshop to clarify the company’s most vital, long-term objectives. We asked questions like, “What would a target of 10x growth actually look like at a granular level?” Then, we set measurable, actionable, and time-sensitive key results goals. Next, we repeated these exercises with each department to establish departmental OKRs that aligned to the ones the company set.
Results
By establishing company-wide OKRs, then giving departments the ability to set their own underneath, we were able to create better organizational alignment and more employee buy-in within Givebutter.
By transforming the company’s nebulous collection of goals into a formal and explicit framework, any team member can now see when the company or department has reached their goals, along with any theoretical third-party. This increased transparency has instilled more ownership over results at all levels of the company, contributing to a successful $7M Seed raise in Jun 2022
How Max Created
Company-Wide
Buy-In Around
Givebutter’s Vision
“Chase has an incredible ability to take our goals and make them objective and refined.”
Max Friedman
Co-Founder at Givebutter