How to Set Communications Goals That Motivate Your Team (Not Just Hit KPIs)
Comms teams are asked to set goals all the time. Campaign goals, engagement goals, fundraising goals. But for many teams, these targets can feel like obligations rather than motivation. The numbers are there, the spreadsheets are filled, and yet… no one’s excited.
I recently read Get It Done by Ayelet Fishbach, and it gave me a helpful lens to understand why this happens. Fishbach is a behavioural scientist who studies how and why we pursue goals.
What stood out to me most is this: designing motivating goals is a creative process. It’s not just about writing SMART objectives and ticking them off. It’s about how goals make us feel as much as what they help us achieve.
Here are three ideas from the book that I think are useful for comms leaders trying to keep themselves, and their teams, motivated over the long haul.
Motivation comes from meaning, not metrics
One of Fishbach’s main arguments is that effective goals are ones we want to pursue. That might sound obvious, but many of the goals we write for teams focus only on outcomes such as clicks, conversions and reach, and miss the emotional point.
I’ve seen this in a lot of the communications audits we’ve done for nonprofits. Teams are tasked with improving their social media “performance”, but it’s not always clear what success would look like beyond a number. The goal becomes, say, “increase Instagram engagement by 10%”, but no one really cares about that number. It’s just a line in a report.
What would happen if we rephrased that? Something like: “build a more active Gen Z audience around our mission” or “share more stories that our community actually talks about”. You can still measure it. But you’ve designed a goal that speaks to meaning, not just performance.
When a goal feels connected to real-world outcomes (audience, identity, reputation, revenue…) it becomes easier to care about, and easier to act on.
The middle is the hardest part
The book also covers something we notice time and again in comms strategy work: the middle always drags.
This might be mid-way through a campaign, mid-way through the year, or even mid-way through a project that started with a lot of excitement. Fishbach calls this the “mid-point slump”: motivation naturally dips once we’re far enough in that the novelty has worn off, but not yet close enough to the finish line to feel the urgency.
It’s useful to name this as normal. Not a failure. Not a signal to abandon the goal. Just part of the shape of motivation.
As a comms lead, you can build in systems to account for this. I’ve seen teams who pause mid-campaign to take stock, and who then reframe the second half based on what they’ve learned. You can end a phase at the mid-point, and start a new phase – we are all more motivated at the beginning of things.
The key is to expect the slump and plan around it.
Goals and habits are not the same thing
This is the bit where Get It Done challenges some of the thinking in James Clear’s Atomic Habits. Fishbach argues that goal-setting and habit-building are two different tools. Goals are for specific achievements, like launching a report or winning media coverage. Habits are for routines, like replying to DMs or posting on LinkedIn every Tuesday.
Both are important. But they work differently.
The risk comes when we confuse the two. I’ve seen organisations turn everything into a goal, even things that would be better treated as habits. “Post on Instagram every weekday” isn’t really a goal—it’s a habit. And it needs a different kind of support: a rhythm, a system, maybe a template. On the flip side, trying to turn every campaign into a habit leads to dilution. A goal has urgency. A habit has consistency. They serve different needs but they reinforce each other.
So it’s worth asking: are you building a system? Or are you pursuing an outcome? And is your team clear on which is which?
Your team’s energy is part of the strategy
If your comms goals aren’t landing, the issue might not be the strategy. It might be the energy. Often, when I do audits or planning sessions with teams, what’s missing isn’t a calendar or a framework. What’s missing is clarity about why the goal matters, who it’s for, and how progress will be recognised.
This is something we take seriously in our audit process. We don’t just review the content and platforms. We ask teams how they feel about their comms. What’s working? What they’re proud of. What they’re avoiding. What they wish they could stop doing altogether. The answers usually tell me more than the metrics do.
If you’re designing a new comms strategy or just trying to refresh a tired one; this kind of reflection can be more useful than another round of KPIs. Start with the real questions: what are we trying to change? What do we need to say? Who do we want to reach? What do we want them to do?
Then design your goals accordingly.
In case your comms goals look good on paper but feel flat in practice, it may be time to step back and reconnect them to meaning, not just metrics.
If you’d like support to audit your current approach or refresh your comms strategy with goals your team can genuinely get behind, you can explore our digital comms audit and get in touch to start a conversation.
