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Key Purpose Indicators: Measuring What Matters Most with Melissa Perrin and Haley Rushing

First United Bank’s Haley Rushing, Board Member, and Melissa Perrin, Chief Culture and Communications Officer, joined us for an engaging conversation on a groundbreaking concept: Key Purpose Indicators (KPIs)

These innovative metrics don’t just help measure and track the fulfillment of purpose, they also provide valuable insights to guide business decisions and drive maximum impact.

Here are three key takeaways discussed that highlight how tracking both purpose and performance can take your business to the next level.

Your purpose will shape the KPIs you should focus on

Haley starts by quoting Ed Freeman, “Humans need red blood cells to live but the purpose of life is not to produce red blood cells. Companies need profit to live, but that’s not why they exist.” In the same way, we should think more deeply about the purpose of our lives and subsequently, the purpose of why we do business.

Highlighting how Key Performance Indicators and Key Purpose Indicators go hand-in-hand, Haley reflects on a time when she worked with Southwest Airlines. Southwest Airlines set a purpose-driven goal: to give people the freedom to fly. By tracking key performance indicators like market penetration, market share, profitability, and their ability to deliver on this purpose, they identified areas for growth. One major step was expanding their routes, which helped increase the flying population from 15% to over 85% in less than 30 years.  

Additionally, by working with the Department of Transportation, Southwest discovered they contributed to a 20% overall increase in travel — clear evidence that they were fulfilling their purpose of giving more people the freedom to fly.

Another company that works towards its purpose is Walmart. Walmart’s purpose, “Save money, live better,” drives their key performance indicators, including comp store sales, operating margin, revenue per square foot, and category market share. A central question guides their efforts: “Are we saving people money and helping them live better?”  

Haley notes that living within a Walmart trade area, especially if you shop there, reduces your cost of living by about $3,400 annually. Additionally, surveys show that over 90% of customers agree Walmart helps them save money and live better — proving they’re staying true to their purpose.

While these two companies are vastly different from each other, we can learn that every interaction that a customer has with the company should be — in some way — fulfilling its purpose. Southwest embodies this with their $49 flights — allowing the freedom of flying to their customers — and Walmart with groceries that are 20% less than buying them elsewhere — saving them money. 

Be intentional about your purpose statement

While standard Performance Indicators show the state of the business — profits, efficiency, and growth — they don’t answer why employees are proud to work there, how the local community feels about the company, or the true value it brings to people’s lives.

Key Purpose Indicators fill this gap by measuring what truly matters: the difference the company is making, the happiness of its community, and the deeper connection employees and customers feel toward its mission. They provide insight into the heart of a business, not just its bottom line.

For example, like most companies, First United Bank wanted to understand the impact they’re making — not just for their employees, but also for the customers and communities they serve. Guided by their purpose statement, “To inspire and empower others to spend life wisely,” Melissa Perrin explains that “to inspire means to encourage and support, while to empower means to provide resources, tools, and opportunities.”

To bring “spend life wisely” to life, they developed four key pillars to focus their efforts: Faith, Financial Well-Being, Health, and Personal Growth — ensuring a holistic approach to their mission.

Being intentional about the focus on their purpose statement, First United Bank has different programs, resources, and opportunities for stakeholders to grow in each pillar. Melissa shares a big project which was to create a space where people feel they can spend life wisely — transforming the physical space. Within First United Bank’s transformed locations, they provide books on each pillar to encourage and support someone in an area of need. In addition to free books, they also offer various workshops within each pillar, partner with local schools and places to help encourage the different pillars, and lift the focus pillars to not only employees but their customers and communities as well. 

Listening can increase your impact 

First United Bank developed a survey to evaluate the effectiveness of their purpose-driven initiatives. Haley explains they first asked respondents to rate their well-being in the bank’s four pillars: Faith, Financial Well-Being, Health, and Personal Growth — establishing a baseline.  

Next, they explored resource usage, asking, “Are people using what we offer, and how has it impacted them?” They also gauged the bank’s impact with simple statements like, “My [pillar] has improved.” Finally, demographic data provided insights into which segments were thriving or needed more support.  

Although the survey was a great starter, to really measure the success of their impact towards their purpose statement, they took a three-step approach for each pillar — subjective, objective, and known contributors — subjective meaning how someone feels about their lives in each pillar, objectively meaning what could we actually look at to say whether they are doing good in an area, and known contributors are things they know contribute to cultivating well-being in each pillar. 

With the intention to do this survey annually with employees and customers, and surveying the community bi-annually, it provides a great baseline need for stakeholders to know where people are thriving, struggling, or suffering. Using key demographic segments from the survey, they were able to see how age, gender, and the difference between rural and urban centers — how these segments make vastly different outcomes for each pillar. Learning those nuances helped First United Bank focus on what matters to help improve those communities with the right plan of action.

If you’d like to dive deeper into Haley and Melissa’s insights, watch the full video here!