Every group has a reason for being; a mission. It is what charges you up to do all the work. Your mission might be to make people happy, to rock the world with phenomenal cover songs, become famous and quit the day job, or it might be to preserve a particular musical tradition.
Since our inception, Blue of a Kind has existed primarily to create something fun. Equally important to us has been lending our voices to help fundraisers, causes and to benefit folks down on their luck in our community. We sing to share a special brand of mirth, and we sing to benefit others. Having fun, making fun and doing good seems like plenty of good reasons to exist and to work so hard.
Mission forms your identity
We're refining our mission as we go along. We've become more focused on raising the performance value of our work, a natural thing for any singing group to work on. Just making the "To the Sky" CD raised our performance bar significantly, but our primary goal in making it was to create another way to raise more money for the charities we support. Becoming better and avoiding complacence have naturally become fundamental to our mission. These values carry over into all aspects of the singer's lives, into their families and on into the community.
In the last month, Blue of a Kind has appeared on a float in a parade, sung hymns graveside on Memorial Day, been covered in a feature article of the Boston Globe, appeared live on FOX25 TV and entertained a thousand folks and a few wild critters at the Zoo. So another part of our mission is also coming into greater focus: we want to sing in more cool places.
All of the above goals support one another. The better we get, the more mirth and joy we can create, the more goodwill and charity we can spread around - the more exciting the performance opportunities become. Having a coherent mission gives you better buy-in on the part of the members to work hard. At the same time, as the character of the group becomes hardened publicly along the lines of your mission, you gain more buy-in from the community to hire and enjoy you. They know who you are and what you bring to the party. They can believe in you, and they can lock in on all the wacky stuff you do in the name of fun.
With "Blue of a Kind", we're getting more and more solid opportunities to sing in cool places especially because we've communicated clearly we're a bunch of fun-loving guys who work hard to sing well, share delightful music and help folks (and even some critters) in need.
Your identity is something your audiences will cherish as much as your music.
