Company goals in project template v company goals as company goals

English Forum Asana for Nonprofits Nonprofit Tips & Tricks
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Hello, we’re a nonprofit on a free Enterprise level trial.

Having looked through previous similar posts and read the relevant articles, viewed the video etc, I’m still unclear on the distinction between setting Company Goals to which projects can be attached and using the project template that contains Company Goals and Milestones. Can anyone provide a use case or some tips?

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Hi @Nature_Lover , welcome to the forum! I’m not totally sure which project template you’re referring to, but I’m assuming it has some milestones/tasks that are being used as “goals”. If that’s the case, there are a few differences to point out.

Goals are a native object in Asana (basically a type of information that you can customize and do stuff with). You can subscribe projects or tasks to these goals. You can also nest goals in a hierarchy (if you’re familiar with OKRs, it’s basically a cascading version of this).

They allow you to do some interesting things in rolling up that data (e.g., you could have a company-wide goal that is parent to team goals, which are in turn parents to individual goals; when each individual updates their goal, that progress rolls all the way back up to the company goal). You can also write status updates, segment goals by time period, and a few other interesting things.

Having a “goal” milestone/task within a project allows you to track your goals as you would in a spreadsheet or similar (i.e., you can set fields on them, comment, put in dates, etc.). Definitely not a bad option, but it won’t have the same types of functionality that the goal object does. Since you’re on the enterprise level, I would definitely recommend experimenting with the native goals and seeing if they work for you. Perhaps checking out this post (and others in the Forum Leaders tips channel) will give you some ideas:

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Thank you so much @Stephen_Li . That’s hugely helpful - I will try it out with your good advice in mind!

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Welcome, @Nature_Lover,

In addition to @Stephen_Li’s great reply…

That template would be useful for users with plans that don’t offer the Goals feature. (Also, before the Goals feature existed, templates like that were the best approach for goals in Asana.)

If your plan has access to Goals, generally that would be the proper feature to use.

Thanks,

Larry

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Thank you @Ipb. That’s very helpful to know.

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