Targeting Your Customer:
Not Just for Business Anymore
Marketing for not-for-profits is the subject for a thousand books, but there is one marketing fundamental often left out of planning efforts because it's uncomfortable: "Targeting Your Customer." The passion for mission is alive and well in Kansas City's not-for-profit community, and good work is being done. In past economic and funding climates, a good mission, marginal to adequate delivery of results and influential leadership were enough to keep not-for-profits happily plugging along. That day is gone.
Seasoned community leaders agree that never before have all the forces aligned to create such a hostile environment for not-for-profits, particularly those serving Kansas City's health and human service needs: A lingering poor economy and resulting dwindling foundation assets; strategic direction changes among Kansas City's major funding policy makers; and now a controlling political climate that has historically believed resources will somehow "trickle down" to the community's most needy. Targeting your customers and defining truly discrete niches may have been strategically advantageous in the past--it's survival now.
Applying business practices to not-for-profits is fine when it means having clear financial statements, creating a vision and planning strategies to achieve it--even creating accountability systems for management feels ok, as long as we can still serve "everybody." But when you start forcing the conversation about narrowing the definition of who gets served with increasingly limited resources, it feels like "leaving someone out," and that flies in the face of what we think of as good "social work."
Remember, board members are ultimately volunteers. Getting into sensitive discussions and making difficult decisions to narrow the impact zone can be overwhelming. But the reality is that an organization's growth depends on hashing through data and having tough discussions.
Many mature organizations in Kansas City have been able to succeed for years without the kind of constant redefinition of marketing strategies required by a profit motive in a fickle marketplace. With significant community organizations closing their doors, and more to come, those planning to survive better pinpoint their markets.
One such example of an organization confronting changes in their marketplace head-on is the Women's Employment Network, a successful, 15-year-old organization with a clear mission of "helping women raise their self- esteem and achieve economic independence through sustained employment." WEN now serves women with significantly different needs in a completely different labor market than in the past. This year, WEN's board and staff have researched employer expectations, occupational growth opportunities for women, indicators of the long term impact of WEN's effectiveness, and loads of demographic data to identify those women in the KC metro area most likely to look to WEN for help and most likely to achieve highly with the skills provided by WEN.
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strategic tools that will help drive growth in a depressed market: 1. Name each group of customers and stakeholders, and their distinct needs of the organization; 2. Ensure ongoing research and feedback systems to identify changing market demand and customer expectations for your programs; 3. Develop clear, measurable, data-driven strategies to meet each customer group’s unique needs; 4. Regularly review changes to your market segment to monitor impact on the market based on hard external data. |
Serving women on the spectrum from homelessness to membership at the Central Exchange, WEN identified a segment where it can truly change the water level. That decision did not come easily. It means that those women with insurmountable barriers to employment will first have to be served indirectly through referral to a carefully selected network of strategic partners, serving other segments on the spectrum, and return to WEN when their likelihood of success best matches WEN's abilities to serve them. WEN, like all other organizations facing market realities, realized it could not be everything to everyone. Careful stewardship of the community investment made in not-for-profits, as well as a passionate desire to make a difference, demands that we do the hard work of defining a target market that can be monumentally affected by our presence in their lives.
Janet Baker currently serves as Community Liaison for the Center for the City at UMKC. She can be contacted at 816-235-6359. E-mail bakerjane@umkc.edu.
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