Don’t you love it when everything just clicks — when it all goes according to plan? It’s an awesome feeling to have that happen. On the flip side, it’s a real pain when you are sure you’re doing everything right and it’s still not working. That’s maddening.
I believe that’s one of the reasons why start-up community benefit organizations occasionally run into trouble. Each organization starts out to fill a need — a community demand. The organizers then make it their mission to fill the need. They develop a vision of the future where there is no need and they create a plan to connect the mission with the vision — kismet. Almost.
Donors have to agree that the community need is worth alleviating and that the community benefit organization is the group most suited to the task. That’s the other side of demand — the one that I think too many community benefit organizations fail to realize. They have to have a demand for their service and a demand to fund their service. Both demands are competitive. If one is missing, then even the greatest mission, vision, and plan won’t work. The brightest minds can create the most efficient service delivery for the neediest population, but the donors must feel the need to fund it. If they don’t have a need, it won’t happen. If they are perfectly content with how their dollars currently address the problem they won’t shift their attention to another group.
You cannot create demand where there is no pain. In the community benefit sector the pain must exist in two places — with the donor and the recipient. As in any sale, without pain there is no demand.
You couldn’t be more right! The rub of course is that what most often motivates people who do social change work is the community demands/needs, not the donor demands/needs. The trick is to maintain the right balance with the appropriate level of emphasis on the community’s needs (which after all is where community benefit organizations should focus their efforts and expertise).
Where it gets especially tough, and I speak here from experience, is when you are trying to solve a social problem that most donors don’t even know exists. So for instance with the work that IssueLab does, talk to most nonprofits and they are keenly aware of how tough it is to get attention for their research. Talk to most donors and they’ll ask “doesn’t google take care of that?”. Sadly most of these information consumers/donors don’t even know what we’re missing until we tell them.
So, like all things in this “marketplace” of services and goods, the perception of need and demand needs to be cultivated. And now, we’re talking about marketing!