How Nonprofits Can Think “Outside In”
If you’ve been following me on Twitter or LinkedIn, you know that I’ve been sharing a handful of CX tips based on the insights I gained as the Vice President of Customer Experience for a major nonprofit organization.
In my previous role, my team was happy to host a “CX Book Club” every quarter to help socialize and educate others in the organization about CX. Our first book was “Outside In” by Kerry Bodine and Harley Manning. Here are some of the key takeaways we gathered after our reading and discussion about how nonprofits and social impact organizations can start to think “Outside In”:
Talk to the people you are working to serve.
This may seem fairly obvious, and most of us come into the office every day or collaborate with colleagues online to talk about touchpoints, services we offer, and different ways that we engage with the people we are working to serve. That’s a great discussion, but by definition, it is within your organization. It is “inside out”. If you really want to achieve social impact with customer experience work, you have to go outside of your organization and talk to the people you serve. You need to get insights directly from them that allow you to have empathy for them.
Understand that everyone in your organization contributes to customer experience work.
Whether you’re providing services, solutions, or products, whatever it is you’re doing to try to help people, they are having experiences. Just like you cannot not communicate, you cannot not provide an experience to the people you are working to serve. The better you understand the experiences that they are having, both good and bad, from their perspective, the more likely it is that you will be able to help and help them more.
Rethink the Customer Experience Pyramid.
If you are familiar with the Customer Experience Pyramid written about in the book, you know that “Meets Needs” is at the bottom, “Easy” is in the middle, and “Enjoyable” is at the top. However, as a nonprofit, you might find it more appropriate to swap “Enjoyable” for “Meaningful” at the top of the pyramid. If you provide a meaningful experience as a nonprofit of social impact organization, people will probably love what you are doing and are going to tell other people about it.
Think scalable results instead of billions.
The for-profit world has proven that customer experience work can help business make billions of dollars. Don’t get confused or be put off by this if you work for a nonprofit or in a social impact environment. Swap out “making billions” for “achieving scaled impact,” and the same holds true. The companies that do this successfully plan customer experience work right into their business, build business cases around it, budget for it, and resource to it. You can do the exact same thing in your organization. In fact, you need to.
Start with strategy.
In order to understand customer experience as a business strategy, you need to change the way you run your business. This is true for any organization, whether it be a nonprofit, social impact organization, for-profit, or member organization. While the 6 Customer Experience Disciplines are equally important, regardless of the type of organization, Rome wasn’t built in a day. Everyone has to start somewhere. I would suggest starting with Strategy and Customer Understanding.
If you haven’t picked up a copy of “Outside In”, I’d highly recommend it. To learn more about how many of the key points of the book can apply to your nonprofit or social impact organization, check out SocialImpactCX Tips 1–9.
__
The first 10 podcast episodes are live now, and more content is coming soon! Listen now to podcasts on iTunes or check out all video and audio postings on YouTube.
If you’re interested in joining the SocialImpactCX community, follow SocialImpactCX on Twitter.
