Blog #3 - Personal Connection: The Competitive Edge of NPOs

Understanding an industry and identifying the potential customers is crucial for the success of any social venture. Last week, Professor Zak reviewed competitive analysis and ‘owning a market’. He discussed the five attributes that make for a competitive social venture idea: relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trial-ability, and observability. I wanted to explore the idea of ‘observability’. To refresh your memory, observability describes whether or not the value created by your good / service is detectable. Not only that, but is the change being generated something that others want to be a part of? This idea of a personal connection, or personal appeal is a vital competitive advantage for Nonprofit Organizations (NPOs).

For class, we read “The Dragonfly Effect” by Jennifer Aaker & Andy Smith which went into detail about the exponential influence of social media. To summarize, the article described a variety of inspirational stories where social media was utilized (in crowdsourcing projects) to reach a vast audience for support. Take, for instance, the story of Sameer Bhatia: A Stanford graduate and successful entrepreneur who was diagnosed with Acute Myelogenous Leukemia. Out of fierce determination to beat the cancer, he set out on a quest through the internet to find a potential donor for a bone marrow transplant. However, the odds were clearly against him as he found out the chance of finding a perfect match for his ethnicity were 1/20,000. In a miraculous turn of events, Team Sameer, his social media campaign, was able to harness platforms like FaceBook, Google +, and YouTube in order to spread the word about the urgency of his medical condition and find a match. One of main reasons this campaign took off was because it tapped into people’s pathos (higher emotions of empathy and compassion) and it made it so that people who have previously experienced similar ‘lack of donor’ roadblocks were more likely to show support. Engaging potential customers and/or donors with a personal connection is a key component to the success of any social venture.

However, one point I want to argue is that the personal connection not applies to consumers, but also the employees. In a News-Leader article titled, “Nonprofitshave to harness employees’ passion to stay competitive”, journalist Matt Lemmon says that the employee’s personal connection to the overall mission of the organization proves to be a competitive edge for NPOs. For instance, nonprofits tend to have employees that work more hours for less compensation out of a sense of devotion to the cause (although, NPOs need to be careful not to exploit this dedication). Another advantage of gathering enthusiastic, driven employees is that they generally come with a deeper understanding of the issue(s) than the average person. Nonprofits with an assemblage of insightful, intelligent, passionate people are more likely to effectively address the social issues at hand. To conclude, my overall argument is that the idea of a ‘personal connection’ is the most compelling incentive system for customer/employee engagement. Assuming that this insight is true, I wanted to ask you all one question: Does your social venture provide a product or service that consumers and employees can form a personal connection with?