What makes your nonprofit organization unique? A 7-Step Process to Determine Your Unique Selling Proposition
Perhaps more to the point, what makes the public care? What makes them want to send money? What about you makes them want to volunteer?
A generation ago, business schools promoted “competitive advantage” or “comparative advantage.” One example was the “Chicago Boys,” University of Chicago-educated businessmen who in the early 1970s helped reshape the economy of the nation of Chile. What Chile had in abundance was government-owned copper production (after some expropriations) and a high percentage of world reserves. In the following almost four decades, the national copper company managed to become the force of the industry. Today, their decisions to produce more or produce less do much to fix the market.
A similar term you see today is “Unique Selling Proposition,” so commonly used that it is often simply called the USP, without further explanation. That’s more apt for nonprofits, which typically don’t have access to merchandise or other tangible assets that they can leverage competitively.
A vital question to ask yourself, as a nonprofit marketer, is “what is our USP?” Here’s a seven-step process to help you get that information:
1) Gather the leaders of your organization in a room for an hour-long meeting and ask them to write down precisely what your organization has to offer its audience. Don’t let anyone speak or everyone will agree with the first person who speaks. That’s the best possible way to lose information you desperately need. It takes about 5 minutes.
2) Then have everyone take turns reading their ideas and let the others brainstorm them. Write all of these ideas on a flipchart so that the pages can be torn out and taped to the wall. Limit this process to about 20 minutes.
3) Give each person the opportunity to add or modify their own contribution. Take about 2 minutes each.
4) Use a consensus-building method to reduce your USP definition to two or three items at most. One would be best, but few organizations seem willing to admit that they have only one great and unique thing about them. Take the rest of your time to accomplish this.
Set up another one-hour meeting to go through the next steps. This gives your leadership time to reflect and become more comfortable with your USP.
5) This is a difficult question. Decide if your USP is still relevant in today’s world. I am currently working with an organization in our community that has become a respected institution for several decades, but is struggling financially. Those problems probably stem from the fact that the service you offer is no longer viable. Times have changed; he didn’t. Worse yet, he didn’t even understand that the world around him was changing.
6) Assuming your core offering to your community, your USP, is still relevant, determine who your audiences are. That is plural, because you will have an audience for fundraising, another for volunteers, another for clients, etc.
7) Integrate your USP into your public relations and marketing. Do it subtly, of course, but be sure to read your USP statement before you write a press release, before you talk to your local Rotary Club, before you ask a new acquaintance to consider volunteering.
This may not be an easy exercise for long-established organizations and may open the door to more internal discussion than you intended. But despite this, or because of it, it is important. Perhaps Socrates had non-profit organizations in mind when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”
