Marketing & Non-Profit Organizations

Perhaps the area where the greatest difficulty in coming to terms with application of marketing theory is to be found is that of non-profit organizations. The main reason for this is that most traditional marketing theory is described in terms of improving profit performance. This use of profit as the main measure of marketing effectiveness allows for a practical (and measurable) approach in commercial organizations; but it can pose major problems for those organizations which find difficulty in measuring their performance in such terms. An important example of this has been the problems experienced by Tony Blair in the UK trying to control the budgets of National Health service (NHS) organizations.

Match

One further problem may be that some non-profit organizations simply do not recognize the requirement to meet their customers' needs. The measure most frequently suggested to replace `profit' in the non-profit context appears to be `match'. Thus, the non-profit organization seeks, or should seek, to make the best match between use of its resources and the needs of its customers or clients. In this context, marketing is a means of optimizing this `match', of most productively matching the resources available to provide what the users need and want - exactly as in any commercial operation.

Customer Types

One additional complication in the case of non-profit organizations may be that there will be several types of `customer'. There are the `clients' for the service, as well as those who `decide' who the `clients' will be, and the `donors' of the funds to provide that service. Each of these groups will have a different set of needs and will need to be marketed to separately.

References

[http://futureobservatory.dyndns.org/9432.htm D. Mercer, ‘Marketing’ (Blackwell, 1996)]