Recently, we’ve had the opportunity to be involved in some studies and projects that embrace very different cultures. A team of us conducted Circles of Influence at DEREE - The American College of Greece in Athens, an exceptional private liberal arts college. Shortly thereafter, we led a retreat with the board of HELPSudan, a not-for-profit founded by some of the Lost Boys who now reside in Chicago. Our work with these two clients helped us realize how universally applicable the concepts that support our philosophy of coherence truly are.
Both DEREE and HELPSudan share a central challenge: the vast difference between their primary and supporting customers. Peter Drucker, the great mastermind of not-for-profit management, tells us that primary customers are the people our mission statements are written to serve and that supporting customers are the “volunteers, members, partners, funders, referral sources, employees and others who must be satisfied.”
In most settings, the gap between primary and supporting customers is not so great. Take almost any American college or university. The primary customers are current students, closely followed by faculty and staff, including administrators. The supporting customers—prospective students, parents, alumni, donors and, depending on the institution, an assortment of other key players (churches, communities, media, government and the like)—are likely not too different than the primary customers. They usually share similar demographics and psychographics, speak the same language and, in many cases, even look alike.
For HELPSudan, the primary customers are young students, teachers, parents, elders and chiefs in small and remote communities in southern Sudan. Their support customers include many wealthy, young American urbanites, as well as a teenager who has managed to raise more than $15,000 through her own fundraising energies at school, and a senior citizen who crafts fabric pencil cases to be sold at the organization’s fundraisers in the U.S.
At DEREE, the primary customers are students, faculty and staff of this private liberal arts college. Because DEREE is located in a country whose citizens perceive public education as the most valid route to lifetime security, and because not-for-profit organizations in Greece are rare, the supporting customers (including many prospective students) live in other countries and share a very different mindset about how education works.
Of course, this huge discrepancy between primary and supporting customers creates tremendous communication challenges—I mean, opportunities—for these organizations. Indeed, the greatest challenge is to ensure that their messages remain coherent, while still taking into consideration the needs of both primary and secondary customers. They cannot assume that what connects with one set of customers will automatically resonate with the next. And although these are extreme cases, the same holds true for the majority of not-for-profit organizations.
Doomed is the institution that believes it can communicate two separate messages to these audiences. The tightrope we walk in ensuring that both audiences connect with our message is thin, and sometimes the tensions between the two audiences can be overwhelming. Fear not: If you are mindful of your communication efforts, it can be done.
The moral of the story is this: Be hyper-aware of the subtle—or in the case of DEREE and HELPSudan, vast—differences between your primary and supporting customers. If your message is coherent, you shouldn’t have anything to worry about.
