Who is your client?

I had quite the discussion with one of my teaching peers about who the client is for non-profit organizations. Do you know who your client is?

If you are a direct service agency, you will find it easier to answer this question, but if you are an umbrella organization, then is your client the people that you are raising the money for or the service provider agencies that offer the services? To add one more, is your client the researchers or the funders?

My argument was that whoever you are servicing, as stated in your mission, is your client. Well, you might say that is still not clear. Let's use an example. Supposing you worked for the national cancer society and your mission at the head office was "to find cures for patients suffering from various types of cancer. We will do this through extensive research." Who would be your client or possibly client(s)?

This can create quite the debate and has!! I would argue that the client is or are all the cancer patients. My colleague would argue that it is the researchers.

Let me throw something out at you. Supposing we were to take the researchers as the clients, then our success could be measured by finding the reseachers and the money to undertake extensive research. In other words, we could be judging our success by number of ongoing research projects. That is process. Yes, researchers do want to find cures, but...

If we were to take the cancer patients as the primary client, then success would ultimately be based upon finding cures for various forms of cancer or for increasing the survival rate. The focus is ultimately back on the person who is suffering from the disease.

Something to think about!

Labels: clients, non-profit, outcomes

posted by Brenda Northey @ 12:48 PM