Who’s the ‘customer’ for NGO’s?

By Michael Doneman | May 17, 2009

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Did an Edgeware team-building workshop recently at the Logan Women’s Health Centre. The question: ‘Who’s your customer?’ elicited the usual response from not-for-profits: ‘it’s women, who otherwise … etc’. This is fine; these are indeed the clients of the service. But are they the customers? It turned out in conversation that the prime customer of the service was government, that is, that the core value exchange was ‘We give you funding (on behalf of *our* customers, the women of Logan) and you give us a service’. The women who access the service are in fact the customer’s customers, so the thing for the Health Centre to do is identify and recognise the (very different) needs of two customer segments.

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