This is a second in a series of blogs on 2018 trends. You can read about the first trend here.
The second trend identified by Forbes is: In the age of experience, EVERYONE is a customer.
What this simply means is that in the world of social media, there is no distinction between your “internal audience” and “external audience.”
That means the experience of your board, staff and volunteers has to be consistent with the story you are sharing to your donors. Because if the experiences are not the same, you risk turning off your donors because you will come off as inauthentic.
In the world before social media, it was pretty easy to separate these two audiences.
I think of my experience in college driving a delivery truck during the holidays for one of the big brand-named companies. I loved their advertising. I was totally thinking it was going to be so fun working for them. Turned out, their “fun” brand story didn’t extend to its drivers. The drivers were treated like we were the enemy. It was a god-awful experience I have never forgotten.
Therefore, in addition to benchmarking your donors’ experiences, it is equally important to measure your internal constituents’ experiences. You need to know if these are out of alignment. Otherwise, you will have a problem.
Stay tuned for the third trend: Empathy is the new black.