Businesses and nonprofit organizations seem obviously different. They inhabit disparate worlds and arise from disparate goals. But, foundationally, the function of a business is not totally dissimilar from that of a nonprofit. Ultimately, business is about making money. It’s a continuous cycle of creating profit and chasing growth — a constant transaction of give and gain.
But embedded in that cycle is a necessity to foster community, without which, business couldn’t truly thrive. For this reason, the businesses who push beyond their growing pains and into the most dominant roles in their market are the same ones who first valued community health and continue to foster it as an integral informant of strategy.
A nonprofit organization, like a credit union, for example, operates within a comparable cycle. While their ultimate goal may not be dictated by profit, the credit union itself is dictated by community. In this way, big businesses can learn a lot about their markets from the values of nonprofit enterprises. Through prioritizing community, businesses can make high-impact changes to comparably inferior marketing and growth strategies; through exposing their service, creating trust and gaining high-level consumer data, businesses can employ positive community action to dissolve common growth barriers like acquisition cost, product development and consumer retention.
To create a clearer picture of how this works, let’s start with the nonprofit credit union. The purpose of the credit union is to maintain a strong and consistent foothold in its affiliated community through providing value that is consistent and trustworthy. In so doing, the credit union provides a transactional service through which it grows and thrives. As if by true symbiosis, the credit union feeds the community and vice versa.
From the outset, credit unions were established as a community service — an entity that could promote financial wellness and grant access to credit and financial products where genuinely beneficial. What that means in a nutshell is that the credit union mission, like many other nonprofits, is designed around one simple notion: service.
Service is an action term. Not only does it require you to act but it contains concepts like “benefit,” “experience” and “satisfaction,” which naturally lead to others like “trust,” “loyalty” and “longevity.” Service, though, and its sister term, serving, while rife with connotations, are simple concepts with simple application. “To serve” means doing right by your consumer; it means promoting the well-being of your consumer, period. No matter the nature of your enterprise, the result of service is a strong community and a strong economy which are, perhaps, the most essential elements for building strong business.
Utah businesses regularly dip a toe into the community, but the real magic happens further below the surface. When businesses understand the function of community and the role it plays in the overall success of organizational health and scalability, the importance of being involved in a community becomes more and more clear. If you compare the most prominent businesses in the state, you’ll also find that they’re the most present. Smart businesses foster and leverage relationships and Utah communities are full of opportunities to use events and other community outposts to strengthen bonds and nurture outliers. When you do that, when you share common interests, support common values and show yourself to the community in a meaningful and transparent way, the community will respond; they’ll support your business.
Even smarter businesses know that such support is not only critical to success right now, but also critical to successful product development and future growth. In this way, nurturing a community can help businesses create continuously better products which creates continuous progression of your business. By contributing to the community, you can create loyalty and begin building a new community around your own business. Giving is a reciprocal gesture and consumers are attracted into it.
Prioritizing community also enables businesses to more effectively identify where their service will be most well-received, where there are holes in the market, where there are holes in their own offerings and the level of competitor-saturation within a specific market. When those elements are understood, a business can discover where and how to most effectively focus effort. Furthermore, community involvement can give businesses insights on how and where to grow. In a perfect circle of mutual collaboration, the community will show you where you’re weakest, where you’re strongest and where your service aligns most with consumers.
For consumers, the major draws of working with a credit union are promises of fair, nondiscriminatory practices and access to resources that promote better financial living. Those are giant promises that can’t be fully articulated in any single marketing piece. Instead, the credit union’s mission is communicated by the community itself. Through constant engagement and give-back, the nonprofit gains trust, credibility and loyalty.
Ultimately, when you show up for your community, it proves that you and your claims are valid and that your service is worth paying for. The easier you make it for your consumers to trust you, the faster consumers will become loyal, and if you create a community for your consumer base, they’ll use it as a soapbox — a platform from which they’ll sing your praises. You see, loyal consumers quickly become unpaid evangelists for your brand. That’s priceless. And if you continue using community feedback to create a service that provides real value to your consumers, you’ll be recognized as a solution and not as an outfit that’s strictly out for profit.
By taking an active role in the community, you distinguish yourself from other businesses, which is imperative. This brings us to another point in the reciprocal cycle because, as much as active involvement positively differentiates your business from your competitors, it also helps other small businesses prosper. Credit unions, for example, are collaborative institutions — this means they help each other, and that structure fuels a cycle of mutual assistance toward a common goal. For-profit organizations can apply a similar principle. A strong community is good for business — yours and your neighbors’ — so when you serve the community, you strengthen the whole economic ecosystem. As you bolster your business’s external presence, you establish a distinguishable culture of dedication and generosity which also makes you more attractive to potential partner organizations. Just like credit unions collaborate for the greater good, business partnerships can lead to big strategic changes with more informed targeting and allocation of resources.
Altogether, fostering a strong community creates stability for your business. It informs your products, maintains relationships, nurtures loyalty, attracts advocates and, in the long run, it opens doors. When you partner with the community, you become part of a larger network that is invested in your success.
Whether your business is big or small, when you empower the community you serve and when you create community around your service, that community will carry you further. If you want to be bigger than your bottom line, invest in your community.
Mallory Merrill is a content marketer at University Federal Credit Union in Salt Lake City.