VRM is about making better customers — on customers’ terms, and in better ways than any vendor makes available today. – Doc Searls
I believe that by giving contributors more ways to engage with nonprofits and more say over that engagement, that these contributors will be more generous with all of their resources (time, muscle, intelligence, connections, and money). These ways to engage include providing the contributors more access options for possible engagement, allowing them to manage and broaden these interactions according to their own preferences, and giving them more options in regulating their own privacy. Many earlier posts on this blog relate to these ideas. Designing for Generosity and What a Nonprofit Web Site Can Say are just a few. How can this work? Will this not leave nonprofits with no way to deepen relationships with their contributors? These are important questions that are being explore in the commercial (for-profit) world as well. This blog discusses one for-profit development area that may lead the way for non-profits in the future.
Because they are involved in rethinking the way business is done in the modern world, and they reference “generosity” regularly, I follow some web-based business thought leaders – like Doc Searls. One of the projects that Searls is involved with is the development of software that will help consumers manage their relationships with the set of vendors where they do business. Right now, companies use Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to gather and use information about their customers: who buys from them, at what price, and through which outlets (on the web, at a store, catalogue or phone order, etc.). Charitable organizations have something similar in donor management systems and software. Searls and his group are working to create a reciprocal system – Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) – that engages the consumer in having more control over the “demand side” of commercial transactions.
Model of VRM and CRM by Eve Maler in her blog Pushing String
What is intriguing to me is to think about how this VRM model might work for people who have relationships with various charitable organizations. First let’s explore their VRM ideas a bit.
Project VRM has a web page that explains the project and gives these principles:
- Relationships are voluntary.
- Customers are born free and independent of vendors.
- Customers control their own data. They can share data selectively and control the terms of its use.
- Customers are points of integration and origination for their own data.
- Customers can assert their own terms of engagement and service.
- Customers are free to express their demands and intentions outside any company’s control.
These can all be summed up in the statement Free customers are more valuable than captive ones.
Replace the word Customer in the list above with the word Contributor, and I think this list nicely expresses a better model for generosity in a contributor/nonprofit relationship. This is, as the VRM folks say it, user-centric. These concepts may sound somewhat radical, whether in the nonprofit or for-profit world. But consider that eBay and Farecast (cheap airline flight finder) already work in the direction of VRM – they allow the consumer to determine the item they want to buy at the price they want, independent of what the company may want them to buy. And on the nonprofit side, the organization The Hunger Project is moving close to this model by allowing contributors so many options for engagement and giving.
What would it be like if nonprofits could expend fewer resources on courting donors to greater engagement? What might a synergy between the combined energies of contributors, charitable organizations, and beneficiaries of their missions produce? Some of this energy is going to waste today because all of the onus on growing relationships lies with the charitable organizations. Especially in this down economy, where so many people are suffering, and the charitable organizations trying to serve them are short on resources, we cannot waste anyone’s energy.