Advocamp: Erin Hall
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Nonprofit Mama Hope built a school in Tanzania that supports 300 students using resources and personnel from partners in local communities. The school ranked 7th out of 52 in the district, and without it over 1/3 of students would lack access to education. Successful companies like Zappos, Netflix, and Classy focus on culture, advocacy, and outcomes over just outputs. Classy's core values are to have a great culture reflecting their values, manage for outcomes not just outputs, and consider humanity and customer-employee relationships.
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Advocamp: Erin Hall
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- 2. How to Build Long-Lasting Success: Embrace the True Meaning of Advocacy 2
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- 6. 6 Nonprofit Mama Hope Input(s): Resources and trained personnel; along with partners in local communities who are set to build a school in Tanzania. Output(s): Team builds a new school that supports 300 students. Outcome(s): School ranked #7 out of the 52 schools in that district and without the school, over ⅓ of the students in that school would not have access to education.
- 7. 7 Nonprofit Mama Hope Input(s): Resources and trained personnel; along with partners in local communities who are set to build a school in Tanzania. Output(s): Team builds a new school that supports 300 students. Outcome(s): School ranked #7 out of the 52 schools in that district and without the school, over ⅓ of the students in that school would not have access to education. Zappos Clearly defined culture and core values. Hiring people who align to this culture. Happy, satisfied employees. Superior customer service & experience. Netflix Clearly defined set of expectations. Empowering and training self sufficient employees. Strong, defined culture. High performance and high expectations on doing a job well-done and a sense of ownership.
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- 12. Classy’s Core Values 1. Behind a great brand is a great culture. 2. Learn from the best: your culture is a reflection of your values. 3. Manage to outcomes, not outputs. 4. Consider humanity and the interconnectivity between customer + employee advocacy when managing to your outcomes. 12
- 13. Key Takeaways 1. Behind a great brand is a great culture. 2. Learn from the best: your culture is a reflection of your values. 3. Manage to outcomes, not outputs. 4. Consider humanity and the interconnectivity between customer + employee advocacy when managing to your outcomes. 13
Editor's Notes
- My name is Erin Hall and I am in the Director of Marketing and PR at a startup named Classy, based in San Diego. A few quick background points on Classy for context: - Classy is first platform for social impact that over 2500 organizations use to run their business, grow their fundraising, and manage and engage their supporters. - We started in 2009 as a pub-crawl raising money for a cause close to our founder’s hearts and in 2011 we identified as a tech company. - Today we are building what we believe to the very best software for nonprofits - When I joined in July of 2014 when we had about 40 employees and we just crossed the 160-employee mark. As the head of our marketing efforts I can confirm that we design most of our strategies using a customer-centric approach. We believe our story is best told through the stories of or our customers and we’ve managed to built a culture that reinforces this customer-centric perspective. But ironically, we don’t have customer advocacy explicitly called out in our core values so this discussion stems from me wondering how we at Classy are setting ourselves up for sustainability and long term success leveraging our strong culture and customer-centric focus. In the end, I’m looking to explain how exactly culture and customer advocacy are tied together to create long lasting success? So, let’s jump into the conversation….
- I am not going to pretend to be the first person to make a correlation between great companies and great brands with great cultures. Many people have already explored this relationship so in lieu of spearheading this research, let me just give you some context on the hundreds of others who have already discovered in books, talks, blog posts, and studies that a single great ingredient of a great brand, is in fact a great culture. For example, Google tells me there are 232M related search results for “how do great companies build great cultures”. And, Amazon tells me there are 56,558 books that cover “Company Culture”. There are also at least 69 Ted Talk videos on “company culture”. Point is, we can enter this discussion confident with the fact that company culture is in fact a major driver to long term success.
- Culture today also has a lot meaning – sometimes we think of culture as our values, other times it address how we get things done. In today’s benefit-ridden world, culture is often discussed as the benefits and perks provided by a company. So to also ensure we’re all on the same page, let’s clarify the meaning of culture as defined by our good friend, Mr. Webster: The most relevant definition to our discussion today suggests that culture is “the set of shared attitudes, values, goals and practices that characterize an institution or organization”. Ok, so we have agreed that there is real power in having a strong company culture and we define culture as a set of shared values. Let’s move on.
- To continue to explore the correlation between a great company and a great culture, let’s look at two iconic company cultures. First up, Zappos: From an interview I heard on Hubspot’s postcast, The Growth Show, with Zappos’ Head of Culture, Zappos was once worried about losing its culture before a heavy growth spurt. To avoid this, Zappos decided to define what their culture is and then hire people to align with the culture so the culture wouldn’t have to change. They hire people based on their ability to align with the values, not people who have to flex or change for the values, and then use these 10 core values to guide the decisions of the organization. This in turn creates happy employees who can then be in service of customers. CLICK And, lets also take a look at Netflix, perhaps one of the most iconic cultures of innovation. Known for hiring “fully formed adults” and giving them the space and power to perform, they are equally known for quickly firing people and moving on if you’re not the very best or simply not as necessary. Similar to Zappos, Netflix spent some time writing all the things the company valued, what mattered to them, what they expected in their people. The result was a now famous document that outlines how they expect self-sufficient employees to perform and own a sense a responsibility to the company.
- Shifting gears slight, at Classy, we’re often discussing nonprofits and the impact of their work. When it comes to donor dollars, grant money, program impact or anything around longevity and sustainability it boils down to whether or not a nonprofit understand and can communicate a logical model around its inputs, outputs, outcomes and impact. Let’s break down what some of these definitions mean with an example. Mama Hope is a nonprofit that works to develop education, health, children and food programs in Kenya, Tanzania, Ghana and Uganda. CLICK So for them, here is what one program model might look like: Inputs: Resources and trained personnel; along with partners in local communities who are set to build a school in Tanzania. Output: This team comes together to build a new school that supports 300 students. Outcome: In the recent national exams, this school ranked #7 out of the 52 schools in that district and without the school, over ⅓ of the students in that school would not have access to education. What this model empowers, is for the organization to design its programs, align its resources, and set up its campaigns and fundraising efforts, all in an effort to clearly address the potential outcome. Their goal is to demonstrate the impact their organization and programs had on the educational system and students in Tanzania.
- So now, having this output-outcome framework, let’s model out what Zappos and Netflix might look like: CLICK With Zappos, they start off by defining their culture and core values and then hire folks who can best align around these values. This results in happy, satisfied employees as the output who are focused on delivering superior customer service as the outcome. With Netflix, they too started with a defined set of expectations and a commitment to empowering their employees which creates an output of a strong defined culture. The outcome, at least what they anticipate and expect, is a high performing company and employees with a sense of responsibility. My point is, from what I can see from these iconic culture examples, is in the for profit world a lot of emphasis is put on managing to the outputs whether that’s happy employees like Zappos, or a strong company culture, like Netflix. Conversely and interestingly enough, in the nonprofit world, we almost require a nonprofit to manage to its outcomes, or the difference their programs and efforts will make. And without an emphasis on the nonprofit’s outcomes, we as donors or supporters may question the nonprofits’ effectiveness and potentially waiver in our loyalty, donations or support. So, my question is, if we are looking to correlate culture as a key element of long-lasting success, should we manage culture as an output or as an outcome? Or another question might be, should a for-profit business focus on managing more to its outcomes vs. its outputs.
- So this is where we start to talk about customer advocacy. I’m by no means suggesting that Netflix or Zappos don’t manage to the outcome of customer advocacy but it’s certainly not something as vocal or transparent in the research as they do around culture. Zappos has said that through reinforcing its culture, it creates happy employees who are able to best service the needs of their customers (the outcome). Similarly, one could imagine that through managing to culture as an output at Netflix, employees are empowered and able to make the best decisions for themselves and the business, which in turn helps to drive the business forward (the outcome). But, what would a for-profit company look like if it clearly and outwardly managed to the outcome of impacting the lives of the consumers they served, which is certainly one way to define customer advocacy?
- Have you heard for the game bananagrams? How about a quick show of hands for anyone who has played? For those of you who may not know tit, bananagrams is basically a fast-paced game of using tiles to create your own crossword puzzle in front of you, with all words that connect, before your opponents do. I’m no master but I’m a frequent winner and I tell people it’s because I’m not tied to my board. At any given point, I might scratch my entire board, or give up that amazing 12-letter word in the middle of my board in an frenzied effort to make a new home for all the solo tiles laying around. CLICK Here’s another quick story about my friend’s 10 month old son. Her son is in the lowest percentile for his age in development. Mind you, this child comes from two parents who have PHDs from Yale in Computational Biology and Bioinformatics. Trust me, this kid has highly intelligent genetics in his favor. The doctor’s told my friends that he’s developing slower because they give him his toys rather than letting him figure out how to reach for them or grab them on his own. So, to increase his development they have to simply change the way they play with him. And when they started to do this, their son quickly started to learn a new way of playing and within weeks jumped to the highest developmental indexes. CLICK Did you know that in a herd of Elk, only the female matriarch knows how to get and find food for the entire herd? And if she dies before identifying the next in line to pass along this knowledge, eventually the entire herd would die. The only way an elk herd sustains itself it through the knowledge that only 1 Elk has at any given time. So, what is the point of these 3 stories? My point is this, from birth, as seen with my friend’s 10 month old, we are born with the ability to learn, re-learn, and un-learn. This adaptiveness, as presented by the secret to winning bananagrams, is what makes us human. It’s not enough that we build great companies by defining what makes up our culture. The Elk herds demonstrate for us that by nature, we can all align around an idea, a single person, or core values and march together towards a common goal. But unlike Elk who aren’t able to learn together or from each other at a mass scale, we as humans are born to do this. And, we can exercise this right everyday whether it’s playing with toys as newborns, winning at bananagrams, or showing up to work and supporting in the growth of a company as its culture evolves to stay relevant over time to its consumers.
- What I’m getting at is true customer advocacy is simply an extension of human advocacy. If we were to model this out, it might look something like this: Inputs: employee advocacy output: culture outcomes: customer advocacy If the outcome is having an impact on our customers and making a difference in their lives, this actually starts with the output of culture, which stems from inputs of advocating for your employees, seeing them as people, as humans. In other words, managing to the outcome of customer advocacy starts with your own people.
- And like all hour glasses, at some point you can flip this and this showcases how really, your customers and employees are the same inputs. So if you start to see a shift in your consumer behaviors, or their price and feature needs or sensitivities change, or the competitive landscape shifts, economic factors influence some sort of change, etc. we are able to learn, re-learn or unlearn as employees and re-align around the core values based on what our customers need at that point in time. Hear me out that I’m not dismissing the idea of articulating culture by defining values and mission statements and hiring attributes, these are all critical pieces of the puzzle. But my theory is we might not be managing to the right stuff first, which is actually about the people and our human-ness, or our humanity. Outside of our opposable thumbs, the is the single characteristic that makes us human which is the ability to think about our thinking. In other words, we are able to think about what we might need in the future, or figure out what didn’t work in the past, and derive a plan for what might need to be different as we move forward. This is the beautiful thing. When you exercise our humanity, when we think about our humanness, and if you do this when thinking about building a culture…this is the definition of true customer advocacy.
- So circling back to my first question using Classy as the example: how exactly are culture and customer advocacy tied together? And specifically, if we don’t have customer advocacy explicitly called out in our core values, how do we manage to the outcomes of our business using our strong culture and customer-centric strategies? What I realized is that we do have customer advocacy in our culture. And it starts with our people and from our people. Everyone we hire at Classy is passionate about helping the social sector innovate, evolve, and succeed. We identify these people first, and then communicate our core values with the expectations that everyone can personally rally around them in a way that is authentic and meaningful to them. This ultimately creates a culture this a living, breathing reflection of our people which can change and evolve as needed from our ability to learn, re-learn and unlearn. This then empowers us to advocate for our customers in the same way we wish to be seen as humans. This reflection gives new meaning for me, to our core values: I now recognize, that consciously or not, these core values were designed with the customer in mind but built for the ability of the employees to literally make a difference in the lives of our customers every day. We manage our business to the outcome of customer advocacy, which is a choice we make and it’s supported through culture as an output and the people we hire as the inputs.
- In summary, managing your company to the outcome of a impacting your customers’ lives, is contingent on creating culture as an output. And, for culture to be an output, you have to recognize that your employees are able to best define, through learning, re-learning and un-learning, what it means to live out your core values every day. And in the end, advocating for their success, and their needs, will position your culture to be one that advocates for the successes and needs of your customers. I believe the approach of managing your business to the outcome of customer advocacy, as opposed to the output of culture, is the secret ingredient to building a long-lasting, sustainable company.