Communicating and cultivating meaningful relationships with clients is essential to maintaining your client base. A business model must identify the profitability of certain kinds of clients and manage customer relationships (like follow-up, recognition, or personalized thanks) accordingly. Know your allies and don’t dump a bunch of money reaching out to remote populations that will not generate compensatory profit; on the flip side, look at ways of branching out and testing the waters for alternative target markets .... just be sure to look before you leap!!
In assessing the sustainability of Distribution Channels within the framework of the business model,
we should reflect on the following:
we should reflect on the following:
People & Customer Relationships
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- Do we have a good customer relationship strategy? Look at the different values for each of your organization's target populations and develop specialized strategies for maintaining relationships with each type of client. Do they respond best to a newsletter? and email? a phonecall? Learn how Earth Access can strengthen its relationship with each type of constituents.
- A core fundraising principle is to move donors up a gift ladder and have them make larger and larger donations over time, which in turn provide increasingly appealing "gifts" (or bribes) for donors.
- Start out by asking for something small. People are more like to continue giving to an organization once they have made a small investment. (For example, ask for postage stamps -- many people have collections of old postage stamps or 1-3 cent filler stamps collecting dust. This is a small donation that many people won't even consider a monetary donation, but later you can publish a concrete figure of donations collected when you go back to ask for more! You will also get a good idea of how many people are responding to your product -- collect vital information during this process like zip codes & company affiliations) Think of other creative in-kind donations that are relatively simple and inexpensive to request from your mailing list; help them feel like they were part of building the organization and they will be more likely to take responsibility for maintaining it in the future.
Planet & Customer Relationships
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- Consider the impact of your organization's methods of communication and the resources employed (for example: email correspondence requires electricity; snail mail uses paper products (potentially recyclable onsite) and the burning of fossil fuels through traditional postal delivery systems.
- Talk to your constituents and find out what their perceptions of Earth Access' environmental impact are. Talk with organizations that tend to differ from your mission to learn what (if any) points of opposition they may present.
- How does the environment and program offerings at Earth Access strengthen relationships with clientele. Does the environment contribute to repeat business? How does our clientele perceive their relationship to their natural surroundings at Earth Access compared to in their traditional home environment?
Profit & Customer Relationships
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- Engage customers in feedback about the organization't programs and key activites to help strengthen customer relations and improve internal processes, resulting in lower operating costs.
- Create strategic alliances with suppliers who share common values and goals to ensure sustainability best practices among a partner network, which will ultimately improve efficiency into and cost out of your supply chain.
- Take the opportunity to optimize your workforce, create a business sustainability culture, and align employee and company values. This will reduce turnover, which reports indicate significantly improves performance.