GMI Insights Blog

Peter Drucker offers the “Five Most Important Questions You Will Ever Ask About Your Nonprofit Organization.” We start with the first question. What Is Our Mission? "To satisfy the customer is the mission and purpose of every organization [The mission statement] focuses the organization on action…. It alone can prevent the most common degenerative disease of organizations … splintering their always limited resources on things that are interesting or look profitable rather th

Identifying our nonprofit's customers Today, we dig into the second of Peter Drucker’s five simple but powerful questions. Question 2. Who is our customer? This is a tricky question for nonprofits because there are multiple levels of customers. Not everyone is a customer of everything. Primary Customer Primary customers are why the we exists. The primary customers are the ones we provide value in helping solve their problem and who must be satisfied . We may serve one or mul

How well are we providing what our customers consider value?

What Are Our Results (what is the bottom line) Every business needs to answer, why are we here? What is our mission? What are our results? Peter Drucker pointed out that all organizations need to focus on results. We need to be performance focused instead of just well intentioned. Results are the key to survival. Performance is the ultimate test for any organization. Unfortunately, many businesses don’t prioritize performance and results. For many organizations, being sp

Do you have the right tools to implement your plan? “Although I don’t know a single for-profit business that is managed as well as a few of the nonprofits, the great majority of the nonprofits can be graded a “C" at best. Not for lack of effort, most of them work very hard. But for lack of focus , and for lack of tool competence …. “For years most nonprofits felt that good intentions were by themselves enough. But today, we know that because we don’t have a bottom line we hav