Changes in thinking for the future of charity ecommerce
Not using short-term thinking about the organisation making money, but rather having vision and understanding of what problems we should be solving for our supporters.
Not starting with ‘what things can we sell’, but rather ‘what value do our customers want from us’.
Not following traditional/industrial/Talyorist thinking of putting lots of the same types of people in the same building and giving them fixed processes to follow, but rather than modern thinking of diverse and remote teams focused on solving a problem (imagine a workforce that is truly representative of our supporters and our society because we can employ someone with a heart condition from a South-East Asian background who lives in a small town somewhere but can login and work as a customer service agent for a few hours every Sunday afternoon).
Not longer applying the old charity mindset of value flowing one-way from supporters to the organisation, but rather applying a two-way value exchange model to thinking so that everyone gets the benefits.
Not being all about pipeline value delivery where the value of a thing moves through the business step-by-step until it reaches the customer (but not joined-up because of the organisational hierarchy constraints), but rather platform value delivery where we create things that customers use to derive their own value because we’re with our supporters every step throughout their life, from cradle to grave (and building services that can be sold to other charities).
Not looking inwards but rather having an appreciation of the trend in modern business of moving from ‘optimised-for-production’ (doing what is efficient for the business) to ‘optimised-for-consumption’ (doing what is effective for the customer) and how that shift will affect charity/retail/ecommerce.