Marketing professor Theodore Levitt once remarked that “People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill. They want a quarter-inch hole.”  The idea is that you need to sell results, not the product or features.

This is why nonprofit marketing gurus talk about having a “you” focus in your nonprofit.  When you are talking about your organization in your marketing and not on how the donor is solving a problem or filling a need, you are talking about the drill and not the hole.

Here’s the trick: a hole is not why people buy drills either.

Maybe they are buying hope for the future, as they use the drill to build a crib.  Maybe they are buying piece of mind – attaching the bookcase to the stud so the toddler doesn’t tip it on to herself or building the sturdy swing set.  Maybe they are buying nostalgia – a way to hang pictures of the toddler and the girl on the slide for when she’s left for college.

In each case, they are hiring the drill to do a job.  This “jobs to be done” framework was posited by Clayton Christensen and colleagues.  And it’s an interesting way to think about our nonprofits – what are donors hiring us to do?

If we can say we are effective at saving lives and changing lives, we are doing a good job of reporting how effective our drill is at making holes.  That’s the first step of why donors hire us, but it’s not close to the whole story.  As Christensen et al say, “Jobs are never simply about function – they have powerful social and emotional dimensions.”

This all ties back to our donors’ identities – who they are relative our organizations and what we are helping them do.

For example, several organizations work right now to help with food, water, and basic educational needs in hard-hit South Sudan.  The impacts a potential donor would be making, then, are similar.

And yet I’m doubtful there is a large overlap in the donors to South Sudanese relief efforts from Catholic Relief Services, Baptist Global Response, and Lutheran World Relief.  Each of these sets of donors is saying something very similar, and very different, about themselves by the organization they choose to support.

This is not to say results are irrelevant.  You will have to prove that you are wisely using donors’ money to make the impact they want.  But results are a means to an end.

To get committed donors – donors who will retain and upgrade and stick with you through the tough times – you need to understand what itch your donors are using you to scratch.  It may be different reasons for different donors, just like different people want to accomplish different things with a drill.  But that is the central mission we have.  If we want people to use our organizations to do a job, we need to know what job it is they want us to do.