How to Create a Unique Value Proposition for Your Nonprofit with eLearning

Creating a successful nonprofit organization takes many different things, but one of the—if not the most—important thing is to have a unique value proposition. This will set you apart from competitors and, even more importantly, explain succinctly what people will get by supporting your organization.

What is a value proposition

The traditional value proposition is the benefit from buying your product. Whether it be time, convenience, investments, or status. The value could quite literally be anything, but for nonprofits it’s typically more nebulous: how will this nonprofit impact its target community?

The communal nature of nonprofits and its effects

The nonprofit’s value proposition is often communal in nature, “if you support us, we will help this target group, by doing x.” As such, fulfilling a nonprofit’s value proposition typically requires many more steps and services than a typical for-profit product. For example, if your nonprofit organization’s value proposition is to uplift a community by equipping them with skills for jobs, then there’s many steps that you have to go uphold that. Maybe you need to vent people, devise training programs for them, ensure that can follow your programs, then help them find a job. Simple on paper, but complex in practice.

Why is the value proposition so important

One word: funding. With a boom in nonprofits across the United States and a rise in funding-aggregation websites, competing with other nonprofits is made more difficult especially because the essence of these nonprofits need to be boiled down into short value proposition. However, uniqueness is not the only goal here; your promised impact needs to be palpable and foreseeable.

A value proposition must be unique, palpable, and foreseeable

These three adjectives, unique, palpable, and foreseeable, describe how a would-be funder should derive from your value proposition, just removing one makes it much harder for people to bet on you.

Let’s say your value proposition is this: “We are going to develop and deploy trash-eating robots into cities to solve the litter problem.” It certainly is unique: I’ve never seen a robot prowl for trash, and the effect is palpable: imagine all the benefits if your city was cleaner, but it is not foreseeable: that technology is far away from now and, even if it could be done, could you trust people go along with it? Furthering this, imagine a value proposition of “we would like to play tunes from speakers around the city.” Unique: certainly, foreseeable: I don’t see why not, palpable: there would be no impact.

Using learning software for your value proposition

Teaching is one of the most valuable contributions of nonprofits, and therefore, demonstrating that your nonprofit will use tools to educate people can elevate your value proposition. The reasons for this are complex but are outlined above—learning helps communities, has a lasting impact, and is easy to foresee.

How to include education into your value proposition

Some value propositions will be more difficult to include education than others, but, for some nonprofits, education fits directly with their organizations’ goals and should be highlighted in the value proposition. If you are using a learning management system like CoreAchieve, your value proposition could look something like: we’re promoting financial literacy in this area by publishing articles, providing workshops, and offering learning courses online.

Why online courses

You might be looking at the value proposition above and wondering, why does it have to be online courses? Well, it doesn’t have to be, but providing online courses to either employees or community members is a quick, efficient way of teaching people. You could dump your time and money into something like workshops, beneficial in their own way, but what about people who can’t make it because of work, location, or family?

Online courses allow anyone in a nonprofit’s community or organization to learn on their time regardless of their work schedule, location, or homelife. This effect compounds whenever one realizes that the people most often impacted by nonprofits—the poor, the overwhelmed, the barely making it by—are already in a system far greater than and consuming them. Not to mention that online courses allow an organization to expand their influence to other communities.

eLearning, value propositions, and nonprofits

Not every nonprofit will need to incorporate eLearning, but many should. Online learning provides the ability to constantly keep workers within the organization up-to-date on all the needs, issues, and new required skills needed by the nonprofit while providing more opportunities to teach communities and upgrade their value proposition.

Only learning doesn’t have to be expensive

Nonprofits don’t have to worry about the cost of learning software, CoreAchieve offers a completely free version that comes with all functionality, so you can implement and play with the software with no time limit.

If used properly with value proposition, eLearning can boost the funding received by a nonprofit organization. Especially as eLearning allows for training across the world, meaning more people will be willing to provide funding. Incorporating online learning content is an investment for longevity, whether it be the community or the nonprofit.