October 2, 2013
A Complaint is a Rose Waiting to Bloom
By Kay Nakamura
Every nonprofit has received a call or member complaint. It doesn’t feel good. It is awful to know that you have let someone who believed in you down but should you chalk it up to a one-time event and let it pass?
Embrace the negative! It is feedback in its truest form. Appreciate and welcome sour comments. Complaints are often delivered with emotion and passion. How you respond, your sincerity in solving the problem, and your return feedback to your member or client can turn a bad experience into a bed of roses. Member, client and donor retention is a risk issue for nonprofits. By addressing discontent promptly with a well laid plan, you can retain your stakeholder and get good word-of-mouth marketing in the same.
Stakeholders with solved problems are gold mines for your organization.
- Happy customers who get their issues solved tell about 4-6 people about their experience. — White House Office of Consumer Affairs
- It costs 6-7 times more to acquire a new [customer] than retain an existing one. — Bain & Company
Join me today at 2:00 EST for our webinar: Tending the Garden of Complaints: Transforming How You Approach Stakeholder Discontent.
Kay Nakamura is Director of Client Solutions at the Nonprofit Risk Management Center. She welcomes your feedback about this article, or your questions about the Center’s products and services. Kay can be reached at (202) 785-3891 or Kay@nonprofitrisk.org.
Risk Webinars
Policy Drafting Help is a Click Away: My Risk Management Policies
If you’re looking for help developing custom risk management policies for your nonprofit, look no further. The Center is pleased to offer My Risk Management Policies, an affordable, easy-to-use online tool that helps you create custom policies in a matter of minutes. Policy templates are organized into 22 categories. Creating a new social media policy, youth protection policy or code of conduct is a snap using My Risk Management Policies, and requires far less time that it takes to find a mildly suitable sample using an Internet search engine.
Pass it On!
If you enjoy reading the Center’s Risk eNews and know others who would as well, please use the Forward email link that appears at the bottom of this issue. The link offers an easy way to share this issue with a colleague. When you use the link your colleague will receive an invitation to subscribe.
© 2013 Nonprofit Risk Management Center