If the COVID-19 pandemic taught us anything, it’s the importance of keeping a nimble mind and adapting to an ever-changing world. At this year’s ProCon—the JCCs of North America Professional Conference—that theme was fully embraced with a reimagined virtual event that brought together JCC professionals from across the country, as well as from JCC Global and Israel for the first time.
During the event, our Director of Enterprise Marketing Christy Brown contributed to the discussion and learnings with a presentation on reinventing revenue streams. During her session, she provided an overview of market trends and peer insights, as well as a comprehensive action plan for reimagining programs to drive increased revenue. Below we’ll highlight some of the main takeaways.
Mega Trends Impacting JCCs
If you want to refine your offerings to better support your members and drive increased revenue, the first step is understanding what your members emotionally and physically need. What are they worried about? What has their attention? What factors are affecting their overall wellbeing? To find the answer to these questions, mega trends can be a useful tool to guide your focus.
According to the American Psychological Association’s Stress in America 2020 report, Americans are increasingly concerned with three main topics: safety, health, and community.
Safety
- 58% of Americans are seriously concerned with personal safety (an 18% year-over-year increase). Among their concerns, bankcard fraud and identity theft are the highest. Additionally, 63% of Americans are seriously concerned with epidemics and natural disasters.
Health
- 61% of people lost or gained more weight than they wanted to in the last year, 67% are concerned about their family members’ health, and 78% report feeling significantly stressed.
Community
- 59% of Americans are worried about violence toward minorities. 55% are stressed about climate change, and 36% report serious loneliness.
One more startlingly statistic: 71% of Americans feel that right now is the lowest point in our nation’s history. However, the same amount of people also feels hopeful about the future.
So, what does all this mean? It means that while there are several issues and concerns plaguing your members, they also have hope that someone or something will make it better. That’s where your organization comes in. With a more holistic understanding of your community’s core needs, you’ll be better equipped to innovate new ways your organization can meet those needs.
Learning from Peer Insights
Once you’ve identified the major themes impacting your members, take some time to learn from your peers and see what they’re doing to adapt to a changing market. A good place to start is Daxko’s Accelerate Leadership Roundtable series.
During the series, we give changemakers within the nonprofit movement the chance to share how they’re innovating to better serve their members. Past and upcoming themes include: challenging what it means to be a donor or a member, expanding community partnerships to multiply results, telling the story behind how your organization brings community together, and driving staff morale to drive further impact.
Four Steps to Reimagining Revenue Streams
With research from market trends and peer insights under your belt, it’s time to take action to revise and improve your revenue streams, beginning with your programs. Follow this basic framework to get started.
- Audit your current programs
- Explore new program opportunities.
- Get your message out.
- Scale your processes and staff.
Audit Your Current Programs
The best way to evaluate your current programs is by creating a program map to measure community impact vs. profitability. For example, preschool is highly profitable but also highly impactful. Social programming for students with special needs may not be highly profitable, but it is highly impactful.
Remember: You’re a nonprofit, so many programs will operate on a deficit, and that’s OK. To help make up for those deficits, look for areas where you can scale profitable endeavors and adapt current programs to increase both impact and profit.
Explore New Opportunities
Dig deeper into your community by leveraging community resources, conducting internal research and focus groups, and considering industry trends to inform ways you can better serve your members with programming. Tap into resources like Community Health Needs Assessments published by local hospitals to provide insight into where your community is lacking.
Operationalize your findings by applying what you’ve learned to your own organization. Use outcome-driven research to figure out what outcomes your members are trying to drive, rather than what immediate “wants” they think they have. For example, a member could report a need for more treadmills because they can never find two next to each other when they want to work out with a friend. What they might really be saying is they need a way to ensure accountability for their workouts. This could be better solved by increased group fitness classes that drive more revenue.
Get Your Message Out
Once you’ve identified a plan for new programming, it’s essential that you have a complete go-to-market plan. If you’re investing in reinventing your offerings, your efforts will be wasted without an equally impressive marketing plan to get the word out.
One email about a new program offering won’t do the trick. In addition to outbound email, consider the following outlets when developing a marketing strategy:
- SMS Texting
- Social media accounts
- SEO management
- Directory listings
- Content marketing
- Paid ads
- Push notifications
If your team doesn’t include a dedicated marketing professional, consider enlisting help from Daxko. Our expert digital marketing team can develop a comprehensive strategy that includes many of the mentioned outlets. An intelligent member engagement assistant like Conversica can also be a huge help in messaging members to make sure they’re aware of your new offerings.
Scale Your Staff
The final step in the process of reinventing revenue streams is to focus on your efficiency. Consider implementing technology solutions to ease the burden from your staff, so they have more time to focus on the relationship-building, revenue-driving jobs they were hired to do. With tools like Daxko’s member management platform, you can scale time-consuming tasks, making more time to focus on the big picture of changing lives with your organization.
Ready to start reinventing? Schedule a free operational analysis with our team to identify areas where you can reinvent revenue streams.