I think it’s important we understand how people form relationships and connections with nonprofit organizations. Prior to reading the Michalski and Helmig article I had never thought about how people become attached to one organization over another. I had also never thought about the varying degrees to which people associated their personal identity to membership or donations to a nonprofit. But it makes sense we should know how these attachments happen. I think it can also provide reflections on the organization itself.
By this I mean if organizations can learn what it is about their mandate, values, services, etc that people connect with the most it gives them a clearer picture of what their work means to the community at large and not just their client base. It might also help to give nonprofits insight into what their community likes most about their organization and also address any gaps that might appear. In other words, if a nonprofit focuses the most on their services and finds out people in the community are actually connecting most with a particular service, it might help the nonprofit refocus on what the community needs at that point in time. The set of questions used in the article could be retooled to provide a scope of a nonprofit’s programs and given to members of the community. Perhaps patterns would emerge around popular programs. For example, a social service nonprofit could create sets of questions for each of their services using the five-point scale. Maybe a set of questions for employment services, counseling and computer literacy just as examples. People from the community could answer and if there were higher instances of identity salience with employment services the nonprofit could react accordingly. The five-point model used is good but I think it could be expanded on.
S. Michalski & B. Helmig. (2008). What Do We Know About the Identity Salience Model of Relationship Marketing Success? A Review of the Literature. Journal of Relationship Marketing, 7-1
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