Test Your Niche to Develop Your Organization’s Superpower

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 03. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.

Let’s Get Started Over Lunch

Designing Tomorrow co-host Jonathan Hicken sat down for lunch with Al Ramadan, the Founder and CEO of category design consultancy Play Bigger and co-author of “Play Bigger: How Pirates, Dreamers, and Innovators Create and Dominate Markets”. Al is working with the City of Santa Cruz to develop community solutions to coastal erosion. The Seymour Marine Discover Center that Jonathan leads is located on cliffs overlooking the Monterey Bay.

During lunch, Jonathan and Al talked about the Seymour Center, and he started asking himself these big questions about the organization’s category, or as we call it — niche. This led Eric and Jonathan to talk about five questions that Jonathan thinks are the most important ones to test a social impact organization’s niche.

Here we go.

Question 1: What Specific Problem Does Your Organization Address?

Another way to ask this might be, can you explain to a five-year-old why your organization exists? This thinking is similar to our previous article, Your Theory of Change isn't finished until your Grandma can understand it.

Leaders at social impact organizations don’t spend enough time really going deep on this question. You might have a hand-wavy answer to this question or an intuitive answer. But are you doing a good job explaining it to your team, explaining it to your community of supporters, and really making a case for why this problem needs to be addressed? That's usually where we see things being unclear. At Cosmic, sometimes when we bring on a new client, it takes us a while to figure out what the problem is they’re actually solving. They often describe the work their organization does, but they gloss over why this work matters in the first place.

Some organizations change over time — and not always for the better. In the quest to have more impact, some organizations that have existed for some years go deeper on that impact. Leaders want to include more people in the impact or include more cases of the problem occurring and want to solve more of it. A lot of people talk about this as mission creep — when an organization loses sight of the singular problem that their organization was solving in the first place.

Overcoming Mission Creep

Think about mission creep as a boiling frog problem. It's usually not something that happens in one big chunk. It happens slowly over time. Oftentimes it happens because the nature of the problem is changing. In the best case, it happens because the original problem was solved, and then an organization wonders, well, what else can we do? 

We usually see mission creep as a natural tendency in the social impact space for organizations to see the sector through their origin story. As they do more work against the problem they were originally created to address, they see how that problem connects with others, and how their problem is actually part of a larger systemic or structural issue. And so they want to solve those things as well. And there are times where an organization should solve those problems or they have to solve them in order to address their initial problem.

Know Your Strengths

But there are also times where other organizations are already working on those other parts of the problem and our client’s efforts would be best served by partnering with or supporting these other organizations, staying in their lane, and just getting better at solving the original problem more deeply or more fully. We've seen people overcome this tendency. And we've been the ones to point it out, which can be kind of uncomfortable. But it’s our professional responsibility to do so when we see it. 

One of the reasons we're so passionate about niche is because getting clear on the exact problem that you're solving, how you’re doing it differently than anyone else, and what the stake is that you’re putting in the ground is so important to the success of a social impact organization.

Question 2: If Your Organization Disappeared Tomorrow, Who Would Feel the Most Pain?

One of the first things we do when we're working with a client is target audience work. And when we say target audience work, you might be thinking of developing personas. That's not how we do it. Usually social impact organizations are a micro ecosystem, like a microclimate made up of a lot of different players. They might be donors, supporters, customers, partners, and/or beneficiaries and there's a story that needs to be told. There are messages that need to be crafted for each of those audiences, and there are things that you need those people to do to help support your mission.

We spend a lot of time thinking about how we can break down this community into roughly three to five core segments, and how we can make sure that we are telling the right stories to those segments at the right times. We want to deeply understand their motivations for getting involved with our client. One of the first things we do in that exercise is identify what segment relies on our organization's work most. Is there a primary segment of that target audience strategy? Framing your target audience question as, “If we were to disappear, who would experience the most pain?” can help social impact leaders get to the core of that audience.

A Theoretical Example

If you're an organization that serves parents with young kids who need childcare, one of the challenges you may face as a social impact leader is being inclusive. You want to make sure that we're serving anybody who wants or needs your services. And at the same time, defining your audience is inherently an exclusionary process. You are saying it's these specific parents who need the help. And if you don't have young kids, we don't really exist for you. And that needs to be okay. Those parents are welcome to participate. But for leaders who want to create inclusive spaces and inclusive organizations — which most social impact leaders want to do — it can be a challenging exercise to say also who you are not for. But that's an equally important step in determining your target audiences and niche.

As we're all working to be more inclusive in who we serve and how we show up in our communities, there's a natural tension. And that tension is healthy. But the answer isn’t just  to say that we're for everyone because you're not and you shouldn't be. You need to be comfortable putting down strong boundaries around who you serve and who you don't.

Question 3: What is Your Unique Solution to Solving this Problem?

Are you uniquely positioned to solve the problem you were created to address in a way that's different or better than other people also working in that same problem area? In our experience, there are very few issues that only one organization is focusing on. Among social impact issues, there are usually different parts of the problem that different organizations are serving. 

There's some natural overlap between the problem area that you're solving and what might be called the sub-problem that you're solving and the sub-problem that other organizations are solving. This is why getting clear about your niche is so important. It allows you to say, “This is our lane. Because of reasons X, Y, Z, we're uniquely positioned to do better than everyone else, because of our team, because of our resources.” Whatever the reasons might be, really focus on doing that really, really well.

Develop Your Focus

The more that you can focus, the easier it becomes to know, yes, this is our lane, or no, this isn't. Yes, this is for us. No, this isn't for us. And it allows you to get better. You do more reps across the same things over time instead of having to learn how to solve all these new problems or spin up these new teams. 

Now of course, the world's changing. The problem’s not static. So the nature of the problem is fluid. So you have to be responsive to that. But getting that clarity of purpose around your unique strengths and the unique model that you bring to the table differently or better than anyone else is crucial to your success.

A Real-World Example

Jonathan runs a small aquarium science center, and so he often overlaps with environmental educators and other environmental nonprofits. They all have the same outcomes in mind — some version of environmental education or conservation. But they all have different contributions to that work. And Jonathan thinks it's a strength, it's a benefit, especially in collaborative impact environments and collective impact situations. 

The better defined your unique solution is, the more fruitful a collaboration can be because it's really clear where you fit in the journey of impact — whether it's for an individual or the broader impact overall. Some people might think this is about competition. This is about one-upping someone else in your space. And Jonathan actually says, “On the contrary, this is a way to strengthen collaborations and collective impact and lift everyone up. It makes it more clear for everyone working in this ecosystem.”

Question 4: What are the Ramifications for Not Solving the Problem?

Oftentimes we're working with clients to help them paint a realistic vision for a better future. What are they working towards at a meta level? And this is kind of the opposite of that — if your organization disappears tomorrow, what would be the ramifications of you disappearing at large? And not just for the population that you're helping. 

The climate action space is constantly reminding us that if we don't take action, there will be ramifications. There's a balance here, because if all you do in your messaging and communication is talk about how horrible things will be if we don't solve this problem, you risk demotivating your supporters. People will move away from a space of action into a space of apathy. “Oh my gosh, this thing is just so large and intractable. What's even the point?” You have to be careful around making a case both for the ramifications of not solving the problem, but even more importantly, the benefit to humanity at large of solving it.

Think about projecting the answer to this question outwards. Thinking through this question is a tool to help leaders hone their answers to the first three questions. If you imagine that your organization disappeared tomorrow, what are the ramifications of that? Finding that answer to that question helps leaders understand where they’re having impact. Use it as a litmus test for internal strategy.

Be cautious about using doom and gloom as your main messaging strategy. It only works for so long and then it turns supporters away.

Question 5: Who are Your Competitors or Your Impact Collaborators and How are You Different?

Under the disappearance framework we’ve been using, this question might be reframed as, “If you disappear tomorrow, who would your audience turn to?” Developing an answer to this question can help social impact leaders test their niche and understand their ecosystem.

One of the first things we do when we bring a new client on is a landscape review — essentially our way of getting up to speed with who else is working in their issue area. The landscape analysis helps us identify where there are gaps in the landscape and how to help our client further differentiate and own a niche within the ecosystem. It's really helpful to see both who else is out there doing this work and how they’re positioning themselves. How they’re talking about themselves. 

One challenge we face is that not everyone's very good at differentiating themselves, so you start to see a lot of people in a given space using similar language. I think that's a challenge when trying to advise our clients on how to differentiate.

Help Your Supporters Choose You

Think about this from a potential supporter’s view. If every organization in the space the supporter cares about sounds the same, then who should they support? Everyone's working on this issue. How do they know who's doing it better or worse? And then people start to fall back on either social proof or whatever other ways they make those decisions. 

For a social impact organization’s internal team, it’s important to look at the landscape and at competitors. It’s worthwhile to think about who would take up their portion of the work if your organization disappeared. Taking this approach is a good way to test the boundaries of your niche and see where you might be bouncing against similar aligned organizations in your ecosystem.

The Benefits of Testing Your Niche

We do a lot of niche work with clients. We strongly believe that really clearly identifying and owning a niche is like a superpower for a social impact organization — and one that we wish more social impact organizations spent time working and solving. 

Having and answering these five questions can definitely help people to start testing their niche and realize that their niche work is not ever done. It’s something that you have to constantly evolve as the landscape changes, as the nature of the problem changes, and as the world continues to evolve.

Defining your social impact niche is critical to building a brand that matters and attracting funders, supporters, and advocates. 

Getting your social impact niche right can be the difference between slow, incremental progress, and massive, transformative change for your organization and your mission. We invite you to use the five questions above to test your niche today to be certain that you’re telling your brand story most effectively, differentiating your organization, and grabbing the attention of the people and organizations that can help you move your mission forward faster.