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Focus On What Gets You 5/5

April 27, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

According to a piece in Harvard Business Review about what companies can learn from their biggest fans, apparently only the highest levels of satisfaction will result in an increase of productivity and revenue and reverse downward trends. This is apparently true for both customers and employees

According to the article author, Marcus Buckingham, the wrong way to turn around a problematic environment whether it be customer or employee disengagement/dissatisfaction isn’t to fix what is broken but rather to invest more effort into the organization’s strengths. And those strengths are only found within the areas identified as extremely positive experiences.

Marketing research consistently shows that incentives and loyalty perks produce short-term transaction spikes but no increase in lifetime customer value…

[….]

To truly move people toward positive outcomes, leaders must pay attention to what I call “extreme positive experiences”—which make employees speak with genuine passion about their work and customers not just prefer but love a product or service—and then operationalize what’s working in those experiences.

Source

This obviously makes sense but what I was really surprised to learn is that the experience has to indeed be rated as extremely positive to effect the sought for change. Only 5/5 is effective, 4/5 won’t do. Apparently combining the 4s and 5s results to arrive at a satisfaction score doesn’t provide an accurate measure. People cram more satisfaction between 4 and 5 than 3 and 4.

Someone who gives a 5 out of 5 rating to something has an altogether different experience of that thing than someone who rates it a 4 does. (That’s why leaders should never combine 4 and 5 ratings into a single “percent favorable” bucket when trying to understand what experiences to design for employees or customers; it’s also why the Net Promoter Score, which combines the top two scores on the scale, is a problematic metric.)

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Buckingham cites the example of Kroger supermarkets when rival Publix supermarket chain was opening stores in the Cincinnati market. Based on feedback from customers, Kroger redoubled their efforts to have their employees focus on adding and improving personal interactions with customers, including training them to take groceries to shoppers’ cars and load them safely.

After surveying employees about things that improved their satisfaction, they ended up identifying people who really enjoyed and were invested in cleaning. Kroger management arranged things so that those people were protected in doing that work. In other words, they created an environment and process where these employees were not interrupted or reassigned from performing this work.

I should note Buckingham mentioned he consults for Kroger. He may not be entirely unbiased in his account of their success. On the other hand, Kroger is headquartered in Cincinnati so any loss of market share to Publix on their home turf would be an assault on their pride. They were likely highly motivated to achieve great results.

It seems they did. Leaning into those things that rated highly with both employees and customers, they saw some positive results. Their loss of business to Publix was reduced to 48% of what they projected and some of the stores in the Cincinnati-Dayton district had revenue increases.

Perhaps even more important was the improvement in job satisfaction for employees.

In the months following their introduction, team engagement scores increased seven points, and associate turnover dropped by 10.9%. Customers’ ratings of store cleanliness increased by 28.9 points, and their ratings of associate friendliness in the stores jumped 45 points, leading to a 4.5% increase in overall customer satisfaction.

Source

Audience Relations, Building Public Will For Arts And Culture, Leadership, Management Philosophy, Marketing/PR

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Using Your Imagination Is The Test

April 22, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Last week I heard a news story about the Department of Education moving to require colleges and universities to provide graduates are better off with a degree than a high school diploma or risk losing their funding.

I thought back to the survey years ago where corporate CEOs said that the top skill new hires needed to move their companies forward is creativity.

To me the increased push toward only granting degrees for a unitarian result measured in wages represented a disconnect between the federal government and the stated needs of corporations.

Though granted, that survey was about a decade ago and now many companies are laying people off in favor of AI. It should be no surprise to anyone that short term profit tops long term corporate goals.

Seth Godin addressed this to a degree in a post he made in early March where he said society is increasingly focused on the question, “Will This Be On The Test?” vs. “What If..”.

He says exercising creativity and imagination is actually harder work than people credit.

Imagination is a skill and it takes effort.

It’s not useful to say, “I’m not imaginative.”

It’s more accurate to realize that we might not care enough to get good at it, or to put in the effort it takes.

As tasks continue to be automated, the hard work of imagination is worth investing effort in.

Source

creativity

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Fund Raising Platforms May Be Raising Money Without Your Approval

April 21, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Over on the Charity Lawyer blog Ellis Carter recently posted on a topic that was not on my radar at all. Twenty-three states have sent a letter to GoFundMe regarding donation pages created for 1.5 million non-profits without their knowledge and consent. Apparently Alaska’s attorney general has filed suits against six other donation platforms for doing the same thing.

So you may want to check to see if there are donation pages created in your organization’s name that you did not ask for.

Carter explains some of the issues with this:

…Donors may believe the nonprofit approved the donation page when it did not. The nonprofit may have no control over the content of the page. The nonprofit may not know donations are being solicited in its name. And the nonprofit may be left to deal with donor confusion and regulatory questions about a fundraising effort it never authorized.

…..If a platform creates a donation page without a nonprofit’s knowledge or approval, there is no clear assurance that the nonprofit agreed with the way it was described, understood how donations would be processed, or accepted the legal and practical consequences of the arrangement.

That should concern both charities and donors. Charitable giving depends on public trust, and that trust is weakened when fundraising happens in a nonprofit’s name without the nonprofit’s consent…

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Additionally, Carter says she has actually had clients ran into trouble when they decided to stop soliciting donations in states only to have state regulators point to these unauthorized pages and question whether the organization had truly stopped soliciting.

One of the reasons why the possibility of this situation hadn’t been on my radar is because I assumed sites like GoFundMe has a process for verifying a page was actually created by the non-profit named. The fact they are creating pages without an organization’s knowledge leads me to suspect it would be easy for an imposter to create fake pages in a non-profit’s name as well.

Which again, suggests it may be wise to check for unauthorized fund raising efforts on some of these websites.

Fundraising, Info You Can Use

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Succession Planning Case Study And Resources

April 20, 2026

by:

Joe Patti

Last week, CreativeWest hosted a high quality webinar on succession planning. The guest speakers were Roy Hirabayshi, a founder of San Jose Taiko, and Tom Clareson of the Bay Area Arts Readiness Network ond Lyrasis. (Slide decks of their presentations are available.)

Roy talked about the succession planning San Jose Taiko undertook when he and his wife PJ, the Executive Director and Artistic Director, respectively, decided to retire.

I recall hearing when they retired but I was unaware they had started their succession planning seven years prior. What I found valuable about Roy’s presentation was his discussion of all the things they considered. It wasn’t just internal factors like who would succeed them, what records and information needed to be passed on, and what the impact of losing the institutional memory of two of the founders departing at the same time.

They were also concerned about the local community, including the Japantown community in San Jose. Their relationship with taiko groups in Japan and across the US, relationships with donors and funders. They worked across the succession preparation years to cultivate relationships between their successors and these external entities so that there was a level of comfort and familiarity.

They also recognized that there was a need to pay attention to cultural stewardship elements, including musical instruments, scores, and preservation of cultural expression which they embodied.

Tom Clareson’s presentation was more focused on the perspective of what do you do when you don’t have a lot of time to prepare for leadership transitions. Many of his suggestions fell into the general practice of regularly documenting and updating plans, descriptions of procedures, using a standard filing and naming process so that successors have an easier time accessing and understanding what needs to be done.

Emergencies and disasters played a big part in his presentation as well. Even if there is no loss of personnel, having back-ups, redundancies, plans of action for continuing operations in the face of natural disasters, emergencies and technological crises is important.

He said they have added a new category known as Administrative Disasters which includes funding changes/cuts; reputational disasters, event cancellations, socio-political shifts, and succession planning, as areas non-profit organizations should prepare for.

His slide deck had a lot of resources and links related to these issues. Due to recent events he had a couple slides devoted to questions about how small organizations can do succession planning and maintain programmatic and collections management continuity during staffing/leadership gaps caused by the loss of federal funding.