Experience design: Creating value for nonprofits

Camilla Lemons, Kayleigh Hudson and Matthew J. Mazzei

Business Horizons, 2025, vol. 68, issue 5, 627-643

Abstract: In today’s hypercompetitive markets, most sectors are saturated with competitors, making it more important than ever for companies to generate unique value for stakeholders. Companies are increasingly and purposefully crafting customer experiences as a means to create such value and to establish competitive advantage. Although for-profits have been quick to adopt the practice of experience design (XD) in developing meaningful experiences and interactions, nonprofit entities have been slow to follow. XD is an integrated and strategic operational approach that creates relevant value for stakeholders of an organization by designing customizable yet consistent brand experiences. The failure to embrace and adopt XD is a missed opportunity for nonprofits. While a well-crafted experience offers a supplemental value for the products and services of for-profit firms, experiences provide a fundamental and exceptional source of value for nonprofit organizations. Thoughtful XD offers the potential to establish trust, improve connectivity, build loyalty, and boost relevance with a diverse set of stakeholders, including donors, employees, and strategic partners. Successful outcomes of well-executed XD at nonprofit organizations include increased donor retention rates, larger financial resource pools, and enhanced societal impact. Our work outlines key principles for implementing XD and equips resource-constrained nonprofits in implementing XD at low cost.

Keywords: Experience design; Nonprofit organizations; Human-centered design; Design thinking; Journey mapping; Brand identity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S000768132400123X
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:bushor:v:68:y:2025:i:5:p:627-643

DOI: 10.1016/j.bushor.2024.08.007

Access Statistics for this article

Business Horizons is currently edited by C. M. Dalton

More articles in Business Horizons from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().