How social impact tech companies can leverage April Dunford's positioning formula.
Your company built a powerful tool to tackle mission-critical challenges for organizations—and you do it better than anyone else. But with 1.9 million nonprofits, standing out in this crowded space is tough. Competition is also at an all-time high, with Omatic reporting that nonprofit tech platforms alone have nearly tripled since 2010.
To grab the attention of overwhelmed customers, your product needs to truly shine to reach the right buyers. The first step? Reevaluate your strategy for securing your place in the market—aka positioning.
Positioning is the bedrock of growth, shaping everything from your messaging to demand generation, sales and even your roadmap. Yet, it’s often neglected until numbers dip and leadership starts asking tough questions.
Let’s be clear: positioning isn’t just a description of what your product does well. It’s your unique approach for winning the market.
A New Approach to Positioning
As a marketer with 17 years of experience across six different nonprofit tech companies, I’ve explored various positioning methods, including those from Pragmatic Institute and Product Marketing Alliance. While these approaches provide solid best practices, they’re time-consuming, overlook how your prospect views competitive alternatives and IMHO, don't naturally translate into sales pitches or decks.
Then I came across April Dunford’s book, Obviously Awesome, and it felt like discovering the Northwest Passage of positioning. It's more efficient, powerful, and gets you to the promised land faster. Her approach cuts out unnecessary research, especially feature-driven competitive analysis, and delivers a strategy that’s distinctly yours—something competitors can’t copy and, most importantly, that sales teams actually love.
Here’s what April Dunford’s winning formula means for social impact companies:
1 - Identify Your Best-Fit Customers
It’s easy to get bogged down in endless market and competitive research, instead start by focusing on your existing customers who already love your product and are good for your business. Don’t worry about figuring out why certain customers don’t fit—just understand which ones do. Prioritize your wins over your losses and look for patterns among your best customers. Create a short list of your best-fit customers to refer back to during the positioning exercise.
2 - List Your Top Competitive Alternatives
Instead of drilling down on the top companies/products who are competitors, identify the alternatives that your customers see as solutions to their problem. The distinct value of your product is defined by how it compares to alternatives in the minds of your customers. Most organizations aren’t fully aware of their options, so it’s vital to focus on what they perceive as alternatives—including doing nothing (the biggest deal-killer of all).
Ask yourself: What would your best-fit customer do if your product didn’t exist?
It’s easy to dismiss options that don’t seem like direct competitors. For example, if your product is a nonprofit marketing platform, you might consider Salesforce Marketing Cloud, HubSpot, Feathr, or Bonterra as your main rivals. But what if your best customers consistently compare you to something in a weird category, like GoDaddy? This actually works in your favor as your differentiated value will much easier to explain.
After all, if you’re a Fuji apple, you want to compete against an orange, not a Red Delicious!
Here’s another example: At a company I worked with, we asked DBAs at large nonprofits what problems they were solving with our CRM. One common issue was removing duplicates for direct mail—a costly data problem. But when asked what they’d do without our product, they didn’t mention other nonprofit tech companies—they said they’d use a data warehouse or a commercial business intelligence tool instead. Similarly, when we asked smaller nonprofits the same question, they either did nothing or relied on spreadsheets—not another company.
From a positioning standpoint, understanding what a customer might replace you with is key in understanding how they categorize your product. Once you know what they’re comparing you to, it's much easier to show your differentiated value—especially to prospects. In the example above, the competitive alternatives are 1) spreadsheets, 2) a data warehouse or BI tool, and 3) no action.
3 - Analyze the Approaches of Top Competitors
After you’ve identified 3-5 competitive alternatives, group them by their approach to solving the problem. Instead of diving into value or feature comparisons, focus on your unique approach to tackling the issue at hand. For example, if you’re one of the hundreds of fundraising tools, you would focus on your unique approach to raising money.
What people really want to know is how you're different from how they’re currently solving the problem.
By framing the conversation around your approach to solving their top problems, you give your sales team a powerful tool—a perspective that helps prospects rethink the pros and cons of different approaches to the problem. This is much more impactful than simply listing the ways you deliver value.
Here’s an example of competitive approaches for a mock nonprofit marketing platform:
Competitive Approach 1: Siloed tracking
Separate tools for each channel, like email and social.
Pros: Specialized tools for each channel.
Cons: Data is fragmented, harder to get a full picture, more manual work.
Competitive Approach 2: Do nothing
No dedicated tracking system in place; manual efforts like spreadsheets.
Pros: No cost.
Cons: Time-consuming, prone to errors, lacks insight for strategic decision-making.
Your Approach: Built-in campaign tracking
Integrated tracking for campaigns and engagement across all channels.
Pros: Centralized data, real-time insights, streamlined reporting.
Cons: Requires initial setup and customization.
By focusing on the pros and cons of different approaches (before a demo), you set the stage for a deeper discussion about why your approach is uniquely suited to solve their problem.
4 - Isolate Your Unique Attributes
Start by listing what makes your product special, including features and strengths that the competitive approaches lack. It’s okay if not every capability is unique compared to all competitors; the key is to organize these capabilities into three overarching themes and ask, “So what?” to uncover the true value.
PRO-TIP: Stay away from pure value statements like “raise more money” or “save time”—those are expected.
Here’s how to structure it:
UNIQUE ATTRIBUTE | BENEFIT | VALUE |
Gala Events Automation | Personalized event experience using past activity | Increase revenue from galas |
Event Prospect Scoring | Identify attendees with the highest likelihood to renew at an event | Improve retention of major donors who attend events |
5 - Group Values Into Themes
After creating your list of unique attributes and their corresponding benefits, you’ll likely notice natural patterns in your value statements. These patterns can be grouped into overarching themes that encapsulate the differentiated value of your product.
Here’s an example:
Value Theme 1: Increase revenue from galas
Value Theme 2: Boost retention of major donors who attend events
6 - Define Characteristics of Customers Who Care
For each value theme, determine what makes a target account care deeply about the value you provide. List the traits of accounts that are most aligned with the value you offer.
VALUE | CHARACTERISTICS |
Increased revenue from galas | Gala raises between $50K and $1M |
Annual contributions $5M-$25MHealth, Arts & Culture, Human Services | |
Retention of major donors who attend events | Total contributions $3M-$25MMajor donor program with dedicated staff |
Advocacy, Arts & Culture, Human Services |
7 - Choose the Right Market Category
Defining the market category your product fits into helps customers understand where to position your offering—be it CRM, Online Giving, or Marketing—allowing for easy comparisons with other options. This is particularly effective if your product fits neatly within an established category. But what if it doesn’t?
Take Attentive.ly, for example: the first social listening platform for nonprofits. In 2016, I was the marketing director at a startup focused on this niche. Our tool helped nonprofits identify influencers in their CRM—a groundbreaking concept (now illegal under GDPR). At the time, terms like “influencer” and “social listening” were new to the sector. We faced a choice: stick with the familiar but competitive fundraising category or claim a new one?
After gathering market feedback, we chose “social listening for nonprofits,” and it paid off. We generated demand, ranked as the #1 search result, and was voted by hundreds of nonprofits as a "must-have" tool. This attracted new customers and led to our acquisition within only two years.
Your Business Leader Should Own Positioning
Because positioning is a business strategy for winning your slice of the market, it's essential for your business leader to lead the positioning team. While marketing often spots red flags and should be involved, true buy-in comes from executive participation.
April Dunford says: “A positioning exercise that’s not a team effort driven by the business leader will fail.”