Want to Improve Your Client's Experience? Just Add Hospitality!

What do hotels and direct service nonprofit organizations have in common?  More than you might think.

As you know, social sector organizations provide crucial services, resources and care to countless individuals every day. But these same organizations also face many challenges to delivering top-notch service to clients, such as staffing constraints and financial limitations.  Could an increased focus on hospitality and client service, a strategy honed by the hotel industry, be a vital part of solving these challenges, sectorwide?

This is the promise of the Hospitality + Service initiative, a new offering for nonprofits developed in partnership by Hilton Worldwide, Taproot Foundation and Points of Light.  Hospitality + Service consists of two key resources:

·         Hospitality + Service Curriculum for client-facing nonprofit staff and volunteers

·         Hospitality by Design, a toolkit for nonprofit leaders.

These first-of-its-kind resources bring best practices, strategies and tools, time-tested in the for-profit service industry, to the nonprofit sector.

The Hospitality + Service Curriculum presents practical, easy-to-implement hospitality techniques and information through seven modules. The curriculum is filled with exercises to keep the training engaging and can be facilitated either as individual hour-long sessions or a daylong seminar. 

Hospitality + Service’s toolkit for nonprofit leaders, Hospitality by Design, provides an easy-to-navigate guide to incorporating hospitality into your organization.  By hospitality, we’re not talking about a mint on your pillow, but rather the art of creating a warm, welcoming and safe experience for all clients. The toolkit focuses on the areas ripest for positive impact, including, Building Hospitality from the Ground Up, Knowing Your Client, Building a Strong Team, Facilities Design and Measuring Client Satisfaction.  

So, you may be asking, what, really, can hospitality do for my organization?  

We would argue, a lot.

A strategic focus on hospitality can help you deepen the impact of your mission by increasing client response to your services, tracking and improving client satisfaction, sharing that impact and, in turn increasing funding for your services.  Hospitality by Design guides nonprofit leaders through the journey of embedding hospitality within their organization, all with the intention of increasing social impact.

So whether your organization is already prioritizing hospitality or just starting to think about the effect hospitality can have, we invite you to explore the entire Hospitality + Service offering. We promise a very warm welcome when you do. 

The curriculum and toolkit are available for download on the Hospitality + Service homepage, providing easy, free access to any nonprofit leader.