Are nonprofits from Mars and corporations from Venus?

I love people who love nonprofits.

People who love nonprofits are passionate believers. They celebrate the aspirations, the rewarding work, the innovation, the camaraderie, and everything in between. They embrace the mission like a dog who finally found its way home.

These nonprofit lovers show up as staff, board members, donors, volunteers, clients, or people seeking beauty, help, or connection. They’re all part of the same human story, and they’re all good in my book.

But sometimes I think nonprofits are from Mars and corporations are from Venus. Everyone cares deeply about advancing the work — increasing impact, producing quality results, experiencing joy — yet their assumptions about how nonprofits operate can collide like planets on a misaligned orbit.

Years ago, Tom Packard, a social work professor at San Diego State, gave me the clearest way I’ve ever heard to explain the differences among the nonprofit, for‑profit, and government sectors. It starts with three simple definitions:

The customer is the person who pays.

The client is the person who is served.

The constituent is the person who cares about the entity.

Once you apply those definitions, the nonprofit business model suddenly looks like a spinning‑plates‑on‑sticks balancing act.

In nonprofits, the customer — the entity that pays — is rarely the person receiving the service. Customers might be government agencies – cities, counties, states or the feds, foundations, corporations, or individual donors – large and small. Even ticket buyers at theaters, museums, or concerts are enjoying experiences subsidized by someone else’s generosity, because earned revenue almost never covers the full cost.

Simply put: the client receives goods or services that someone else has paid for.

And constituents? They may care deeply about the mission without being customers or clients. Even the ultra‑wealthy can’t support every worthwhile nonprofit on the planet — if they did, they wouldn’t have any money left.

My purpose in writing this is to help people outside the sector understand the complexity nonprofits navigate every day. The expectations are high, the needs are rising, and the financial pressures are real. Frankly, things have never been more dire.

So please: educate yourself, open your wallet, and open your heart to the nonprofits you love. They may be from Mars, but they’re working hard to keep life on Earth a little more humane.

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Pat Libby is a change management consultant working principally with nonprofit corporations. She is author of The Empowered Citizens Guide: 10 Steps to Passing a Law that Matters to You, Oxford University Press, The Lobbying Strategy Handbook, second edition, Oxford University Press, and Cases in Nonprofit Management, Second Edition, Cognella. She has served as an academic, senior executive, board member, and consultant to innumerable nonprofit organizations and foundations for more than three decades.

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