Designing And Delivering A Supported Housing Service For The 'Un-housable'

There is little disagreement in the literature that either a market or a social orientation could apply when marketing activities are targeted towards vulnerable groups. However, there are complexities when considering which orientation would be more appropriately applied in practice to a non-profit organisation's efforts to change both the design and delivery of its service provision for homeless street drinkers given the lack of self-efficacy of the users of such services, and the complexities of researching and meeting their needs. The aim of this paper is to explore these complexities in light of the project's implementation contrary to the express wishes of both the service's employees and the service's users, which would appear to be opposed to both the notion of centrality of customers (in the case of a market orientation) or wider groups of stakeholders (in the case of a social orientation). Although the case study was informed by previous research undertaken by one of the authors of this article who has many years experience of working with homeless street drinkers, the findings presented within this paper are based upon the case of the project, not the earlier qualitative research which informed the service design.