Nonprofit organizations are increasingly the service providers of social marketing programs which once were almost exclusively government funded. For support, however, they must draw upon a literature which does not well understand what the impact of business methodologies such as marketing will have on organizations whose rationale is to manage conflicts of interest. The research utilizes a typology of nonprofit organizations based on the dimensions of finance and control to test the applicability of the marketing orientation in a survey of 270 nonprofit organizations. Contrary to marketing orientation theory, the organizations did not exhibit any of the three marketing orientation components. Instead all the four types exhibited the same needs awareness component. The finding suggests that these organizations understand their end-users but do not focus on satisfying their needs in the way that market-oriented businesses do because of the presence of conflicts of interest. Validation for the typology was found.