Nonprofit Power Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Nonprofit Power Podcast

Kath Patrick

Business

Education

Frequency: 1 episode/7d. Total Eps: 105

If you’re a progressive nonprofit leader who wants to build powerful influence with the money and policy decisionmakers in your world, but aren’t happy with your progress, help has arrived! Host Kath Patrick has been teaching and coaching leaders on these vital skills for 25+ years, and now she shares her secrets for advocacy success with you every week.

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Data updated on 04/07/2026

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https://workbook.nonprofitpowerpodcast.com
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Score global : 52%

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Three Ways to Take Maximum Advantage of the Congressional Recess Right Now

Episode 105

Sunday, July 27, 2025 • Duration 19:37

Members of Congress are on their way home as we speak, for basically a month long recess, which is known in Congressional speak as a district work period. I want to make sure you have everything you need to take full advantage of this significant opportunity, while you have them right there, easily accessible to you home in the district.

And I know. I hear you. You could be forgiven for thinking that you don't want to see another member of Congress for as long as you live, given how they've been behaving as a body lately. But whoever you've got representing you, they're who you've got right now. Even if we're displeased with them or frustrated with them, we still need to engage them. We still need them doing as much as possible on behalf of the people we serve and the work that we do.

The good news is that your chances of highly successful engagement go way up when they’re home in the district or state – if you know how to leverage the three best ways to engage them.

In this episode, we share:

How members of Congress operate differently when they’re home, and how that creates exceptional opportunities for engagement
The unique advantages offered by a strategically designed program visit
How to create a powerful engagement experience at your program, that is strategically designed to produce results
The boring, but essential action you need to take immediately to ensure your success
How to leverage the unique features of town hall meetings for maximum impact
What NOT to do with your messaging in a town hall setting
How to create empowering and successful opportunities for your clients, volunteers and supporters to be involved in engaging your members of Congress at home

Link: Episode 31 – How to Get Maximum Results from a Decisionmaker’s Visit to Your Program

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The Four Essential Elements at the Heart of High-Impact Advocacy Messaging

Episode 104

Sunday, July 20, 2025 • Duration 29:24

The stakes are really high with advocacy messaging these days, especially for nonprofits. Effective messaging is so critical to every aspect of engaging decisionmakers. At any point in the process, no matter where you are in your relationship with them, your messaging has to work.

But we face a big problem. There's so much noise, there's so many reasons for decisionmakers not to pay attention to or engage with our messaging, that we can't afford to get it wrong.

Today I’m focusing on the four essential elements that are absolutely at the core of high-impact advocacy messaging. If you're missing any one of these four, your messaging's not going to work. So let's take those apart and make sure you have what you need so that you can be generating high-impact messaging all the time.

In this episode, we share:

How to lead with a single statement that captures the essence of what you do and the powerful impact of your work
How to deal with decisionmakers who over-generalize about the problems you solve
How to dismantle the biases and assumptions decisionmakers are making about the people you serve
How to weave together the four essential messaging elements in a short story that engages each decisionmaker and targets their particular aspect of “not getting it”
Four questions to ask yourself to take your core advocacy messaging to even higher levels of effectiveness

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

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Three Areas of Personal Growth that Will Have the Biggest Impact on Your Advocacy Success

Episode 103

Friday, July 11, 2025 • Duration 28:25

Our personal growth as an advocate and as a leader is probably the single most important ingredient for our advocacy success. And yet, it’s one of the things we most often overlook. We don't give enough time and attention to it.

There's a lot of ‘doing’ in advocacy and that's quite naturally what we tend to focus on. But at the core of it all is your growth, your strength, your capacity as a leader and as an advocate.

But how do we grow as a leader, as an engager of decisionmakers and as a powerfully influential advocate? A lot of the growth happens in the doing. But the degree of growth, the levels we reach, are determined by how intentional we are about achieving that growth.

That's what I want to talk about with you today.

In this episode, we share:

Two indicators that it’s time to take one or more of your advocacy skills to the next level
How to create highly effective habits that will cause you to be more powerfully influential with decisionmakers
How to increase your ability to operate from the identity of a powerfully influential leader
One powerful question to ask yourself to take your growth to higher levels
The simple action that will help you stay motivated while you do the work of growing
How to get support for your personal growth work around advocacy

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The Fastest Way to Get Decisionmakers to Value, Respect, and Rely on Your Expertise

Episode 102

Monday, July 7, 2025 • Duration 27:30

One of the biggest frustrations that I hear from Nonprofit leaders is that much too often for comfort, decisionmakers fail to recognize or value our expertise. And when that happens, they're not listening to us in the same way. They're less inclined to take our advice and to give real weight to our assessment of what needs to be done differently. And all of that makes our advocacy work so much harder.

One of the questions I get most often is, what can I do to get decisionmakers to regard me as the expert that I know I am? How do I get them to see me as a highly expert resource that they should be relying on?

The good news is there is a way to do this and it doesn't have to take forever.

In this episode, we share:

The likely reasons decisionmakers aren’t realizing the value of your expertise
One thing you must do if you want decisionmakers to take notice of your expertise
Three common mistakes that will cause decisionmakers to overlook your expertise
The next-level expertise most valued by decisionmakers
How to demonstrate your expertise in a way that will grab decisionmakers’ attention
What makes you an essential person to have in the room, from the decisionmaker’s perspective

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Decisionmakers Do Not Care About Your Services! (and That's OK if You Know What To Do)

Episode 101

Sunday, June 29, 2025 • Duration 28:14

Here’s an uncomfortable truth: Money and policy decisionmakers do not care about your services.

This uncomfortable truth is a source of frustration for so many Nonprofit leaders, and it doesn't have to be. But we have to understand it and learn how to work with it in order for it to be okay.

You’ve probably had this experience. You're talking to a decision maker and you get the feeling that they really don't care about your services. It's because they don't. But that doesn't mean they don't care about what you do. It just means that for them, the services themselves are the least important detail.

The secret to engaging messaging is understanding what the important details are, from their perspective. And to focus your messaging on that.

In this episode, we share:

What decisionmakers really care about with respect to your work
The biggest messaging mistake we tend to make, other than focusing on our services
How to break the most problematic messaging habits we’ve all developed
Two layers of messaging elements that will transform your messaging’s effectiveness
How to distinguish yourself from the competition (particularly for-profit competitors) in terms that matter to decisionmakers
How to train your brain to use the new messaging under pressure, without role play

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The Most Powerful Thing Nonprofit Leaders Can Do Right Now to Preserve Medicaid and SNAP

Episode 100

Sunday, June 22, 2025 • Duration 32:06

The potential for massive cuts to Medicaid and SNAP moved one step closer to reality when the Senate voted its version of the big ugly bill out of committee. The good news is there are still quite a few hurdles to clear before those terrible policies have a chance of becoming law. Which means there are that many more opportunities to defeat them.

Nonprofit leaders have a critical role to play in defeating these proposals. We are definitely not alone in this work. But we do have some unique abilities and opportunities to have a significant impact on the outcome.

We’ve also learned more over the last few months about what works in this particular environment. Our challenge now is to take those lessons and apply them to our advocacy work going forward, so that we can prevail in this fight.

In this episode, we share:

The two keys to defeating the big ugly bills that would slash Medicaid and SNAP
What our opponents are counting on, and how we can wreck their core strategy
The top tactical maneuver we must anticipate and be ready to counter
The biggest mistake we’re likely to make, and how to prevent it
How to create a steady stream of high-impact advocacy messaging without devoting tons of time to it
How to leverage the unique advantages you have as a nonprofit leader to build vocal opposition to these bills

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The Shortest Distance Between Where You Are Now and the Advocacy Results You Want

Episode 99

Saturday, June 14, 2025 • Duration 23:05

I have a really important question I want to ask you. How satisfied are you, really, with the advocacy results that you're currently getting?

Chances are, you're frustrated with at least one of the money or policy decision makers in your world. And there could be a lot of reasons for that frustration.

But here's something you may not have considered. That frustration could be the biggest thing getting in the way of the results you want. In this week’s episode, we're diving into two powerful ways to shorten the distance to those results.

In this episode, we share:

The number one secret to getting the advocacy results you want
How to uncover the hidden sources of much of your frustration with decisionmakers, and why it matters
The critical piece of advocacy strategy most nonprofit leaders are missing
How to turn our frustrations with decisionmakers into part of a winning strategy
The four key questions to ask when developing your advocacy plan, and whenever you hit a roadblock

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How to Successfully Build Advocacy into Every Team Member's Role

Episode 98

Saturday, June 7, 2025 • Duration 34:11

I was on the road working with a client last week. And the CEO there asked me the most awesome question that I was super excited to answer. The minute we had the conversation, I knew it was one that we needed to have on the podcast as well, because it applies to absolutely every direct service nonprofit.

I was on-site to help the client develop some advocacy strategies that were focused on specific desired results, involving particular decisionmaking bodies. But in the course of the conversation, the CEO said to me, “I'm so seeing the value of this work and how much impact it can have when we have a focused team working on a specific advocacy goal. It makes me think, what can we do to train every member of our staff to include advocacy as part of their jobs? Because I'm realizing it's just like we tell them that fundraising is part of everybody's job. It's everybody's job to build financial support for the organization in their personal circles or wherever they travel. I want that for advocacy as well. How do you do that?”

That’s exactly the right question to ask. What I shared with her was, there are three core skills every staff member is going to need, and you’re going to have to train them. And I can tell you how.

In this episode, we share:

How one nonprofit staff member turned a chance encounter with a decisionmaker into a big win
The three core skills your team members need in order to be effective at basic advocacy
The most valuable advocacy skill you can teach your team, that will serve them everywhere in their life
How to create an organizational culture that will support advocacy work by all
The most common organizational culture elements that can inadvertently undermine your efforts, and how to solve them
The natural and intuitive messaging and engagement approach that will be easy for every team member to learn and use effectively

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.

Two Surefire Things You Can Do to Fix Your Messaging on the Fly

Episode 97

Sunday, June 1, 2025 • Duration 31:19

When you're in a conversation with a decisionmaker and it's not going the way you want, they're not engaging, they're not leaning in, or they're not getting what you need them to get. You can tell there's some kind of disconnect happening, and that this is not going to get you what you wanted. Whether that was to just move the conversation forward and deepen the relationship, or whether there was something specific you came to ask for that day.

This happens a lot. And right now, as we're all in this time of even more overwhelm than usual, it can be extra hard to try to figure out: What am I going to do to fix this problem on the fly when I'm right there in the room with the decisionmaker and it's not going well?

I want to share a couple of core strategies that will help rescue you if you find yourself in that situation, without you having to go into deep analysis about what's going wrong in the moment. There's just not that much extra brain space to do any kind of deep analysis while you're in the room.

What you need are some handy tricks up your sleeve that will reset the conversation and get things moving that you want them to go.

In this episode, we share:

The most common mistake nonprofit leaders make in the first 10 minutes of a conversation with a decisionmaker
The simplest, easiest shift you can make in a conversation to create immediate engagement
Why questions engage when facts don’t
Three types of questions you can use with decisionmakers to create engagement
Three simple yet powerful techniques for using your voice to create engagement
Engaging ways to correct a decisionmaker’s misconceptions about your work

How Nonprofit Leaders Can Help Save Medicaid

Episode 96

Saturday, May 24, 2025 • Duration 34:17

There is nothing more timely than the issue of saving Medicaid. We are in a moment of both extreme threat but also extreme opportunity. I know it would be very easy to think that there’s nothing we can do. That massive cuts to Medicaid are a done deal.

The fact is nothing could be further from the truth. And the role that nonprofit leaders can play in turning the tide and saving Medicaid for the people we serve, and for everyone who depends on it, is tremendous right now.

But here's the thing. Our standard advocacy strategies and messaging probably aren't going to work for this particular project. We have to become aware of what's needed, and then be committed to taking action and doing the things that will actually work.

In this episode, we share:

The key elements we need to understand about the Republican strategy to pass their big, ugly bill
The two big flaws in that strategy that show us how to focus our advocacy
The biggest mistake we’re likely to make, and what to do instead
Why arguing the facts and merits of the issue with Members of Congress won’t work
The essential tactics that will have the greatest chance of success in this fight
The three most effective ways to engage your clients, volunteers and supporters and help them make their voices heard on saving Medicaid
How to time your advocacy action for greatest impact

Links:

Here are two great resources for clear and helpful information on Medicaid, work reporting requirements, and other background to help you explain the issue to others:

KFF.org

Families USA

If you found value in this episode, please let others know! I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

Nonprofit Power Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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Nonprofit Power Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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