Nonprofit Power Podcast – Details, episodes & analysis

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!!

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

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!!

If you’ve got great messaging and it’s still not causing decisionmakers to engage with you, chances are you’re dealing with one of the most common advocacy pitfalls that happens to a lot of nonprofit leaders:  We worry so much about what we're going to tell a decision maker, and we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about what we want to ask them. 

Questions are incredibly powerful tools, and they can really work magic in a conversation with a decisionmaker. They can create engagement. They can create an opportunity to go deep, to get information that the decisionmaker wouldn't volunteer otherwise. You can get advice. You can get all kinds of valuable intel, and at the same time build a connection with that decision maker, and have them leaning in and engaging more with you.

The magic of questions is that they engage other people's brains. We can't help it. When we're asked a question we have to engage. We have to stop and think about that question. If someone's just telling us stuff, it’s easy to lose focus, and not really hear what’s being said. But as soon as a question shows up in the conversation, our subconscious makes us pay attention. We get engaged. Decisionmakers get engaged.

But here's the thing. Not all questions are created equal. The fact is, the smarter your questions, the better your results are going to be. The trick is to come up with really smart questions that are going to yield high-level results for you. 

In this episode, we share:

• How low-value questions work against you, and how to avoid them
• The essential advance work that sets you up to ask higher-value questions of decisionmakers
• The two most important questions to ask yourself before you ever meet with a decisionmaker
• Key characteristics of high-value questions that trigger engagement
• How to turn a request for advice into an even higher-value question
• How to use AI to do advance research and craft higher-value questions
• An easy hack to boost your effectiveness as you develop this skill

Link:  Episode 67 – Three Keys to Finding the Right Decisionmaker in Any System

I'm preparing to launch a group coaching program that will focus specifically on helping you craft messaging that will shift decisionmakers’ perspectives and get them on board with sustaining and even expanding your funding. This will be a coaching opportunity for a limited number of people to come in and be part of a group. There'll be some training, but most of it will be coaching and helping you to get your messaging dialed in so that you can address this pressing need.  

What I'm seeing right now is there's nothing more important than this. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn. 

When you look at who's regularly successful in having big influence with decision makers, what you'll notice is that they almost always have a strong relationship with that decision maker.  You probably know from personal experience how hard it is to influence a decision maker when you don't have a strong relationship.  So why do some nonprofit leaders seem to have tons of success at this, while others struggle?

In this episode, we’ll reveal:

• The third pillar of successful advocacy
• How one leader doubled their revenue through strategic relationships
• Secrets of an influential relationship builder
• How to avoid creating purely transactional relationships that don’t feel good
• The biggest mistake you may be making, and how to fix it
• Why vision is at the center of successful strategic relationship-building
• How to manage power imbalances in your relationships with decisionmakers
• The 3 key elements of strategic relationship-building, and how to apply them in your work

Get started leveling up your advocacy game today!  Download your free copy of the Advocacy Success Workbook here, and follow the Pillar 3 guided action.  It will help you get clear on what specific results you want from key strategic relationships, define your ideal relationship with them, and identify three actions you can take to make those relationships stronger.  

If you’re not crystal clear on the specific result you want, how can you ask a decisionmaker for it?  And how will you know whether you’ve gotten it?  In this episode I’ll show you how to drill down to the details of exactly what you want.  And then I’ll show you the specific factors that determine the right way to ask for it.  

In this episode you’ll hear:

• The second pillar of successful advocacy
• The biggest mistake you may be making, and how to fix it
• The different kinds of ask, and when to use them 
• One of the most valuable asks in any situation
• How to balance the big picture with the details when engaging a decisionmaker
• What happens when you nail it
• How to deal with decisionmakers that don’t support your cause
• How to avoid the most common self-defeating mistake in crafting an ask
• How to make a big scary ask

Get started leveling up your advocacy game today!  Download your free copy of the Advocacy Success Workbook here, and follow the Pillar 2 guided action.  It will help you drill down and get super specific on what exactly you want from the key decsionmakers in your world.    

If you don’t know exactly who is in charge of the thing you want, how can you influence the decisions being made?  But knowing who’s in charge is only half the battle.  You also have to know what’s going on in their head and heart so you can truly reach them.  In this episode, we get into the details of how to do that, and what kind of results you can get when you do it well.

In this episode, we reveal:  

• The first pillar of advocacy success
• Assumptions that will get you in trouble
• How to figure out who’s really in charge of a given decision
• Special tactics for knowing how federal funding decisions are really made
• What you need to know about your decisionmakers
• The two most common mistakes you may be making
• One action you can take today to start improving your advocacy results

Get started leveling up your advocacy game today!  Download your free copy of the Advocacy Success Workbook here, and follow the Pillar 1 guided action.  It will help you get much greater clarity on a key decisionmaker in your world, and what makes them tick.  

It’s time for a new conversation about non-profit advocacy.  For a bigger, bolder vision of what progressive, direct-service nonprofit leaders can achieve, and the kind of transformative results you can get when you become a powerfully influential advocate for your services, your organization and the people you serve.  In this very first episode, we dive right into that conversation.

In this episode you’ll hear:

• Why direct-service nonprofits are the key to changing critical money and policy decisionmaking 
• A new definition of advocacy
• The two most important reasons we do advocacy
• The number one key to advocacy success
• The four main pillars that are key to building powerful influence with decisionmakers

There is a lot of fear in the air, and I think it's important that we as nonprofit leaders take a hard look at that and get clear about what we're going to do with it.

The first thing is we have to acknowledge it. I've been part of a number of conversations where the fear is in the air, but it's not being talked about directly. And I think that's a mistake, because we run the risk of letting that fear guide our decision making and our actions in ways that we may not even realize or intend. And that would be a loss for everyone.

I think it's important to call it out, to acknowledge it, to say, yep, it's here. It's legitimate, and while it's real and present in our lives, we don't have to let it run our actions and our decision making. We need to be able to feel the fear, without operating from fear.

In this episode, we share:

• Two keys to navigating our own very real fears
• The essential choice we must make as leaders in times of fear
• One powerful tool for managing fear in this uniquely scary time that you can also use with your team
• Powerful evidence that we have more influence than we realize
• Two keys to helping decisionmakers get out of fear so they can make decisions that serve you

I'm preparing to launch a group coaching program that will focus specifically on helping you craft messaging that will shift decisionmakers’ perspectives and get them on board with sustaining and even expanding your funding. This will be a coaching opportunity for a limited number of people to come in and be part of a group. There'll be some training, but most of it will be coaching and helping you to get your messaging dialed in so that you can address this pressing need.  

What I'm seeing right now is there's nothing more important than this. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn. 

It's time to talk about one of the most frustrating things that can get in an advocate's way: when you've got a decisionmaker that, no matter what you do or say, no matter how hard you push them, it feels like they just will never commit to anything. They either can't or won't make a decision. It can leave an advocate just about tearing their hair out in frustration.

It can turn into a huge time suck. You're trying all these different angles to try to figure out, how do I get through to this person? How do I get them off the dime and make them take an action? To do something already! I've been there and I know what it's like. 

When there's a decisionmaker who can't or won't make a decision, there's a reason behind that. But the stated reason and the real reason are often very different. We have to become detectives to figure out what's really going on. What is the actual reason?

Because here's the thing. How likely is it we're going to just luck into the right messaging or the right strategy if we don't really know what's causing them to fail to make a decision? If we want to figure out the right strategy to make them actually take an action, to move to a decision, the first thing we've got to do is understand why they're not doing that now. 

I want to share with you a process you can use to uncover what’s really going on with that decisionmaker, and how to build a strategy to get them to take action. 

In this episode, we share:

• The six most common reasons behind that indecision 
• The surprising ways fear affects a decisionmaker’s thinking
• The two best strategies to get to the bottom of what’s causing your decsiionmaker’s indecision
• How to read behavioral cues that will tell you what’s driving the decisionmaker
• Key strategies you can use to address the causes of the indecision, and move the decisionmaker to action

I'm preparing to launch a group coaching program that will focus specifically on helping you craft messaging that will shift decisionmakers’ perspectives and get them on board with sustaining and even expanding your funding. This will be a coaching opportunity for a limited number of people to come in and be part of a group. There'll be some training, but most of it will be coaching and helping you to get your messaging dialed in so that you can address this pressing need.  

What I'm seeing right now is there's nothing more important than this. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn. 

There has never been a time when the influence of nonprofit leaders was more needed. In particular, we need to have influence with the money and policy decision makers that hold the power to help or harm the people we serve.

At the same time, a lot of things are happening that could leave a nonprofit leader feeling pretty vulnerable and powerless. Our challenge is to find a way to move like water and create that influence no matter what else is going on. 

One of the things I hear most frequently from nonprofit leaders I work with is some version of, we can't get XYZ critical decision maker to listen to us. We've tried everything and we can't get through to them. We either can't get them to listen, or we can't get access to them, or both. And then what happens is folks just kind of give up on those decision makers or resign themselves to not being able to have influence with them.

I get how that happens, but what's that costing you? If these are money and policy decision makers that matter, can you afford not to have influence with them? Is that really an option?     

In this episode, we share:

• The two biggest problems most nonprofit leaders have in getting access to the right decisionmakers, and how to solve them
• How past experience with decisionmakers can lead you to the wrong conclusions about influence building – and how that gets in your way
• How to train your subconscious brain to seek out and funnel influence-building opportunities to you
• How to craft messaging that will really land with a decisionmaker, and motivate them to work with you
• What it really means to speak the decisionmaker’s language, and why it makes such a huge difference
• How to know when it’s time to switch tactics and build influence another way

I'm preparing to launch a group coaching program that will focus specifically on helping you craft messaging that will shift decisionmakers’ perspectives and get them on board with sustaining and even expanding your funding. This will be a coaching opportunity for a limited number of people to come in and be part of a group. There'll be some training, but most of it will be coaching and helping you to get your messaging dialed in so that you can address this pressing need.  

What I'm seeing right now is there's nothing more important than this. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn. 

Links:

Episode 67 -- Three Keys to FInding the Right Decisionmaker in any System