Episodes

June 6, 2025

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

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 p...
June 1, 2025

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

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 disconn...
May 24, 2025

How Nonprofit Leaders Can Help Save Medicaid

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 t...
May 17, 2025

Self Care in Times of Total Insanity

How do we all be okay when so much is not okay in the world? There's so much bad, scary, overwhelming stuff going on constantly that it’s really hard sometimes to just get out of bed in the morning. Nevermind show up as our best selves, as our best empowered nonprofit leaders fighting for what's ri…
May 9, 2025

The Most Underutilized Advocacy Tool You Can Use Right Now to Improve Your Results

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 muc...
May 3, 2025

How To Stay Strong when Others Around You are Giving into Fear

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 p...
April 27, 2025

How To Deal with a Decisionmaker Who Can't or Won't Make a Decision

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 ...
April 19, 2025

Three Secrets to Building Influence with any Money or Policy Decisionmaker in Your World

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. ...
April 13, 2025

How to Successfully Advocate for Your Funding on Multiple Fronts at Once

We need to talk about an emerging reality that virtually all of my clients are telling me is their number one challenge right now. Everyone is already dealing with multiple threats to federal funding. But now there’s the addi...
April 5, 2025

How to Ensure You Have Maximum Impact when Your Members of Congress are Home in Their Districts

We’re about to enter a period of opportunity to have a lot of influence over our Members of Congress. They'll be home in their districts/states twice in the next seven weeks for “district work periods” to connect with their c...
March 21, 2025

How the Power of Community Building Can Help You Fight Back Against Attacks on Your Program and Your Funding

We all know how valuable community building is, but we often don't understand just how powerful it is. And right now it might just be that nonprofit leaders' superpower as community builders could be one of the keys to making...
March 14, 2025

The Best Way to Help Your Supporters Become Valuable Advocates for Your Work and Funding

This is a time when we need all hands on deck. There's so much need for nonprofits to advocate aggressively for the work that we do, and specifically for the government funding that supports our work. And nowhere is that more...
March 7, 2025

The Essential 5-Point Messaging Framework for Your Advocacy with Congress

Nonprofit leaders have a lot going on in terms of advocacy we need to be doing with Congress. And I’m hearing from a lot of my clients and the folks in my coaching programs, saying “Just strip it down for me. What's the messa...
March 1, 2025

Where to Focus Your Federal Advocacy Efforts Right Now to Have the Greatest Impact

It can be really hard right now as a Nonprofit leader to know where to focus your attention, what to be spending your advocacy energy on and what's going to have the biggest impact. For the vast majority of direct service non...
Feb. 21, 2025

How to Deal with the Right Wing's "Waste, Fraud & Abuse" Propaganda

The right wing's "waste, fraud, and abuse" propaganda is being used to justify massive and indiscriminate slashing of federal funding for anything and everything. That propaganda is hurting nearly every nonprofit in this coun...
Feb. 15, 2025

How to Defend Against Attacks on Your Federal Funding – Part 2

There is so much more still to discuss about how we can defend against ongoing attacks on your federal funding. In this week’s episode, we're focusing on the second key piece of the strategy, which is shaping public opinion ...
Feb. 8, 2025

How to Defend Against Attacks on Your Federal Funding - Part 1

We have a lot to talk about with all of the threats that are aimed at federal funding for a critical array of safety net programs. We've had quite a rollercoaster ride in the last couple of weeks, but I believe that there are...
Jan. 31, 2025

The Top Three Things to Focus on First When Crisis Strikes

It feels like we're having a crisis about every 20 seconds, and this week is no exception. Just at the beginning of the week we had another sudden, chaos-inducing announcement from the new administration that they were going ...
Jan. 24, 2025

How to Combat the Right Wing Messaging that Could be About to Endanger Your Program's Funding

If it wasn’t clear before this week, we now know that the entire suite of government-funded safety net programs is in the right wing’s cross hairs. The ambition to dismantle these programs isn't new. What is new is the level ...
Jan. 18, 2025

How to Access Confidence Even When You’re Way Outside Your Comfort Zone

Confidence is one of those things that so many people struggle with, and others seem to have no problem with. And neither group understands the other one very well. So I want to get into where does confidence come from, and h...
Jan. 11, 2025

Why Money and Policy Decisionmakers Rarely Receive Your Intended Message – and What You Can Do About it

There's a really big problem out there that chances are you're experiencing: Too many money and policy decisionmakers just aren't getting your core message. What I want to help you do today is shift what you're doing just a l...
Jan. 4, 2025

Setting Powerful Intentions that Will Serve You Well in the New Year

What makes intention setting so powerful is that it is more about the being than about the doing. If we fail to attend to our intentions, we risk not only missing our goals, but missing out on the experience we want to have w...
Dec. 22, 2024

How to Capture Your Most Valuable Lessons from 2024

Between the waning light and the kind of tucking in that happens around the solstice, and the anticipation of closing one year and opening a new one. It's the perfect time to do some reflection on how the year has gone for us...
Dec. 15, 2024

When Professionalism Can Become a Liability

One of the most problematic tropes that gets emphasized over and over again for nonprofit leaders can wind up absolutely wrecking your ability to really connect with decision makers. That’s the belief that you must be ultra-p...