How To Build a Strong Cadre of Influential Champions - Episode 42

You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we reveal how to build a strong cadre of influential champions. So stay tuned. If you want to have real and powerful influence over the money and policy decisions that impact your organization and the people you serve, then you're in the right place. I'm Kath Patrick and I've helped dozens of progressive nonprofit leaders take their organizations to new and higher levels of impact and success by building powerful influence with the decision makers that matter. It is possible to get a critical mass of the money and policy decision makers in your world to be as invested in your success as you are. To have them seeking you out as an equal partner. And to have them Bringing opportunities and resources to you. This podcast will help you do just that. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. Hey everybody. Kath Patrick here. Thank you so much for tuning into another episode of the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode. Having a strong cadre of powerfully influential champions is a huge asset that can dramatically accelerate your advocacy success. And when you have a key decision maker, themselves operating as your champion, that takes things to a whole other level of impact. Imagine how powerful the impact would be if you had an entire cadre of money and policy decision makers who are operating at champion level on your behalf. Hey there folks. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. So who are these influential champions? How do you know if you have a true champion? And how do you get more of them? You've probably already got several champions on some level. People who are super fans of your organization and its work and who go out of their way to evangelize about your stuff. Maybe they give a lot of money. Maybe they donate a lot of volunteer time. Or they do something else that shows by their actions, how strong their affinity is for your work and how much they believe in it. The ultimate test of champion behavior by a decision maker or other influential ally is not only are they taking action on your behalf, but they are leveraging the power of their role and the influence they have to make things happen for you. That is huge. Because they can, if they choose to, influence their peers and their colleagues as well to start pulling the levers of power on your behalf. That's when really big things start to happen and huge results start to come about. The most valuable types of champions are your key money and policy decision makers. But it can also include others who work in those systems or institutions. As well as people who are influential in other arenas, that the decision maker values and listens to. I want to give you some examples of what this can look like. Because for those of you who may not have had a high level champion operating on your behalf, it may sound like a pipe dream. But the fact is it is achievable. And there are a lot of great examples of how this manifests itself. So. As I said, this may be the top level decision maker, or it might be somebody with influence on that decision maker. And all of these are de-identified examples from my own client's experience. In one case we have a a mid-level state agency administrator who is passionately aligned with one aspect of a nonprofit's work. And this administrator has a vision for an outcome. And they see the potential of two nonprofits actually, to help bring that about. So the administrator reaches out to those non-profits and initiates conversations about how they might work together to bring about this outcome that the administrator wants. And basically says to the nonprofits, design me a program that will get me these results and I'll find a way to fund it. So the non-profits do their job. They design the program and the mid-level administrator then goes to bat for that initiative, and the funding for it, within the agency and makes it happen. The initiative gets robustly funded. It gets great results. And building on those great results and the enhanced support that that generates within the agency, it becomes an institutionalized program that's funded annually by that agency. So there's one example of how a well-placed champion can be an enormous bringer of opportunity for you. Another example. This is a nonprofit engaging with multiple contracting partners. And all the partners are happy with the outcomes and the ROI. That's all good. But one of them sees the true value. And has a broader perspective on what this might mean. They see the potential for how big the impact could be if this solution were applied more broadly for more people. And they get excited. So of course, they give great testimonials for this nonprofit, but they go way further. They go out on their own and start speaking at conferences, speaking to other groups about how valuable this kind of partnership is. They start telling others in their field that this partnership, these services, this is making a huge difference for our business. And it could be making a huge difference for your business. In fact, they're so enthused that they're telling their colleagues that anybody in this field would be foolish not to partner with a nonprofit that's capable of producing these kinds of results. And of course, they dramatically expand their own contracting relationship with the nonprofit so that more people can be helped. And they don't whine about the cost of the service because they see its true value. Now on a even bigger scale, there's a story of a member of Congress who goes from being generally supportive and aligned with a nonprofit's work and their results, to becoming the chief sponsor and advocate around federal legislation to dramatically expand the availability of, and funding for, those services for an entire group of nonprofits nationwide. And I will share more about that story in a little bit. But you begin to see with just this handful of examples that are all relatively recent from clients that I work with, that high level champion behavior can be had. And when you have it, it can have an extraordinary impact on your ability to serve more people and help them at a deeper level. So let's take those stories apart a little bit and talk about the hallmarks of a champion, and specifically a champion who is also a decision maker. These are the behaviors that show that they are a champion. They take action, even when they haven't been asked to do so. They alert you to opportunities and potential resources, They freely share strategic advice with you to help you engage additional decision makers, to get the thing done. And they themselves go out and engage additional decision makers to get the thing done.,. They freely share strategic advice with you to help you engage additional decision makers, to get the thing done. And they seek out and engage other decision makers to support the things that you're seeking to achieve and to ask for specific action from them. Fundamentally, they leverage the power of their role to help you. Who wouldn't want these things? And what I'm really happy to tell you is that this is achievable. no matter what level you're currently operating at. There are two basic ways to get these kinds of champions. We can either find them. Or we can develop them. If you can find someone who is a decision-maker or a person who has influence with decision-makers, who is also already firmly in your camp, that's wonderful. It does happen occasionally, but it's not the norm. And there may be some decision makers whose values and priorities strongly align with the work that you do, but they may or may not know about you yet. Another type of a find-able champion would be people who were advocates before, or who have a nonprofit background and then have run for and won elected office. Or who have moved into a decision making role in a government agency and brought with them their values and passions. Some of the best ways to find these folks is by having and developing strong networks. I have in my personal network, a number of former advocates who are now in elected office or in government agency jobs who fit this description. Now their jobs aren't ones that bring them into day-to-day contact with service provider organizations. So those groups might not be on their radar. But if a service provider organization came to them with a policy ask that connected to improving outcomes or making the system work better for a particular group of people or anything like that, they would be all ears. Absolutely. So sometimes you have to just use your network to make the assumption: we've got friends in high places. We just don't know who they are yet. And even in very red states, there are often progressive minded people working in various agencies that connect to the social service network. And they can be incredible allies and potentially champions. But first you got to find them. Every once in a while they find you, that would be the example I gave at the beginning about a state agency person who went looking for nonprofit partners. But more often than not, you need to find them and develop a relationship and go from there. Most of the time you're going to be developing championships over time. And they're likely to be decision makers who are aligned with some aspect of your work already. Perhaps they have a passion for a specific type of work that you do. Perhaps they have a particular interest in ensuring that a particular problem gets solved or that a particular population does well and thrives. Perhaps they're just broadly progressive minded and are inclined to support anything that moves forward a progressive perspective on problems and solutions. Any one of these is a good basis for beginning to develop a champion. The thing is you very often don't know ahead of time who among your somewhat aligned or even strongly aligned decision-makers will become champions on your behalf, and who will simply remain strong and helpful allies. Which isn't too bad either. We welcome them all. So the way to come at this, and to come at all strategic relationship building, is to view absolutely everyone who's aligned in at least one way, as a potential future champion. And you work on the relationship development operating from the perspective and the belief that they have the potential to become a champion. This is really important for two reasons. One, we often talk ourselves out of that higher level of engagement. If someone doesn't appear super enthusiastic about every aspect of our work, it can be easy to think, well, they don't have potential be a champion because they're just not that excited about our stuff. And it may be that they're not excited, yet. But the more they learn, and the more they engage with you, the more invested they may become. And I've seen this happen time and again. I've got a client at the national level right now that has developed an incredible champion, who is a member of Congress in a very important committee leadership role who started out just being generally supportive. It was one of many progressive causes that he thought was good on general principle. And the organization, whose district he represents, engaged in a concerted effort to expose him to deeper and deeper levels of their work and of understanding its impact. And they did a lot of work to develop that relationship and to increase this Congress person's level of support and action taking over time. To the point where now, after several years of this relationship building work, he is a top level champion of their work. He's also become a champion of a national coalition of organizations like this individual one from his district. And he is now leading the development of, and the strategic efforts to pass, federal legislation that would make it possible ultimately for the services to be available on a much broader scale for far more people than currently can receive them. And he's done a lot of that work himself. He's been engaging his colleagues. He's tasked his staff with working with the coalition and with other congressional staff to move this forward. They've held hearings. They've sponsored a briefing. He's also provided a lot of strategic advice around advocacy, and how to move this forward with other members of Congress. He shared with coalition members, how they can be most effective in engaging the support of their own members of Congress. But it's really important to point out that this level of engagement and action taking and leveraging of power was developed over time. And what's kinda cool is that congressperson will be the first to tell you the story of how that happened. He freely acknowledges that he didn't start in this place of passionate support. And you know, In this case, the local organization that was developing the relationship initially. They didn't start out with a goal of enacting federal legislation someday. They started out with a goal of getting this member of Congress to take some small actions that would increase the resources available and would make it easier for the organization to expand the geographic scope of their service area. And then as the organization's staff and the congressperson got to know one another, and that relationship got stronger all the time. The local organization was also very consciously creating opportunities to help that member of Congress develop a deeper level of understanding of the problem being solved, of the complexity of how the organization goes about solving the problem, the extraordinary impact that it has on both the lives of the people they serve. And also in terms of ROI, cost savings, in terms of all kinds of other large benefits to society. And very importantly, they facilitated multiple opportunities for that member of Congress to engage with people who had received the services. For him, that was a key piece that turned him into a champion. And he speaks frequently about that being a key piece of his shift to becoming much more deeply committed to making sure the services are available on a much larger scale, because he has heard firsthand from the people who were helped what an enormous difference it makes. And he found that incredibly compelling. He's also a very practical strategist. And so he also sees how this is beneficial as a policy matter. Not only because it helps people, but also because it solves a very large and important and costly problem. That isostssing a lot to go unsolved. So there are also fiscal reasons why this should be made more widely available. So if you're going to set out to develop a champion, there's some really critical things to focus on. And some of it is about your mindset as to how you go about this. Number one. Do not limit your goals for a given strategic relationship based on what you think is possible right now. Hold in your mind that all of these stories were relationships developed and strengthened over time. Some took longer or some took less time, but none of them were instant. Understand that building champions is typically a long-term project, maybe multiple years. So you have to be ready to put in the work and not let yourself get frustrated if you don't get instant results. That said, you do want to be constantly evaluating to make sure you're making progress with the relationship. And if you're not making progress, then that's something to be examined more closely. It may be that your messaging is off. Or it may be that they're just never going to be a strong ally. Because, you know, only a subset of your allies will become full champions. But it is also possible that if the engagement strategies you're using aren't landing, it may be that you just need to shift your strategies or your messaging a little bit, and that you will be able to make progress when you do that. So try that before you consign them to not-potential-champion status. A critical thing is to create regular opportunities for developing deeper understanding of the impact of your work. And that includes program visits, interactions with clients. It includes testimonials from other influential folks whose opinion that decision-maker respects. Of course, all of your ROI data and all of that. It's anything and everything you've got. But you want to create opportunities for deeper understanding. Because people with surface understanding of anything, don't typically become champions for it. It's really not possible. They have to understand on a deep level what the problem is, how people experience it in their lives and why that is so difficult to live with. They need to understand how you fix that problem, and the impact it has when you fix it. And then they need to understand the broader implications of that when you are fixing that problem at scale. So it's not only the number of people whose lives are affected, but it's also the broader societal impact. And that's where you start to get into the ROI in a meaningful way. And understand that different things will reach people differently. So you can't assume that what approach works with one decision maker or one potential champion is going to work with another. And then the other thing is cast a wider net. One of the ways you can find some strong prospects for champions is to leverage your existing network in two ways. One, as I mentioned earlier, you may already have in your personal network people who have migrated into more influential roles than back when you knew them at the beginning. So consider that you may have allies that you haven't thought about yet. But you also want to leverage the knowledge of your network, and that definitely includes your board members. If there is an arena of decision-making that you're looking to influence, at least one of your board members should be someone who has at a minimum, a strong network within that universe. And ideally has some influence in it. And get them to then partner with you on creating and executing a relationship building plan with key players in that arena. And board members are one place to start, but anyone in your network who has reach and influence into the arena that you want to develop a champion. I. Leverage that network and their knowledge and their cooperation. One thing to be aware of is an issue that has thwarted the development of many potential champions. And that is the presence of any hidden beliefs you may have that run counter to the two core beliefs from which you must operate to successfully develop champions. The internal game here is critical. You must operate from the belief that any ally you're dealing with could become a champion with the right engagement and the right nurturing. And that there are many compelling reasons why a decision-maker or other influential person would want to be a champion for your organization and the work that you do. No matter how well founded they may be. If you are harboring beliefs that decision-makers and other influential people don't value the people you serve, don't value the work that you do, don't value the work of nonprofits in general, I don't value one or more aspects of what you do. If you enter the strategic relationship building process with any of those beliefs unaddressed, it will infiltrate how you approach that relationship. If you bring those into your strategic relationship building work, whether consciously or unconsciously. That will impact how the decision-maker responds to you and how they engage with you. They will sense it. They may not be able to describe what they're sensing, but they will sense it. And it will dramatically decrease the prospect that they will become a strong ally or eventually a champion. So. If you are harboring some of those beliefs. It can be a very productive exercise to examine the source of them. It may in fact be your lived experience that you've dealt with a lot of decision makers and other influential people who did not value your work, who did not value the people you serve. Honor that by taking yourself through a process where you look at those beliefs and say, Here's where those come from. This is how I came to believe this. And that is a valid part of my experience and informs my strategic relationship building work. But I will not allow it to govern my work. I get to choose. So, of course, when you encounter a decision maker, who's clearly opposed to everything you stand for. Then yeah. You know, they're not going to be an ally and they're not a potential champion. That's pretty simple. But it's the ones who are in the great middle. The ones who don't know much about you yet, who you may not know very well yet. There's not much of a relationship yet. It's in there that there are hidden gems to be found. But you will not find them unless you operate from the belief that anyone who is aligned with some part of what we do or who we serve is a potential champion. And the great thing is, you can simply choose to operate from that expectation. In a lot of ways, the process of building champions is not significantly different than the process of strategic relationship building overall. It's just that you're looking for a deeper level of commitment, a deeper level of investment. A greater willingness to take substantial action and to leverage the power and influence that that person has, whether they are a high level decision maker or a mid-level decision maker. That they're willing to go the extra mile for you and the work that you do. And that does not happen without building a close, strong, deep relationship. And you want to be doing that as much as possible, always. It's what we talk about all the time on the podcast, about how important it is to be building deep, strong strategic relationships with all of the money and policy decision makers in your world. But to get to the level of having one or more people in those arenas operating as your champion is a key ingredient in catapulting your access to opportunity, your access to resources and your ability to make a bigger impact on a bigger scale and help more people at a deeper level. Which is what we all got into this work to be able to do. I think it's safe to say that there's not a single nonprofit operating today that would not dramatically benefit from the development of a cadre of powerfully influential champions. The question for you is, are you ready to get to work to make that happen for you? Thanks for listening. And I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.