The Big Hole in Your Messaging that You Can't See and that's Costing You Money

You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. In today's episode, we reveal the big hole in your messaging that you can't see and that's costing you money. 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 there, folks. Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast. I'm your host, Kath Patrick. I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because there is a huge messaging problem that happens all the time with nonprofit leaders that is virtually invisible to us, and yet can be incredibly costly. And I don't want that to be happening to you. I don't want that to be happening to you, but the truth is, it probably is, at least with some of your decisionmakers. And here's how you know that it's happening. If you have any decisionmakers who still aren't getting it about what you really do and the impact of it and its value, there is most definitely a hole in your messaging. when they're not getting it, the very first place to look is your messaging around the problem you solve. And here's why. The truth is decisionmakers will not care one bit about your solution if they don't first care about the problem that you solve. Nonprofit leaders tend to do a couple of things pretty consistently when we're talking about the work that we do, and that's that we make the assumption that everybody understands the problem. That they understand it at the level of depth that we do, that they understand it from the perspective that we do, that they get why it's a problem, they get all the reasons it's a huge deal, and here we are with this amazing solution. Isn't that great? But the fact is, most people and most decisionmakers do not go around thinking every day about the problem that you solve. They may not think about it at all much, unless they're specifically focused on that area of work. And even if they're focused in that area of work, there's no guarantee that they see the problem from the same lens that you do, from the same perspective. I guarantee you that unless they also have a background in providing services in this realm, they very likely do not understand the level of impact of the problem in the way that you do. Because you understand it from the standpoint of having worked directly with the people who are in the problem. You see up close and personal every single day the impact that problem has on their lives, how difficult it makes their lives, and what an incredible transformation happens when you help solve the problem. We tend to think that the problem is obvious, that everybody already gets that. And so we jump right to the solution. We start right in with, "Here's what we do. Here's who we help. Here's what, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah." They're not gonna be listening to any of that if they don't first think that the problem is important, serious, and urgent to solve. If they don't think those things, then all your cool information about how you solve it and the wonderful results that it produces, they're like, "Yeah, but it's not that big a problem, so whatever." You know, it's just kinda sliding off of them. So when I have clients who come to me and say The first place I have them look is messaging around the problem itself. And what I very often find is that there's almost no messaging about the actual problem. It's all about the solution. And maybe it's about the ROI and all that stuff, which is great. You want all of that, but it doesn't mean anything to the decisionmaker until they see the problem the same way you do. Or they see the problem some other way that's uniquely theirs, but that makes it, in their mind, an important and urgent thing to solve. They don't have to see it the same way. They just have to see that it is urgent and important to solve. Once they feel that, then when you show up with a solution, they're gonna lean right in and say, "Talk to me about how we solve this agreed-upon urgent problem." But here's the reality, and I know that you bump into this all the time, 'cause I hear about it all the time from my one-to-one clients and in my coaching groups. I hear this all the time. They're not getting it. They don't really get why this matters. Well, if they don't get why it matters, it means they don't understand the problem. And if they don't understand that, why would they ever invest in your solution? So- That's what we're gonna burrow in on today, is how do you fix that with your messaging? To help the decisionmaker come to the place of feeling that the problem that you solve is urgent and important to solve, your messaging needs to address three aspects of the problem. We need to look at the problem as experienced by the individual who's in the problem and the impact that it has on their life. We need to talk about the cost of the problem as experienced by the person's family and by the wider community, and the cost to all of those entities. And then we have to address the cost of the problem in real dollar terms. We want all three of these pieces. Now, you may or may not know ahead of time which of these three aspects are gonna resonate most with any given decisionmaker. You might have some clues about that or you might not, it depends. But, if you have solid messaging that's designed to go to the heart of why this matters on all three of those pieces, then you'll be ready to reach anybody no matter where they're starting because you're gonna have all the ingredients. Let's look at how this plays out. Part of what's going on here is an issue of depth. A lot of decisionmakers have a very surface understanding of the problem that you solve. And that is almost worse than them not understanding it at all. Because if they've got this kind of surface understanding, it's gonna be something super simplified that does not typically convey urgency. A quick example. If you run a food bank, on the surface, the problem you solve is that people don't have enough food. They don't have enough to eat. Okay. Now, I know that if that's your work, you feel the incredible urgency of that problem and how vital it is to solve it. But the decisionmaker may not feel that that's a vital and urgent problem. They may go, "Yeah, yeah, that's a shame. That's terrible. It's really sad that people don't have enough to eat. That's a bummer." If they're thinking that, then that means they don't really understand what it's like, number one, to be in that problem. And in fairness, why would they? Most people who wind up in decision-making roles with control over resources and policy, sometimes they come from very humble beginnings and have somewhere in their background a time in their life when they or their family needed help from a nonprofit of some kind. Maybe they needed help with housing or food or healthcare or employment or whatever they needed. But a lot of decisionmakers have no experience personally. So unless they are already really invested in the issue, their understanding is very distant, very removed, very surface-y. To get to the depth and really start to help them get it on a visceral level, part of what we have to do is ask ourselves, "so what?" multiple times with each of these three pieces. And if we keep asking, "so what?" that will help us get to the depth of the impact in a way that's gonna actually matter to that decisionmaker. So back to our example. Okay, you run a food bank. The surface problem you're solving is people don't have enough to eat. Well, so what? Other than, gosh, that's a shame, so what? Well, part of the answer to so what is, what does that look like in that person's life? How does that affect their day-to-day existence and their ability to function in the world? If they have a family, how does it affect not only their family, but how they're interacting with their family? Maybe there's enough money for food for the first two or three weeks of the month, but the last week of the month, there's just absolutely no money for food. They're already stretching every dollar the best they can. They're already buying bulk. They're already buying the off-brand seconds, the cheapest possible ways to purchase food. They're already doing all of that. They're being incredibly resourceful in how they're going about feeding themselves and their kids. They've already done all the easy solutions, all the things that might come to mind as, "Well, have you tried this? Have you tried that?" Yeah, they've tried all of it, and the fact is that it still isn't enough They don't make enough money and there's not enough food at the end of the month to feed the kids. And so what happens is the adults don't eat. They feed the kids. The kids have to have food, they feed the kids. And the kids are getting boxed mac and cheese, and that's about it. The adults are maybe getting one meal a day because they can't afford to feed everybody. So then this person still has to go to work. They still gotta show up and work their eight-hour day, and they've had nothing to eat. And so they struggle to get through the workday. Their focus is off. They start getting sick. Their health begins to suffer. On and on. And meanwhile, the kids still don't really have enough to eat, but at least they're eating. And this isn't sustainable. If this goes on month after month, it starts to break down to where now the parent is struggling with their own health because their nutrition is terrible. And they're simply not eating enough. They are now malnourished and they can't function, so they're not able to be as effective at work. And now it's a problem for the employer Maybe they lose a job because they couldn't focus or they couldn't be there consistently. So now they're even less stable, there's even less money for food, and the problem just keeps getting worse. And yes, they've signed up for SNAP benefits but those have been curtailed. They've done all the things. They're signed up for every possible thing, but all of that has been curtailed or made difficult to access. And so we are the thing that holds families together. We are the thing that makes certain that the adults have enough food to eat that they can actually still go to work and function. We make sure that the kids have enough to eat so that they can do well in school. That's the so what? that helps the decisionmaker understand the experience and go from, oh, it's a bummer to be hungry," to, "It's a big problem when people are hungry, when they don't have enough food." And remember, when the decisionmaker's thinking about it's a bummer to be hungry, it means maybe they missed lunch that day 'cause they got too busy and forgot to eat. But no sweat, they'll make it up later. They'll have a snack in the afternoon. They'll go home and eat a big dinner, whatever. They're not worried about not having enough food. They're not worried about having enough food for themselves. They're certainly not worried about having enough food for their kids. So for them to really understand what it's like to be in that problem, you need to give them a picture that's vivid enough that helps them see it. And you can tell it as a story. That always helps. You can say, "Let me tell you about Susie Q, one of our typical clients. This is her situation. This is what she struggles with. This is what her kids are going through," so on and so forth. All the things. That rolls together the impact on the individual, which is one of the pieces, and the impact on the family and the community as a second piece. And then you can roll in the cost of the problem in real dollar terms. Cause that's not necessarily obvious. But once you've tied this to the person's ability to work, for example. If their nutrition is so inconsistent that they can no longer consistently show up to work, or they start to develop serious health problems because they're malnourished. What food they are eating is bad for them, too many carbs, not enough protein, all the things, then they start to develop diet-related health complications. And then that further impedes their ability to go work full-time. Now they require additional support because they're not able to work full-time because they can't function, because now they've got health complications that came from insufficient nutrition. And so the cost becomes what other supports have to be put in place. Now there's healthcare costs associated with this. Now this person may require other public assistance benefits in order to sustain themselves and their family. All because they didn't have enough to eat or they didn't have enough food that was healthy for them and became sick. If you have specific dollar figures that you have, great, you roll those in, but you can still communicate how this starts costing money to the system. And you layer all that in. Being able to explain the problem that way goes a long way toward helping decisionmakers get on the same page with the actual problem. What it looks like, what it feels like, why it's important, how urgent it is, how important it is to solve it. Oh my goodness, if we don't solve this, all these other bad things that I hadn't thought about are gonna be happening. And that starts costing real dollars. That brings me to another piece that we have to deal with, which is the because. The reason for the problem They don't have enough food because... It's really important that we build the because into the story of the person in the problem. So that we can counter any unhelpful beliefs the decisionmaker may hold about the reason the person has the problem in the first place. There's a certain subset of decisionmakers that tend to be particularly guilty of this, but any decisionmaker who doesn't have a good grasp on the problem can fall victim to this. The most common unhelpful belief, and the one that we have to be really alert to, is the belief that the problem is somehow the individual's fault. It's because of something they did or did not do that brought the problem on themselves. And as long as the decisionmaker's able to hold that belief, they can make the problem be just about the individual and have it be the individual's responsibility to go find the solution So we have to tackle that piece too, and it's absolutely doable to weave that into the story as well. Part of how we do that is, we, to continue with this example of the food bank, but you would use this in any service delivery context, that very often the people we're helping are employed. They have jobs. They have income. They are working their tails off. A lot of folks are working multiple jobs. And if they're not, it's often because either they themselves have serious health problems, or they are caring for someone in the family with serious health problems, or they have a bunch of young kids and they're caring for the kids, and it makes more economic s-sense for them to be home caring for the kids than it does to try to pay for childcare. But the bottom line is, the folks who are accessing the services of virtually all of my clients are working their tails off all the time trying to keep hearth and home together, trying to s-support their families, trying to help their kids grow and thrive, trying to help other family members. They're working really hard. Whether they're getting paid or not, they're working their tails off, and they're frazzled, and it's not enough. So we have to help decisionmakers get that part too. That first of all, this is not an individual failing. Someone is not hungry because they didn't have enough hustle to feed themselves. Like, that doesn't even make sense. They're gonna actually suggest that someone is so lazy they'd rather starve than work for food? That's insane. But if we let them kinda just carry on this idea of, "Well, you know, they could have done blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," and there's always some they coulda, they coulda. The easiest way to counter that is to just build into your story kind of a little set of facts about all the things the person has done to try to solve the problem themselves. They're doing this, they're doing that. They have three part-time jobs. They've accessed all the public assistance programs. They've done all the things, but they still need this additional support from the nonprofit, and that's what's the difference between them being able to function and not. And the function or not, has major consequences for the individual, for the family, for the community, and for the bottom line. But we gotta build in that counter to the, "Well, yeah, they just could've, just work harder, just do blah, blah, blah, blah, blah," whatever. No. We just nip that in the bud by building it into the story in the first place. And we don't do it in a way that is confrontational or anything else. You just slide it in there. It's part of the story. It's part of the richness of the fabric of what you're telling them about Susie Q, about your typical client, who this is what's going on. This is what they're experiencing. They've done this and this, and this and this, and these 27 other things. They've done everything humanly possible to solve the problem themselves. And that helped up to a point. If they could've fully solved it themselves, they would've. But that's why we're here. That's why the work that we do, the way we solve that last piece of the problem, is so important and so impactful. That's where we make the difference. And then you can start to talk about the transformation that happens when they get your services. You've set the stage with what it's like to be in the problem and all the costs, all the ripple effects of the problem from that individual. When you then talk about the transformation that happens when they get your services, then you build all those pieces back in. the transformation doesn't just transform the individual's situation. It transforms all those ripple effects as well. And that's where ROI starts to happen. That's where cost savings start to happen. That's where families thriving starts to matter. That's where communities thriving starts to come in. It's a big shift, a big, powerful change. But none of that will make any sense unless and until they understand the problem at the same level of depth as you do. And in a way that matters to them, that makes them go, "Oh, wait, that's a problem. That's really a problem. That's a big deal. We gotta solve that." Then they wanna know about your solution. So that's our task. Number one, we stop assuming. From this day forward, we will never again assume that any decisionmaker, unless we already have a long-standing relationship with them and we know exactly what they think. But if we don't already know that, we are gonna never again assume that anybody, any decisionmaker, understands why the problem is a problem, why it's urgent and important to solve. We're gonna start there. And we're gonna show them that with a good story, that explains the three key pieces of the problem as it's experienced by the individual and the impact that it has on their life in some detail, what that looks like. And the impact and cost of the problem as experienced by the family and by the community, by an employer, by society, and the cost, in a sense, that it has for all of them. And then we get to the real dollar terms cost of the problem whenever possible, in whatever way you're able to characterize that. And we address the because. We talk about why they're in the problem. That they've already done the 529 things to not be in the problem, and yet they are still in it because. It's very important we deal with that so that we get at those unhelpful beliefs that might be lurking in the decisionmaker's mind that keep them from thinking that it's their job to do anything about this. Once you've got all that together a coherent story-based piece of messaging, you're gonna have everything you need to get that decisionmaker bought in on the problem and saying, "Yeah, we gotta do something about that." And then that's the opening for all the rest of your amazing messaging. And you can talk about the transformation and how it changes, and why investing in your solution is the absolute best possible decision they can make. But they can't get there if they don't first buy into the urgency and importance of the problem that you solve. Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.