July 20, 2025
The Four Essential Elements at the Heart of High-Impact Advocacy Messaging
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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You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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In today's episode, we share the four essential elements at the heart of high impact advocacy messaging.
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So, stay tuned.
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If you wanna 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.
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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.
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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.
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Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
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Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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Hey there folks.
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Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because the stakes are really high with messaging these days.
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There's so much noise, there's so many reasons for people not to pay attention to or engage with your messaging, that we can't afford to get it wrong.
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Effective messaging is so critical to every aspect of engaging decision makers at any point in the process.
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No matter where you are in your relationship with them, your messaging has to work.
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So today I wanna focus on the four essential elements that are absolutely at the core of high impact advocacy messaging.
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If you're missing any one of these four, your messaging's not gonna work.
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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.
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There are a million possible messaging strategies and techniques, and all kinds of things you can add to your messaging that will make it even more effective, even more engaging, even more high impact.
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But today I just wanna focus on the four things that have to be there no matter what.
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And the reason for this is that if you've been engaging decision makers for any length of time, you already know that the level of their not getting it is pretty high a lot of the time.
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We have to battle that constantly.
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To make sure that decision makers have what they need to understand and really value the work that you're doing.
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There's some things they've really gotta grasp.
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The four elements that are essential for your messaging are, number one, what you do, which includes who you help and the impact you make on their lives.
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Number two, the specific problem or problems that you solve.
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Number three, what's unique about your solution to those problems?
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And number four, the impact of your unique solution and how it creates exceptional outcomes.
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While I've broken those out into four elements, when you're crafting your messaging, you'll wanna make sure that you've got all four in there.
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But it's not step one, step two, step three, step four.
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You will weave all of this together and you will emphasize different elements more strongly, depending on who you're talking with.
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So for example, if you have a decision maker that really does not fully understand the problem that you solve, you're gonna have to emphasize that pretty strongly with them.
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Because if they don't get the problem you solve, then they're not gonna understand the value of your solution.
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They're not gonna understand any of the rest of it.
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They're not gonna know that the impact is a big deal.
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Similarly, if you're aware that there tends to be a lot of confusion or overgeneralization among decision makers about what you do and who you help, then you will want to emphasize that more strongly.
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You're gonna weight these things differently, depending on who you're talking with and what they're most challenged by in their getting it about the value of your work.
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Fundamentally, what we're doing with all of this is we're communicating the value of your work.
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That's the bottom line.
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But we need these four elements in order to do that in a way that is going to actually cause the decision maker to get all the things they need to get in order to understand the value.
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The first thing is what you do.
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Who you help and the impact that your work makes on the folks that you help.
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That's the primary thing.
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And as I've said in a lot of different episodes lately, including one that was thusly titled, decision makers don't care about your services.
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So when I say what you do, I don't mean all the services you provide and all of that.
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What I mean is the essence of what you do.
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How do you transform lives?
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What is that?
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Because that weaves together the thing that you do and the impact you create.
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And that's how you want to characterize that.
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A lot of times what folks will do is they'll, particularly in an introductory meeting with a decision maker, they'll go on about a little bit about the history of the organization and maybe a little bit about your mission.
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And then you talk about the services you provide and how many people you help each year, so on and so forth.
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But when we do that, we're making a bunch of assumptions.
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We're making the assumption that the decision maker cares about those details.
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They probably care about the number of people you serve, but they probably don't care about most of the rest of that.
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And what we risk when we give them information that doesn't feel relevant to them, or immediately important to them, is they start tuning out.
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And we are always trying to make sure that we don't cause that.
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Instead what we wanna cause is engagement.
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We want them leaning in.
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So every piece of your messaging should be structured with that aim.
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When you're introducing your organization to any decision maker for the first time, or maybe after a little bit of time when they've kind of forgotten you.
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You wanna lead with a single statement that combines what you do, who you help, and the impact you make on the people you help.
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You're gonna be talking about impact a lot.
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But in this context, it's really kind of the essence of the impact.
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It's not the 27 details of the ROI and all of that.
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It's really the essence of the impact on the individual.
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And if there is a really concise essence of the impact it makes on the community at large, then you add that too.
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But bottom line, this is really about how what you do changes lives.
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And you're talking about it from the perspective of the person whose life has changed.
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So if you're in the housing space and you're talking about that impact, you're painting the picture from the eyes and experience of the person you help.
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So you might say a sentence or two about what it's like for folks before they get your help, and then what life is like after they get your help, how their life has changed.
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And that makes a nice little story that's a great way to introduce what you do, who you help, and the profound impact it has.
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Most Nonprofit leaders are pretty good at that.
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The one thing I see happen a lot is that too much detail gets added.
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And one of the biggest mistakes that happens is adding in a whole lot of discussion about the details of the services.
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That's not what you lead with.
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It's not important until the decision maker has really bought in and wants to know, well, how'd you do that?
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Wait a minute, what are you doing that's making that happen?
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That will be getting to what's unique about your solution.
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Even there, you're not gonna catalog your services.
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You're going to speak to what is unique.
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But even more fundamentally than that, they've gotta understand the problem or problems that you solve.
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And here's the challenge with that.
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A lot of decision makers over generalize about most problems that nonprofits solve.
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There's a bunch of different reasons for that, but first and foremost, that usually happens when the thing that you work on is not a pet issue for that decision maker.
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If it's their pet issue, they probably do have much greater knowledge and are gonna be starting from a more informed place.
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But the vast majority of decision makers you engage with are not gonna be in that place.
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There's gonna be some part of the problem that they don't have their head fully around or that they misunderstand, or that they overgeneralize about.
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They just have a very broad brush sense of what the problems are.
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And if they've got any sort of ideological bias mixing in where they're inclined to make the problems be the individual's fault, and that if they would just do X, Y, or Z, then they wouldn't have these problems.
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If you're battling that, then you've got some extra work to do to help explain the problem.
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So with this, you wanna make sure that you're being clear about the nature of the problem, how it is experienced by the people you serve.
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What is it like to live in that problem?
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That is the best way to help a decision maker really get it, and to let go of a little bit of their predispositions to make it be simple.
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Most decision makers want to think of most problems as being simple.
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Because the more complicated they are, the more money they cost to solve and the more work they take to solve, and that's inconvenient.
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So they really are hoping that things are fairly simple.
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And unfortunately most of the time we are there to help them understand actually, not so much.
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The best way to do that is to help them understand how the person who has the problem, experiences the problem.
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And what it means in their life, what it means in their family's life.
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'Cause most of the time, particularly if you're serving adults, most of them have kids involved.
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There's other family members.
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And so there's ripple effect throughout the family when one member of the family is experiencing this problem.
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Or maybe the whole family's experiencing the problem.
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If it's a housing issue or a food insecurity issue, then everybody's affected.
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That is by definition, a problem the whole family is experiencing altogether.
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If it's a workforce development thing or it's healthcare or nutrition or some of those others, then the problem may be principally experienced by the individual client.
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But then there are still ripple effects on the family, obviously.
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So you can work from those kind of two categories, but you want the decision maker to have a clear picture in their head.
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And a story is the best way to do this, to help them understand what it's like to live in that problem.
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And then you can talk about some challenges to solving the problem.
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Workforce development leaps to mind.
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So you may have the individual client who needs to identify a career pathway that's going to lead to a family sustaining job.
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And maybe they're several steps away from that at this point.
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So they're gonna have to do a lot of things to get fully on that pathway and start moving toward the desired result.
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But there's other stuff in the way.
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There's childcare, there's transportation, there's all sorts of other things that are in the way of that person being able to successfully participate in say, education or training that's gonna help them get to that result.
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So if we don't address those additional barriers, then the chances of them being able to succeed in the primary goal, go way down.
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So we can't treat the need for the career pathway and the education and training as just the only problem.
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There are other things involved, so we have to look at the whole picture and address those things as well.
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Depending on what your agenda is with that decision maker, you might go on to say, you know, and the particular challenge with this is that most government funding sources that support this work don't want to take on the responsibility, particularly of the childcare question.
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Cause it's expensive.
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But if we don't deal with it, we set the person up for failure.
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And then we've invested the money in their training and it still hasn't created the result that we wanted.
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So we can't just pretend that's not there.
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We have to find a way to deal with it.
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So you're beginning to help them understand.
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And you might describe why when you combine, for example, transportation and childcare as a problem for a person who wants to participate in these services.
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I have been known to like, draw this on a notepad real quick if I'm sitting there in the room with the person.
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And say, you know, look, so here's where they live.
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Made a little X on the paper.
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And half an hour away in this direction is where the training place is that they need to go get their training.
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And then over here in a triangle in the other direction, a half an hour from either of those places is where the childcare is.
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And this person doesn't have a car.
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So they've gotta figure out how to take public transportation or get somebody to give them a ride.
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'Cause they can't afford a ride share or a taxi every day.
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So they're now burning at least an hour to an hour and a half in the morning and in the afternoon, just getting everybody where they need to be so that they can participate in this training.
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And then they've gotta be present and focused and fully participate in the training.
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But they've already burned three or four hours in their total day just getting places.
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Most decision makers, not all, but a lot of decision makers do get, for example, the challenges of getting your kid to childcare and then getting to work and all of the logistics that are involved.
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That's challenging enough when you have your own car or you can afford a ride share and you can just get everybody as efficiently as possible from point A to point B.
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It's still a hassle, but when you have to do all this using public transportation or a borrowed ride that may or may not show up on time, then this just becomes 10 times more complicated and time consuming and exhausting.
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So that helps you begin to tackle one of the things that is a problem for decision makers is that they tend to view all problems from the lens of how they would solve them with all the resources they have at their disposal.
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And for the most part, the people who are accessing services from nonprofits tend to be lower income and they don't have those resources.
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So really helping the decision maker get it, what it's like to live in the problem and what additional problems that causes because of the lack of resources available to solve it a handier way.
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That's really essential to them getting all the pieces of the problem that you're tackling.
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And as much as possible, you're doing this all through story and example, and connecting it to their own experience.
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You can say, you know, I don't know if you've ever had to deal with childcare stuff, but it can be a real pain.
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And if they go, oh yeah, yeah, I know.
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Then you've got a hook and then you can relate it.
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Whatever arena you're in, there's pieces that are familiar that you can help the decision maker connect to.
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Like, oh yeah, I get that part.
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I've dealt with something similar, right?
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The difference is they deal with it with resources.
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And the folks we're working with are dealing with it with very limited resources, which makes everything harder and take longer and be more exhausting.
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And if we don't address those holes, it often sets the person up to be unable to succeed in the primary solution that we're trying to engineer.
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So helping them understand all that and how the problem actually manifests in real people's lives, and how complicated it is to actually really fix it and not just kind of throw some money at it or slap a bandaid on it and hope for the best.
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But to really solve it and really get people to a place of thriving, or well on a pathway to thriving.
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So then that's a easy companion to the third piece, which is what's unique about your solution?
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What do you do to solve the complex bundle of problems in a way that causes you to be able to produce really exceptional outcomes?
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Better than average.
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Really great.
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What's your secret sauce?
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What is it about your approach?
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Now, again, this is not where you tell them all about the details of your services.
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This is where you tell them about your unique angle on the solution.
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So using the example I started with, you could say, recognizing that both the childcare and transportation are essential components that we have to deal with.
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Whether or not federal resources are gonna pay for them, we gotta deal with'em some kind of way.
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And so here are the two solutions that we've come up with that are innovative and very effective.
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And the result is that folks spend less time getting from all the different places they gotta be.
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They have reliable childcare and reliable transportation, and this is how we're able to make that happen.
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But you're talking at a conceptual level.
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You're always ready to provide more detail when they ask.
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But what you want is to give them the conceptual, give them the basics and pull them into asking more about how you get this done.
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And part of how we do that is the fourth thing, which is the impact of your unique solution and how it creates exceptional outcomes.
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I happen to have put this as number four, but again, this is not step 1, 2, 3, and four.
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These are interwoven.
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And a lot of times what's really smart is to lead with impact.
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If you have an exceptional characterization of your outcomes, whether it's data or something else, that's powerful and surprising.
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To be able to say, we solve the problem of X and we are able to take folks from point A to point Z.
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The impact and the exceptional outcomes are both going to be about the people who receive the services.
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How is their life changed in powerfully impactful and exceptional ways?
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And how does the community benefit in exceptional ways?
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So this is where you get into cost savings, return on investment, all of those things.
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That, particularly if you can show that the upfront investment in the work that you do results in a net savings long term, and to be able to characterize that with actual numbers if at all possible.
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That's a huge attention getter.
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But it's not the only thing that matters.
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But it is very attention getting, so if you have it, use it.
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Or you can talk about a really exceptional outcome that is an impact on the person.
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Let's use a healthcare example for this.
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Let's say somebody who's dealing with chronic diabetes and hypertension.
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Very common combination and often difficult to control.
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You can describe what the person's life is like when they are living with these two conditions being uncontrolled.
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You can explain why they're uncontrolled, what's going on in that person's life.
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And as long as those two conditions are uncontrolled, here's how that manifests in their life.
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They had been employed full-time, but as these conditions got more and more out of control, they were not able to continue to work full-time.
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They had to go to part-time work.
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And then that fell through.
00:20:22.703 --> 00:20:26.453
And so now they're occasionally working, but it's really difficult.
00:20:26.703 --> 00:20:38.814
They had employer provided health insurance when they were working full-time, but when they had to downgrade to part-time, they lost their insurance and now they're worried about expenses and so they see the primary care doc less often.
00:20:39.384 --> 00:20:43.733
And that just keeps piling onto the problem and making it worse.
00:20:44.513 --> 00:20:47.673
The more their condition deteriorates, the worse they feel.
00:20:48.034 --> 00:20:53.796
And the less they feel like they can pull themselves together to get to the primary care office.
00:20:54.155 --> 00:20:56.736
So it just all builds on one another.
00:20:56.826 --> 00:20:59.645
And it affects their kids, it affects their family.
00:21:00.246 --> 00:21:02.796
Everything in their life is touched by this.
00:21:03.224 --> 00:21:05.295
And it becomes a downward spiral.
00:21:05.795 --> 00:21:12.993
And the more that spirals downward, the more the costs to the community, to the systems pile up.
00:21:13.723 --> 00:21:26.931
But when we are able to reverse that, when we are able to address all of the pieces, all of the challenges that they're dealing with to make it possible for them to regularly connect to primary care.
00:21:27.431 --> 00:21:37.063
And help them become able to fully participate in their own care, and to start taking on increasing roles of managing their own care.
00:21:37.542 --> 00:21:40.188
When we're able to do that, things start to turn around.
00:21:41.087 --> 00:21:42.587
Their condition starts to improve.
00:21:42.678 --> 00:21:45.018
They have more energy, they're able to work.
00:21:45.317 --> 00:21:49.877
They're getting to the point where they feel like maybe they could go back to full-time work.
00:21:50.298 --> 00:21:54.128
And when they're able to do that, they don't need public assistance anymore.
00:21:54.128 --> 00:22:00.098
Now they're back in the game and they're able to take care of their kids and they're able to do all of these things.
00:22:00.729 --> 00:22:03.818
That's the kind of powerful impact we're able to make.
00:22:04.318 --> 00:22:08.679
You notice, nowhere in there did I say what services we provided to make that happen.
00:22:09.179 --> 00:22:09.929
It's not important.
00:22:10.489 --> 00:22:12.739
Not to the decision maker, not right now.
00:22:13.239 --> 00:22:16.321
If they ask and they wanna know, well, how do you do that?
00:22:16.352 --> 00:22:17.311
What's involved?
00:22:17.362 --> 00:22:20.031
What do you have to do to make that happen?
00:22:20.531 --> 00:22:25.461
Even then you may go more conceptual and say, well, you know, one of the things we found.
00:22:25.961 --> 00:22:30.477
Is that involving community health workers in this process is extremely valuable.
00:22:30.977 --> 00:22:40.487
We are able to send a community health worker to their home and provide them with education and support and a check-in right there in their own space.
00:22:40.987 --> 00:22:44.971
And that helps them stay more consistently on their medications.
00:22:45.454 --> 00:22:48.923
Which then in turn begins to make their condition more stabilized.
00:22:49.433 --> 00:22:58.217
And as they're feeling better, then the community health worker works with them to invite them to come into the primary care office, to the clinic.
00:22:58.926 --> 00:23:00.426
And we have an education component.
00:23:00.426 --> 00:23:01.777
We have this, that, and the other.
00:23:02.227 --> 00:23:03.997
But again, conceptual.
00:23:04.386 --> 00:23:07.207
You are not describing how, you're describing what you're doing.
00:23:07.707 --> 00:23:08.787
Cause that's what's important.
00:23:09.287 --> 00:23:15.762
And you can say, you know, and we got a little pushback around, well this is gonna cost more to have these community health workers going out.
00:23:16.196 --> 00:23:27.339
But what we found is that those community health workers, the massive impact it makes on improving people's health, more than pays for the cost of the community health workers.
00:23:27.839 --> 00:23:30.450
It's a super productive investment.
00:23:30.700 --> 00:23:32.140
You frame things like that.
00:23:32.682 --> 00:23:38.825
Always ready to provide additional detail in direct response to a decision maker's question.
00:23:39.244 --> 00:23:41.255
But you want them asking you questions.
00:23:41.255 --> 00:23:43.384
You don't wanna give them all the information upfront.
00:23:44.258 --> 00:23:50.425
So with these four essential elements, what you really want is kind of a mix and match.
00:23:50.920 --> 00:23:53.289
And they are going to overlap quite a bit.
00:23:53.470 --> 00:23:54.220
That is fine.
00:23:54.910 --> 00:24:05.750
One of the best ways to kind of experiment and play with this is to challenge yourself to craft a story of no more than four paragraphs.
00:24:06.250 --> 00:24:15.329
To craft a short story that weaves together all four of these messaging elements without ever detailing your services.
00:24:15.829 --> 00:24:22.690
And see how many different ways you can tell that story that covers all four of those.
00:24:23.190 --> 00:24:35.329
And then you can look at that and say, okay, for a decision maker who has trouble comprehending the true nature of the problem that we solve, what else needs to be in there for them?
00:24:36.049 --> 00:24:38.690
And then you can write a couple sentences about that.
00:24:39.680 --> 00:24:51.705
For the decision maker who thinks that all fill in the blank type services, all healthcare services, all housing, all nutrition services all workforce development services are the same.
00:24:52.205 --> 00:24:52.895
It doesn't matter.
00:24:52.895 --> 00:24:55.205
You could pick one out of a hat and it'd be all be the same.
00:24:55.705 --> 00:24:58.796
You do not want them thinking that because here's the problem.
00:24:58.796 --> 00:25:02.816
If it's all the same, then you can just go for the lowest price option.
00:25:03.076 --> 00:25:07.448
If they just think it's a widget, then let's find the cheapest widget supplier.
00:25:07.948 --> 00:25:11.367
That's why you have to help them understand that you are not the same.
00:25:11.867 --> 00:25:14.508
Because in fact, you do produce exceptional outcomes.
00:25:14.567 --> 00:25:21.048
Your solution is unique, or at least some aspects of your solution are unique, and therefore more valuable.
00:25:21.900 --> 00:25:23.238
They've gotta be able to see that.
00:25:23.856 --> 00:25:36.694
So if they are inclined to think that all the solutions around town are the same, you need extra messaging to draw those distinctions to help them see the difference.
00:25:36.994 --> 00:25:41.833
And of course, you want to do that without bashing the other service providers around town.
00:25:42.333 --> 00:25:43.113
That's not the point.
00:25:43.113 --> 00:25:45.272
The point is to show how you are exceptional.
00:25:45.772 --> 00:25:49.403
And a lot of how you do that is you talk about the outcomes.
00:25:49.903 --> 00:25:52.633
Those two things are tied closely together.
00:25:52.873 --> 00:26:00.492
The uniqueness of your solution, that secret sauce of yours is almost always the reason that you get the exceptional outcomes you do.
00:26:00.992 --> 00:26:01.982
That's only logical.
00:26:02.343 --> 00:26:05.029
So you can talk about those two together.
00:26:05.489 --> 00:26:11.183
Just add a bit more robust discussion of what's unique about the solution.
00:26:12.270 --> 00:26:15.986
So craft a couple of stories that weave all four of these in.
00:26:16.645 --> 00:26:25.875
Play with adding more emphasis on one element or another that you can use with decision makers who need a little more help grasping that particular piece.
00:26:26.375 --> 00:26:38.061
And once you've done that, you're going to have a body of messaging that will be pretty solid and you'll be able to mix and match pretty effectively.
00:26:38.932 --> 00:26:45.082
Now, the one other thing that's really helpful to do once you've put two or three of these stories together and played around with them.
00:26:45.922 --> 00:26:50.592
Is ask yourself a handful of questions about each of them.
00:26:51.092 --> 00:26:53.971
What can I do to make this even more engaging?
00:26:54.471 --> 00:27:00.432
What can I do to make this surprising or intriguing or confounding?
00:27:01.241 --> 00:27:12.647
You're always looking to engage a decision maker's emotion as well as their intellect, and so when you are able to introduce surprise, to confound them, to spark their curiosity.
00:27:13.127 --> 00:27:14.688
That's emotional engagement.
00:27:14.867 --> 00:27:16.428
And that will cause them to lean in.
00:27:17.218 --> 00:27:23.788
Think about ways you can invite the decision maker to share their connection to some piece of the experience that the client is having.
00:27:24.308 --> 00:27:30.638
Even if it's on a really different scale and is wildly different because they have such different resources available to them.
00:27:30.999 --> 00:27:35.797
At the core are still some of the basic struggles that people have with stuff.
00:27:36.576 --> 00:27:39.336
People with plenty of resources struggle with chronic illness.
00:27:39.426 --> 00:27:45.546
People with plenty of resources struggle with childcare stuff, struggle with certain aspects of housing issues.
00:27:46.238 --> 00:27:51.248
There's a lot of ways that people can connect to the essence of the client experience.
00:27:51.893 --> 00:27:56.423
It doesn't work for everything, but if you think there's something there, ask yourself that.
00:27:56.923 --> 00:28:06.222
Another thing that's useful to ask is, what's one piece of the problem we solve that most decision makers are unlikely to be aware of or understand fully?
00:28:06.722 --> 00:28:08.373
And make sure you include that.
00:28:08.873 --> 00:28:18.412
What's one misconception that decision makers often have about the work that we do, the problem that we solve, or the unique solution that we offer?
00:28:18.912 --> 00:28:23.951
What's one common misperception that decision makers often have about the cost?
00:28:24.531 --> 00:28:29.602
But don't ask those questions until after you've crafted the initial story that includes these four elements.
00:28:30.365 --> 00:28:42.817
The extra questions are to help you draw out more detail, more angles of characterizing these four core things, so that they are as rich and robust as possible.
00:28:43.037 --> 00:28:47.987
So that you've then got a body of messaging that's gonna work pretty well for you in most settings.
00:28:49.111 --> 00:28:52.050
My goal here was to make this not be super complicated.
00:28:52.500 --> 00:28:57.934
I want you to focus just on these four elements and get those really solid.
00:28:58.434 --> 00:29:06.505
There's tons more to do after that, but if you don't have these four nailed down, all the rest of it isn't really gonna help you that much.
00:29:07.105 --> 00:29:09.565
So play with these, build your stories.
00:29:10.065 --> 00:29:13.755
Ask some questions to pull out a little bit more nuance and detail.
00:29:14.384 --> 00:29:17.535
And then take'em for a test drive and refine from there.
00:29:18.035 --> 00:29:18.875
I know it'll help.
00:29:19.625 --> 00:29:24.605
Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:00.050 --> 00:00:02.660
You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:02.930 --> 00:00:09.980
In today's episode, we share the four essential elements at the heart of high impact advocacy messaging.
00:00:10.220 --> 00:00:11.599
So, stay tuned.
00:00:17.789 --> 00:00:26.699
If you wanna 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.
00:00:27.329 --> 00:00:40.319
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.
00:00:40.948 --> 00:00:53.488
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.
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Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
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This podcast will help you do just that.
00:00:59.518 --> 00:01:02.548
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:01:08.168 --> 00:01:08.858
Hey there folks.
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Welcome to another episode of the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
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I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because the stakes are really high with messaging these days.
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There's so much noise, there's so many reasons for people not to pay attention to or engage with your messaging, that we can't afford to get it wrong.
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Effective messaging is so critical to every aspect of engaging decision makers at any point in the process.
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No matter where you are in your relationship with them, your messaging has to work.
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So today I wanna focus on the four essential elements that are absolutely at the core of high impact advocacy messaging.
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If you're missing any one of these four, your messaging's not gonna work.
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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.
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There are a million possible messaging strategies and techniques, and all kinds of things you can add to your messaging that will make it even more effective, even more engaging, even more high impact.
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But today I just wanna focus on the four things that have to be there no matter what.
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And the reason for this is that if you've been engaging decision makers for any length of time, you already know that the level of their not getting it is pretty high a lot of the time.
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We have to battle that constantly.
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To make sure that decision makers have what they need to understand and really value the work that you're doing.
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There's some things they've really gotta grasp.
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The four elements that are essential for your messaging are, number one, what you do, which includes who you help and the impact you make on their lives.
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Number two, the specific problem or problems that you solve.
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Number three, what's unique about your solution to those problems?
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And number four, the impact of your unique solution and how it creates exceptional outcomes.
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While I've broken those out into four elements, when you're crafting your messaging, you'll wanna make sure that you've got all four in there.
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But it's not step one, step two, step three, step four.
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You will weave all of this together and you will emphasize different elements more strongly, depending on who you're talking with.
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So for example, if you have a decision maker that really does not fully understand the problem that you solve, you're gonna have to emphasize that pretty strongly with them.
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Because if they don't get the problem you solve, then they're not gonna understand the value of your solution.
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They're not gonna understand any of the rest of it.
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They're not gonna know that the impact is a big deal.
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Similarly, if you're aware that there tends to be a lot of confusion or overgeneralization among decision makers about what you do and who you help, then you will want to emphasize that more strongly.
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You're gonna weight these things differently, depending on who you're talking with and what they're most challenged by in their getting it about the value of your work.
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Fundamentally, what we're doing with all of this is we're communicating the value of your work.
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That's the bottom line.
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But we need these four elements in order to do that in a way that is going to actually cause the decision maker to get all the things they need to get in order to understand the value.
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The first thing is what you do.
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Who you help and the impact that your work makes on the folks that you help.
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That's the primary thing.
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And as I've said in a lot of different episodes lately, including one that was thusly titled, decision makers don't care about your services.
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So when I say what you do, I don't mean all the services you provide and all of that.
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What I mean is the essence of what you do.
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How do you transform lives?
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What is that?
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Because that weaves together the thing that you do and the impact you create.
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And that's how you want to characterize that.
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A lot of times what folks will do is they'll, particularly in an introductory meeting with a decision maker, they'll go on about a little bit about the history of the organization and maybe a little bit about your mission.
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And then you talk about the services you provide and how many people you help each year, so on and so forth.
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But when we do that, we're making a bunch of assumptions.
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We're making the assumption that the decision maker cares about those details.
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They probably care about the number of people you serve, but they probably don't care about most of the rest of that.
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And what we risk when we give them information that doesn't feel relevant to them, or immediately important to them, is they start tuning out.
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And we are always trying to make sure that we don't cause that.
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Instead what we wanna cause is engagement.
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We want them leaning in.
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So every piece of your messaging should be structured with that aim.
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When you're introducing your organization to any decision maker for the first time, or maybe after a little bit of time when they've kind of forgotten you.
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You wanna lead with a single statement that combines what you do, who you help, and the impact you make on the people you help.
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You're gonna be talking about impact a lot.
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But in this context, it's really kind of the essence of the impact.
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It's not the 27 details of the ROI and all of that.
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It's really the essence of the impact on the individual.
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And if there is a really concise essence of the impact it makes on the community at large, then you add that too.
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But bottom line, this is really about how what you do changes lives.
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And you're talking about it from the perspective of the person whose life has changed.
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So if you're in the housing space and you're talking about that impact, you're painting the picture from the eyes and experience of the person you help.
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So you might say a sentence or two about what it's like for folks before they get your help, and then what life is like after they get your help, how their life has changed.
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And that makes a nice little story that's a great way to introduce what you do, who you help, and the profound impact it has.
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Most Nonprofit leaders are pretty good at that.
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The one thing I see happen a lot is that too much detail gets added.
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And one of the biggest mistakes that happens is adding in a whole lot of discussion about the details of the services.
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That's not what you lead with.
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It's not important until the decision maker has really bought in and wants to know, well, how'd you do that?
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Wait a minute, what are you doing that's making that happen?
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That will be getting to what's unique about your solution.
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Even there, you're not gonna catalog your services.
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You're going to speak to what is unique.
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But even more fundamentally than that, they've gotta understand the problem or problems that you solve.
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And here's the challenge with that.
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A lot of decision makers over generalize about most problems that nonprofits solve.
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There's a bunch of different reasons for that, but first and foremost, that usually happens when the thing that you work on is not a pet issue for that decision maker.
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If it's their pet issue, they probably do have much greater knowledge and are gonna be starting from a more informed place.
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But the vast majority of decision makers you engage with are not gonna be in that place.
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There's gonna be some part of the problem that they don't have their head fully around or that they misunderstand, or that they overgeneralize about.
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They just have a very broad brush sense of what the problems are.
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And if they've got any sort of ideological bias mixing in where they're inclined to make the problems be the individual's fault, and that if they would just do X, Y, or Z, then they wouldn't have these problems.
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If you're battling that, then you've got some extra work to do to help explain the problem.
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So with this, you wanna make sure that you're being clear about the nature of the problem, how it is experienced by the people you serve.
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What is it like to live in that problem?
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That is the best way to help a decision maker really get it, and to let go of a little bit of their predispositions to make it be simple.
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Most decision makers want to think of most problems as being simple.
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Because the more complicated they are, the more money they cost to solve and the more work they take to solve, and that's inconvenient.
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So they really are hoping that things are fairly simple.
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And unfortunately most of the time we are there to help them understand actually, not so much.
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The best way to do that is to help them understand how the person who has the problem, experiences the problem.
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And what it means in their life, what it means in their family's life.
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'Cause most of the time, particularly if you're serving adults, most of them have kids involved.
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There's other family members.
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And so there's ripple effect throughout the family when one member of the family is experiencing this problem.
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Or maybe the whole family's experiencing the problem.
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If it's a housing issue or a food insecurity issue, then everybody's affected.
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That is by definition, a problem the whole family is experiencing altogether.
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If it's a workforce development thing or it's healthcare or nutrition or some of those others, then the problem may be principally experienced by the individual client.
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But then there are still ripple effects on the family, obviously.
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So you can work from those kind of two categories, but you want the decision maker to have a clear picture in their head.
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And a story is the best way to do this, to help them understand what it's like to live in that problem.
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And then you can talk about some challenges to solving the problem.
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Workforce development leaps to mind.
00:11:32.433 --> 00:11:39.826
So you may have the individual client who needs to identify a career pathway that's going to lead to a family sustaining job.
00:11:40.376 --> 00:11:43.517
And maybe they're several steps away from that at this point.
00:11:43.907 --> 00:11:51.142
So they're gonna have to do a lot of things to get fully on that pathway and start moving toward the desired result.
00:11:51.642 --> 00:11:53.591
But there's other stuff in the way.
00:11:54.042 --> 00:12:07.292
There's childcare, there's transportation, there's all sorts of other things that are in the way of that person being able to successfully participate in say, education or training that's gonna help them get to that result.
00:12:07.442 --> 00:12:17.341
So if we don't address those additional barriers, then the chances of them being able to succeed in the primary goal, go way down.
00:12:17.841 --> 00:12:24.898
So we can't treat the need for the career pathway and the education and training as just the only problem.
00:12:24.947 --> 00:12:30.823
There are other things involved, so we have to look at the whole picture and address those things as well.
00:12:31.494 --> 00:12:46.274
Depending on what your agenda is with that decision maker, you might go on to say, you know, and the particular challenge with this is that most government funding sources that support this work don't want to take on the responsibility, particularly of the childcare question.
00:12:46.698 --> 00:12:47.658
Cause it's expensive.
00:12:48.046 --> 00:12:51.388
But if we don't deal with it, we set the person up for failure.
00:12:51.447 --> 00:12:55.587
And then we've invested the money in their training and it still hasn't created the result that we wanted.
00:12:56.128 --> 00:12:58.258
So we can't just pretend that's not there.
00:12:58.258 --> 00:12:59.817
We have to find a way to deal with it.
00:13:00.291 --> 00:13:02.150
So you're beginning to help them understand.
00:13:02.567 --> 00:13:12.413
And you might describe why when you combine, for example, transportation and childcare as a problem for a person who wants to participate in these services.
00:13:12.855 --> 00:13:17.552
I have been known to like, draw this on a notepad real quick if I'm sitting there in the room with the person.
00:13:17.552 --> 00:13:19.937
And say, you know, look, so here's where they live.
00:13:20.298 --> 00:13:21.649
Made a little X on the paper.
00:13:21.948 --> 00:13:29.133
And half an hour away in this direction is where the training place is that they need to go get their training.
00:13:29.493 --> 00:13:37.023
And then over here in a triangle in the other direction, a half an hour from either of those places is where the childcare is.
00:13:37.523 --> 00:13:39.023
And this person doesn't have a car.
00:13:39.572 --> 00:13:43.413
So they've gotta figure out how to take public transportation or get somebody to give them a ride.
00:13:43.442 --> 00:13:46.052
'Cause they can't afford a ride share or a taxi every day.
00:13:46.562 --> 00:14:00.038
So they're now burning at least an hour to an hour and a half in the morning and in the afternoon, just getting everybody where they need to be so that they can participate in this training.
00:14:00.248 --> 00:14:04.628
And then they've gotta be present and focused and fully participate in the training.
00:14:05.128 --> 00:14:11.471
But they've already burned three or four hours in their total day just getting places.
00:14:11.971 --> 00:14:24.183
Most decision makers, not all, but a lot of decision makers do get, for example, the challenges of getting your kid to childcare and then getting to work and all of the logistics that are involved.
00:14:24.214 --> 00:14:32.524
That's challenging enough when you have your own car or you can afford a ride share and you can just get everybody as efficiently as possible from point A to point B.
00:14:32.703 --> 00:14:46.519
It's still a hassle, but when you have to do all this using public transportation or a borrowed ride that may or may not show up on time, then this just becomes 10 times more complicated and time consuming and exhausting.
00:14:47.019 --> 00:14:59.236
So that helps you begin to tackle one of the things that is a problem for decision makers is that they tend to view all problems from the lens of how they would solve them with all the resources they have at their disposal.
00:14:59.754 --> 00:15:06.658
And for the most part, the people who are accessing services from nonprofits tend to be lower income and they don't have those resources.
00:15:07.317 --> 00:15:20.518
So really helping the decision maker get it, what it's like to live in the problem and what additional problems that causes because of the lack of resources available to solve it a handier way.
00:15:21.357 --> 00:15:26.958
That's really essential to them getting all the pieces of the problem that you're tackling.
00:15:27.696 --> 00:15:34.255
And as much as possible, you're doing this all through story and example, and connecting it to their own experience.
00:15:34.255 --> 00:15:38.875
You can say, you know, I don't know if you've ever had to deal with childcare stuff, but it can be a real pain.
00:15:38.905 --> 00:15:40.556
And if they go, oh yeah, yeah, I know.
00:15:40.826 --> 00:15:43.316
Then you've got a hook and then you can relate it.
00:15:43.644 --> 00:15:50.058
Whatever arena you're in, there's pieces that are familiar that you can help the decision maker connect to.
00:15:50.058 --> 00:15:51.438
Like, oh yeah, I get that part.
00:15:51.979 --> 00:15:53.389
I've dealt with something similar, right?
00:15:53.599 --> 00:15:56.239
The difference is they deal with it with resources.
00:15:56.479 --> 00:16:04.458
And the folks we're working with are dealing with it with very limited resources, which makes everything harder and take longer and be more exhausting.
00:16:05.061 --> 00:16:14.767
And if we don't address those holes, it often sets the person up to be unable to succeed in the primary solution that we're trying to engineer.
00:16:15.267 --> 00:16:28.986
So helping them understand all that and how the problem actually manifests in real people's lives, and how complicated it is to actually really fix it and not just kind of throw some money at it or slap a bandaid on it and hope for the best.
00:16:29.486 --> 00:16:36.000
But to really solve it and really get people to a place of thriving, or well on a pathway to thriving.
00:16:36.750 --> 00:16:43.113
So then that's a easy companion to the third piece, which is what's unique about your solution?
00:16:43.383 --> 00:16:54.431
What do you do to solve the complex bundle of problems in a way that causes you to be able to produce really exceptional outcomes?
00:16:54.931 --> 00:16:56.130
Better than average.
00:16:56.760 --> 00:16:57.660
Really great.
00:16:58.160 --> 00:16:59.421
What's your secret sauce?
00:16:59.451 --> 00:17:01.431
What is it about your approach?
00:17:01.850 --> 00:17:07.409
Now, again, this is not where you tell them all about the details of your services.
00:17:08.038 --> 00:17:13.070
This is where you tell them about your unique angle on the solution.
00:17:13.570 --> 00:17:23.419
So using the example I started with, you could say, recognizing that both the childcare and transportation are essential components that we have to deal with.
00:17:23.749 --> 00:17:28.652
Whether or not federal resources are gonna pay for them, we gotta deal with'em some kind of way.
00:17:29.102 --> 00:17:35.442
And so here are the two solutions that we've come up with that are innovative and very effective.
00:17:35.942 --> 00:17:41.596
And the result is that folks spend less time getting from all the different places they gotta be.
00:17:41.807 --> 00:17:48.153
They have reliable childcare and reliable transportation, and this is how we're able to make that happen.
00:17:48.653 --> 00:17:50.363
But you're talking at a conceptual level.
00:17:50.820 --> 00:17:54.321
You're always ready to provide more detail when they ask.
00:17:54.869 --> 00:18:05.375
But what you want is to give them the conceptual, give them the basics and pull them into asking more about how you get this done.
00:18:05.875 --> 00:18:14.695
And part of how we do that is the fourth thing, which is the impact of your unique solution and how it creates exceptional outcomes.
00:18:15.340 --> 00:18:20.034
I happen to have put this as number four, but again, this is not step 1, 2, 3, and four.
00:18:20.094 --> 00:18:21.473
These are interwoven.
00:18:22.163 --> 00:18:27.787
And a lot of times what's really smart is to lead with impact.
00:18:28.433 --> 00:18:37.566
If you have an exceptional characterization of your outcomes, whether it's data or something else, that's powerful and surprising.
00:18:38.115 --> 00:18:48.310
To be able to say, we solve the problem of X and we are able to take folks from point A to point Z.
00:18:48.810 --> 00:18:54.421
The impact and the exceptional outcomes are both going to be about the people who receive the services.
00:18:54.840 --> 00:19:00.155
How is their life changed in powerfully impactful and exceptional ways?
00:19:00.655 --> 00:19:05.976
And how does the community benefit in exceptional ways?
00:19:06.624 --> 00:19:12.513
So this is where you get into cost savings, return on investment, all of those things.
00:19:12.748 --> 00:19:27.465
That, particularly if you can show that the upfront investment in the work that you do results in a net savings long term, and to be able to characterize that with actual numbers if at all possible.
00:19:27.965 --> 00:19:29.405
That's a huge attention getter.
00:19:29.905 --> 00:19:32.650
But it's not the only thing that matters.
00:19:33.282 --> 00:19:36.252
But it is very attention getting, so if you have it, use it.
00:19:36.752 --> 00:19:41.803
Or you can talk about a really exceptional outcome that is an impact on the person.
00:19:42.353 --> 00:19:44.032
Let's use a healthcare example for this.
00:19:44.532 --> 00:19:48.825
Let's say somebody who's dealing with chronic diabetes and hypertension.
00:19:48.884 --> 00:19:53.027
Very common combination and often difficult to control.
00:19:53.503 --> 00:19:58.844
You can describe what the person's life is like when they are living with these two conditions being uncontrolled.
00:19:58.903 --> 00:20:03.763
You can explain why they're uncontrolled, what's going on in that person's life.
00:20:04.094 --> 00:20:10.483
And as long as those two conditions are uncontrolled, here's how that manifests in their life.
00:20:10.983 --> 00:20:18.784
They had been employed full-time, but as these conditions got more and more out of control, they were not able to continue to work full-time.
00:20:18.834 --> 00:20:21.023
They had to go to part-time work.
00:20:21.294 --> 00:20:22.703
And then that fell through.
00:20:22.703 --> 00:20:26.453
And so now they're occasionally working, but it's really difficult.
00:20:26.703 --> 00:20:38.814
They had employer provided health insurance when they were working full-time, but when they had to downgrade to part-time, they lost their insurance and now they're worried about expenses and so they see the primary care doc less often.
00:20:39.384 --> 00:20:43.733
And that just keeps piling onto the problem and making it worse.
00:20:44.513 --> 00:20:47.673
The more their condition deteriorates, the worse they feel.
00:20:48.034 --> 00:20:53.796
And the less they feel like they can pull themselves together to get to the primary care office.
00:20:54.155 --> 00:20:56.736
So it just all builds on one another.
00:20:56.826 --> 00:20:59.645
And it affects their kids, it affects their family.
00:21:00.246 --> 00:21:02.796
Everything in their life is touched by this.
00:21:03.224 --> 00:21:05.295
And it becomes a downward spiral.
00:21:05.795 --> 00:21:12.993
And the more that spirals downward, the more the costs to the community, to the systems pile up.
00:21:13.723 --> 00:21:26.931
But when we are able to reverse that, when we are able to address all of the pieces, all of the challenges that they're dealing with to make it possible for them to regularly connect to primary care.
00:21:27.431 --> 00:21:37.063
And help them become able to fully participate in their own care, and to start taking on increasing roles of managing their own care.
00:21:37.542 --> 00:21:40.188
When we're able to do that, things start to turn around.
00:21:41.087 --> 00:21:42.587
Their condition starts to improve.
00:21:42.678 --> 00:21:45.018
They have more energy, they're able to work.
00:21:45.317 --> 00:21:49.877
They're getting to the point where they feel like maybe they could go back to full-time work.
00:21:50.298 --> 00:21:54.128
And when they're able to do that, they don't need public assistance anymore.
00:21:54.128 --> 00:22:00.098
Now they're back in the game and they're able to take care of their kids and they're able to do all of these things.
00:22:00.729 --> 00:22:03.818
That's the kind of powerful impact we're able to make.
00:22:04.318 --> 00:22:08.679
You notice, nowhere in there did I say what services we provided to make that happen.
00:22:09.179 --> 00:22:09.929
It's not important.
00:22:10.489 --> 00:22:12.739
Not to the decision maker, not right now.
00:22:13.239 --> 00:22:16.321
If they ask and they wanna know, well, how do you do that?
00:22:16.352 --> 00:22:17.311
What's involved?
00:22:17.362 --> 00:22:20.031
What do you have to do to make that happen?
00:22:20.531 --> 00:22:25.461
Even then you may go more conceptual and say, well, you know, one of the things we found.
00:22:25.961 --> 00:22:30.477
Is that involving community health workers in this process is extremely valuable.
00:22:30.977 --> 00:22:40.487
We are able to send a community health worker to their home and provide them with education and support and a check-in right there in their own space.
00:22:40.987 --> 00:22:44.971
And that helps them stay more consistently on their medications.
00:22:45.454 --> 00:22:48.923
Which then in turn begins to make their condition more stabilized.
00:22:49.433 --> 00:22:58.217
And as they're feeling better, then the community health worker works with them to invite them to come into the primary care office, to the clinic.
00:22:58.926 --> 00:23:00.426
And we have an education component.
00:23:00.426 --> 00:23:01.777
We have this, that, and the other.
00:23:02.227 --> 00:23:03.997
But again, conceptual.
00:23:04.386 --> 00:23:07.207
You are not describing how, you're describing what you're doing.
00:23:07.707 --> 00:23:08.787
Cause that's what's important.
00:23:09.287 --> 00:23:15.762
And you can say, you know, and we got a little pushback around, well this is gonna cost more to have these community health workers going out.
00:23:16.196 --> 00:23:27.339
But what we found is that those community health workers, the massive impact it makes on improving people's health, more than pays for the cost of the community health workers.
00:23:27.839 --> 00:23:30.450
It's a super productive investment.
00:23:30.700 --> 00:23:32.140
You frame things like that.
00:23:32.682 --> 00:23:38.825
Always ready to provide additional detail in direct response to a decision maker's question.
00:23:39.244 --> 00:23:41.255
But you want them asking you questions.
00:23:41.255 --> 00:23:43.384
You don't wanna give them all the information upfront.
00:23:44.258 --> 00:23:50.425
So with these four essential elements, what you really want is kind of a mix and match.
00:23:50.920 --> 00:23:53.289
And they are going to overlap quite a bit.
00:23:53.470 --> 00:23:54.220
That is fine.
00:23:54.910 --> 00:24:05.750
One of the best ways to kind of experiment and play with this is to challenge yourself to craft a story of no more than four paragraphs.
00:24:06.250 --> 00:24:15.329
To craft a short story that weaves together all four of these messaging elements without ever detailing your services.
00:24:15.829 --> 00:24:22.690
And see how many different ways you can tell that story that covers all four of those.
00:24:23.190 --> 00:24:35.329
And then you can look at that and say, okay, for a decision maker who has trouble comprehending the true nature of the problem that we solve, what else needs to be in there for them?
00:24:36.049 --> 00:24:38.690
And then you can write a couple sentences about that.
00:24:39.680 --> 00:24:51.705
For the decision maker who thinks that all fill in the blank type services, all healthcare services, all housing, all nutrition services all workforce development services are the same.
00:24:52.205 --> 00:24:52.895
It doesn't matter.
00:24:52.895 --> 00:24:55.205
You could pick one out of a hat and it'd be all be the same.
00:24:55.705 --> 00:24:58.796
You do not want them thinking that because here's the problem.
00:24:58.796 --> 00:25:02.816
If it's all the same, then you can just go for the lowest price option.
00:25:03.076 --> 00:25:07.448
If they just think it's a widget, then let's find the cheapest widget supplier.
00:25:07.948 --> 00:25:11.367
That's why you have to help them understand that you are not the same.
00:25:11.867 --> 00:25:14.508
Because in fact, you do produce exceptional outcomes.
00:25:14.567 --> 00:25:21.048
Your solution is unique, or at least some aspects of your solution are unique, and therefore more valuable.
00:25:21.900 --> 00:25:23.238
They've gotta be able to see that.
00:25:23.856 --> 00:25:36.694
So if they are inclined to think that all the solutions around town are the same, you need extra messaging to draw those distinctions to help them see the difference.
00:25:36.994 --> 00:25:41.833
And of course, you want to do that without bashing the other service providers around town.
00:25:42.333 --> 00:25:43.113
That's not the point.
00:25:43.113 --> 00:25:45.272
The point is to show how you are exceptional.
00:25:45.772 --> 00:25:49.403
And a lot of how you do that is you talk about the outcomes.
00:25:49.903 --> 00:25:52.633
Those two things are tied closely together.
00:25:52.873 --> 00:26:00.492
The uniqueness of your solution, that secret sauce of yours is almost always the reason that you get the exceptional outcomes you do.
00:26:00.992 --> 00:26:01.982
That's only logical.
00:26:02.343 --> 00:26:05.029
So you can talk about those two together.
00:26:05.489 --> 00:26:11.183
Just add a bit more robust discussion of what's unique about the solution.
00:26:12.270 --> 00:26:15.986
So craft a couple of stories that weave all four of these in.
00:26:16.645 --> 00:26:25.875
Play with adding more emphasis on one element or another that you can use with decision makers who need a little more help grasping that particular piece.
00:26:26.375 --> 00:26:38.061
And once you've done that, you're going to have a body of messaging that will be pretty solid and you'll be able to mix and match pretty effectively.
00:26:38.932 --> 00:26:45.082
Now, the one other thing that's really helpful to do once you've put two or three of these stories together and played around with them.
00:26:45.922 --> 00:26:50.592
Is ask yourself a handful of questions about each of them.
00:26:51.092 --> 00:26:53.971
What can I do to make this even more engaging?
00:26:54.471 --> 00:27:00.432
What can I do to make this surprising or intriguing or confounding?
00:27:01.241 --> 00:27:12.647
You're always looking to engage a decision maker's emotion as well as their intellect, and so when you are able to introduce surprise, to confound them, to spark their curiosity.
00:27:13.127 --> 00:27:14.688
That's emotional engagement.
00:27:14.867 --> 00:27:16.428
And that will cause them to lean in.
00:27:17.218 --> 00:27:23.788
Think about ways you can invite the decision maker to share their connection to some piece of the experience that the client is having.
00:27:24.308 --> 00:27:30.638
Even if it's on a really different scale and is wildly different because they have such different resources available to them.
00:27:30.999 --> 00:27:35.797
At the core are still some of the basic struggles that people have with stuff.
00:27:36.576 --> 00:27:39.336
People with plenty of resources struggle with chronic illness.
00:27:39.426 --> 00:27:45.546
People with plenty of resources struggle with childcare stuff, struggle with certain aspects of housing issues.
00:27:46.238 --> 00:27:51.248
There's a lot of ways that people can connect to the essence of the client experience.
00:27:51.893 --> 00:27:56.423
It doesn't work for everything, but if you think there's something there, ask yourself that.
00:27:56.923 --> 00:28:06.222
Another thing that's useful to ask is, what's one piece of the problem we solve that most decision makers are unlikely to be aware of or understand fully?
00:28:06.722 --> 00:28:08.373
And make sure you include that.
00:28:08.873 --> 00:28:18.412
What's one misconception that decision makers often have about the work that we do, the problem that we solve, or the unique solution that we offer?
00:28:18.912 --> 00:28:23.951
What's one common misperception that decision makers often have about the cost?
00:28:24.531 --> 00:28:29.602
But don't ask those questions until after you've crafted the initial story that includes these four elements.
00:28:30.365 --> 00:28:42.817
The extra questions are to help you draw out more detail, more angles of characterizing these four core things, so that they are as rich and robust as possible.
00:28:43.037 --> 00:28:47.987
So that you've then got a body of messaging that's gonna work pretty well for you in most settings.
00:28:49.111 --> 00:28:52.050
My goal here was to make this not be super complicated.
00:28:52.500 --> 00:28:57.934
I want you to focus just on these four elements and get those really solid.
00:28:58.434 --> 00:29:06.505
There's tons more to do after that, but if you don't have these four nailed down, all the rest of it isn't really gonna help you that much.
00:29:07.105 --> 00:29:09.565
So play with these, build your stories.
00:29:10.065 --> 00:29:13.755
Ask some questions to pull out a little bit more nuance and detail.
00:29:14.384 --> 00:29:17.535
And then take'em for a test drive and refine from there.
00:29:18.035 --> 00:29:18.875
I know it'll help.
00:29:19.625 --> 00:29:24.605
Thanks for listening and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
