Oct. 5, 2025
What's Standing in the Way Between You and the Advocacy Results You Want?
One of the sources of constant frustration that I hear from Nonprofit leaders is about not having the advocacy results they want. If that's you, you're in good company. A lot of Nonprofit leaders experience this problem.
The other reality is that Nonprofit leaders are really busy. Too busy to spend your time on anything that isn't going to produce a clear, tangible result. So what we all need is to find the fastest, most effective way to get to the advocacy results we want.
What's the shortest distance between where you are now, in terms of influence and results with decision makers that matter to you, and the results you actually want to see from those decisionmakers? A lot of what I do is help Nonprofit leaders create a roadmap that plots the shortest distance between those two points.
But here's the thing. A lot of times, even on that shortest path, there can be stuff in the way. And we can't always see it.
In this episode, we share:
- The four most common obstacles and mistakes that get in the way of great advocacy results
- Why the lack of a dedicated advocacy staff member is not the problem
- How to focus your strategic relationship-building work for maximum results
- The two essential ways to build influence with decisionmakers
- Four key ingredients to making it easy for a decisionmaker to say ‘yes’ to your ask
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're taking a look at what's standing in the way between you and the advocacy results you want.
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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 I wanna tackle one of the sources of constant frustration that I hear from Nonprofit leaders about not having the advocacy results they want.
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If that's you you're in good company.
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A lot of Nonprofit leaders experience this problem.
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And here's the other reality.
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Nonprofit leaders are really busy.
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Too busy to spend your time on anything that isn't going to produce a clear, tangible result.
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So what we all need is to find the fastest, most effective way to get to the advocacy results you want.
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What's the shortest distance between where you are now in terms of influence and results with decision makers that matter to you and the results you actually wanna see from those decision makers.
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A lot of what I do is help Nonprofit leaders create a roadmap that plots the shortest distance between those two points.
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But here's the thing.
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A lot of times, even on that shortest path, there can be stuff in the way.
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And we can't always see it.
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If you don't have the advocacy results you want, there's probably something in the way, usually several somethings in my experience.
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And what I've noticed is that there are several common problems or mistakes that most often are what's getting in the way.
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It's not usually some really wild and unusual thing that's unique to a particular situation or organization.
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It's usually a pretty consistent set of stuff, which is good because that means there's a lot of experience and evidence for how you can either remove those obstacles or get around them, and get back on that shortest path to your results.
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One of the most common mistakes is thinking you don't have time to do advocacy, or enough time to do advocacy.
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And then that leads to thinking that the only way you can do really great advocacy that's really effective is to hire someone to do it.
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And since you don't have the money to hire a full-time advocacy person, that means you can't do really great advocacy.
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Once I say that out loud, I'm pretty sure you can see how that is some circular reasoning that can get us in trouble pretty quickly.
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I have some good news, which is that the reality is you're already doing advocacy work.
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So it's not that you don't have time.
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You're already doing it.
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And remember that around here we define advocacy work as applying to any decision maker in your world that has influence over money and policy decisions that matter to you.
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And so whether you're talking with government agency people or elected officials or potential contracting partners, or any other decision maker in your world.
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Corporate funders, whoever it might be.
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When you need something from them, and you're engaging them to help make that happen.
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That's advocacy.
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So you know you're already doing a lot of that.
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The important question is, how can we make sure that your advocacy work gets the results you want?
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Another mistake that I see a lot is overestimating the strength of your existing relationships with decision makers.
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And then getting surprised and disappointed when those folks don't follow through for you when you really need them.
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And It tends to come up as, oh, we have great relationships.
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All the electeds love us, everybody loves us.
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They think we're great.
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They love our work.
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They've been to our program, they visited, they get what we do.
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And then you come to find out when you have a heavy lift that you want from them, that they're not as in love with you as you thought.
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They're not bought in enough to commit the investment that you need from them.
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Whether that's an investment of time or money, or policy change, whatever it is.
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Another thing that's often in the way, and this goes to both time and results, is not being targeted enough with your strategic relationship building.
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There's definitely something to be said for broad spectrum relationship building.
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But if you're operating with limited time and energy, and particularly if you have something you need from a small subset of decision makers, focus the time and energy you have on that small subset.
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The other biggest thing that tends to be in the way is not being strategic with every piece of your messaging, all the time.
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And what that leads to is that then you're not able to engage decision makers in every encounter.
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We talk a lot all the time on the podcast and in my coaching programs, about the importance of having your messaging dialed in with every single decision maker, because that's what's gonna drive their buy-in.
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That's what's gonna drive their investment.
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That's what's gonna get them to really get it about the value of what you do.
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And so if we don't have that dialed in all the time for every decision maker, then we don't get the level of engagement we want from that decision maker.
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It also tends to result in not asking for the things we want in a way that makes it really easy for the decision maker to say yes.
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Cause that is all about messaging.
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So you see when you put all that together, if you even have one or two or three of those things in your way.
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It makes your advocacy work much harder, which makes it take longer and feel like more of an uphill slog And it's keeping you from getting the results you want.
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So a lot of what I do with my one-to-one clients and with my coaching programs is I help leaders become super consistent and effective and efficient at always having all these pieces dialed in.
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So that they're available at every encounter with decision makers.
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Once you start to do that, you start to see your results improve very quickly.
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So let's talk about the specifics of what we can do instead, to get around those obstacles that tend to be in our way.
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First and foremost, target your strategic relationship building work.
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We've already established you don't have unlimited time and energy.
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Now, I will say that if you're someone who just builds connection everywhere you go,'cause that's just how you roll, that's totally fine.
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And that's wonderful actually, that will serve you very well.
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But there's still the question of where do you put your focused energy and attention on actually building influential relationships with decision makers that matter.
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That needs to be targeted and focused.
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And some criteria that you can use for that are decision makers that are fixtures in your world, versus those that are kind of one-offs.
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The ones that are there again and again, year after year, those are the ones where, first of all, you're gonna have the opportunity to build really deep collaborative relationships that are super influential.
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Whereas the one-offs, we may need to build a quick relationship here and there for something that pops up.
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But if it's a choice between that and deepening the relationship with someone who's regularly in your world, that's certainly a strategic judgment call that merits real thought and strategic attention.
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Especially if you can't do both.
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Another way to focus your targeting is to differentiate between decision makers that you know you need something from, versus decision makers that it would be good to have a relationship with on general principle.
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Because they're in an influential role, they command a lot of respect and attention in your arena, those kinds of things.
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Again, if you've got the bandwidth to do it all, go for it.
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But the main thing is that you are deliberately strategic about every single strategic relationship that you set out to build and strengthen and to cultivate influence within that relationship.
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Cause that's what this is all about.
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You've got to cultivate influence if you expect them ultimately to do what you want them to do.
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As a key piece to that, another thing that's absolutely critical is making sure that you have clearly defined results and outcomes.
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What do you want as your end result, and what actions do you specifically want each decision maker to take in order to bring about or get closer to that result?
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You'd be surprised how often this gets skipped.
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And I understand how it happens.
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It's easy to kind of think, well, we know what we need from them.
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We need them to give us more money.
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We need them to change a policy that's really not working for us or for the people we serve.
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Or we need them to invest more money.
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Okay, that's good, but that is not a specific result.
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A specific result is how much money?
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By when?
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Out of what funding source?
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I'm not saying that you have to have all the answers about exactly where the money's gonna come from.
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That may be something you have to have a conversation with a decision maker to determine.
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But you have to be super clear on how much money for what purpose to achieve what end result.
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And always be able to talk about this in terms of the outcomes it's going to produce for the decision maker and the stuff they care about.
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But if you're not clear about all of that before you go to talk to them about what you want, or even before you go to talk to them at all, then the focus of your conversations, the way you frame your messaging, all of that is going to be less strategic than it could be, and therefore less effective.
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I see more mistakes happen here than maybe anywhere else.
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Another point of clarity that's important, is to have a really clear-eyed view of the strength of each of your current relationships with your high priority decision makers.
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This is really a big deal.
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Because this is where it's very easy to tell yourself a story that feels good, that feels true, that we have these great relationships.
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Ask yourself, for real, is that relationship where we need it to be, given what we need from them?
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How confident are we that they would say yes to the thing that we want?
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How much influence do we really have with them?
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And what level of influence do we need?
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I feel like in these times particularly, it's important to call out that there are two ways to build influence.
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Engagement, which is our preferred method always.
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Whenever possible we want to influence through engagement.
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But it's not always possible.
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Sometimes there is not enough alignment there for that to work.
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And in that case, the other way you build influence is with pressure.
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We've talked a lot about that on a number of other episodes.
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And if you haven't listened to them lately and have any concerns at all about using pressure or how to use it effectively, I recommend that you go back and check those out.
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Cause we have to be able to do both.
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If we're only about engagement and we're unwilling to use pressure, we're leaving a huge chunk of advocacy effectiveness laying in the toolbox unused, and it will affect your results.
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So you absolutely need to be comfortable using both.
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And you wanna be clear about which of those approaches you need to use with each of your critical decision makers.
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When in doubt, always try engagement first.
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But if you get feedback or other intel that tells you that ain't gonna work, then be ready with your pressure strategy.
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A really useful thing to ask yourself is, where do we have the greatest influence now with which decision makers?
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And then reflect on how did we build that?
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And then how can we take what we know about how we were able to do that successfully with one relationship, and take those same strategies to the next one?
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A little bit earlier I mentioned we need to get crystal clear on exactly what you want.
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Specifically, what actions do you need the decision maker to take to get to the specific desired result that you want?
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But then there's another piece, which is once you have clarity on that, you wanna be able to ask for it in a way that makes it easy for the decision maker to say yes.
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There's a few pieces to how you frame that ask that are essential ingredients for making it as easy as possible for the decision maker to say yes, These are in no particular order, but all of them should be present, and they're all about messaging.
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You wanna make sure that you're bypassing the decision makers' defensive points.
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Almost always in a context with a decision maker, there's something they're gonna feel defensive about when you're asking for something, whether it's money or a policy change.
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Because the fact that you have to ask means they didn't already do the thing, and they may be defensive about why they haven't done it, or they may be defensive about a lot of other things.
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The more you've learned from conversation with them and heard from others about where they tend to get defensive.
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You wanna make sure that you accommodate that in your messaging.
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It is always super helpful to acknowledge the challenges that they're dealing with.
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Now, you wanna be careful when you do this, that you're not opening a window to give them an excuse not to do the thing.
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But they are dealing with challenges just like we all are.
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And if they haven't already said yes, it's because maybe there's a few things in the way and some of those are challenges they're having to deal with.
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So acknowledging that, particularly right now.
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For example, I have a number of clients who are engaging state agency decision makers and state legislators about budgetary decision making.
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And you know, the states are in a challenging position, right?
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They're dealing with the federal constriction of funds the same way we all are, and the uncertainty that goes with that.
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Those are some obvious challenges that they have to deal with.
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And acknowledging the fact that that is a challenge and that it's not easy to deal with, lets the decision maker know that you get it, that they gotta deal with stuff too.
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It's absolutely essential that you connect to something that they also want.
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And you may have to stretch pretty far to come up with that.
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But aligning the thing that you want with something that they want is always advisable.
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And I'm gonna probably wind up saying this about a hundred times, but be specific about what it is that you want them to do.
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Very often I find it's helpful to even go so far as to offer a fairly detailed path for action so they don't have to figure that part out for themselves.
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This is a line you have to walk.
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You don't want to insult their intelligence, but know, I've done this in a number of different contexts.
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Where basically I work out for myself what all the action steps are that they would need to take and how things need to be configured.
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And I might do that in some detail just to get clear on it for myself.
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So that I understand the full impact of, when I make this ask, what does that mean for what are they gonna have to do?
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Saying yes is one piece of it, but then they're gonna have to like do stuff.
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So what is that stuff they gotta do?
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The more you can lay that out in detail and get your head around it, you can do a couple things.
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One, it helps you understand how heavy a lift this is gonna be for the decision maker, which is always helpful.
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And the other thing it does is it lets you look for places in there where you might be able to be helpful.
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Maybe there's a little pathway that has to happen that's got five things in it that somebody's gonna have to do.
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Well, maybe two of those are things that you can pick up, and that it might even make more sense for you to do.
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In which case you can offer that.
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And you can say, you know, I get that this is kind of a complicated ask.
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And as best I've been able to think it through, I think there's basically five key pieces to this, and then you can just put it out in bullet points, A, B, C, D, E.
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And then say, but it occurs to me that actually on B and D, we could probably take a lot of that on.
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And would that be helpful to you?
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You're reducing the effort they have to make to think about how to get the thing done.
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You're giving yourself clarity.
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And you're surfacing opportunities for you to be helpful and to make it easier for them to say yes.
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As an adjunct to that, the other thing always is to offer to do your part.
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Whatever is involved, there are almost always pieces you can help with.
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And it's so valuable for you to offer to do your part, and then do it.
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Your willingness to be part of the solution, to help make the thing happen, goes a long way with decision makers.
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It lets them know that you're not just coming with your hand out, but you're willing to do some work and be a problem solving partner with them, and that is always extremely valuable.
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We've talked about the major mistakes to avoid, and what to do instead in order to find the shortest distance between where you are now and the result you need from your advocacy.
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And always, my goal is to help you be as effective and efficient as you possibly can because you don't have time to waste.
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You don't have time to spend on stuff that doesn't work.
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And so the question I always ask my clients is, are you 100% happy with the advocacy results you have now?
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And if the answer is no, then let's take a look at what might be in the way of getting those results and what can we do to shift a few strategies, shift a few approaches.
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to get you on the path to that shortest distance between where you are now and the results you wanna see.
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I promise you that with the right strategies and the right messaging, you can absolutely increase the quality of your advocacy results.
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Without necessarily spending any more time doing it.
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It's just a matter of becoming more strategic, more efficient, and clearing those roadblocks that are currently holding you back.
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Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
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You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:03.310 --> 00:00:10.689
In today's episode, we're taking a look at what's standing in the way between you and the advocacy results you want.
00:00:11.099 --> 00:00:12.478
So stay tuned.
00:00:18.637 --> 00:00:27.547
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.
00:00:28.146 --> 00:00:41.167
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.
00:00:41.796 --> 00:00:54.337
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.
00:00:54.396 --> 00:00:57.186
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 I wanna tackle one of the sources of constant frustration that I hear from Nonprofit leaders about not having the advocacy results they want.
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If that's you you're in good company.
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A lot of Nonprofit leaders experience this problem.
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And here's the other reality.
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Nonprofit leaders are really busy.
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Too busy to spend your time on anything that isn't going to produce a clear, tangible result.
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So what we all need is to find the fastest, most effective way to get to the advocacy results you want.
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What's the shortest distance between where you are now in terms of influence and results with decision makers that matter to you and the results you actually wanna see from those decision makers.
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A lot of what I do is help Nonprofit leaders create a roadmap that plots the shortest distance between those two points.
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But here's the thing.
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A lot of times, even on that shortest path, there can be stuff in the way.
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And we can't always see it.
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If you don't have the advocacy results you want, there's probably something in the way, usually several somethings in my experience.
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And what I've noticed is that there are several common problems or mistakes that most often are what's getting in the way.
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It's not usually some really wild and unusual thing that's unique to a particular situation or organization.
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It's usually a pretty consistent set of stuff, which is good because that means there's a lot of experience and evidence for how you can either remove those obstacles or get around them, and get back on that shortest path to your results.
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One of the most common mistakes is thinking you don't have time to do advocacy, or enough time to do advocacy.
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And then that leads to thinking that the only way you can do really great advocacy that's really effective is to hire someone to do it.
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And since you don't have the money to hire a full-time advocacy person, that means you can't do really great advocacy.
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Once I say that out loud, I'm pretty sure you can see how that is some circular reasoning that can get us in trouble pretty quickly.
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I have some good news, which is that the reality is you're already doing advocacy work.
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So it's not that you don't have time.
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You're already doing it.
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And remember that around here we define advocacy work as applying to any decision maker in your world that has influence over money and policy decisions that matter to you.
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And so whether you're talking with government agency people or elected officials or potential contracting partners, or any other decision maker in your world.
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Corporate funders, whoever it might be.
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When you need something from them, and you're engaging them to help make that happen.
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That's advocacy.
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So you know you're already doing a lot of that.
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The important question is, how can we make sure that your advocacy work gets the results you want?
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Another mistake that I see a lot is overestimating the strength of your existing relationships with decision makers.
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And then getting surprised and disappointed when those folks don't follow through for you when you really need them.
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And It tends to come up as, oh, we have great relationships.
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All the electeds love us, everybody loves us.
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They think we're great.
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They love our work.
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They've been to our program, they visited, they get what we do.
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And then you come to find out when you have a heavy lift that you want from them, that they're not as in love with you as you thought.
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They're not bought in enough to commit the investment that you need from them.
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Whether that's an investment of time or money, or policy change, whatever it is.
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Another thing that's often in the way, and this goes to both time and results, is not being targeted enough with your strategic relationship building.
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There's definitely something to be said for broad spectrum relationship building.
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But if you're operating with limited time and energy, and particularly if you have something you need from a small subset of decision makers, focus the time and energy you have on that small subset.
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The other biggest thing that tends to be in the way is not being strategic with every piece of your messaging, all the time.
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And what that leads to is that then you're not able to engage decision makers in every encounter.
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We talk a lot all the time on the podcast and in my coaching programs, about the importance of having your messaging dialed in with every single decision maker, because that's what's gonna drive their buy-in.
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That's what's gonna drive their investment.
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That's what's gonna get them to really get it about the value of what you do.
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And so if we don't have that dialed in all the time for every decision maker, then we don't get the level of engagement we want from that decision maker.
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It also tends to result in not asking for the things we want in a way that makes it really easy for the decision maker to say yes.
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Cause that is all about messaging.
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So you see when you put all that together, if you even have one or two or three of those things in your way.
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It makes your advocacy work much harder, which makes it take longer and feel like more of an uphill slog And it's keeping you from getting the results you want.
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So a lot of what I do with my one-to-one clients and with my coaching programs is I help leaders become super consistent and effective and efficient at always having all these pieces dialed in.
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So that they're available at every encounter with decision makers.
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Once you start to do that, you start to see your results improve very quickly.
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So let's talk about the specifics of what we can do instead, to get around those obstacles that tend to be in our way.
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First and foremost, target your strategic relationship building work.
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We've already established you don't have unlimited time and energy.
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Now, I will say that if you're someone who just builds connection everywhere you go,'cause that's just how you roll, that's totally fine.
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And that's wonderful actually, that will serve you very well.
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But there's still the question of where do you put your focused energy and attention on actually building influential relationships with decision makers that matter.
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That needs to be targeted and focused.
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And some criteria that you can use for that are decision makers that are fixtures in your world, versus those that are kind of one-offs.
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The ones that are there again and again, year after year, those are the ones where, first of all, you're gonna have the opportunity to build really deep collaborative relationships that are super influential.
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Whereas the one-offs, we may need to build a quick relationship here and there for something that pops up.
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But if it's a choice between that and deepening the relationship with someone who's regularly in your world, that's certainly a strategic judgment call that merits real thought and strategic attention.
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Especially if you can't do both.
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Another way to focus your targeting is to differentiate between decision makers that you know you need something from, versus decision makers that it would be good to have a relationship with on general principle.
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Because they're in an influential role, they command a lot of respect and attention in your arena, those kinds of things.
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Again, if you've got the bandwidth to do it all, go for it.
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But the main thing is that you are deliberately strategic about every single strategic relationship that you set out to build and strengthen and to cultivate influence within that relationship.
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Cause that's what this is all about.
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You've got to cultivate influence if you expect them ultimately to do what you want them to do.
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As a key piece to that, another thing that's absolutely critical is making sure that you have clearly defined results and outcomes.
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What do you want as your end result, and what actions do you specifically want each decision maker to take in order to bring about or get closer to that result?
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You'd be surprised how often this gets skipped.
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And I understand how it happens.
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It's easy to kind of think, well, we know what we need from them.
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We need them to give us more money.
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We need them to change a policy that's really not working for us or for the people we serve.
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Or we need them to invest more money.
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Okay, that's good, but that is not a specific result.
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A specific result is how much money?
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By when?
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Out of what funding source?
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I'm not saying that you have to have all the answers about exactly where the money's gonna come from.
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That may be something you have to have a conversation with a decision maker to determine.
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But you have to be super clear on how much money for what purpose to achieve what end result.
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And always be able to talk about this in terms of the outcomes it's going to produce for the decision maker and the stuff they care about.
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But if you're not clear about all of that before you go to talk to them about what you want, or even before you go to talk to them at all, then the focus of your conversations, the way you frame your messaging, all of that is going to be less strategic than it could be, and therefore less effective.
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I see more mistakes happen here than maybe anywhere else.
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Another point of clarity that's important, is to have a really clear-eyed view of the strength of each of your current relationships with your high priority decision makers.
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This is really a big deal.
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Because this is where it's very easy to tell yourself a story that feels good, that feels true, that we have these great relationships.
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Ask yourself, for real, is that relationship where we need it to be, given what we need from them?
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How confident are we that they would say yes to the thing that we want?
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How much influence do we really have with them?
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And what level of influence do we need?
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I feel like in these times particularly, it's important to call out that there are two ways to build influence.
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Engagement, which is our preferred method always.
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Whenever possible we want to influence through engagement.
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But it's not always possible.
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Sometimes there is not enough alignment there for that to work.
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And in that case, the other way you build influence is with pressure.
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We've talked a lot about that on a number of other episodes.
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And if you haven't listened to them lately and have any concerns at all about using pressure or how to use it effectively, I recommend that you go back and check those out.
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Cause we have to be able to do both.
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If we're only about engagement and we're unwilling to use pressure, we're leaving a huge chunk of advocacy effectiveness laying in the toolbox unused, and it will affect your results.
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So you absolutely need to be comfortable using both.
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And you wanna be clear about which of those approaches you need to use with each of your critical decision makers.
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When in doubt, always try engagement first.
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But if you get feedback or other intel that tells you that ain't gonna work, then be ready with your pressure strategy.
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A really useful thing to ask yourself is, where do we have the greatest influence now with which decision makers?
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And then reflect on how did we build that?
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And then how can we take what we know about how we were able to do that successfully with one relationship, and take those same strategies to the next one?
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A little bit earlier I mentioned we need to get crystal clear on exactly what you want.
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Specifically, what actions do you need the decision maker to take to get to the specific desired result that you want?
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But then there's another piece, which is once you have clarity on that, you wanna be able to ask for it in a way that makes it easy for the decision maker to say yes.
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There's a few pieces to how you frame that ask that are essential ingredients for making it as easy as possible for the decision maker to say yes, These are in no particular order, but all of them should be present, and they're all about messaging.
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You wanna make sure that you're bypassing the decision makers' defensive points.
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Almost always in a context with a decision maker, there's something they're gonna feel defensive about when you're asking for something, whether it's money or a policy change.
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Because the fact that you have to ask means they didn't already do the thing, and they may be defensive about why they haven't done it, or they may be defensive about a lot of other things.
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The more you've learned from conversation with them and heard from others about where they tend to get defensive.
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You wanna make sure that you accommodate that in your messaging.
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It is always super helpful to acknowledge the challenges that they're dealing with.
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Now, you wanna be careful when you do this, that you're not opening a window to give them an excuse not to do the thing.
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But they are dealing with challenges just like we all are.
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And if they haven't already said yes, it's because maybe there's a few things in the way and some of those are challenges they're having to deal with.
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So acknowledging that, particularly right now.
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For example, I have a number of clients who are engaging state agency decision makers and state legislators about budgetary decision making.
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And you know, the states are in a challenging position, right?
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They're dealing with the federal constriction of funds the same way we all are, and the uncertainty that goes with that.
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Those are some obvious challenges that they have to deal with.
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And acknowledging the fact that that is a challenge and that it's not easy to deal with, lets the decision maker know that you get it, that they gotta deal with stuff too.
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It's absolutely essential that you connect to something that they also want.
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And you may have to stretch pretty far to come up with that.
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But aligning the thing that you want with something that they want is always advisable.
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And I'm gonna probably wind up saying this about a hundred times, but be specific about what it is that you want them to do.
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Very often I find it's helpful to even go so far as to offer a fairly detailed path for action so they don't have to figure that part out for themselves.
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This is a line you have to walk.
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You don't want to insult their intelligence, but know, I've done this in a number of different contexts.
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Where basically I work out for myself what all the action steps are that they would need to take and how things need to be configured.
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And I might do that in some detail just to get clear on it for myself.
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So that I understand the full impact of, when I make this ask, what does that mean for what are they gonna have to do?
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Saying yes is one piece of it, but then they're gonna have to like do stuff.
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So what is that stuff they gotta do?
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The more you can lay that out in detail and get your head around it, you can do a couple things.
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One, it helps you understand how heavy a lift this is gonna be for the decision maker, which is always helpful.
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And the other thing it does is it lets you look for places in there where you might be able to be helpful.
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Maybe there's a little pathway that has to happen that's got five things in it that somebody's gonna have to do.
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Well, maybe two of those are things that you can pick up, and that it might even make more sense for you to do.
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In which case you can offer that.
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And you can say, you know, I get that this is kind of a complicated ask.
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And as best I've been able to think it through, I think there's basically five key pieces to this, and then you can just put it out in bullet points, A, B, C, D, E.
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And then say, but it occurs to me that actually on B and D, we could probably take a lot of that on.
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And would that be helpful to you?
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You're reducing the effort they have to make to think about how to get the thing done.
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You're giving yourself clarity.
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And you're surfacing opportunities for you to be helpful and to make it easier for them to say yes.
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As an adjunct to that, the other thing always is to offer to do your part.
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Whatever is involved, there are almost always pieces you can help with.
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And it's so valuable for you to offer to do your part, and then do it.
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Your willingness to be part of the solution, to help make the thing happen, goes a long way with decision makers.
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It lets them know that you're not just coming with your hand out, but you're willing to do some work and be a problem solving partner with them, and that is always extremely valuable.
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We've talked about the major mistakes to avoid, and what to do instead in order to find the shortest distance between where you are now and the result you need from your advocacy.
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And always, my goal is to help you be as effective and efficient as you possibly can because you don't have time to waste.
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You don't have time to spend on stuff that doesn't work.
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And so the question I always ask my clients is, are you 100% happy with the advocacy results you have now?
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And if the answer is no, then let's take a look at what might be in the way of getting those results and what can we do to shift a few strategies, shift a few approaches.
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to get you on the path to that shortest distance between where you are now and the results you wanna see.
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I promise you that with the right strategies and the right messaging, you can absolutely increase the quality of your advocacy results.
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Without necessarily spending any more time doing it.
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It's just a matter of becoming more strategic, more efficient, and clearing those roadblocks that are currently holding you back.
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Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
