Dec. 15, 2025
Why is There So Much Dumb Public Policy and What Can We Do About It?
Why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it? There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great. But the flip side of that is the rules that are attached to that money. The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent. All those rules, more often than not, get in the way of Nonprofits’ ability to provide a high-quality service that is going to actually solve the probl...
Why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it?
There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great. But the flip side of that is the rules that are attached to that money. The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent. All those rules, more often than not, get in the way of Nonprofits’ ability to provide a high-quality service that is going to actually solve the problem.
It happens so often that we start to think that's just the way it always is. I had a conversation recently with one of my clients who expressed this exact sentiment. She had been dealing with a number of really stupid public policy problems. And one day in exasperation, she just said, “public policy is just bad. It never works.”
My initial reaction to that was to argue with her. But the fact is, a lot of the time that's true.
The problem with operating from that frame is two things really. One, it presumes things can't be changed. And two, it keeps you operating under a set of limitations that are tangibly impairing your ability to deliver the exceptional outcomes you want to create.
It’s time to take apart why so much public policy is such a mess. And then look at what we can do about it – without devoting our entire lives to changing public policy. Because we have other work we have to do.
There really are things that we can do. And you'll not be surprised to learn that a lot of them center on our messaging and engagement strategies.
In this episode, we share:
- The three main causes of unhelpful, counterproductive public policy around funding
- How good intentions result in some of the worst policy decisions
- The biggest mistake Nonprofit leaders often make when trying to get decisionmakers to change an unhelpful policy
- Why your best policy analysis will likely be ignored if you offer it at the wrong point in the process
- The perspective shift we must be able to make in order to motivate the decisionmaker to help solve the problem they created
- How to create powerful metaphors that will help decisionmakers see the flaws in their policy
Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level and start getting next-level results? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:
On the Podcast website
On LinkedIn
WEBVTT
00:00:00.050 --> 00:00:02.629
You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:02.870 --> 00:00:12.189
In today's episode, we take a look at the question, why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it?
00:00:12.519 --> 00:00:13.960
So stay tuned.
00:00:20.390 --> 00:00:29.300
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.
00:00:29.899 --> 00:00:42.920
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.
00:00:43.549 --> 00:00:56.090
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.
00:00:56.149 --> 00:00:58.939
Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
00:00:59.539 --> 00:01:01.670
This podcast will help you do just that.
00:01:02.119 --> 00:01:05.150
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:01:10.743 --> 00:01:11.493
Hey there folks.
00:01:11.493 --> 00:01:13.414
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:01:13.623 --> 00:01:14.914
I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
00:01:15.293 --> 00:01:19.754
I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because this is a question that really matters.
00:01:20.384 --> 00:01:34.965
Even with all the recent chaos and cuts, there's still a ton of federal funding and state and local government funding that flow to nonprofits to provide direct services to a variety of constituents that you work with.
00:01:35.724 --> 00:01:42.040
There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great.
00:01:42.540 --> 00:01:50.204
But the flip side of that is that more often than not, the rules that are attached to that money.
00:01:50.965 --> 00:01:58.905
The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent, all of that.
00:01:59.415 --> 00:02:10.093
All those rules more often than not get in the way of actually providing a high quality service that is going to actually solve the problem.
00:02:10.963 --> 00:02:16.987
And it happens so often that we start to think that that's just the way it always is.
00:02:17.574 --> 00:02:24.564
And in fact, it was a conversation I had recently with one of my one-to-one clients who expressed this exact sentiment.
00:02:25.104 --> 00:02:30.115
She had been dealing with a number of really stupid public policy problems.
00:02:30.534 --> 00:02:35.680
And one day in exasperation, she just said, public policy is just bad.
00:02:36.080 --> 00:02:37.069
It never works.
00:02:37.319 --> 00:02:40.419
And my initial reaction to that was to argue with her.
00:02:41.020 --> 00:02:44.259
But the fact is that a lot of the time it's true.
00:02:45.016 --> 00:02:52.877
The problem with operating from that frame that it's always stupid, it's always causes more problems than it solves.
00:02:53.747 --> 00:02:54.887
Is two things really.
00:02:55.187 --> 00:02:58.206
One, it presumes things can't be changed.
00:02:58.706 --> 00:03:10.875
And two, it keeps you operating under a set of limitations that are tangibly impairing your ability to deliver the exceptional outcomes that you want to create.
00:03:11.425 --> 00:03:14.514
So in this episode, I wanna talk about both of those pieces.
00:03:14.965 --> 00:03:19.094
And take apart why so much public policy is such a mess.
00:03:19.905 --> 00:03:26.632
And then look at what can we do about it without devoting our entire lives to changing public policy.
00:03:26.632 --> 00:03:28.521
Because we have other work we have to do.
00:03:29.122 --> 00:03:37.852
But there really are things that we can do, and you'll not be surprised to learn that a lot of them center on our messaging and engagement strategies.
00:03:38.451 --> 00:03:39.502
So let's get into it.
00:03:41.110 --> 00:03:49.996
If you like my client, have been disgusted and frustrated a good chunk of the time around the dumb public policy that you have to deal with.
00:03:50.496 --> 00:03:58.366
And you've been tempted to kind of just roll your eyes and find the work around so that you can get on with your work.
00:03:58.575 --> 00:04:04.782
Serve the people you serve, and just deal with the BS and accept it as a fact of life.
00:04:05.472 --> 00:04:09.271
If that's where you've been operating from, I totally understand it.
00:04:09.771 --> 00:04:16.221
But I wanna invite you to consider that there may be a way to shift some of that.
00:04:17.002 --> 00:04:24.579
Maybe not all of it, but maybe at least some of the things that are giving you the most trouble, causing you the most headaches.
00:04:24.879 --> 00:04:26.170
And we can start with those.
00:04:26.976 --> 00:04:40.490
There is absolutely no shortage of examples of poorly crafted public policy that winds up actually getting in the way of the delivery of high quality services to benefit the people it's intended to help.
00:04:41.055 --> 00:04:42.196
We've all run into this.
00:04:42.276 --> 00:04:46.406
There's all kinds of examples all across the direct service landscape.
00:04:47.288 --> 00:04:51.880
If there's government money involved, there are going to be a lot of rules.
00:04:52.420 --> 00:04:54.610
For some obvious reasons.
00:04:54.670 --> 00:04:56.321
It's the taxpayer's dollars.
00:04:56.500 --> 00:05:01.781
The policymakers are trying to make sure they're being good stewards of those dollars and so on and so forth, and that's fine.
00:05:02.230 --> 00:05:03.821
Nobody has a quarrel with that.
00:05:04.122 --> 00:05:11.850
There needs to be clarity about who is to be helped, what's the focus of the services, how is that gonna work, how's the money gonna be spent, this, that and the other.
00:05:11.850 --> 00:05:12.689
You gotta have that.
00:05:12.870 --> 00:05:13.649
I understand that.
00:05:14.182 --> 00:05:18.151
I don't think anybody in the Nonprofit space would say, no, we shouldn't have any rules.
00:05:18.151 --> 00:05:19.862
Just give us the money and leave us alone.
00:05:19.862 --> 00:05:25.822
Although, I understand the temptation to say that too, but you can understand why that probably wouldn't fly.
00:05:26.418 --> 00:05:31.208
So if we know there've gotta be rules and we accept that as a baseline.
00:05:31.838 --> 00:05:46.408
Then the question becomes, how can we make sure that the rules make sense in the context of making sure that the people who are supposed to be helped, first of all, are truly helped and that real impact happens.
00:05:46.908 --> 00:05:52.790
And secondly, that those providing the services, which are very often direct service nonprofits.
00:05:52.850 --> 00:06:02.043
That you are able to do your work and help folks in the way that is the most effective, the most impactful.
00:06:02.593 --> 00:06:13.398
Without having to jump through a lot of ridiculous hoops or work around artificially created barriers, that slow you down and make it harder for you to deliver the impact that you know you can.
00:06:14.396 --> 00:06:22.807
There's a couple of core problems that cause these kinds of unhelpful, counterproductive policies to happen again and again.
00:06:23.826 --> 00:06:29.432
And we have to understand the causes so that we can affect it and change it.
00:06:30.391 --> 00:06:36.482
One of the most important basic problems is that the decision makers don't understand how stuff works on the ground.
00:06:37.108 --> 00:06:43.560
In addition to that, they also frequently have an investment in the problem being simple.
00:06:44.425 --> 00:06:48.026
Because if the problem is simple, it's cheap and easy to solve.
00:06:48.435 --> 00:07:08.372
And they very likely also have multiple biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people being served and what their lives are like, and about what constitutes a quote, legitimate unquote service or a service that is germane to the core problem at hand.
00:07:09.355 --> 00:07:32.882
Some examples of these kinds of thinking things aren't legitimate or germane would be, childcare in the context of workforce development or tailored nutrition in the context of healthcare A classic example in workforce development is that, yeah, in theory, federal workforce development dollars can be used to pay for childcare, but only as the source of last resort.
00:07:32.913 --> 00:07:42.706
Only if the participant in the program has already explored and exhausted and been denied for every other possible source of money, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:42.706 --> 00:07:48.706
They make it really, really hard, and at which point, effectively it's not available.
00:07:49.466 --> 00:07:54.766
In addition, for that and many other direct services that stem from federal funding.
00:07:55.266 --> 00:08:03.045
Usually there's a set of rules at the federal level, but then there's also rulemaking authority that occurs at the state and local level as well.
00:08:03.196 --> 00:08:12.499
So you can wind up with three different layers of bad policy, each looking a little bit different based on what the decision makers involved are thinking about.
00:08:12.949 --> 00:08:15.216
So this can get super messy.
00:08:15.716 --> 00:08:18.165
But the core problem doesn't change.
00:08:18.315 --> 00:08:31.930
The core problems are not understanding the work on the ground, having a bunch of biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people who are being served and about what constitutes a relevant or germane or legitimate service.
00:08:32.677 --> 00:08:46.929
When that happens, you wind up with policy that creates multiple roadblocks to accessing any of the ancillary services and also to benefiting fully from the original core service.
00:08:47.509 --> 00:08:53.777
The reason it happens is they just really don't get what the work is and how you make your outcomes happen.
00:08:54.230 --> 00:08:59.059
They don't understand what is happening between you and the client as you help them.
00:08:59.530 --> 00:09:01.692
They don't get what that person needs.
00:09:01.692 --> 00:09:03.613
They don't get what's going on in their life.
00:09:04.423 --> 00:09:09.643
There are two main reasons why decision makers don't understand these core pieces.
00:09:10.546 --> 00:09:17.416
Other than the fact that they have never actually done the work, which the vast majority of them have no experience in direct service Nonprofit work.
00:09:17.416 --> 00:09:19.666
So that's already a problem.
00:09:20.535 --> 00:09:23.645
But we can't do anything about that, right?
00:09:23.706 --> 00:09:25.416
That's not a solvable problem.
00:09:25.416 --> 00:09:27.576
So we have to help them get it in other ways.
00:09:28.365 --> 00:09:30.417
Here's where the real problem hits.
00:09:30.917 --> 00:09:39.866
The reality is that the main reasons they don't understand is that no one has shared that information with them, perhaps at all.
00:09:40.366 --> 00:09:48.230
Or if they have, they've committed a very common mistake, which is to share that information in very dry and factual terms.
00:09:48.750 --> 00:10:05.783
It might involve a bunch of statistics and data and percentages and say, so you need to understand that 40% of all workforce development program participants have childcare needs that if those aren't met, are going to make them unable to participate successfully in the program.
00:10:06.432 --> 00:10:18.464
And when you factor in for gender and you look at how many women who are in those programs have a childcare issue, the percentage jumps to something like 70%.
00:10:18.976 --> 00:10:26.086
And without this additional service, without the childcare assistance, they're not gonna be able to participate successfully in the program.
00:10:26.586 --> 00:10:27.037
Okay.
00:10:27.667 --> 00:10:30.787
You would think that would be pretty persuasive, right.
00:10:31.287 --> 00:10:35.417
But there's so much missing from that kind of factual messaging.
00:10:35.596 --> 00:10:37.187
There's nothing about it that's not true.
00:10:37.187 --> 00:10:38.897
There's nothing about it that's wrong.
00:10:39.557 --> 00:10:56.384
It's just incomplete and totally not up to the task of not only informing the decision maker, but causing not only understanding, but engagement and a desire to make something change, to make it better.
00:10:57.033 --> 00:11:08.423
The other thing is that those kinds of narratives are often aimed at the wrong target because it presumes that more information and facts will fix the problem of the decision maker not getting it.
00:11:09.144 --> 00:11:17.879
But we have to remember that there's a bunch of other reasons why they're not getting it, and the biggest of them is those biases and unhelpful beliefs.
00:11:18.240 --> 00:11:23.509
Remember that when a belief has been formed, the brain considers it to be fact.
00:11:24.009 --> 00:11:29.899
So giving someone a different fact is not sufficient to dislodge a belief.
00:11:30.395 --> 00:11:33.505
Because their reticular activating system will filter it out.
00:11:34.046 --> 00:11:43.515
So we have to break through that and connect with them other ways so that they can eventually let some additional information in and we can deepen their understanding.
00:11:44.015 --> 00:11:46.355
So we have to understand why they don't get it.
00:11:46.416 --> 00:11:54.426
And then we have to connect the reality of how stuff actually works with the emotional center of the decision maker's brain.
00:11:54.926 --> 00:11:58.964
If we're just talking to the rational center, nothing's gonna change.
00:11:58.964 --> 00:11:59.984
They're not gonna get it.
00:12:00.043 --> 00:12:03.260
Because they have a filter in place that is not allowing that in.
00:12:04.014 --> 00:12:11.962
But when we can connect to the emotional center and engage that, then that allows for room to consider other perspectives.
00:12:12.462 --> 00:12:18.633
So that can include helping them understand actually who really is the constituency for this?
00:12:18.633 --> 00:12:20.102
Who is receiving these services?
00:12:20.153 --> 00:12:22.283
What is their life like when they are in the problem?
00:12:23.062 --> 00:12:27.062
And how does that play out as an emotional experience for them?
00:12:27.062 --> 00:12:27.993
What are they feeling?
00:12:27.993 --> 00:12:28.712
What are they seeing?
00:12:28.712 --> 00:12:30.033
What are they hearing?
00:12:30.033 --> 00:12:32.013
What are they smelling and touching?
00:12:32.452 --> 00:12:47.144
All of the sensory experience of being in that problem needs to come alive for that decision maker so that they really can begin to see the problem from the true perspective of the person who needs the services.
00:12:47.635 --> 00:13:02.659
And not just a generic description of, oh, well these are single mothers with blah, blah, blah problem, or these are people with multiple chronic diseases who need these three things in order to not get too sick and wind up in the hospital all the time, or whatever you're working on.
00:13:03.529 --> 00:13:06.820
Those are facts, but they don't resonate.
00:13:07.559 --> 00:13:08.730
They are surface level.
00:13:09.269 --> 00:13:11.960
They are looking from outside in.
00:13:13.206 --> 00:13:17.167
And where we want the decision maker is to be on the inside of it.
00:13:17.256 --> 00:13:22.047
To feel it, to experience it emotionally, what it's like to be in that problem.
00:13:22.547 --> 00:13:30.836
And to begin to think about from a place of, gee, if I were in the situation, what would I be doing?
00:13:31.563 --> 00:13:42.355
We have to create ways for the decision maker to understand the way in which the current poorly crafted policy is doing several things.
00:13:42.565 --> 00:13:46.375
One, it is making that person's life harder, not easier.
00:13:47.784 --> 00:13:52.075
It is moving them further away from solving the problem, not closer.
00:13:52.625 --> 00:13:58.264
And as long as they remain in the problem, they continue to be a cost.
00:13:58.764 --> 00:14:03.414
They can't move out of the problem until the services are successful for them.
00:14:04.105 --> 00:14:11.634
And the reason the services aren't able to be successful for them is because there are roadblocks that have been put in place by the policy.
00:14:12.341 --> 00:14:28.717
They gotta see that from the inside and connect the emotional experience of what that is like, of the frustration of doing everything you can to abide by the rules and then still have obstacle after obstacle thrown in your path.
00:14:29.258 --> 00:14:35.263
Not by the whims of the world, but by the actual policy itself that was allegedly designed to help them.
00:14:36.306 --> 00:14:42.509
Helping a decision maker see all that and get that requires some serious visualization.
00:14:42.792 --> 00:14:48.491
Some painting of a picture, figuratively speaking, of how this all plays out.
00:14:49.042 --> 00:14:58.563
And to use the same imagery and emotional connection to hit on points of relevance that matter to the decision maker.
00:14:58.945 --> 00:15:01.345
To hit on aligned interests.
00:15:02.033 --> 00:15:10.688
For example, this is an example I like to use a lot'cause it's super common and comes up in the majority of conversations with decision makers.
00:15:10.899 --> 00:15:12.389
Which is the financial impact.
00:15:13.078 --> 00:15:24.385
So one of the things that happens is that decision makers think they're being responsible and rational and being good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar and all those things.
00:15:24.635 --> 00:15:26.946
This is, it's super important to understand.
00:15:27.155 --> 00:15:29.436
They think they're making good policy.
00:15:29.885 --> 00:15:33.576
They did not set out to make crappy policy.
00:15:34.235 --> 00:15:35.556
They think they did a good job.
00:15:36.056 --> 00:15:37.196
They're proud of themselves.
00:15:37.196 --> 00:15:38.426
Like, yeah, look what we did.
00:15:38.426 --> 00:15:39.145
This is great.
00:15:39.355 --> 00:15:40.166
Good policy.
00:15:40.166 --> 00:15:41.005
It's working.
00:15:41.505 --> 00:15:42.466
They don't know.
00:15:42.966 --> 00:15:49.235
So helping them to see that it's not working the way they intended is very important.
00:15:49.895 --> 00:15:59.855
At the same time, we as advocates need to be able to put ourselves in the decision maker's position and see the world the way they see it.
00:16:00.605 --> 00:16:02.316
They think they made good policy.
00:16:02.865 --> 00:16:14.567
And because they lack depth of knowledge and understanding of the problem being solved and all of that, they're making some decisions based on faulty assumptions and faulty information.
00:16:15.118 --> 00:16:21.327
But you know, how much do you love being told that you screwed up?
00:16:21.957 --> 00:16:27.307
That this thing you worked on that you thought was pretty good actually is not so good?
00:16:27.807 --> 00:16:30.238
None of us really loves hearing that, right?
00:16:30.327 --> 00:16:39.956
So we have to be aware that when we're engaging these decision makers, they're kind of invested in that policy, if they had anything to do with creating it.
00:16:40.734 --> 00:16:48.524
One of the ways that we can do that is to connect to what their intent was..' Cause there's always an intent.
00:16:48.553 --> 00:16:49.573
Usually there's several.
00:16:50.114 --> 00:16:54.938
And depending on who you're dealing with and what part of the political spectrum they're sitting on.
00:16:55.328 --> 00:17:05.019
Maybe their goal was genuinely to help people get out of the problem because they believe that's important and they really have empathy and they want that to happen.
00:17:05.618 --> 00:17:08.189
They just failed to do that very well.
00:17:08.848 --> 00:17:12.950
Others are very grudging about helping people at all.
00:17:13.130 --> 00:17:21.910
And feeling like we shouldn't have to spend government money on this at all, but if we're going to, by God, we're gonna make sure that nobody who's not entitled to this gets a penny.
00:17:21.910 --> 00:17:29.875
And we're not gonna let anybody game the system and get in there and get these wonderful goodies, without being fully deserving, blah, blah, blah.
00:17:30.682 --> 00:17:32.059
And anywhere in between.
00:17:32.119 --> 00:17:36.934
You can have folks who are just very focused on, we know there's a problem to solve.
00:17:36.984 --> 00:17:46.255
We are dealing with the fact that there are limited resources, and we wanna make sure that we help as many people as possible with the resources we have.
00:17:46.944 --> 00:17:52.194
And this one is the source of more problems than you can imagine.
00:17:52.694 --> 00:17:54.730
Because here's what they're doing.
00:17:55.490 --> 00:18:06.079
They think, because they don't understand how this stuff works, they don't understand the depth of complexity of the problem and how you go about solving it and how you help people get out of the problem.
00:18:06.621 --> 00:18:08.570
They don't really get the details of that.
00:18:08.847 --> 00:18:10.137
They get the broad strokes.
00:18:10.786 --> 00:18:29.231
And so from their perspective of the problem being relatively simple, it makes perfect sense, if you have limited dollars, to structure the policy and the rules in such a way that as many people as possible will be touched by those services, by those dollars.
00:18:29.731 --> 00:18:37.092
And that's when you get things like super unhelpful and counterproductive limitations on duration of service.
00:18:37.592 --> 00:18:44.778
Well, if we have this person stay in this program for six months then that's gonna cost X, Y, Z dollars.
00:18:44.959 --> 00:18:50.449
But if we say they can only be in it for three months, then we can help twice as many people.
00:18:50.949 --> 00:18:57.361
And if we cut it down even less than that, maybe if we make it only like eight weeks, then we can help even more people.
00:18:57.361 --> 00:19:02.540
So let's do that because we don't have enough dollars and we gotta make sure we're helping more people.
00:19:03.208 --> 00:19:17.090
And that's fine if you don't stop and think about, okay, wait a second, what's the difference in the experience and the quality of services, the level of support, et cetera, et cetera, that are associated with that longer duration of service?
00:19:17.590 --> 00:19:25.865
And they rarely stop to ask the question, but what if it really takes six months to solve the problem?
00:19:26.256 --> 00:19:32.885
What if you actually can't solve the real problem in three months or in eight weeks?
00:19:33.431 --> 00:19:37.213
You can slap a bandaid on it, but you can't really solve it.
00:19:37.713 --> 00:19:44.523
That's an uncomfortable and inconvenient question when you're faced with limited resources and a desire to help as many people as possible.
00:19:45.023 --> 00:19:52.519
So many bad policies and rules come from that one issue.
00:19:53.364 --> 00:20:02.140
So when we're talking with a decision maker about fixing that, one of the first things we have to do is acknowledge their good intent.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:10.950
Acknowledge that yes, it is challenging when there's limited resources and you have to figure out how are we best going to help as many people as possible?
00:20:11.319 --> 00:20:13.690
Completely fair question, completely fair objective.
00:20:14.507 --> 00:20:18.106
Then you begin to pull them into how that plays out.
00:20:18.837 --> 00:20:22.587
Let's say we're talking about a six month duration of service versus a three month.
00:20:23.127 --> 00:20:37.096
To be able to walk them through the participant's experience of that and what's getting solved and how their life is changing if they are able to be in it for the full six months, which is how long it takes to really solve the problem.
00:20:37.596 --> 00:20:42.455
Versus what their experience is like when they only have three months.
00:20:43.006 --> 00:20:53.296
And what gets left out, what falls through the cracks, what never gets resolved, what doesn't get addressed, how many different aspects of the problem go unsolved.
00:20:53.685 --> 00:21:05.405
And how does that then impair that person's ability to emerge from the service at a place of thriving, or a lot closer to thriving than they were when they started.
00:21:05.955 --> 00:21:11.836
And to be able to play that out in detail, but pull in the emotional experience of it.
00:21:12.715 --> 00:21:23.161
When you do that, it also allows you to speak from the participant's perspective in terms of how they're approaching their involvement in this work.
00:21:23.797 --> 00:21:25.797
Because they're an active partner in it.
00:21:26.297 --> 00:21:30.511
Services aren't something we spray onto people to fix something.
00:21:31.011 --> 00:21:42.045
Virtually every social service there is requires the participant's involvement, cooperation, engagement, and partnership for it to work well.
00:21:42.545 --> 00:21:46.451
There's behavioral change involved, there's capacity building.
00:21:46.451 --> 00:21:51.851
There's all kinds of stuff that happens as part of the delivery of these services.
00:21:52.213 --> 00:21:59.834
And if you try to rush that, surprise, you don't get as good a result because behavioral change takes time.
00:22:00.344 --> 00:22:01.723
Learning takes time.
00:22:02.324 --> 00:22:04.269
Health impacts take time.
00:22:05.053 --> 00:22:08.712
There's a ton of metaphors you can use to help them get that.
00:22:09.134 --> 00:22:13.711
You can use something that would be relevant in their life, that they would have an actual stake in.
00:22:14.132 --> 00:22:37.301
Anything that would take the decision maker some time to learn how to do and to change a behavior, So you could say, let's say you go to the doctor and they tell you that you've gotta make radical changes to your diet in order to solve an impending health crisis, or maybe one that's already begun to happen for you.
00:22:38.201 --> 00:22:40.380
And you're like, okay.
00:22:40.380 --> 00:22:43.920
I know that I need to do that, but like, that's hard.
00:22:43.950 --> 00:22:45.480
There's a lot of moving parts.
00:22:45.730 --> 00:22:46.809
I usually eat out.
00:22:46.809 --> 00:22:48.359
Or I usually get takeout.
00:22:48.359 --> 00:22:52.407
I usually pull a prefab thing out of the freezer and stick it in the microwave.
00:22:52.769 --> 00:22:53.940
I don't have time to cook.
00:22:53.940 --> 00:22:54.994
I don't even know how to cook.
00:22:55.364 --> 00:22:56.834
How am I gonna do all that?
00:22:57.646 --> 00:23:03.527
And if there's a program available that will teach you how to do all that.
00:23:03.826 --> 00:23:08.567
How to plan a super healthy meal that's gonna address your specific dietary needs for your health condition.
00:23:08.896 --> 00:23:17.707
How to plan those meals, how to shop for them, how to prepare them at home, and how to do that in a way that doesn't take all your time.
00:23:18.343 --> 00:23:23.666
Then you can go deeper and say, if they told you, we have a program that'll teach you that.
00:23:23.916 --> 00:23:28.707
You can do it online or you can do it in person and it's like four hours a week total.
00:23:28.707 --> 00:23:30.032
And know it's for two weeks.
00:23:30.292 --> 00:23:43.923
If you're starting from scratch and you don't know how to cook, how confident do you feel that you're gonna be able to master all those things in a span about eight hours of support?
00:23:44.415 --> 00:23:45.855
What if you screw up one of the recipes?
00:23:45.855 --> 00:23:46.336
Then what?
00:23:46.336 --> 00:23:48.145
And what if you can't find the ingredients?
00:23:48.645 --> 00:23:49.516
All the things.
00:23:49.945 --> 00:23:52.776
Is two weeks of support to do a major life change like that.
00:23:52.786 --> 00:23:54.316
Is that gonna feel doable?
00:23:54.816 --> 00:23:56.405
How supported are you gonna feel in that?
00:23:56.405 --> 00:23:59.256
How successful do you think you're gonna be in making those changes?
00:23:59.873 --> 00:24:05.469
But what if you had that support for a couple hours a week, every week for six months?
00:24:05.679 --> 00:24:11.348
Where you could ask questions, you could check in, you could come and do some in-person cooking sessions.
00:24:11.348 --> 00:24:12.578
You could work with other people.
00:24:12.628 --> 00:24:15.898
You could, kind of share the journey with some other folks.
00:24:16.317 --> 00:24:18.267
How doable does that start to feel?
00:24:18.767 --> 00:24:19.057
Okay.
00:24:19.092 --> 00:24:19.721
And why?
00:24:19.932 --> 00:24:21.971
Why does the short one not feel doable?
00:24:21.971 --> 00:24:23.662
And why does the longer one feel doable?
00:24:23.662 --> 00:24:25.471
So I grabbed this one out of a hat.
00:24:25.877 --> 00:24:31.612
But there's all different kinds of metaphors and parallel experiences that are relatable for the decision maker.
00:24:32.483 --> 00:24:33.923
Education is another one.
00:24:33.923 --> 00:24:38.483
You can say, well, what if your kid's school sent a note home.
00:24:38.483 --> 00:24:44.193
And said, we're doing AP calculus and your kid is a great candidate for it.
00:24:44.493 --> 00:24:51.622
But we don't have a lot of funding, we don't have enough instructors to cover all the kids who need AP calculus.
00:24:51.801 --> 00:24:54.757
But we wanna make sure you get it, so here's what we're gonna do.
00:24:54.836 --> 00:24:59.217
We're gonna take that semester long AP calculus course and we're gonna compress it into three weeks.
00:24:59.967 --> 00:25:10.557
And we're gonna rotate kids through so that by the end of the semester, every kid who is eligible for AP calculus will still get their AP calculus, and it'll be great.
00:25:11.057 --> 00:25:18.971
What are the chances that your kid is gonna have a productive experience trying to learn a semester's worth of AP calculus in three weeks?
00:25:19.520 --> 00:25:21.171
What's that experience gonna be like for them?
00:25:21.671 --> 00:25:22.990
How stressed out are they gonna be?
00:25:22.990 --> 00:25:24.299
How frustrated?
00:25:24.349 --> 00:25:26.660
How much are they gonna feel like they're just drowning all the time?
00:25:27.160 --> 00:25:28.630
And how much of it is gonna stick?
00:25:29.130 --> 00:25:35.041
That's another metaphor to help somebody see why taking a thing that takes a while to work.
00:25:35.548 --> 00:25:44.593
Compressing the timeframe so you can help more people is not only not particularly helpful, but in fact may actually cause harm.
00:25:45.525 --> 00:25:47.755
So you could make up metaphors for this all day long.
00:25:48.717 --> 00:25:54.220
And it's always helpful for it to be aligned in some way, connected a little bit on some angle to the thing that you do.
00:25:54.220 --> 00:25:57.309
But at the very least, it needs to be relatable to the decision maker.
00:25:57.651 --> 00:25:59.030
Something they can get their head around.
00:25:59.240 --> 00:26:01.760
A problem they might actually experience.
00:26:02.181 --> 00:26:06.351
Because if it's something they don't believe they'll ever experience, they'll tune you out.
00:26:06.851 --> 00:26:17.451
But when you can engage them with a metaphor and bring in that parallel experience, that is analogous to the thing that they have done with the policy to your participants.
00:26:17.840 --> 00:26:20.661
That's how you begin to help them see.
00:26:21.407 --> 00:26:33.324
So there's many, many ways that we can do this, but the bottom line is that they have to be able to internalize the reality of the impact of their policy decisions.
00:26:33.954 --> 00:26:40.619
The other thing we need to be able to do is to paint the picture for them about how it could and should be working.
00:26:41.119 --> 00:26:47.288
You describe how it's working now, what is the experience of the people who are receiving the services.
00:26:47.468 --> 00:26:50.423
And to some extent, possibly the experience you're having as well.
00:26:50.423 --> 00:26:56.137
If there are significant barriers that you're having to divert staff time to work around or deal with.
00:26:56.498 --> 00:27:02.237
If it's having negative impacts on your ability to deliver the service then you can talk about that as well.
00:27:02.737 --> 00:27:06.757
But it's mostly about the participant'cause that's who the program is supposed to benefit.
00:27:07.257 --> 00:27:15.111
And then we wanna be able to paint the picture about what it would look like if things were working the way they should.
00:27:15.611 --> 00:27:23.645
And you then connect the difference between those two to a specific piece of policy language or a set of them.
00:27:24.219 --> 00:27:30.459
You paint the picture of how it works when you're able to deliver your services without being hampered.
00:27:30.959 --> 00:27:37.949
How that flow happens, how the outcomes are greatly improved, how much more dramatically people's lives are improved.
00:27:38.449 --> 00:27:50.103
And how much bigger a return on the investment there is because you're actually solving the problem for good and not just slapping bandaids here and there to try to spread thin resources even thinner.
00:27:50.720 --> 00:27:56.140
You help them experience emotionally, viscerally, sensorially, the way things are now.
00:27:57.157 --> 00:28:00.519
And the way things would be if it were working the way it's supposed to.
00:28:01.019 --> 00:28:09.632
And then you tie that difference to the problematic policy and say, here's why there's this disconnect.
00:28:10.498 --> 00:28:22.013
Think about doing it that way, and how much different that decisionmakers ability to hear you would be, and ability to really grasp the impact of the policy.
00:28:22.513 --> 00:28:36.804
Versus using sort of white paper language, where you're coming in with your policy analysis of, well, you know, this policy is designed this way and these pieces of language are causing this problem and da da da da.
00:28:37.124 --> 00:28:44.253
And believe me, I have written a lot of those kinds of analyses over the years.
00:28:44.644 --> 00:28:45.513
Lots of them.
00:28:45.993 --> 00:28:47.364
And there is a place for that.
00:28:47.657 --> 00:28:50.837
But it's as a follow on.
00:28:50.958 --> 00:28:53.718
It's after you've done all that engagement.
00:28:53.718 --> 00:28:59.755
After you've brought the decision maker to understanding that there is a serious flaw in the policy.
00:28:59.934 --> 00:29:04.674
It's having a serious negative consequence that affects something they care about.
00:29:05.319 --> 00:29:07.884
And now they're upset and now they wanna fix it.
00:29:08.575 --> 00:29:14.646
That's when you come in with, okay, so we've done the analysis.
00:29:15.021 --> 00:29:18.981
Here's where the specific policy elements are problematic.
00:29:19.281 --> 00:29:21.166
Here's what will fix it.
00:29:21.717 --> 00:29:23.487
Let's talk about how we get that done.
00:29:23.987 --> 00:29:28.547
But too often we wanna go in with that last part first.
00:29:29.096 --> 00:29:32.375
And we already know how that tends to turn out.
00:29:32.806 --> 00:29:35.536
It tends not to result in policy change.
00:29:36.036 --> 00:29:38.385
So I invite you to think about this.
00:29:39.040 --> 00:29:49.096
Consider how you could engage your decision makers differently when you run into the inevitable, poorly crafted policy that's causing problems for you and the people you serve.
00:29:49.636 --> 00:29:55.952
Instead of throwing up your hands in frustration and disgust and saying, these jokers never seem to get it right.
00:29:56.502 --> 00:30:01.682
And I've told them 57 times that their policy is wrong and they should change the language to blah, blah, blah.
00:30:02.182 --> 00:30:03.202
Try this instead.
00:30:03.606 --> 00:30:07.442
And leave your, how you fix it, till the end.
00:30:08.313 --> 00:30:10.742
After they've engaged, after they've bought in.
00:30:11.292 --> 00:30:16.728
After they've really internalized the reality that the policy isn't working the way it should.
00:30:17.718 --> 00:30:19.728
And that they care and want to fix it.
00:30:20.438 --> 00:30:23.938
Give that approach a try and watch your results start to improve.
00:30:24.788 --> 00:30:28.266
Before you go, I have some news I think you're gonna want to hear.
00:30:29.006 --> 00:30:35.986
To kick off the new year, i'm gonna be offering a brand new program designed to help you take your advocacy results to the next level.
00:30:37.181 --> 00:30:49.300
I've designed this program to focus on a handful of the most powerful and effective strategies for engaging your money and policy decision makers in a way that gets you the results you want.
00:30:50.045 --> 00:31:00.575
We cover lots of different strategies and techniques here on the podcast, and I've heard so much wonderful feedback about the value folks are getting from that, which is awesome.
00:31:01.497 --> 00:31:03.061
But I also hear that it's a lot.
00:31:03.957 --> 00:31:09.987
And what I hear more and more is just gimme the things I absolutely have to have.
00:31:10.467 --> 00:31:16.106
Tell me what's gonna be the most effective, the most powerful, and let me focus on that.
00:31:16.977 --> 00:31:18.882
So that's what I've decided to do with this new program.
00:31:19.751 --> 00:31:26.862
It's laser focused on a set of core strategies that are incredibly powerful and universally effective.
00:31:27.281 --> 00:31:31.001
It doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter what service niche you're in.
00:31:31.362 --> 00:31:34.031
This is the shortest path to success.
00:31:34.888 --> 00:31:44.523
I'll be teaching those core strategies and supporting you with lots of coaching and weekly conversations, all designed to equip you to get the results you want.
00:31:45.727 --> 00:31:48.906
I am limiting this to the first 10 founding members who step up.
00:31:49.507 --> 00:31:56.346
I'm limiting it because I wanna make sure that you get exactly what you need from the teaching and the coaching.
00:31:57.037 --> 00:32:02.376
And as a founding member, you'll have the opportunity to direct the focus of the coaching as we go.
00:32:03.498 --> 00:32:13.607
Think about how many times you've been frustrated with a decision maker not getting it, not getting the true value of your work and its impact.
00:32:14.178 --> 00:32:16.248
This is where we fix that.
00:32:17.018 --> 00:32:17.978
So come on in.
00:32:18.278 --> 00:32:21.488
Shoot me a message on either LinkedIn or the podcast website.
00:32:21.758 --> 00:32:23.228
I'll put those links in the show notes.
00:32:23.617 --> 00:32:29.222
And let's make a plan to work together in the new year and start getting you those next level results.
00:32:29.741 --> 00:32:34.511
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:00.050 --> 00:00:02.629
You're listening to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:00:02.870 --> 00:00:12.189
In today's episode, we take a look at the question, why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it?
00:00:12.519 --> 00:00:13.960
So stay tuned.
00:00:20.390 --> 00:00:29.300
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.
00:00:29.899 --> 00:00:42.920
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.
00:00:43.549 --> 00:00:56.090
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.
00:00:56.149 --> 00:00:58.939
Bringing opportunities and resources to you.
00:00:59.539 --> 00:01:01.670
This podcast will help you do just that.
00:01:02.119 --> 00:01:05.150
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:01:10.743 --> 00:01:11.493
Hey there folks.
00:01:11.493 --> 00:01:13.414
Welcome to the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
00:01:13.623 --> 00:01:14.914
I'm your host, Kath Patrick.
00:01:15.293 --> 00:01:19.754
I'm so glad you're here for today's episode because this is a question that really matters.
00:01:20.384 --> 00:01:34.965
Even with all the recent chaos and cuts, there's still a ton of federal funding and state and local government funding that flow to nonprofits to provide direct services to a variety of constituents that you work with.
00:01:35.724 --> 00:01:42.040
There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great.
00:01:42.540 --> 00:01:50.204
But the flip side of that is that more often than not, the rules that are attached to that money.
00:01:50.965 --> 00:01:58.905
The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent, all of that.
00:01:59.415 --> 00:02:10.093
All those rules more often than not get in the way of actually providing a high quality service that is going to actually solve the problem.
00:02:10.963 --> 00:02:16.987
And it happens so often that we start to think that that's just the way it always is.
00:02:17.574 --> 00:02:24.564
And in fact, it was a conversation I had recently with one of my one-to-one clients who expressed this exact sentiment.
00:02:25.104 --> 00:02:30.115
She had been dealing with a number of really stupid public policy problems.
00:02:30.534 --> 00:02:35.680
And one day in exasperation, she just said, public policy is just bad.
00:02:36.080 --> 00:02:37.069
It never works.
00:02:37.319 --> 00:02:40.419
And my initial reaction to that was to argue with her.
00:02:41.020 --> 00:02:44.259
But the fact is that a lot of the time it's true.
00:02:45.016 --> 00:02:52.877
The problem with operating from that frame that it's always stupid, it's always causes more problems than it solves.
00:02:53.747 --> 00:02:54.887
Is two things really.
00:02:55.187 --> 00:02:58.206
One, it presumes things can't be changed.
00:02:58.706 --> 00:03:10.875
And two, it keeps you operating under a set of limitations that are tangibly impairing your ability to deliver the exceptional outcomes that you want to create.
00:03:11.425 --> 00:03:14.514
So in this episode, I wanna talk about both of those pieces.
00:03:14.965 --> 00:03:19.094
And take apart why so much public policy is such a mess.
00:03:19.905 --> 00:03:26.632
And then look at what can we do about it without devoting our entire lives to changing public policy.
00:03:26.632 --> 00:03:28.521
Because we have other work we have to do.
00:03:29.122 --> 00:03:37.852
But there really are things that we can do, and you'll not be surprised to learn that a lot of them center on our messaging and engagement strategies.
00:03:38.451 --> 00:03:39.502
So let's get into it.
00:03:41.110 --> 00:03:49.996
If you like my client, have been disgusted and frustrated a good chunk of the time around the dumb public policy that you have to deal with.
00:03:50.496 --> 00:03:58.366
And you've been tempted to kind of just roll your eyes and find the work around so that you can get on with your work.
00:03:58.575 --> 00:04:04.782
Serve the people you serve, and just deal with the BS and accept it as a fact of life.
00:04:05.472 --> 00:04:09.271
If that's where you've been operating from, I totally understand it.
00:04:09.771 --> 00:04:16.221
But I wanna invite you to consider that there may be a way to shift some of that.
00:04:17.002 --> 00:04:24.579
Maybe not all of it, but maybe at least some of the things that are giving you the most trouble, causing you the most headaches.
00:04:24.879 --> 00:04:26.170
And we can start with those.
00:04:26.976 --> 00:04:40.490
There is absolutely no shortage of examples of poorly crafted public policy that winds up actually getting in the way of the delivery of high quality services to benefit the people it's intended to help.
00:04:41.055 --> 00:04:42.196
We've all run into this.
00:04:42.276 --> 00:04:46.406
There's all kinds of examples all across the direct service landscape.
00:04:47.288 --> 00:04:51.880
If there's government money involved, there are going to be a lot of rules.
00:04:52.420 --> 00:04:54.610
For some obvious reasons.
00:04:54.670 --> 00:04:56.321
It's the taxpayer's dollars.
00:04:56.500 --> 00:05:01.781
The policymakers are trying to make sure they're being good stewards of those dollars and so on and so forth, and that's fine.
00:05:02.230 --> 00:05:03.821
Nobody has a quarrel with that.
00:05:04.122 --> 00:05:11.850
There needs to be clarity about who is to be helped, what's the focus of the services, how is that gonna work, how's the money gonna be spent, this, that and the other.
00:05:11.850 --> 00:05:12.689
You gotta have that.
00:05:12.870 --> 00:05:13.649
I understand that.
00:05:14.182 --> 00:05:18.151
I don't think anybody in the Nonprofit space would say, no, we shouldn't have any rules.
00:05:18.151 --> 00:05:19.862
Just give us the money and leave us alone.
00:05:19.862 --> 00:05:25.822
Although, I understand the temptation to say that too, but you can understand why that probably wouldn't fly.
00:05:26.418 --> 00:05:31.208
So if we know there've gotta be rules and we accept that as a baseline.
00:05:31.838 --> 00:05:46.408
Then the question becomes, how can we make sure that the rules make sense in the context of making sure that the people who are supposed to be helped, first of all, are truly helped and that real impact happens.
00:05:46.908 --> 00:05:52.790
And secondly, that those providing the services, which are very often direct service nonprofits.
00:05:52.850 --> 00:06:02.043
That you are able to do your work and help folks in the way that is the most effective, the most impactful.
00:06:02.593 --> 00:06:13.398
Without having to jump through a lot of ridiculous hoops or work around artificially created barriers, that slow you down and make it harder for you to deliver the impact that you know you can.
00:06:14.396 --> 00:06:22.807
There's a couple of core problems that cause these kinds of unhelpful, counterproductive policies to happen again and again.
00:06:23.826 --> 00:06:29.432
And we have to understand the causes so that we can affect it and change it.
00:06:30.391 --> 00:06:36.482
One of the most important basic problems is that the decision makers don't understand how stuff works on the ground.
00:06:37.108 --> 00:06:43.560
In addition to that, they also frequently have an investment in the problem being simple.
00:06:44.425 --> 00:06:48.026
Because if the problem is simple, it's cheap and easy to solve.
00:06:48.435 --> 00:07:08.372
And they very likely also have multiple biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people being served and what their lives are like, and about what constitutes a quote, legitimate unquote service or a service that is germane to the core problem at hand.
00:07:09.355 --> 00:07:32.882
Some examples of these kinds of thinking things aren't legitimate or germane would be, childcare in the context of workforce development or tailored nutrition in the context of healthcare A classic example in workforce development is that, yeah, in theory, federal workforce development dollars can be used to pay for childcare, but only as the source of last resort.
00:07:32.913 --> 00:07:42.706
Only if the participant in the program has already explored and exhausted and been denied for every other possible source of money, et cetera, et cetera.
00:07:42.706 --> 00:07:48.706
They make it really, really hard, and at which point, effectively it's not available.
00:07:49.466 --> 00:07:54.766
In addition, for that and many other direct services that stem from federal funding.
00:07:55.266 --> 00:08:03.045
Usually there's a set of rules at the federal level, but then there's also rulemaking authority that occurs at the state and local level as well.
00:08:03.196 --> 00:08:12.499
So you can wind up with three different layers of bad policy, each looking a little bit different based on what the decision makers involved are thinking about.
00:08:12.949 --> 00:08:15.216
So this can get super messy.
00:08:15.716 --> 00:08:18.165
But the core problem doesn't change.
00:08:18.315 --> 00:08:31.930
The core problems are not understanding the work on the ground, having a bunch of biases and unhelpful beliefs about the people who are being served and about what constitutes a relevant or germane or legitimate service.
00:08:32.677 --> 00:08:46.929
When that happens, you wind up with policy that creates multiple roadblocks to accessing any of the ancillary services and also to benefiting fully from the original core service.
00:08:47.509 --> 00:08:53.777
The reason it happens is they just really don't get what the work is and how you make your outcomes happen.
00:08:54.230 --> 00:08:59.059
They don't understand what is happening between you and the client as you help them.
00:08:59.530 --> 00:09:01.692
They don't get what that person needs.
00:09:01.692 --> 00:09:03.613
They don't get what's going on in their life.
00:09:04.423 --> 00:09:09.643
There are two main reasons why decision makers don't understand these core pieces.
00:09:10.546 --> 00:09:17.416
Other than the fact that they have never actually done the work, which the vast majority of them have no experience in direct service Nonprofit work.
00:09:17.416 --> 00:09:19.666
So that's already a problem.
00:09:20.535 --> 00:09:23.645
But we can't do anything about that, right?
00:09:23.706 --> 00:09:25.416
That's not a solvable problem.
00:09:25.416 --> 00:09:27.576
So we have to help them get it in other ways.
00:09:28.365 --> 00:09:30.417
Here's where the real problem hits.
00:09:30.917 --> 00:09:39.866
The reality is that the main reasons they don't understand is that no one has shared that information with them, perhaps at all.
00:09:40.366 --> 00:09:48.230
Or if they have, they've committed a very common mistake, which is to share that information in very dry and factual terms.
00:09:48.750 --> 00:10:05.783
It might involve a bunch of statistics and data and percentages and say, so you need to understand that 40% of all workforce development program participants have childcare needs that if those aren't met, are going to make them unable to participate successfully in the program.
00:10:06.432 --> 00:10:18.464
And when you factor in for gender and you look at how many women who are in those programs have a childcare issue, the percentage jumps to something like 70%.
00:10:18.976 --> 00:10:26.086
And without this additional service, without the childcare assistance, they're not gonna be able to participate successfully in the program.
00:10:26.586 --> 00:10:27.037
Okay.
00:10:27.667 --> 00:10:30.787
You would think that would be pretty persuasive, right.
00:10:31.287 --> 00:10:35.417
But there's so much missing from that kind of factual messaging.
00:10:35.596 --> 00:10:37.187
There's nothing about it that's not true.
00:10:37.187 --> 00:10:38.897
There's nothing about it that's wrong.
00:10:39.557 --> 00:10:56.384
It's just incomplete and totally not up to the task of not only informing the decision maker, but causing not only understanding, but engagement and a desire to make something change, to make it better.
00:10:57.033 --> 00:11:08.423
The other thing is that those kinds of narratives are often aimed at the wrong target because it presumes that more information and facts will fix the problem of the decision maker not getting it.
00:11:09.144 --> 00:11:17.879
But we have to remember that there's a bunch of other reasons why they're not getting it, and the biggest of them is those biases and unhelpful beliefs.
00:11:18.240 --> 00:11:23.509
Remember that when a belief has been formed, the brain considers it to be fact.
00:11:24.009 --> 00:11:29.899
So giving someone a different fact is not sufficient to dislodge a belief.
00:11:30.395 --> 00:11:33.505
Because their reticular activating system will filter it out.
00:11:34.046 --> 00:11:43.515
So we have to break through that and connect with them other ways so that they can eventually let some additional information in and we can deepen their understanding.
00:11:44.015 --> 00:11:46.355
So we have to understand why they don't get it.
00:11:46.416 --> 00:11:54.426
And then we have to connect the reality of how stuff actually works with the emotional center of the decision maker's brain.
00:11:54.926 --> 00:11:58.964
If we're just talking to the rational center, nothing's gonna change.
00:11:58.964 --> 00:11:59.984
They're not gonna get it.
00:12:00.043 --> 00:12:03.260
Because they have a filter in place that is not allowing that in.
00:12:04.014 --> 00:12:11.962
But when we can connect to the emotional center and engage that, then that allows for room to consider other perspectives.
00:12:12.462 --> 00:12:18.633
So that can include helping them understand actually who really is the constituency for this?
00:12:18.633 --> 00:12:20.102
Who is receiving these services?
00:12:20.153 --> 00:12:22.283
What is their life like when they are in the problem?
00:12:23.062 --> 00:12:27.062
And how does that play out as an emotional experience for them?
00:12:27.062 --> 00:12:27.993
What are they feeling?
00:12:27.993 --> 00:12:28.712
What are they seeing?
00:12:28.712 --> 00:12:30.033
What are they hearing?
00:12:30.033 --> 00:12:32.013
What are they smelling and touching?
00:12:32.452 --> 00:12:47.144
All of the sensory experience of being in that problem needs to come alive for that decision maker so that they really can begin to see the problem from the true perspective of the person who needs the services.
00:12:47.635 --> 00:13:02.659
And not just a generic description of, oh, well these are single mothers with blah, blah, blah problem, or these are people with multiple chronic diseases who need these three things in order to not get too sick and wind up in the hospital all the time, or whatever you're working on.
00:13:03.529 --> 00:13:06.820
Those are facts, but they don't resonate.
00:13:07.559 --> 00:13:08.730
They are surface level.
00:13:09.269 --> 00:13:11.960
They are looking from outside in.
00:13:13.206 --> 00:13:17.167
And where we want the decision maker is to be on the inside of it.
00:13:17.256 --> 00:13:22.047
To feel it, to experience it emotionally, what it's like to be in that problem.
00:13:22.547 --> 00:13:30.836
And to begin to think about from a place of, gee, if I were in the situation, what would I be doing?
00:13:31.563 --> 00:13:42.355
We have to create ways for the decision maker to understand the way in which the current poorly crafted policy is doing several things.
00:13:42.565 --> 00:13:46.375
One, it is making that person's life harder, not easier.
00:13:47.784 --> 00:13:52.075
It is moving them further away from solving the problem, not closer.
00:13:52.625 --> 00:13:58.264
And as long as they remain in the problem, they continue to be a cost.
00:13:58.764 --> 00:14:03.414
They can't move out of the problem until the services are successful for them.
00:14:04.105 --> 00:14:11.634
And the reason the services aren't able to be successful for them is because there are roadblocks that have been put in place by the policy.
00:14:12.341 --> 00:14:28.717
They gotta see that from the inside and connect the emotional experience of what that is like, of the frustration of doing everything you can to abide by the rules and then still have obstacle after obstacle thrown in your path.
00:14:29.258 --> 00:14:35.263
Not by the whims of the world, but by the actual policy itself that was allegedly designed to help them.
00:14:36.306 --> 00:14:42.509
Helping a decision maker see all that and get that requires some serious visualization.
00:14:42.792 --> 00:14:48.491
Some painting of a picture, figuratively speaking, of how this all plays out.
00:14:49.042 --> 00:14:58.563
And to use the same imagery and emotional connection to hit on points of relevance that matter to the decision maker.
00:14:58.945 --> 00:15:01.345
To hit on aligned interests.
00:15:02.033 --> 00:15:10.688
For example, this is an example I like to use a lot'cause it's super common and comes up in the majority of conversations with decision makers.
00:15:10.899 --> 00:15:12.389
Which is the financial impact.
00:15:13.078 --> 00:15:24.385
So one of the things that happens is that decision makers think they're being responsible and rational and being good stewards of the taxpayer's dollar and all those things.
00:15:24.635 --> 00:15:26.946
This is, it's super important to understand.
00:15:27.155 --> 00:15:29.436
They think they're making good policy.
00:15:29.885 --> 00:15:33.576
They did not set out to make crappy policy.
00:15:34.235 --> 00:15:35.556
They think they did a good job.
00:15:36.056 --> 00:15:37.196
They're proud of themselves.
00:15:37.196 --> 00:15:38.426
Like, yeah, look what we did.
00:15:38.426 --> 00:15:39.145
This is great.
00:15:39.355 --> 00:15:40.166
Good policy.
00:15:40.166 --> 00:15:41.005
It's working.
00:15:41.505 --> 00:15:42.466
They don't know.
00:15:42.966 --> 00:15:49.235
So helping them to see that it's not working the way they intended is very important.
00:15:49.895 --> 00:15:59.855
At the same time, we as advocates need to be able to put ourselves in the decision maker's position and see the world the way they see it.
00:16:00.605 --> 00:16:02.316
They think they made good policy.
00:16:02.865 --> 00:16:14.567
And because they lack depth of knowledge and understanding of the problem being solved and all of that, they're making some decisions based on faulty assumptions and faulty information.
00:16:15.118 --> 00:16:21.327
But you know, how much do you love being told that you screwed up?
00:16:21.957 --> 00:16:27.307
That this thing you worked on that you thought was pretty good actually is not so good?
00:16:27.807 --> 00:16:30.238
None of us really loves hearing that, right?
00:16:30.327 --> 00:16:39.956
So we have to be aware that when we're engaging these decision makers, they're kind of invested in that policy, if they had anything to do with creating it.
00:16:40.734 --> 00:16:48.524
One of the ways that we can do that is to connect to what their intent was..' Cause there's always an intent.
00:16:48.553 --> 00:16:49.573
Usually there's several.
00:16:50.114 --> 00:16:54.938
And depending on who you're dealing with and what part of the political spectrum they're sitting on.
00:16:55.328 --> 00:17:05.019
Maybe their goal was genuinely to help people get out of the problem because they believe that's important and they really have empathy and they want that to happen.
00:17:05.618 --> 00:17:08.189
They just failed to do that very well.
00:17:08.848 --> 00:17:12.950
Others are very grudging about helping people at all.
00:17:13.130 --> 00:17:21.910
And feeling like we shouldn't have to spend government money on this at all, but if we're going to, by God, we're gonna make sure that nobody who's not entitled to this gets a penny.
00:17:21.910 --> 00:17:29.875
And we're not gonna let anybody game the system and get in there and get these wonderful goodies, without being fully deserving, blah, blah, blah.
00:17:30.682 --> 00:17:32.059
And anywhere in between.
00:17:32.119 --> 00:17:36.934
You can have folks who are just very focused on, we know there's a problem to solve.
00:17:36.984 --> 00:17:46.255
We are dealing with the fact that there are limited resources, and we wanna make sure that we help as many people as possible with the resources we have.
00:17:46.944 --> 00:17:52.194
And this one is the source of more problems than you can imagine.
00:17:52.694 --> 00:17:54.730
Because here's what they're doing.
00:17:55.490 --> 00:18:06.079
They think, because they don't understand how this stuff works, they don't understand the depth of complexity of the problem and how you go about solving it and how you help people get out of the problem.
00:18:06.621 --> 00:18:08.570
They don't really get the details of that.
00:18:08.847 --> 00:18:10.137
They get the broad strokes.
00:18:10.786 --> 00:18:29.231
And so from their perspective of the problem being relatively simple, it makes perfect sense, if you have limited dollars, to structure the policy and the rules in such a way that as many people as possible will be touched by those services, by those dollars.
00:18:29.731 --> 00:18:37.092
And that's when you get things like super unhelpful and counterproductive limitations on duration of service.
00:18:37.592 --> 00:18:44.778
Well, if we have this person stay in this program for six months then that's gonna cost X, Y, Z dollars.
00:18:44.959 --> 00:18:50.449
But if we say they can only be in it for three months, then we can help twice as many people.
00:18:50.949 --> 00:18:57.361
And if we cut it down even less than that, maybe if we make it only like eight weeks, then we can help even more people.
00:18:57.361 --> 00:19:02.540
So let's do that because we don't have enough dollars and we gotta make sure we're helping more people.
00:19:03.208 --> 00:19:17.090
And that's fine if you don't stop and think about, okay, wait a second, what's the difference in the experience and the quality of services, the level of support, et cetera, et cetera, that are associated with that longer duration of service?
00:19:17.590 --> 00:19:25.865
And they rarely stop to ask the question, but what if it really takes six months to solve the problem?
00:19:26.256 --> 00:19:32.885
What if you actually can't solve the real problem in three months or in eight weeks?
00:19:33.431 --> 00:19:37.213
You can slap a bandaid on it, but you can't really solve it.
00:19:37.713 --> 00:19:44.523
That's an uncomfortable and inconvenient question when you're faced with limited resources and a desire to help as many people as possible.
00:19:45.023 --> 00:19:52.519
So many bad policies and rules come from that one issue.
00:19:53.364 --> 00:20:02.140
So when we're talking with a decision maker about fixing that, one of the first things we have to do is acknowledge their good intent.
00:20:02.640 --> 00:20:10.950
Acknowledge that yes, it is challenging when there's limited resources and you have to figure out how are we best going to help as many people as possible?
00:20:11.319 --> 00:20:13.690
Completely fair question, completely fair objective.
00:20:14.507 --> 00:20:18.106
Then you begin to pull them into how that plays out.
00:20:18.837 --> 00:20:22.587
Let's say we're talking about a six month duration of service versus a three month.
00:20:23.127 --> 00:20:37.096
To be able to walk them through the participant's experience of that and what's getting solved and how their life is changing if they are able to be in it for the full six months, which is how long it takes to really solve the problem.
00:20:37.596 --> 00:20:42.455
Versus what their experience is like when they only have three months.
00:20:43.006 --> 00:20:53.296
And what gets left out, what falls through the cracks, what never gets resolved, what doesn't get addressed, how many different aspects of the problem go unsolved.
00:20:53.685 --> 00:21:05.405
And how does that then impair that person's ability to emerge from the service at a place of thriving, or a lot closer to thriving than they were when they started.
00:21:05.955 --> 00:21:11.836
And to be able to play that out in detail, but pull in the emotional experience of it.
00:21:12.715 --> 00:21:23.161
When you do that, it also allows you to speak from the participant's perspective in terms of how they're approaching their involvement in this work.
00:21:23.797 --> 00:21:25.797
Because they're an active partner in it.
00:21:26.297 --> 00:21:30.511
Services aren't something we spray onto people to fix something.
00:21:31.011 --> 00:21:42.045
Virtually every social service there is requires the participant's involvement, cooperation, engagement, and partnership for it to work well.
00:21:42.545 --> 00:21:46.451
There's behavioral change involved, there's capacity building.
00:21:46.451 --> 00:21:51.851
There's all kinds of stuff that happens as part of the delivery of these services.
00:21:52.213 --> 00:21:59.834
And if you try to rush that, surprise, you don't get as good a result because behavioral change takes time.
00:22:00.344 --> 00:22:01.723
Learning takes time.
00:22:02.324 --> 00:22:04.269
Health impacts take time.
00:22:05.053 --> 00:22:08.712
There's a ton of metaphors you can use to help them get that.
00:22:09.134 --> 00:22:13.711
You can use something that would be relevant in their life, that they would have an actual stake in.
00:22:14.132 --> 00:22:37.301
Anything that would take the decision maker some time to learn how to do and to change a behavior, So you could say, let's say you go to the doctor and they tell you that you've gotta make radical changes to your diet in order to solve an impending health crisis, or maybe one that's already begun to happen for you.
00:22:38.201 --> 00:22:40.380
And you're like, okay.
00:22:40.380 --> 00:22:43.920
I know that I need to do that, but like, that's hard.
00:22:43.950 --> 00:22:45.480
There's a lot of moving parts.
00:22:45.730 --> 00:22:46.809
I usually eat out.
00:22:46.809 --> 00:22:48.359
Or I usually get takeout.
00:22:48.359 --> 00:22:52.407
I usually pull a prefab thing out of the freezer and stick it in the microwave.
00:22:52.769 --> 00:22:53.940
I don't have time to cook.
00:22:53.940 --> 00:22:54.994
I don't even know how to cook.
00:22:55.364 --> 00:22:56.834
How am I gonna do all that?
00:22:57.646 --> 00:23:03.527
And if there's a program available that will teach you how to do all that.
00:23:03.826 --> 00:23:08.567
How to plan a super healthy meal that's gonna address your specific dietary needs for your health condition.
00:23:08.896 --> 00:23:17.707
How to plan those meals, how to shop for them, how to prepare them at home, and how to do that in a way that doesn't take all your time.
00:23:18.343 --> 00:23:23.666
Then you can go deeper and say, if they told you, we have a program that'll teach you that.
00:23:23.916 --> 00:23:28.707
You can do it online or you can do it in person and it's like four hours a week total.
00:23:28.707 --> 00:23:30.032
And know it's for two weeks.
00:23:30.292 --> 00:23:43.923
If you're starting from scratch and you don't know how to cook, how confident do you feel that you're gonna be able to master all those things in a span about eight hours of support?
00:23:44.415 --> 00:23:45.855
What if you screw up one of the recipes?
00:23:45.855 --> 00:23:46.336
Then what?
00:23:46.336 --> 00:23:48.145
And what if you can't find the ingredients?
00:23:48.645 --> 00:23:49.516
All the things.
00:23:49.945 --> 00:23:52.776
Is two weeks of support to do a major life change like that.
00:23:52.786 --> 00:23:54.316
Is that gonna feel doable?
00:23:54.816 --> 00:23:56.405
How supported are you gonna feel in that?
00:23:56.405 --> 00:23:59.256
How successful do you think you're gonna be in making those changes?
00:23:59.873 --> 00:24:05.469
But what if you had that support for a couple hours a week, every week for six months?
00:24:05.679 --> 00:24:11.348
Where you could ask questions, you could check in, you could come and do some in-person cooking sessions.
00:24:11.348 --> 00:24:12.578
You could work with other people.
00:24:12.628 --> 00:24:15.898
You could, kind of share the journey with some other folks.
00:24:16.317 --> 00:24:18.267
How doable does that start to feel?
00:24:18.767 --> 00:24:19.057
Okay.
00:24:19.092 --> 00:24:19.721
And why?
00:24:19.932 --> 00:24:21.971
Why does the short one not feel doable?
00:24:21.971 --> 00:24:23.662
And why does the longer one feel doable?
00:24:23.662 --> 00:24:25.471
So I grabbed this one out of a hat.
00:24:25.877 --> 00:24:31.612
But there's all different kinds of metaphors and parallel experiences that are relatable for the decision maker.
00:24:32.483 --> 00:24:33.923
Education is another one.
00:24:33.923 --> 00:24:38.483
You can say, well, what if your kid's school sent a note home.
00:24:38.483 --> 00:24:44.193
And said, we're doing AP calculus and your kid is a great candidate for it.
00:24:44.493 --> 00:24:51.622
But we don't have a lot of funding, we don't have enough instructors to cover all the kids who need AP calculus.
00:24:51.801 --> 00:24:54.757
But we wanna make sure you get it, so here's what we're gonna do.
00:24:54.836 --> 00:24:59.217
We're gonna take that semester long AP calculus course and we're gonna compress it into three weeks.
00:24:59.967 --> 00:25:10.557
And we're gonna rotate kids through so that by the end of the semester, every kid who is eligible for AP calculus will still get their AP calculus, and it'll be great.
00:25:11.057 --> 00:25:18.971
What are the chances that your kid is gonna have a productive experience trying to learn a semester's worth of AP calculus in three weeks?
00:25:19.520 --> 00:25:21.171
What's that experience gonna be like for them?
00:25:21.671 --> 00:25:22.990
How stressed out are they gonna be?
00:25:22.990 --> 00:25:24.299
How frustrated?
00:25:24.349 --> 00:25:26.660
How much are they gonna feel like they're just drowning all the time?
00:25:27.160 --> 00:25:28.630
And how much of it is gonna stick?
00:25:29.130 --> 00:25:35.041
That's another metaphor to help somebody see why taking a thing that takes a while to work.
00:25:35.548 --> 00:25:44.593
Compressing the timeframe so you can help more people is not only not particularly helpful, but in fact may actually cause harm.
00:25:45.525 --> 00:25:47.755
So you could make up metaphors for this all day long.
00:25:48.717 --> 00:25:54.220
And it's always helpful for it to be aligned in some way, connected a little bit on some angle to the thing that you do.
00:25:54.220 --> 00:25:57.309
But at the very least, it needs to be relatable to the decision maker.
00:25:57.651 --> 00:25:59.030
Something they can get their head around.
00:25:59.240 --> 00:26:01.760
A problem they might actually experience.
00:26:02.181 --> 00:26:06.351
Because if it's something they don't believe they'll ever experience, they'll tune you out.
00:26:06.851 --> 00:26:17.451
But when you can engage them with a metaphor and bring in that parallel experience, that is analogous to the thing that they have done with the policy to your participants.
00:26:17.840 --> 00:26:20.661
That's how you begin to help them see.
00:26:21.407 --> 00:26:33.324
So there's many, many ways that we can do this, but the bottom line is that they have to be able to internalize the reality of the impact of their policy decisions.
00:26:33.954 --> 00:26:40.619
The other thing we need to be able to do is to paint the picture for them about how it could and should be working.
00:26:41.119 --> 00:26:47.288
You describe how it's working now, what is the experience of the people who are receiving the services.
00:26:47.468 --> 00:26:50.423
And to some extent, possibly the experience you're having as well.
00:26:50.423 --> 00:26:56.137
If there are significant barriers that you're having to divert staff time to work around or deal with.
00:26:56.498 --> 00:27:02.237
If it's having negative impacts on your ability to deliver the service then you can talk about that as well.
00:27:02.737 --> 00:27:06.757
But it's mostly about the participant'cause that's who the program is supposed to benefit.
00:27:07.257 --> 00:27:15.111
And then we wanna be able to paint the picture about what it would look like if things were working the way they should.
00:27:15.611 --> 00:27:23.645
And you then connect the difference between those two to a specific piece of policy language or a set of them.
00:27:24.219 --> 00:27:30.459
You paint the picture of how it works when you're able to deliver your services without being hampered.
00:27:30.959 --> 00:27:37.949
How that flow happens, how the outcomes are greatly improved, how much more dramatically people's lives are improved.
00:27:38.449 --> 00:27:50.103
And how much bigger a return on the investment there is because you're actually solving the problem for good and not just slapping bandaids here and there to try to spread thin resources even thinner.
00:27:50.720 --> 00:27:56.140
You help them experience emotionally, viscerally, sensorially, the way things are now.
00:27:57.157 --> 00:28:00.519
And the way things would be if it were working the way it's supposed to.
00:28:01.019 --> 00:28:09.632
And then you tie that difference to the problematic policy and say, here's why there's this disconnect.
00:28:10.498 --> 00:28:22.013
Think about doing it that way, and how much different that decisionmakers ability to hear you would be, and ability to really grasp the impact of the policy.
00:28:22.513 --> 00:28:36.804
Versus using sort of white paper language, where you're coming in with your policy analysis of, well, you know, this policy is designed this way and these pieces of language are causing this problem and da da da da.
00:28:37.124 --> 00:28:44.253
And believe me, I have written a lot of those kinds of analyses over the years.
00:28:44.644 --> 00:28:45.513
Lots of them.
00:28:45.993 --> 00:28:47.364
And there is a place for that.
00:28:47.657 --> 00:28:50.837
But it's as a follow on.
00:28:50.958 --> 00:28:53.718
It's after you've done all that engagement.
00:28:53.718 --> 00:28:59.755
After you've brought the decision maker to understanding that there is a serious flaw in the policy.
00:28:59.934 --> 00:29:04.674
It's having a serious negative consequence that affects something they care about.
00:29:05.319 --> 00:29:07.884
And now they're upset and now they wanna fix it.
00:29:08.575 --> 00:29:14.646
That's when you come in with, okay, so we've done the analysis.
00:29:15.021 --> 00:29:18.981
Here's where the specific policy elements are problematic.
00:29:19.281 --> 00:29:21.166
Here's what will fix it.
00:29:21.717 --> 00:29:23.487
Let's talk about how we get that done.
00:29:23.987 --> 00:29:28.547
But too often we wanna go in with that last part first.
00:29:29.096 --> 00:29:32.375
And we already know how that tends to turn out.
00:29:32.806 --> 00:29:35.536
It tends not to result in policy change.
00:29:36.036 --> 00:29:38.385
So I invite you to think about this.
00:29:39.040 --> 00:29:49.096
Consider how you could engage your decision makers differently when you run into the inevitable, poorly crafted policy that's causing problems for you and the people you serve.
00:29:49.636 --> 00:29:55.952
Instead of throwing up your hands in frustration and disgust and saying, these jokers never seem to get it right.
00:29:56.502 --> 00:30:01.682
And I've told them 57 times that their policy is wrong and they should change the language to blah, blah, blah.
00:30:02.182 --> 00:30:03.202
Try this instead.
00:30:03.606 --> 00:30:07.442
And leave your, how you fix it, till the end.
00:30:08.313 --> 00:30:10.742
After they've engaged, after they've bought in.
00:30:11.292 --> 00:30:16.728
After they've really internalized the reality that the policy isn't working the way it should.
00:30:17.718 --> 00:30:19.728
And that they care and want to fix it.
00:30:20.438 --> 00:30:23.938
Give that approach a try and watch your results start to improve.
00:30:24.788 --> 00:30:28.266
Before you go, I have some news I think you're gonna want to hear.
00:30:29.006 --> 00:30:35.986
To kick off the new year, i'm gonna be offering a brand new program designed to help you take your advocacy results to the next level.
00:30:37.181 --> 00:30:49.300
I've designed this program to focus on a handful of the most powerful and effective strategies for engaging your money and policy decision makers in a way that gets you the results you want.
00:30:50.045 --> 00:31:00.575
We cover lots of different strategies and techniques here on the podcast, and I've heard so much wonderful feedback about the value folks are getting from that, which is awesome.
00:31:01.497 --> 00:31:03.061
But I also hear that it's a lot.
00:31:03.957 --> 00:31:09.987
And what I hear more and more is just gimme the things I absolutely have to have.
00:31:10.467 --> 00:31:16.106
Tell me what's gonna be the most effective, the most powerful, and let me focus on that.
00:31:16.977 --> 00:31:18.882
So that's what I've decided to do with this new program.
00:31:19.751 --> 00:31:26.862
It's laser focused on a set of core strategies that are incredibly powerful and universally effective.
00:31:27.281 --> 00:31:31.001
It doesn't matter where you live, it doesn't matter what service niche you're in.
00:31:31.362 --> 00:31:34.031
This is the shortest path to success.
00:31:34.888 --> 00:31:44.523
I'll be teaching those core strategies and supporting you with lots of coaching and weekly conversations, all designed to equip you to get the results you want.
00:31:45.727 --> 00:31:48.906
I am limiting this to the first 10 founding members who step up.
00:31:49.507 --> 00:31:56.346
I'm limiting it because I wanna make sure that you get exactly what you need from the teaching and the coaching.
00:31:57.037 --> 00:32:02.376
And as a founding member, you'll have the opportunity to direct the focus of the coaching as we go.
00:32:03.498 --> 00:32:13.607
Think about how many times you've been frustrated with a decision maker not getting it, not getting the true value of your work and its impact.
00:32:14.178 --> 00:32:16.248
This is where we fix that.
00:32:17.018 --> 00:32:17.978
So come on in.
00:32:18.278 --> 00:32:21.488
Shoot me a message on either LinkedIn or the podcast website.
00:32:21.758 --> 00:32:23.228
I'll put those links in the show notes.
00:32:23.617 --> 00:32:29.222
And let's make a plan to work together in the new year and start getting you those next level results.
00:32:29.741 --> 00:32:34.511
Thanks for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode right here on the Nonprofit Power Podcast.
