Words that work 

Lee Wochner:
Quick question before we even say hello. If a stranger stopped you on the street and asked, “Why does your organization deserve to exist?” — could you answer in one sentence, without using the word “impact”?

Many nonprofit leaders can’t. Not because they don’t know their organization — they know it better than anyone alive. It’s because nobody has ever made them sit down and answer that question out loud, in plain language, with no grant-speak allowed.

That’s what today is for.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:
Welcome back to How to Market Your Nonprofit. And welcome to the first of a two-part series that we’ve wanted to record for a while.

Here’s the setup. Every time we start working with a new nonprofit client — or check back in with an existing one when something feels off, when engagement’s dropped or a campaign just isn’t landing the way it used to or when things have changed with their organization — we run them through a discovery process. In this case, a discovery questionnaire. Nineteen questions, five parts. It can be, hands down, the single most important block of time we spend with a client, because everything that comes after — the website, the campaign, the fundraising appeal, the social calendar — gets built on top of whatever comes out of that conversation. Skip it, or rush it, and you can end up with marketing that’s technically competent and strategically hollow — nice-looking graphics wrapped around a message nobody actually agreed on.

Today and next episode, I’m walking you through that questionnaire, start to finish, in the same order we use it with clients. Our goal is to prompt your thinking, and to help condition you to putting your best foot forward in introducing your organization and what you do – in order to get more supporters.

We do this process onsite with clients, and sometimes we do it remotely via video meeting, and the results are always illuminating. We all have mirrors – and this process is intended to help you look in the mirror and help you look (and sound) your best before you go to that prospect meeting, that board meeting, that presentation you’re going to make.

This episode covers the first two parts: who you are, and whom you’re actually talking to. Next episode, we get into the harder stuff — what’s broken, what tools you’ve actually got versus what you think you’ve got, and what winning looks like twelve months from now.

And before we jump in, let me add one more thing:  I know that you want to just dive right in doing whatever it is  you do. I know that you’re a world-improver, a neighborhood solver, a lifter-up of people, a savior in your corner of the universe, and that you don’t want to do this work and would rather just go off and do the things that your mission says you do.

I know that because that used to be me, too.

But decades later, I can tell you with authority that you’re always better off when you make the time for thoughtful planning, for strategy, for re-examination. Just jumping in, or just continuing on, costs you money and opportunity – and, worse, it costs you the most expensive cost, which is time. Because you can’t get back time.

So: Please take the time to do this. It’ll take you maybe half an hour to follow this process with me today, and then over the course of a day or a few days or maybe a week, you can answer all the questions to come in this process. I promise you it’ll be time well spent.

So: Grab a notebook, or pull over if you’re driving and want to jot something down later. Let’s get into it.

Jaclyn Uloth:
92% of nonprofits feel unprepared for AI. What we find is that the leaders who are pulling ahead aren’t avoiding it; they’re using it strategically. There’s a clear framework for where AI can help your organization and where it can quietly undermine it. Get the full breakdown in our latest issue of Counterintelligence at counterintuity.com.

Lee Wochner:
And we’re back with just me today on a solo cast, walking you through part one of our discovery questionnaire that we present to clients and work with clients on. And it’s designed to help you better position yourself in the nonprofit marketplace for better support, better donations, and better outcomes. And so now we’re on to part two. There are five parts. We’ll cover the other three parts in the next podcast episode.

But for right now, we’re going to dig into part two, which is enchantingly entitled Audience Ecosystem and Stakeholder Mapping. That is just the sort of language we don’t want you to use in your marketing. But there it is in our process: Audience Ecosystem and Stakeholder Mapping. So the goal here with this is to identify the different groups you need to be talking to: donors, volunteers, beneficiaries, partners, because

Quote, our audience, close quote, as a single phrase almost never describes reality. You’ve got several audiences, and they don’t all want to hear the same thing in the same tone through the same channel. a grant officer at a foundation, and a first time fifteen dollar donor on Instagram, and a very well off.

person who is considering a fifty hundred thousand dollar grant, a donation, they’re all technically supporters, but writing to them identically usually means you’re not really reaching either one perfectly well. So here’s question number five, the first one under audience ecosystem and stakeholder mapping.

Who is your ideal donor or champion? And I want you to describe them as a specific person, not a demographic slice. So forget age and location for a second. What keeps this person up at night? What do they personally want out of their own life? Recognition, meaning, connection, legacy, impact. What misconceptions do they walk around?

With about your cause that you would love to connect. And I’m going to give you an example from my career. In holy cow, in 30 over 30 years ago, I did a survey of the audience. This was when I was running a a theater here in Los Angeles. I did a survey of the audience, and I had assumptions about them. And I my assumptions were wrong. This is why it’s good to figure out.

Who you’re involved with and therefore who you’re talking to. So I found out that the audience was equally made up of people without a lot of income and people with a very high income. Well, why were they all coming to my theater? Well, the unifying thing was they were highly educated and they were interested in new experiences, and my theater was only doing new work.

By emerging playwrights. And we had a good community vibe going. So what I started doing was, as a result of that, was I sent out letters asking for $10 to to part of that audience. And then the other part of that audience I would meet with and ask for five or $10,000. And so as you hear, I’ve segmented them. And I knew that I was talking to more than one audience. And then also as we started to get government support.

I started to talk to the city and the county and the state in in a different way than these others and to grant makers. So that’s the purpose of this exercise. And I know it probably sounds like something you already know. but it’s it’s important to challenge our own assumptions and our own ways of doing things. So

So let’s see if we can dig into your ideal donor or champion, the the person that you are targeting generally in your marketing and your messaging. So think of your actual top three donors right now by name.

What do they have in common? Are they at a certain stage in life? Are are they inhabiting a certain career position? Do they have a personal experience with the issue you work on? We once worked with a national organization that assumed their ideal donor was a wealthy retiree. And when they actually looked at their top givers, the pattern was rather different.

they were mid career professionals in their forties, many of whom had themselves or their families been affected by the exact issue the nonprofit addressed. And that single discovery changed their marketing approach.

Once you’ve got the ideal donor or champion, then ask the blunt version of the real question. Why would a total stranger choose to give you, and I’ll say $10 again, why would a total stranger choose to give you $10 instead of give that $10 to literally any other cause competing for their attention that day? If you can answer that cleanly, you’re most of the way to a usable message.

And if you if you’re not able to yet, this exercise is that is exactly the gap that we seek to close with this exercise. We’ll expose the gap and then you can work to fill it in. Question number six. What is a specific tangible outcome of a hundred-dollar donation? Let’s say. So this is where some nonprofit marketing quietly falls apart. The the promise is.

General, it’s vague. It helps kids, doesn’t really move people. It’s too vague to picture, to plant in your mind. 70% of your brain is wired toward visualization. When you say it helps kids, we don’t really have an easy way to visualize that. If you say it provides 10 meals and two hours of one-on-one tutoring, well, that does, because a donor can actually visualize that.

So over the years, we’ve sat with clients numerous times helping to do this math, turning the phrase your gift supports our mission into something like $100 covers one week of after school snacks for a full classroom. Same program, same budget, completely different ability to make someone reach for their wallet. I recently made a donation.

because it was clearly spelled out to me what issue they would cover that really deeply moves me. and I believe they can do that. And they and they portrayed it in a way that I could visualize the women it would be helping. So if you don’t have that translation ready yet, dollars converted into something concrete and countable, that’s homework to do before your next campaign goes out.

while it’s live, not while it’s live. And while you’re at it, what’s the one success story you should be telling every single new donor, the one that captures this best? And let me say again, you may have already done this work. I just want to cover the basis here because our goal here is to be helpful. And we are sure committed to helping nonprofits. Question number seven: who are the beneficiaries of your work and how do they currently find you?

So, and I mean find you in two ways. How do they learn about you? And then how do they find you to be? So walk through the emotional state of the people you’re helping in their in their very first interaction with your organization. How were they? Were they scared? Were they anxious? Were they embarrassed to need help? Were they hopeful? Were they exhausted from trying everything else first? That emotional.

Starting point should shape your tone everywhere. Your intake materials, your website copy, even your volunteer training.

A domestic violence shelter and a job training program might both serve people in crisis, but the first one needs language built around safety and discretion. While the second one needs language built around momentum and dignity. Mixing those up, even with good intentions, can quietly keep people away or even.

Push people away at the exact moment they’re deciding whether to reach out. So now that you have clearly identified the beneficiaries of your work and how they currently find you to be and how they interact with you, is there a barrier? Get specific about the barrier. What’s the biggest thing keeping more people from accessing your services right now? Is it on their part? Is it awareness?

Is it transportation? Is it stigma? Is it paperwork?

How does your specific work directly alleviate their pain points? And you know, these are rudimentary marketing questions, right? What problem are you solving? What’s the how do people feel pain? And how do you relieve the pain through what you do? So the closing question here is one of the most clarifying ones in this entire questionnaire. What’s the one thing you provide?

That beneficiaries genuinely cannot get anywhere else.

Okay, question eight.

And this is the final one. We are pulling into the station. Question eight. Who are your key institutional partners or competitors for attention? So, which other organizations are your donors also supporting? And why do you think they share their wallet share with them? Right? You don’t want to be the same as everyone else, and you don’t want anyone else to be the same as you. But if they’re

Supporting something over there, what is your relationship to that and why is that messaging working? If a donor says, this is related to that question, if a donor says, I already give to unnamed other organization number one, right? What’s your honest answer for why you still need their support?

And now that you’ve thought about these competitors for awareness, or perhaps key institutional partners, are you looking to stand out from others or are you looking for ways to partner with them?

So again, we have great examples of clients and other nonprofits we know that partner with other organizations because focus gets you far. So it’s good to know what others are doing. It’s good to know how you can partner. And by the way, it’s good to know how you can share audience. When I was running the Performing Arts League in Los Angeles 23 years ago,

I wanted to pull all the performing arts together, which I was able to do for a while while I was there. Because I felt like it was the same ticket buyer. The people who go to the theater are the people who go to the opera, are the people who go to dance, are the people who go to the symphony and go to dance and on and on and on. And yes, they went to dance twice because I love dance. the big competition was not each other. The big competition was staying home and watching television. So,

What has happened since then is more and more of these organizations are now sharing deals with each other. Hey, here’s an offering from our partner. You can get 25, 40% off to this event. Here’s our special link. And so it enables, let’s say, a large theater to focus on what they do and let the symphony focus on what they do. They’re not splitting office, they’re sharing, they’re not splitting audience, they’re sharing audience back and forth.

So and you learn things from looking at other people nearby in your sector. So who are your key institutional partners or competitors for attention? And what do you want the relationship to be? And are you looking to stand out from them or are you looking for ways to partner with them? And again, it will solidify what are you doing differently?

So that’s parts one and two of our, let’s call it an onboarding questionnaire, our discovery questionnaire, who you are and who you’re for. We covered those parts today. Eight questions down, eleven left for next time. here’s your homework before the next episode. Don’t try to answer all eight of these perfectly in your head right now.

while you’re half listening or like me taking your dogs on a walk, write them down. Get your leadership team in a room, or even just yourself in a notebook and answer them in full questions.

Here’s your homework before the next episode. Don’t try to answer all eight of these perfectly in your head right now while you’re half listening on a walk, perhaps, listening to your podcast. That’s I listen to them while walking my dog sometimes. Write the answers down. Get your leadership team in a room or even just yourself and a notebook and answer them in full sentences.

You’ll be surprised almost every time how different the answer you say out loud is from the answer you assumed you would give. And don’t be alarmed if your team doesn’t fully agree on every answer the first time through. That disagreement is normal and it’s a good part of the exercise. And it’s far better to find it now in a notebook and reconcile it now than later in a campaign.

That half your board, perhaps quietly, doesn’t believe in.

When we work with clients, we usually take the better part of a day on site with their team to walk through these questions and the questions in part two and do some other exercises. And we do that to allow time to think and interact and dig down to the real answers, the ones that will register with people. So take some of that thought time for yourself too. Writing is learning. So write down some answers.

Next time, next time we get into the part of this process that tends to be the most uncomfortable. But you it you learn good things there. The most uncomfortable part is the friction points slowing you down. The tools you’re actually using versus the tools you think you’re using. And on a better note, what success genuinely looks like 12 months from now.

That’s where the real strategy work starts, looking at the future in 12 months and knowing that you can get there. Again, it yes, within 10 years, we put a man on the moon and we brought him back. You can do something like that at your nonprofit. Thank you for joining me today for this episode. Nothing gets done without you doing it. So I’m grateful to you for listening. I’ll see you in part two. Keep doing what you’re doing. Thanks a lot.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.