Stop guessing, start knowing 

Lee Wochner:
Last episode I asked you to describe your organization in one sentence without using the word impact. Today I’m going to ask something harder. Can you tell me honestly where your money goes when it comes in? Not where it’s supposed to go, where it actually goes, without checking a spreadsheet first? If you hesitated, this episode is for you.

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. Thanks for joining us today. This is part two of our two-part walkthrough of the discovery questionnaire we run through with new clients and sometimes existing clients who need a refresh. The reason we’re doing this here on the podcast is to help nonprofit leaders refine their marketing. Because of course, we always need to know what we’re marketing and who the people are that we’re marketing to and why, and all those great reporting questions underneath who, what, where, when, why, and how. Quick recap last time we covered organizational identity and audience ecosystem, who you are and who you’re for, eight questions, hopefully a notebook with some real answers in it by now as you followed along. And hopefully at least one moment where you and your team disagreed on something you assumed you’d agree on, because that’s good. That’s the process working. So if you haven’t done that yet, that work, I hope you will, either taking a break now to go back and do it, or even starting after listening to this episode as well. So what I’m saying here is grab a pad and a pen.

At some point, maybe now in preparation for this, or maybe afterward, and then you have to listen to it again. but the purpose of this is to generate questions that you will answer and that will help you on your journey to growing your agency. And I promise you, again, you can do these things within a day or a few days, not a week. This is not a monumental undertaking.

This is establishing the fundamentals of your marketing. You could do this in a couple of hours. It’s a useful exercise, I promise you. We do it all the time, and it’s great to see nonprofits have aha moments as we go through this process. So last time we covered parts one and two, organizational identity and audience ecosystem. Today we cover the back half 11 questions across three parts.

Part three is current challenges and friction points. Basically, what’s broken? Part four is marketing infrastructure and data landscape, what tools and habits you genuinely have versus what you assume you have. And part five is future state and success metrics, what winning actually looks like in specific enough terms that you could know with certainty if you had achieved it.

In other words, you had won. And it’s important to recognize and celebrate success. So this is the half, this episode, where things tend to get a little uncomfortable because it asks you to look honestly at what isn’t working instead of what you wish were working. And that’s normal. That is exactly why this part matters more than people expect. And you know, let me say that we do an assessment too.

And that if you came over to my office, you’d find all sorts of things you could improve. We’re always looking to do better for clients and for the management of our agency. Yes, we’re always putting out stories, but yes, we’re always crunching numbers. And every quarter we do a deep dive into those things. The beauty of that sort of self-examination is that you always find opportunities to do better. And then you can do better. So

As we dig into these questions, questions that I strongly encourage you to think about and answer for yourself, please know that this is not about judgment. I am not being judgy at all. I don’t want to be judged either. This is about learning and refining, about getting even better results, which will feel great. Okay, let’s go.

So part three current challenges and friction points. The goal of this part is to pinpoint the specific setbacks that have actually hindered your growth or visibility, not the generic ones that we all fall into, like we need more funding. Everyone needs more funding. Even the people you think have all the funding think they need more funding, and maybe they do. We’re looking for your specific bottleneck.

The one that’s actually true for your organization and not just true for the sector in general. And by the way, there have times, there have been times at counterintuity when I have been the bottleneck. And thankfully I grew aware of it and I hope I’m no longer the bottleneck. So no great love for bottlenecks. We just want to identify what’s going on and see if we can resolve it. So question number nine is what is the single biggest bottleneck?

Preventing your organization from doubling its impact in the next 12 months. Now notice I said doubling, not growing 10%. Doubling forces you past the comfortable incremental answer and into the real constraint. Is it a lack of awareness? People who’d support you if they knew you existed? Is it a lack of funding specifically as opposed to a lack of?

Capacity to use funding well. So this is a question that when you get a major grant from a Silicon Valley billionaire’s ex-wife, you know, if she arrived with hundreds of millions of dollars for you, would you know what to do with them, et cetera? Or is your bottleneck operational? You could absolutely serve twice as many people if you had the staff, the space, or the systems to do it.

That’s why advanced planning is good. We had a client convinced that their bottleneck was awareness. They assumed nobody knew they existed. When we actually dug in, the real constraint was operational. They had more willing volunteers and more donor interest than they could process because their intake system was a single part-time staffer working from a shared inbox. And I’ve seen that example more than once of

It’s Harry back in the back. He’s overwhelmed. so no amount of additional marketing would have fixed that situation. More awareness would have just made the bottleneck worse. The bottleneck was, poor Harry had not been identified, and nobody was, including Harry, was doing anything about it. So that let’s go one layer deeper. What what have you already tried to fix this? And why didn’t it work the way you hoped, assuming you already knew the bottleneck?

This matters that more than people expect because we see organizations relaunch the same failed tactic with a new logo and wonder why the results don’t change. two grounding questions to have real numbers for. This might help. Where does your money currently come from? Is it 50% grants and 50% individual donors, mostly one major donor, mostly small recurring gifts?

And if you had an extra $50,000 landing in your account tomorrow, and don’t we all wish for that, exactly where would it go first? If you can’t answer that one fast, it’s worth figuring out before you’re ever in a room asking someone for $50,000, because of course that person is going to say, well, why do you need $50,000 and what will you use it for?

So again, what’s the single biggest bottleneck preventing your organization from doubling its impact in the next 12 months? Is it that we don’t know what we’re raising money for, that we don’t know what we would spend it on, that we wouldn’t have the capacity to handle it, et cetera? What’s stopping you? What’s in the way?

Question 10. Where do you feel your current messaging falls short or fails to resonate? So here’s a useful way into this. Think about the last time you tried to explain your work to someone completely outside what you do. A friend at a dinner party, somebody you meet at an event. I always like to talk to people. I meet standing in line or doing whatever.

Your kid’s soccer coach, whoever, what part of what you do was hardest for them to actually understand? That confusion point is usually where your public messaging is failing to just amplified. So where do you feel your current messaging is falling short or failing to resonate?

Also, it’s worth a hard look to see if you have internal silos that are keeping stories from being told. Is your fundraising team talking to your program team? Because the program team gets real life experiences of impact and those, my goodness, I’m gonna cry moments. And the fundraising team could really stand to make use of them because those are the reasons people will support you.

and if they’re not talking to each other, if they’re siloed, if you’re miss, then you’re missing out on sharing stories that were lived and have the tang of real human experience. So, where do you feel your current messaging is falling short or failing to resonate? Question 11. What are the most common objections you hear from potential donors or partners? Not the objections you wish they had, the actual ones.

The ones you hear, plus the ones you’re sure they hear in their head. Like, I don’t know if my donation really gets used efficiently. Or I already support a similar cause. Or I’m not sure this issue is solvable. I hear that one a lot about homelessness, and yet there are people solving homelessness in different areas.

And my response, by the way, to the thing about homelessness of well, this is what we have to have, is we didn’t have this situation when I was a kid. So somehow we as a society created it. If we created it, we can uncreate it. yeah, that’s that’s a bit of a sore point for me. Once you’ve got the real list of the common objections, ask yourself plainly, how are you addressing these in your marketing materials?

So for some organizations, the honest answer is, well, we’re not. the objection just gets ignored and hoped away. we want to spend real budget on slicker design. And the actual objection just sitting in donors’ minds, does this donation even make a difference? Never gets addressed anywhere in the materials at all. That’s a gap worth closing directly in your own words, rather than pretending donors don’t think it.

We’re gonna take a short break here, but when we come back, we’re going to dig into your marketing infrastructure, the tools and assets you’re actually working with to spread your message. Stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth:
Most nonprofit fundraising leans on urgency and guilt. But here’s what actually works: invitation. When you show donors how they can be part of the solution — and why their support matters — people want to help. Your job is just to make them feel important and included. That’s one of several practical messaging shifts we cover in our latest Counterintelligence briefing on fundraising in uncertain times. Read the full article at counterintuity.com.

Lee Wochner:
And we’re back with just me today, walking you through part two of our discovery questionnaire, which is designed to help you better position yourself in the nonprofit marketplace for better support, better donations, and better outcomes, and just a lot more success. I think there was a break before coughing.

Okay, let’s look at the actual machinery behind your marketing because some organizations have a story they believe about their tools and data that does not quite match the reality. It’s always good to do a check-in, right? So now we’re into part four of our overall questionnaire. Part four being marketing infrastructure and data landscape. that’s an exciting name for this, I think.

The goal here is to assess the tools, assets, and historical performance you’re actually working with so that any strategy we build sits on solid ground instead of guesswork. So question 12: What’s the current state of your CRM? That’s your contact record management system, your email, and your website tracking. So here’s the test question we always ask.

And it tends to be a little humbling. but again, it’s good to shed light in those dark corners, right? And then it all gets better. Here’s the question. Do you know exactly where your last ten donors came from?

Was it Facebook? Was it a physical event? a gala, a something, a little meetup. Was it a board member’s personal ask or word of mouth? If you can answer that with real confidence, you’re ahead you’re ahead of the game. That’s pretty good. Imagine if you thought that your email newsletter was your top acquisition channel, and for many nonprofits it is, email works really well.

But what if you actually pulled the data and eight of your last 10 donors had come from a single board member’s personal network? Wouldn’t that drive some changes into your marketing and fundraising outreach real quick? Are you using an actual donor management system or is it a spreadsheet someone updates when they remember to? No judgment either way. Spreadsheets get plenty of small and midsized nonprofits further than people assume.

But you do need to know which one you’re actually running because the strategy for each looks different, and you for sure need to make sure someone is updating it regularly. There’s the saying that you can expect what you inspect. We had a client years ago who said, Well, gee, we’re getting all of these leads, and then they just don’t quite convert what’s going on here. And we found out that there were people, there was a person.

in a back room who was not fund following up at all, even though we had established a system. So we quickly established a new and better system for them and money flowed. You have to check on all of those little choke points in fundraising. And so this these things that we’re talking about here are important. Question 13 which marketing channels, email, social, events, web

Are carrying the real weight for your organization. And obviously, there are many more marketing channels than those. And the flip side of that is which channel feels like a black hole. There’s a lot of effort going in, but almost nothing measurable is coming back out. So most organizations have at least one of these.

sometimes it’s a social platform someone insists on maintaining out of habit rather than results, like a Twitter account, excuse me, X account that three people still update because it felt important to start in 2015, but it’s generating little response. So identifying this honestly is the first step to either fixing it or letting it go. And letting it go is a complete legitimate outcome of this exercise and a recommended one because you

gained the time back and the money. So which marketing channels are carrying the real weight for your organization? And do you have a consistent system for capturing stories and data from the field, the moments, quotes, and outcomes of your program and that your program staff see every day to actually use in marketing later? Or does that material mostly, I’m sorry, evaporate because nobody’s collecting it in the moment? So you need those stories.

For your marketing, are you collecting them? And which marketing channels are carrying the real weight for your organization? Because maybe there’s something you can let go, and maybe there’s something that deserves more water and sunshine. Question 14, what does your current donor journey actually look like from the first touch point to the first gift?

So you want to map this out step by step, the way a person actually experiences it, not the way it looks on an org chart. where do people typically drop off along the way? The beauty of digital marketing is you can track that. Gee, they opened the email. Look, they clicked on the link. Now they were on our website. Now, from our website, they were inspired to make a donation. They clicked the donate button, but they didn’t donate. So

If that’s the repeated pattern, one of those pages is not functioning so well and it’s the one closer to the donation, right? So that’s part of the donor journey. Did they did your branding follow through throughout this? did their did messages support the idea that they should be donating? Were they being asked to make a donation?

In line with their capacity to donate. Does your default donation box say, for instance, $5,000 when this would be a first donation and really they were thinking about $25? And because you have a $5,000 box lit up, they’re disinclined to do that. So you want the branding to follow through, you want the messaging to follow through, and you want to get people on board in a way that’s appropriate for them.

and and just as importantly, are you nurturing them toward becoming a recurring supporter? And are you sending them a a thank you pretty quickly and a and a receipt email and then nurturing them thereafter following up? All right, so friction identified, infrastructure assessed, last part, and this is the one that turns everything we’ve covered across both of these episodes.

And is something we can actually be held accountable to and get closer to success. So part five, future state. Yay, we all want to get to the better future. Future state and success metrics, because we all want the success. So the goal of this part is defining what winning looks like, specifically enough that a strategy built around it actually has a target instead of just good intentions.

So, you want to know what you’re striving for in order to know how to get there. one of the examples that I’ve used with people for a long time is so we’re based in Burbank in Los Angeles. I always ask them, what’s the best way to get to San Francisco? I’ve asked job applicants that here for 19 years. What’s the best way to get to San Francisco? And the correct answer, by the way, is it depends. It depends on what you want. If you want a seating scenic journey,

Maybe you drive along the coastline. If you have a meeting, you’re in a hurry, you’re going to an event, you probably jump on a plane. You can also take a train. And by the way, yes, I know two guys who rode their bikes from Los Angeles to Sacramento or to San Francisco. So you see there are lots of ways to get there. The thing is, what are we trying to achieve? Hence, part five, future state and success metrics.

Okay, so here’s question number 15. If we’re sitting here one year from now, and this has been a massive success, what specifically has changed? So complete this sentence out loud right now. If you’re driving or walking, and if you’re driving, you’re saying it out loud, right? or walking, or you could write it down if you’re at a desk.

12 months from now, this will be a success if blank has happened. And then fill in that blank. Fill in that blank with something specific. Is the primary win a dollar figure? Is it a certain number of new people served? Is it a genuine shift in how the public perceives your cause? So for the intangible wins: brand, authority, community trust.

I think you can track those as well. So, how could you actually measure whether those moved at all? So, as an example, you could track that by counting unprompted mentions of your organization in local press and community Facebook groups over the year. Hey, look, this many times we got mentioned in local chamber gatherings, neighborhood things, online Facebook groups.

You know, it’s not a perfect metric, but it’s a real one. And it’s more concrete than just feeling like things had gotten better. gee, I think it got better. No, you know what? In 2026, we came up on local Facebook groups a hundred and nineteen times. People really know about us. And last year it was only 30 times. There is something good going on here.

And again, your primary win could be a dollar amount. it could be some other success metric, but the thing is you want a success metric that a year from now you would say, wow, we succeeded. It’s essential to know what winning will look like and then tracking your progress in getting to that win.

Question 16. What’s the moonshot goal for the organization over the next year? So we talked about moonshot goals last time, the previous episode, part one of this little series. that’s from Jim Collins. the idea of moonshot goals. So the big one, what is the big one that’s slightly uncomfortable to say out loud because it feels like a stretch? You don’t want to seem absurd, but

I’m always in your corner. I’ll bet you can make it. So what is that moonshot goal for your organization over the next year? And then work backward from it. What’s the very first marketing milestone you would need to hit to make that year-end goal start to feel inevitable rather than aspirational? That first milestone is usually where the actual strategy should start.

I did a marathon some years ago. I never thought I could do a marathon. I did a marathon. Well, obviously for me that was a moonshot goal. I’m going to do this marathon. And by the way, I did it in another country. I did it in Holland and Amsterdam. And I finished. And it was hard. But I trained for it for three months and I got better and better. And one day I couldn’t believe I could run 10 miles.

And then just go about my day because when I started and I was running three miles, I would just go home and collapse on the floor. So when you’ve actually got that goal, that place you’re going to land, it makes a big difference. And if you’re committed to it, you can get there.

Question 17, and we’re getting close to the end now. So please hang in. Question 17: How can outside support help your team without complicating your workflow? So if you remember Stephen Covey’s The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which I encourage you to remember. And if you don’t remember, haven’t read it, please read it. so in that, Covey conditioned us rightly into focusing on our strengths.

And for other matters, we should delegate or we should outsource. The incredible thing about life on planet Earth is there are always other people and other resources, and that’s the benefit. That’s the benefit of having other people and other resources in the world. We should always think about how we could do what we want to do rather than thinking we can’t do something because we don’t have something else. So it’s important to figure out what you want to gain.

Expertise, efficiency, revenue, and how to manage it. So, and this is related to that moonshot goal as well, of course. You can hear that. So let’s say that you you are not, I’ll give you an example. Let’s say that you are not a marketing expert and you need marketing and you want to grow. Some of your concerns might be it’ll cost too much, or we won’t have time to review drafts.

Or it won’t sound like us. Or whatever it is, naming it out loud, even just to yourself makes it dramatically easier to actually plan around. What if you needed better financial management? And again, you’re like, I do can we afford this? And etc. etc. Well, when you get a clearer picture on your numbers, you’re better positioned for success. So there are endless examples of this. And again, you might think of what are your strengths? What do you have?

What is your gap? What is the gap in your capacity and in your operations? And then how would you work with a consultancy or an agency you’re going to bring in? Whatever sort of agency or consultancy you’re going to bring in should be additive, helpful, and well worth it. Naming your fears in advance takes you away from what I always call lack mentality. I lack that.

So therefore, I can’t do that. To opportunity mentality. How can I do what I need and want to do? How would I have to go about doing that? When you turn it into a how, everything seems possible. So the alternative to even thinking about this, if you are not already thinking about this, the alternative to even thinking about this runs the risk of keeping you in the same place you’re in right now. And I know.

You want to do better. I know you’re success driven. I know you want to accomplish your mission. That’s why your nonprofit exists.

Question 18. Are there any non-negotiables or red lines for your brand? Specific imagery, language, or platforms that are strictly off limits because of your mission or your organization’s history. What don’t you want to use? What don’t you want to be associated with? And I think we know already what sort of thing we might be talking about here.

This is the kind of thing that’s painful to discover after a campaign has already gone out. A phrase that’s technically accurate but lands badly with a community we serve. We have gotten educated by clients about some of the particularities of the people they work with and serve that we needed to learn about in order to make sure that the messaging was right. And we always love to learn those new things.

And it’s better to learn those things in advance before you’re already spending money on the campaign. So it’s worth getting explicit about what you don’t say or what you don’t do, what those red lines are, and putting them in writing before you’re spending money and time doing it in actuality. So in short, know your red lines. What you won’t say, can’t say, won’t work with, don’t believe in.

Question 19. This is the closer. This is the last one. Is there anything else you feel we need to know at this point to help you achieve your goals? So that’s a question we ask clients. And it sounds like a throwaway question. And it actually applies really well because it’s open-ended enough. It’s often the most useful single.

Answer the answer we get to this in an entire discovery process. And it comes from this exact open-ended catch-all. Because it gives someone permission to mention the thing that didn’t fit neatly into any of the previous 18 boxes. So at the end of almost every call, I ask the other person, is there anything I didn’t ask you that I should have? And I started doing that eons ago when I was a newspaper reporter. It’s truly amazing what you learn.

When you ask the simple question that starts with, is there anything else? And so you should ask yourself, is there anything else I need to know? Is there anything else we need to know? What wasn’t asked in this process that should have been asked?

Okay, so that’s all 19 questions across five parts. I know that seems like a lot, but we covered, you know, who you are, who you’re for, what’s broken, what you’ve actually got, and what winning looks like. And if you went through both of these episodes seriously, actually writing down real answers, you now have a more honest strategic foundation.

than many nonprofits build in an entire year of planning meetings.

A few notes on using this yourself. First, you don’t have to do all nineteen in one sitting, but it’s good to gather this quickly.

When we work with clients, we usually take the better part of a day on site with their team to walk through all these questions and others 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 the answers. This shouldn’t be a 90-day project, though. It should take a few hours or a day or a few days. You want momentum. Second, the answers will probably

Surface some disagreement among your leadership team. And that’s not a bad outcome. That’s a good outcome. Because that disagreement was already there. This just makes it visible enough to actually resolve. Ideally, in a planning meeting and not in the comments of a campaign that’s already live and that you’re already spending money on and time. And third,

Revisit this process every twelve to eighteen months, or anytime something feels off in your marketing that you can’t quite name. Missions evolve, audiences shift, and the answers you wrote down today will not be the answers you’d give in two years, because you will have succeeded at something in that first year.

If running through this surfaced more questions than answers, that’s normal, and that’s exactly what it’s designed to do. That’s what this question question Saying this over, Lisa.

If running through this surfaced more questions than answers, that’s normal. And it’s exactly what it’s designed to do. That’s what this conversation is for. Finally, if you have questions about this, because there are a lot of questions here, and it may seem overwhelming, I hope not, but it may, I’m inviting you to reach out to me. Shoot me an email at Lee at counterintuity dot com.

Or poke me on LinkedIn. I’m on LinkedIn a lot. I’ll be happy to respond. We can even set up a short phone call if that’s helpful. We’re dedicated to helping nonprofits. Recently, I had a video meeting with a listener of this podcast who is managing a nonprofit in the Dominican Republic that helps save children from drowning by teaching them to swim and teaching them to respect the strong ocean tide. It

Absolutely made my day having that conversation and supporting that mission of keeping kids from drowning. And one of the reasons may be because at age 11, I myself almost drowned. And someone, a stranger, saved me. Thank you for joining me today for this episode. I’m really grateful to you for listening. You’re doing important work, and thank you for that. I appreciate you. Thanks so much.

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.