Your marketing isn’t the problem 

Lee Wochner:

Your marketing might not be the problem. If your nonprofit feels busy, active, committed, but still misunderstood, this conversation is for you. Today, I’m joined by branding strategist and nonprofit consultant, Annika Jackson, to talk about what actually limits impact and support when an organization’s work itself is strong. We explore why clarity comes before campaigns.

How leadership voice shapes trust, and what happens when mission, message, and presence finally line up. Maybe you don’t need to do more marketing. You might just need to make your work easier to understand through marketing. We’ll talk about that and much more on this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit.

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:
Anika, it’s great having you join us today.

Anika Jackson:
Thank you, Lee. I’m really excited to be here.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, I’m looking forward to the conversation. So I’m going to jump right in because I think you have a lot to share and a lot that people are going to take away from this. So we’re just going to dive right in. My expectations are high, but I’m sure you will exceed them. One of the things that you say in your own marketing materials and your own branding materials is that your brand is more than your logo.

Anika Jackson:
Okay, I hope I can live up to your expectations.

Lee Wochner:
And I want to dig into that. Just last night, I was meeting with a nonprofit board—very good people who are committed to the mission. We were talking about all sorts of things, and I wanted to make sure that there was clarity around these things. One of the things we hear from people outside our organization and within is that we think everybody knows these things. And of course, they don’t. So let’s cover some basics.
In what way, when you say your brand is more than your logo, what do you mean by that?

Anika Jackson:
Your logo is a visual cue of your organization—your belief system, your ethos, what you’re trying to convey to the public—just like a sound that’s associated with your brand. Think about Coca-Cola, Netflix, all these little sound cues: sonic branding. It is a part of branding, but it is not your brand at its core.
To me, brand is your mission, vision, values, positioning statements—your North Star. The logo can represent that.

But I’ve had so many people come to me when I had my previous PR agency saying, “We’re ready for PR. We’re ready to get interviews.” I’d say, “Great—tell me more about who you are. What’s your elevator pitch?” And they’d say, “No, no, no—we have social media, we have a logo, we have a website.”
And I’d say, “No, let’s backtrack. Let’s make sure you know what your message is so that we can go out to the right publications, the right people—donors, sponsors, constituents, community partners, potential board members, potential staff members, whoever it is.”

I’ve also worked with nonprofits that had a brand, but interestingly, when we were doing brand strategy work, we found out that some of the people who worked there had never heard of them—and they were a 20-year-old organization in that community. One woman on staff said, “I go to church across the street and I never knew this existed.”

Lee Wochner:
One of the things I’ve discovered working with organizations is the people in the neighborhood, just as you say, have no idea they’re there. And I recently spoke with someone—we’ve been in business about 19 years—and she said, “I didn’t know you did that.” We’re always putting it out, but somehow she wasn’t getting the message.

A logo is like shorthand. You see it and you know what it represents. It’s like hearing someone’s voice—“Here she comes, I can hear her voice.” It’s an indicator of what’s coming.

I was watching the new Apple TV show Pluribus with my son last night. The first thing I noticed, because you and I were talking about logos, is that it opens with a new Apple logo. They took the flat logo and made it 3D; it spins and radiates different colors. It caught my attention right away as a longtime Apple and Mac user. It made me think, “They’re keeping up to date. They’ve done some brand refresh.” So again, to your point, the logo signifies more than just the logo.

Anika Jackson:
Absolutely. And it is important to refresh. Hopefully the people who knew who you were before still know who you are, and the people who didn’t know who you were start to understand that.

Lee Wochner:
Yes—and the way you dress certainly says something about you as well.
So, keeping in alignment with these questions about brand and identity: What is personal branding? Because you also write about personal branding.

Anika Jackson:
I approach personal branding from the same perspective. I think it’s really important to know what our own North Stars are—what we really value, what our personal mission and vision are, and what our values are.

When I had that PR firm, we worked with a variety of clients. We had an opportunity to merge—an acqui-hire—into a bigger agency. I thought this was great. They had the same values as me, from what they’d espoused. My team would be taken care of, I’d get a higher salary than what I’d been paying myself, and my clients would have more resources.

We got in there and I said, “Okay, these were your personal values, but you don’t use these values in your business.” And I’m the kind of person who thinks you should show up the same way no matter where you are.

So if you have a certain value that you hold dear, then it makes it really easy to say yes or no if you know what somebody else’s or some company’s values are. That’s why we see a lot of disruption with organizations now—where a company says, “These are our values,” and then something happens politically perhaps, and they say, “We’re going to change all of that.” Consumers are left behind thinking, “Wait a minute—you’re no longer holding true to the values that you said you had.”

I had that experience. I walked away from that company, and that was really hard to do. It’s really hard to walk away from money. But this was something I thought was even more important.

I actually see this a lot with nonprofits and high-impact organizations. I did a branding workshop for Red Bull on personal branding, and it was really about: How do you connect your personal brand to the work you do? Why are you here? What’s that connection? And how do you use that to set goals and a plan for yourself to get the job you want in the company?

In nonprofits, we often see people who are very heart-centered, mission-driven, and they align with the work because otherwise they wouldn’t be there. Nonprofits are not always treated as full businesses, even though they should be. The money isn’t always there. It can be hard to get donors, hard to refresh and innovate, and hard to get your message out in different ways. And I’m sure that’s a lot of what you see as well.

Lee Wochner:
Absolutely. We know our core values here at Counterintuity, and we work to practice them every day. And of course, our clients have core values.

The times in my life when I did something perhaps not so great—even at age eight or ten—I still think about those. Those moments stick with you. So it’s better to have values and stick to your values. It helps you achieve what you really want to do while you’re here on this earth.

Anika Jackson:
One hundred percent. We all have a purpose. And you have to have a skill set—what you’re good at, that you’re passionate about, that will also make you money and serve others. That’s another way of looking at it, and it can evolve.

I don’t handle PR—well, I guess I do in a different way now. I’m teaching students at university. I’m working with companies and smaller organizations. But I’m really diving into podcasting, which to me is the best PR you can get these days.

Lee Wochner:
So—why is branding important for nonprofits, and how does branding help nonprofits?

Anika Jackson:
Branding can make or break a nonprofit—point blank. I’ll use an example of an organization I was just talking about. They are in South Los Angeles, and I live in a suburb presently. They were called Community Health Councils. What does that sound like? It sounds like an organization that provides healthcare—perhaps a hospital, nurses, clinics, something like that.

Really, it was started out of the 1992 riots and uprising, and they were bringing other organizations in the community together to work through issues and provide services so that people had education, access to food, healthcare, and a number of different things so the population could grow in a healthy manner. So yes, it had to do with health, but it wasn’t a clinic. So that name was really a bad moniker.

Anika Jackson:
So we had to look at who they really were as a brand, and how to make sure people understood that. They chose a new name—Rising Communities—which truly reflects what they do. Community Health Councils did not. People were confused: “Who is CHC? What is this organization? This isn’t what I thought I was being hired for—I thought I was applying to work at a health center.”
That change was really important so that people could understand who they are.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. And again, you want quick takeaway, because people are busy, they’re confused by other things all the time, and there’s a lot of clutter in the perceived atmosphere. You want quick takeaways.

I’m from the East Coast originally, and I don’t know if I see it on menus here, but in a restaurant—have you ever ordered orange roughy?

Anika Jackson:
Yes.

Anika Jackson:
It’s a type of fish.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, it’s a fish. Orange roughy was originally named “slimehead.” No one would order it. So with a little name change—a little branding work—it becomes orange roughy, and suddenly it flies off the menu. What can we say?

So if you’re branding a nonprofit—and we’re talking about personal branding as well—is it important to brand the leader of the nonprofit, the executive director, the president, the nonprofit CEO?

Anika Jackson:
I believe so. I’ve been part of organizations as a volunteer that had people who’d grown into leadership roles, then became CEO, and had been with these organizations 20–30 years. That person—everything they do—is going to represent the brand. Anything they post, people associate with the organization.

And even for a newer leader: the last I heard, there are a lot of executive directors retiring, and not enough people to replace them. We have a challenge with the talent pool. So I think it really is important—especially if you’re bringing in someone new, or someone who’s been there a long time and is the figurehead—to help people accept somebody fresh. One of the best ways to do that is for the leader to have a brand.

Anika Jackson:
They need to be associated with the organization’s brand, show why they’re there, and communicate it—whether through internal documents, external documents, public relations, and the various strategies and tactics we use across communications and marketing.

Lee Wochner:
We’re currently working with a client who is heading an important nonprofit doing really valuable work. Just today, one of our team members and I were messaging about how important and gratifying the work is.

When we started earlier this year, we said we wanted to do some voice work and branding work around the CEO because I think the CEO is a dynamic leader. And my experience with fundraising is that people frequently give to people.

So you take the connections of the executive director or CEO, make sure you have a voice that matches the organization and still reflects the person, and you put it out there—because that’s what reaches people in marketing and fundraising. Do you agree?

Anika Jackson:
Yes.

Anika Jackson:
I completely agree. I was just an executive director at a nonprofit organization attached to a private school. I still do some work for them, but I needed to focus on other things for a while. There were some issues because the organization was so entwined with the founder. He would say, “I don’t want to go back to those people.” He didn’t want to go back to his regular well of supporters.

Anika Jackson:
Meanwhile, the school community—who are already paying high tuition for their high-performing students who need a specific kind of education—wasn’t going to fill the fundraising gap. So we had this challenge: how do we figure out fundraising and the donor story when the founder is tired of telling the story and reaching out to his community?

Great person—I still work with them on a few things—but it does become a big issue if you’re not willing to go out there and be the face of the organization. As a newer executive director, people didn’t know me yet. I wasn’t going to get the same response he would get.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah. I’ll be honest with you, it’s hard for me to imagine someone not wanting to tell the story, but I run into it all the time. I tell people, “You’re being a little too humble.” People do want to meet you. Yes, they want to come see the facility, but they also want to meet you. They want you at events. They want you speaking.

And if you need help with that, we’ll help with that. I’m passionate about the three boards I serve on. I’m passionate about the nonprofit I started in 1990. I’m not running it anymore—very capable people are—but I’m still passionate.

Too frequently, I run into nonprofits that are a little too humble to ask enough of the people who would support their mission. Have you found that?

Anika Jackson:
Yeah, I have found that in both the business world and the nonprofit world. One objection I’ve heard is, “I just want the work to speak for itself. I don’t want it to be about me.”

And I say: It’s not about you. It is about the work. But we need you to tell the story. We need you to be the mouthpiece, the voice, and to be willing to step out of your comfort zone.

When we explain that the message has to come from them—that they are the only one who can share it—it shifts their mindset.

I’ve also seen this in LA with filmmakers: “I made all these films, won all these awards… and then my career stalled because I didn’t do any PR.” I’ve had people say, “I wish I’d met you sooner. I didn’t know I really needed to be out there and do the dance.”
But we all have to, in some way or another.

Lee Wochner:
A dynamic I noticed—10 or 15 years ago—was that Game of Thrones would air on HBO, and afterward they’d run an interview with the cast and creators. And now there’s a podcast. And with Pluribus, everyone’s doing this.

Anika Jackson:
Everybody’s doing it.

Lee Wochner:
And the thing is people want more information. They like the thing, they watched it. My son and I make jokes about, “We don’t need this explained to us—we just watched the episode. Thank you. We’re reasonably intelligent; we got it.” And yet sometimes I still find myself watching it. I’m not going to listen to the podcasts, but it’s extra content because people want to know more about something they’re invested in. And I think that completely applies to nonprofit organizations.

Anika Jackson:
No.

Lee Wochner:
Yes, you made a donation online or wrote a check or went to an event, but you want to know more. You want to know there was impact, you want to know what the values are, and you want to share in the success and the accomplishments of making an impact in people’s lives.

Anika Jackson:
Absolutely. You want to know—you donated because so many kids would be helped by this. You want to know what happened afterward, right? You’re donating to seed an orphanage or a farm or what have you; you want to know what that impact was on that community. I think people are so used to short-term motivations, but this is a long-term game.

Lee Wochner:
Yes.

Anika Jackson:
And so when people give, you need to show them: You made this one donation—this is what it’s going to do right now. But here’s the effect it’s going to have long-term. And if you keep donating, you can have even more of an impact. There’s so much more story we can share.

Lee Wochner:
It’s the difference between speed dating and a commitment. And I at least think a commitment has a manifold benefit that speed dating doesn’t.

Anika Jackson:
Yes. One hundred percent. Absolutely.

Lee Wochner:
So that was fun. Thank you. So now that we understand more about branding per se and identity and storytelling—these things are important. The brand immediately signals to somebody, “Here’s what this is.” The logo might be your first key. Then there’s a tagline. Then there’s messaging that’s unified, and there’s a person telling the story. These all work together. Now that we understand more about branding and identity—
How should nonprofits put out their branding? And especially bear in mind that things have changed rather radically in the country and in the world since 2019.

Anika Jackson:
So radically—and every day, with new AI tools. I do feel that you have to use all of the tools at your disposal. I love talking about the PESO model: paid, earned, shared, owned media, which is common in the PR world. It’s funny—when I translate it to people more on the digital marketing side, they haven’t always heard it in that format.

Lee Wochner:
Mm-hmm.

Anika Jackson:
But if you can take your message and share it in one thing from each of those, that’s going to show consistency to potential donors, sponsors, partners, and the community. You’re sharing the same message—maybe you’re tweaking it slightly, because you can do videos on some platforms while static graphics might perform better on others.

But having that message in your newsletter, and then having a blog post on your website, and then sharing that on social media, and perhaps going on a podcast to get earned media—maybe getting an anecdote from a constituent who experienced the journey with you. Then, depending on your budget, a little paid advertising never hurts.

For that South LA organization—such a great case study—we did a series of bus posters because we knew the community we were trying to reach didn’t have cars. They were using public transportation. So we had to identify high-traffic bus shelters and make sure the materials were in English and Spanish. Normally we wouldn’t think of bus shelters as a key strategy.

Anika Jackson:
They didn’t have time to go on podcasts and be interviewed. Yes, they had a newsletter, but it only went to people already invested in the organization. You have to manage the people inside who are already invested—and also attract newcomers.

Lee Wochner:
So I want to break down this PESO thing to make sure people grab it, because acronyms like this are powerful. They’re their own brand—a logo for the methodology. Walk us through PESO, if you don’t mind.

Anika Jackson:
Sure. And I’ll give a shout-out to Gini Dietrich, an amazing publicist. Spin Sucks is one of her brands, and she created the PESO model. So shout-out to her.

It’s looking at the lens of integrated marketing—but breaking it down so it’s not overwhelming.

Paid media: partnerships or any advertising efforts. Social media ads, radio, cable or streaming ads if that’s where your audience is, direct mail—anything you’re paying for to get your message to a broader audience.

Earned media: reviews. What are people saying about you when you’re not in the room? And also interviews, opinion pieces, podcasts, showing up at the Chamber of Commerce or nonprofit events. It’s your story, but also what others say about you—the third-party validation that you are who you say you are.

Lee Wochner:
Then you’d better have values that you’re expressing through all of them.

Anika Jackson:
One hundred percent. Absolutely.

Shared media: our social platforms. People think they own their social media platforms—no. You may own the content, but you don’t own the platform. If it disappeared tomorrow, would you have access to the people who interact with you? Have you saved your content somewhere safe?

So advertising and marketing help you get people off social media and into your mailing list and donor base.

Owned media: the things you control—your website, your blog, your email list. That’s how you communicate to people who are already your audience.

Lee Wochner:
So there’s your neighborhood, the sidewalk, and your front yard. We try to get people to remember they control their front yard—how it looks as people come toward the door. The city, the neighborhood, Mark Zuckerberg—they may all have different ideas. You can’t control them.

But you can control your digital presence, your message, and what you put out. People will make of it what they make of it, but the more you can own and control, the better. And ultimately the goal is to bring them across your threshold—onto your website, into your email list. Yes?

Anika Jackson:
Yes. And one other comment about shared media: people try to be everywhere and that’s exhausting. Reserve your handles so no one else can take them, sure—but you don’t have to actively use every platform.

New platforms pop up constantly—Clubhouse, Lemon8, etc.—but you don’t need to chase every trend or do TikTok dances that have nothing to do with your mission.

Really identify where your audience lives. Is it LinkedIn? TikTok? Instagram? Go deeper into a few channels. Every channel is nuanced in terms of what content performs best.

If you try to do everything, it’s a treadmill you’ll never get off. The algorithm changes, so then you change tempo, then maybe you’re on the StairMaster—it’s a lot. And you may get low reward if you’re not targeting well.

Lee Wochner:
We’re going to take a break here, but when we come back, Anika and I are going to share more marketing tips for nonprofits. We’re going to talk about artificial intelligence and the do’s and don’ts of running a nonprofit and doing your marketing right now. Stick around.

Jaclyn Uloth:
According to the Association of Fundraising Professionals, the shelf life of a website is two years and seven months. So if your website is three years old or older, it probably needs a tune-up or a complete overhaul so that you can stay current and engaging. A website refresh provides design and content improvements to drive donations and new technology to save you on time.

A website refresh provides design and content improvements to drive donations and new technology to save you time on tedious tasks while keeping your website safe from hackers. a free assessment of your website, contact us through our own website at counterintuity.com or email lee at lee@counterintuity.com. We’re ready to help. And now back to our show.

Lee Wochner:
And we are back with branding and marketing expert Annika Jackson. This is really fun and engaging. There’s a lot to learn here. So let me get tactical for a moment.

Let’s say you’re a smaller nonprofit with an annual budget under $500,000—maybe even below $200,000. Obviously, you’d like to grow so you can serve your mission on a larger scale.

What’s the key branding effort that would help raise awareness and support?

Anika Jackson:
A key branding effort—well, I don’t know if there’s just one. I do think the PESO model applies here too. You may not be able to do big paid advertising, but you might do a small, very targeted effort. Or you may sponsor a community event where the right people will be.

You can get creative and scrappy, but you still need to figure out what you can do in the paid, earned, shared, and owned spaces.

Anika Jackson:
To propel your brand. I think one of the biggest things, though, is probably: go on podcasts. You can search for podcasts for free. You can even put it into an LLM—a ChatGPT or a Claude or another tool. You can go to ListenNotes.com and look up keywords, hashtags, categories, and find podcasts that would resonate with your audience where you can share your knowledge.

Whether it’s a nonprofit podcast, or one about kids if your organization helps kids, or something focused on education—there are a number of different categories you can go through. It might take a little more legwork because you have to listen a bit to make sure it’s the right fit and figure out who to reach out to.

But again, in the past we had to rely on Sales Navigator on LinkedIn or other tools we probably all still use. Now you can literally just put it into an LLM. You can ask ChatGPT: “What are the top 10 or 20 podcasts? Here’s who I am, here’s my expertise, here’s what our organization does. Here are my goals. What are the podcasts I should appear on?” And ChatGPT does a really good job of finding that contact information for you.

So I would say that is one of the best ways because you’re getting social proof. The host is saying that you are who you say you are, that your organization does what you say you do. And that is marketing material for days. You turn one podcast episode into multiple pieces of content. You can use AI to do that, which is great.

You might have a blog post. You could take one or two quotes and make them into an entire article, or into a social media caption with a little more information. That is one of the least expensive ways, I would say, to make things go a lot further.

And also it’s a really good SEO play, because you take that link for that podcast episode, you put it on your website, you share it in your newsletter, you let people know—more discoverability. And then Google starts associating you with all of these different things you’ve been on. So when you Google your organization, guess what’s going to pop up? All these other people—again, the social proof—saying you are doing really good, important work that needed to be shared.

Anika Jackson:
It’s a lot easier these days than trying to get into publications. I can tell you that.

Lee Wochner:
Yeah, I started my career writing for publications and yeah.

The other thing, listening to you, is it gives you a great—being on podcasts gives you a great opportunity to work on that elevator speech and your core message, and to tell your story that you’ve been a little too humble to go out and tell enough. Now you’re on a podcast and you’re used to telling that story.

Anika Jackson:
Yes. Then it just starts flowing. It’s great.

Lee Wochner:
So there is a lot to be done and a lot that can be done. And holy cow, there’s email newsletters, there’s social media, there’s print collateral, there’s videos, there’s podcasts, there’s all of this stuff.

And then meanwhile, of course, if you’re running a nonprofit, you have to do things like achieve your mission—feeding hungry people, protecting the environment, saving endangered species, whatever your mission is.

Is there a right way or a wrong way to prioritize this?

Anika Jackson:
And I would say I’m a little stumped. I don’t know that there’s a right way or wrong way. I would say: make sure that you’re spending on your mission above all else.

A lot of nonprofits think they need to be really impressive with their marketing materials and maybe spend a little too much money there. Maybe they spend a little too much money on the décor for their charity event—upgraded napkins and place settings and chairs. People understand that you’re there to make money for your organization so that you can continue to work in the community.

So while you want to have a good façade, really think about that. Go back to your roots and think about how you can prioritize the mission and getting it out there.

There are a lot of techniques and different things, and I think it really depends on the time. Now everybody does Facebook fundraisers or GoFundMes or different kinds of viral campaigns. One year I was able to do that with a nonprofit that I started—I raised $26,000 just on a Facebook campaign.

Granted, I had one person who was a business owner say, “I want to match up to this much.” Another person said, “Oh, it’s end of the year, I’ll give $5,000 because I need to make more donations.” I had another person willing to do another little match. But out of that one campaign—

I don’t know that you could achieve that as easily now, but that was a special moment in time. So you need to look for: what is the moment in time right now that can help me prioritize the work that I’m doing, still make an impact, and have other people spread the word without me having to spend our whole budget on advertising and marketing.

Lee Wochner:
The other thing that we might add in here is: it’s good to have a plan. Earlier, when you were using your physical fitness metaphors—which, by the way, I do as well—I talk about routine being like going to the gym. It’s a good routine.

You don’t have to be Charles Atlas or some other weightlifter to succeed at the gym. You just have to have a pattern and go. When you have a plan, you can say, “Here we’re effectuating the plan, we’ve set goals, we can monitor results, we can adjust accordingly.”

When you have no plan, you just run around chasing everything, blowing around out in the desert trying to catch something. So planning generally saves you time and money because you planned ahead what the marketing was going to be—and you reminded yourself not to lose your mind trying to do everything.

Anika Jackson:
Yeah, and that is the actual answer—having a plan. I like having processes as well: setting that strong foundation of what are the processes, what are the procedures. So when one thing happens, here’s what we do.

That goes along with planning—having a strategic plan, whether it’s a three- to five-year plan, then breaking it into annual plans, then breaking it into quarterly plans. Different parts of the work need different segments.

And then you have, of course, your return: what’s your return on investment for each of these pieces? What are the metrics that are important for each of them? Like you said—then you can say, “Okay, this is how much time we can spend on this, this, or that.”

Lee Wochner:
We took almost all—and probably all—of our clients off of X, for instance. When it was Twitter, it was a very different environment. We took them off X, and then more of our clients, more recently, we’ve put on LinkedIn, where they weren’t really a big enough presence.

We want to help them get known by business owners and larger foundations and people who are on LinkedIn and could give at a greater level. But the operating environment of X and the tenor of the messages going around X did not seem well-suited to anybody we were working with.

Anika Jackson:
I appreciate you saying that because I got off it for the same reasons. And I do know several people who still post or do different things and they get some good responses, depending on what their industry is or what they’re talking about.

LinkedIn has just blown up. It really is the place to be if you’re doing anything in the business sector. It’s such a great way to make connections with people, to meet people.

You don’t see the same thing that can sometimes happen when people are hiding behind a screen. As a journalist too, people would sometimes write in comments on articles that had nothing necessarily to do with the article—they’d just try to pick things apart.

And I think that’s what you’re talking about: there’s an environment that’s not as welcoming and kind. We want to live in a kind world. We want to live in a world where if somebody sees our post on LinkedIn and they’re not interested in what we’re doing, they’ll ignore it—but if they see it and it’s not what they’re doing, but they know somebody who might be interested, they’ll pass it on.

Lee Wochner:
X no longer seemed to comport with my core values, the core values of this company, or the people we work with. And you know, I like just about everybody and I try to get along with them, but it’s difficult to get along with anybody over there.

It wasn’t serving the mission of anybody we were working with. So we’ve just rerouted that time and those energies over to LinkedIn. And of course we’re on Facebook and Instagram—we’re on other places.

So let me ask you: we’re talking about different platforms here, and I just read part of the laundry list of marketing you can do—email, newsletter, social media, collateral, videos, podcasts, etc. You and I are talking about making these all work together.

And you’re a brand strategist, so branding is important in all of this to make sure your identity comes through. Do you have any tips on how to integrate these to make sure they reinforce each other?

Because in your example of the podcast, you went out and did a podcast and you’ve got all these different story points that come out of it—and then you can constantly link them around and reinforce. Do you have a way that you help people do that, that you recommend?

Anika Jackson:
Yeah. It doesn’t have to be a podcast—it can be any campaign. Anything that you’re doing, any story that really tells who you are, your values, what you do, the results. I think people like to see results. They like to see other faces sometimes.

There are different ways, depending on the work you’re doing and whether you need to keep people’s identities private. You might just want to have staff members visible.

I think it’s important to show the face of the organization—the CEO, the executive director—but also perhaps a program that blew up, that did so well and helped people in spades, and did more than you thought it would. Having the manager, the community manager—whatever that role is called at your nonprofit—have a voice.

Particularly depending on the platform: if it’s a younger-leaning platform, they may be the right person to share that message. But the important thing is to make sure it’s the same message.

It’s really interesting, because tonight as we’re recording, I teach for a couple of master’s programs at USC. One of the programs is Digital Media Management, and right now I’m teaching Digital Content Direction. I just pulled a whole bunch of things on different algorithmic techniques you need to use for different platforms, because they are always tweaking them.

You have to know what they’re prioritizing at this moment in time. That can be a lot of work—but again, going back to AI, you can ask AI: “What are these different platforms doing? Please give me a high-level summary so I can make sure my content for that platform will resonate.”

Then you’re taking the same message—and it is truly the same information—but you might share different parts of it. Maybe on LinkedIn you share a study or a research paper, whereas on other platforms, you share a story from a constituent and what happened as a result of them going through this program.

You may share a win for your nonprofit: “Because of this, we got more funding, because people saw the success we had.” There are so many different stories.

You can share the same thing in different ways. Again, it’s all about keeping it consistent. Consistency doesn’t mean you share the exact same poster or post on every platform, but they all need to share the same message. It still needs to be congruent.

So I don’t know if that helped.

Lee Wochner:
No, that’s—essentially, put yourself out there all the time in ways that reflect who you really are from your values.

We’re in this period of great change, great challenges, and great opportunities, I think. I think people are well aware of the challenges. What do you think are the opportunities, and how are you advising organizations to adapt?

Anika Jackson:
I think there are a lot of opportunities on a global scale—connecting things that are happening in one place to things happening in another place. That’s the advantage of living in a more global society. It can be difficult to think about as well.

I have a nonprofit that I co-founded—a very, very small team of people—and we have our ups and downs. We’ve gotten grants and funding sometimes, and sometimes we haven’t. So we have to look at that organization and ask: Are we feeding the kids? Do they have enough food? Do they have clothes for the holidays? Are they all in school with the right school supplies?

We have the same issues as here in Los Angeles. But if you can find organizations that work on both—so I also work with organizations in LA that do the same kinds of things.

I think one of the biggest things is finding the people who are really married, because of their values, to those specific areas. My areas tend to be women and children’s health and education. I’m a member of Junior League of Los Angeles. I’ve been a member, and that’s what we do. It changes slightly—maybe this year focusing a little more on youth who are aging out of the foster care system than other constituents.

Those are some of the ways to adapt. LinkedIn is such a great place because you can find those people. You can search by tags. On other social platforms too, you can search what people are saying by hashtags to see, “That person might be aligned, they have a voice, they may not live in this community, but I see they live near us, so it might still be something they want to participate in and spread the word about.”

Adapting by using more of those micro-influencers. Adapting by really doing research and having somebody who is finding these connections—global and local—the ways you can reach people who have the same concerns so they can get involved.

I’m also on the board of another nonprofit that focuses on other countries in Africa. My organization is in Ghana. We work with an organization on the ground there. We’ve built an orphanage, we pay for kids’ schooling, food, things like that.

There are other programs in Kenya where they’re teaching digital skills so that people—women, youth, people just out of high school—can have careers in digital: SEO, blog writing, social media. Giving them skills. There are a number of different ways.

And I feel like it’s really hard for me to answer that directly because we’re always having to adapt. But we know all the challenges, and the beauty I see is that communities are coming together.

We’re finding similar people—for instance, on Threads. Threads is huge now. We’re finding the people who are part of our communities and we’re reaching out to connect with them more and more. Whether that means we’re sharing a message for an organization, or we’re sending a check to an organization we’ve never heard of before we started this connection.

And we haven’t spoken so much about AI, because we’ve had so much to discuss—but in this world where we have all this technology and people are so scared of things—“Is AI going to take our jobs? Is AI going to do this?”—use it to your advantage.

Use it to create some of the assets that you need in your own original voice, but also realize that more and more people are starting to want community and connection and to connect with you, because the tech is taking away some of our connection points.

Lee Wochner:
Our listeners—I wish they could see you right now, because when you started talking about your work and your nonprofit work, your service, you just started to glow and got diffusive. It’s like a case study of why everybody needs to go out and tell the story of their work.

You were already lively, but you really came alive there. And it inspires me further—and everybody listening should be inspired by that—because we can all make a difference and really get that glow of making an impact and changing people’s lives. If you’re doing work that’s aligned with that, you have to go out and tell people all the time, every day.

Anika Jackson:
Absolutely.

Lee Wochner:
Anika, do you have any further advice you’d like to share with listeners?

Anika Jackson:
I would say just don’t be afraid to dip your toe into something uncomfortable. We’ve talked about a lot of things that could be uncomfortable for people. It’s really important to think about your mission over yourself.

Get rid of the ego that tells us we need to be small, that we can’t share, that we don’t have value. Be willing to share that story and that journey, like you just said.

And then also, I am pretty optimistic about the communities that are forming and the way people want to help. Even if we’re looking at the economy and thinking, “Okay, we have to manage our budgets a little differently now,” we still want to help.

We’re still giving a little bit, and we’re taking food. I’m at USC; we’re doing a holiday party for faculty, and they’ve asked us to bring food—cans of food and different goods—to help students who may struggle over the holidays.

These are things that we impart on our children. You talked about watching TV with your son. I love it when my daughter suggests that we watch a show together because then that’s time we’re going to sit together; otherwise she may be in her room doing homework or something else.

One thing I’ve done with my daughter—and I don’t think it’s ever too early to start, and this is something everybody should think about, whether you have children or not—is how you can bring one more person into your circle.

We had a small organization when I lived in Houston called Houston Children Give Back. It was about: our kids have access to so much more information, travel, all these different things than we had growing up. My life was nowhere near—I’ve had nowhere near the opportunities, the money, all the things my daughter has grown up around.

So how do you make sure your kids are heart-centered as well? Houston Children Give Back took our children to volunteer at different organizations. What was really great is they would try things out and then they’d find, “I don’t really want to help pets; I really want to go stuff backpacks for kids so they have meals over the weekend.”

Or maybe someone would say, “I really love pets and I want to make sure I’m creating bags of food so that when Meals on Wheels is delivered to seniors, their pets are also getting food.”

Or, “I really want to create blessing bags so when we’re at a stop sign and we see somebody asking for money, we can hand them a bag that has maybe a little bit of change, some food, water, socks, some things to clean themselves with.”

You find out what kinds of questions your kids want to ask, what they’re interested in—and that can seed what they want to do. Because what they want to do is probably not what you want to do, or where your nonprofit giving lies.

Lee Wochner:
Well, I just feel like this conversation could go on and on. There’s so much to talk about and so much to learn. If listeners want to reach out to you, what’s the best way to connect with you?

Anika Jackson:
I love LinkedIn. That is honestly, hands down, the best way to reach me. And on my LinkedIn, in the Featured section, I have a way to set up time. I love doing 30-minute strategy sessions or “let’s talk about anything.” I don’t make any offers or try to sell you on anything—I just like to have these conversations.

And then I also have a Delphi, which is my digital clone. If you have questions about marketing, branding, how to start a podcast, how to do a podcast—anything in that area—my clone is programmed with almost 4 million words from workshops I’ve given, things I’ve taught at university, podcasts—my podcast and podcasts I’ve been on—any articles I’ve written or been in.

She has all the information. You can speak to her or you can text. You can even call her and it’ll be my voice, and she’ll pick up wherever you left off in the text messages. So if you’re not ready to speak to somebody, or you just want to find something out really quick, just do that.

There are a lot of resources that I try to offer on my LinkedIn, and of course that links to all of my other sources of truth.

Lee Wochner:
Anika, it’s been absolutely great spending some time with you. Thank you so much.

Anika Jackson:
Thank you.

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.