I don’t know about you, but I’m feeling a lot more optimistic than I was a week ago. In spite of daily news that can feel pretty daunting, I think we just got a lot of new information out of this past week's elections that give us a ton of reasons for optimism. And I want to share those with you.

A number of my clients have said to me in the last few days, give us a reason for optimism. How are you feeling about this? And each time I've had this conversation, I've gotten clearer about exactly what the big things were that represented major shifts.

I believe these shifts are reasons to get really excited about the rising power of a vast majority of people in this country who do not agree with what is happening. Who feel very strongly about it, and who are willing to go to the ballot box and make their voices heard.

This election was the first opportunity for voters to weigh in on things since the 2024 elections. And boy did they have a lot to say.

In this episode, we share:

• What the pollsters missed that made a huge difference
• The two most significant factors that drove voters’ shift to blue
• The most important thing that didn’t happen, and why it matters
• The two most critical groups of voters who shifted strongly in our favor, and why
• Why the right’s attempts at additional gerrymandering may backfire on them
• The very surprising data point that tells us how many strong allies we have
• What Nonprofit leaders can do to help fight voter suppression and ensure all eligible clients can make their voices heard in the next elections

Links:

Episode 54 – How to Help the People You Serve Make Their Voices Heard at the Ballot Box

Episode 62 – How Your Nonprofit can Help Your Clients Register to Vote in the 2024 Elections

Episode 66 – How to Help Your Clients Make Sure Their Vote Counts

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

There is nothing more exciting than talking with a money or policy decisionmaker who's all in on the conversation. They're leaning in, they're asking good questions. Their gears are turning as they think about how you can work together. That's awesome when that happens.

And then, there are the times where you've got the opposite. They're not engaged. Their body language and their relative silence tell you so. They're listening politely enough, but it feels like they're just waiting for you to be done so they can move on.

When that's happening in real time, it is super stressful. You can tell your messaging's not landing. You can feel them slipping further and further away.

But how to tell what's wrong? And what to do to fix it?

Today I'm sharing with you the four engagement must haves – and how to make sure they're built into all of your messaging. So that you can have the engagement you want and need from your most critical decisionmakers.

In this episode, we share:

• Why it’s harder now to engage decisionmakers than it has even been
• How to pull the decisionmaker in in the first one or two minutes of interaction
• Two key ingredients to grabbing and holding a decisionmaker’s attention
• The real purpose of data and information in the engagement process (it’s not what you’ve been taught)
• How to share ROI data in a way that will get the decisionmaker as excited about it as you are
• Why vivid storytelling is such a powerful engagement tool, and how to use it
• What to focus on first to vastly increase the impact of your message

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

It is no secret that engagement is the key to influence. It’s one of the biggest themes of my work with my clients. We also focus on how and why information and data are not engaging on their own.

We know great messaging is essential, but there's another piece. The biggest secret to engagement – and therefore the secret to having your message land with impact – is you.

You can have fantastic core messaging and still mess up the engagement piece. And when that happens, when the messaging is good, but the engagement fails, that is almost always caused by bringing the wrong energy, vibration, frequency to the encounter.

It happens more often than you'd think. And there are some very specific reasons why it tends to happen. That's what I want to explore today, and help you do things a little bit differently. So that you can consistently bring the kind of energy and vibration and frequency that is going to engage that decisionmaker.

In this episode, we share:

• The biggest driver of your energetic state in a conversation with a decisionmaker
• How to consciously choose the energy you bring, and the emotional state you operate from with decisionmakers, especially when you’re worried about an unwanted result
• Five common emotion-based mistakes many leaders make that can kill the deal, and what to do instead
• How to raise the decisionmaker’s energy and increase the chances of getting a ‘yes’ from them
• Three powerful beliefs to operate from with any decisionmaker that will keep you in a powerful energetic state

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

I'm super energized to have this conversation on the heels of the massive No Kings protests of October 18th. The greatest mass mobilization to date against authoritarianism in this country.

At the same time, I also understand that it’s really easy to feel overwhelmed with all of the bad things coming at us out of this administration. And how easy it is to feel like the actions of one person can't make that much of a difference. But in fact, nothing could be further from the truth.

I was fortunate to be able to attend the huge protest in Washington DC on Saturday. Over 200,000 people were there. We filled Pennsylvania Avenue from steps from the capitol, all the way to the White House. It was extraordinary.

How amazing is it that there were over 7 million people who turned all over the country. In big cities, of course – New York, LA, Chicago. Even more inspiring to me were the thousands of smaller cities and towns and even rural highways, where people showed up to make their voices heard. And to make it abundantly clear that they are not happy with what is happening. They're not happy with the authoritarian power grabs that are happening from 47 and his crew, the complacency of the Republicans in Congress just letting him do whatever he wants. The whole thing is wrong and everybody knows it. And they're standing up to say so.

Part of what was so inspiring and exciting to me was the energy – of hope and determination and belief that by banding together and through the power of our collective action, we can slow down what is happening. We can eventually stop it and then begin to reverse it.

The other thing that I so loved was the absolute joy that people were bringing. We all know it's kind of hard to feel joy with the unbelievably egregious actions from this administration damaging individuals and entire communities.

You might even say it’s unreasonable to feel joy in the face of that. But the source of the joy was from being in the presence of all of these thousands and thousands of people who are here to accomplish the same thing. Who believe passionately in reversing the terrible stuff that's going on and moving us all toward a much better day. That joyous, hopeful energy is so important and so instructive for how we can prevail.

That, and taking concrete action…

In this episode, we share:

• The biggest pitfalls that will take you out of your power, and how to avoid them
• The one simple task that will put you on the path to powerful action
• How to leverage the power of collective action every day
• How to craft messaging that will engage a wider circle of people – even those who aren’t paying much attention to what’s going on
• How to destabilize the pillars that prop up a would-be authoritarian regime
• Three specific actions you can take as a nonprofit leader to make a big impact in this fight

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

There's a huge problem happening all over the Nonprofit universe and beyond right now, and that's fundamentally the problem of fear. In fairness, it's a pretty scary time. And fear is not unfounded for sure.

There are genuine threats facing Nonprofits individually and the sector more broadly. And there are a lot of decisionmakers in all different roles who are also feeling under threat in one way or another.

The thing we often don't take into account is that a lot of decisionmakers are really kind of operating from fear as well. And each of those sets of fear-based operations are causing enormous problems for so many Nonprofit leaders.

Because here's the thing. When we're feeling under threat, when we're feeling fearful, it feels easier to play it safe and stay small. Avoid perceived risk. Stay out of the limelight. Don't do anything big and attention getting, and hopefully we'll get through. The problem is, that carries enormous risk as well.

I would submit that vision, and specifically a bold and compelling vision, is the cure for a lot of those problems and a lot of those fear-based operations. And that involves choosing to lead from vision and to enroll decisionmakers in that vision. Even when, or maybe especially when, there's all sorts of scary things going on all around us.

In this episode, we share:

• How the environment of fear and uncertainty is affecting decisionmakers’ thinking and their actions
• How your big and bold vision can help move decisionmakers out of fear
• The six essential ingredients to a vision that makes decisionmakers want to be part of it
• How to build the story of your vision that will captivate and compel decisionmakers
• The brain science-based strategies that will shift decisonmakers from fear to big-picture thinking that supports your vision

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

One of the sources of constant frustration that I hear from Nonprofit leaders is about not having the advocacy results they want. If that's you, you're in good company. A lot of Nonprofit leaders experience this problem.

The other reality is that Nonprofit leaders are really busy. Too busy to spend your time on anything that isn't going to produce a clear, tangible result. So what we all need is to find the fastest, most effective way to get to the advocacy results we want.

What's the shortest distance between where you are now, in terms of influence and results with decision makers that matter to you, and the results you actually want to see from those decisionmakers? A lot of what I do is help Nonprofit leaders create a roadmap that plots the shortest distance between those two points.

But here's the thing. A lot of times, even on that shortest path, there can be stuff in the way. And we can't always see it.

In this episode, we share:

• The four most common obstacles and mistakes that get in the way of great advocacy results
• Why the lack of a dedicated advocacy staff member is not the problem
• How to focus your strategic relationship-building work for maximum results
• The two essential ways to build influence with decisionmakers
• Four key ingredients to making it easy for a decisionmaker to say ‘yes’ to your ask

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

I want to share with you a story of something that happened to me that I think carries some powerful lessons for how we approach not just advocacy, but pretty much everything.

But those lessons are only part of point. When you listen to this story, you’ll discover how storytelling can be one of the most effective tools for engaging others. But that engagement is not a given.

There’s a way to tell a story that pulls the listener in and has them totally immersed in the story. And there’s a way to tell that same story that will leave them checking their phone and wondering when this will be over.

In this episode, we share:

• Two powerful lessons I learned from the craziest decision I ever made
• Why being concise and to the point is not always the most effective way to engage a decisionmaker
• How our brains respond to effective storytelling that causes us to engage, retain what we hear, and even change our perspective
• The difference between a compelling and engaging story, and a “just the facts” story
• Four key ingredients of a story that cause engagement

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!

On a scale of 1 to 10, how comfortable are you in saying out loud that your organization's work and the results that you get are the best? The best.

If you said 10, congratulations. You are in great shape on that front. But if your response was an 8 or below. Or if you didn't even answer, but instead said, well, “best” compared to what, or to whom? Or some other equivocation, then there are some questions to explore.

If you're a Nonprofit leader who strives for excellence and who's looking to make a powerful impact in the world, I am confident that there's at least one aspect of the work that you do, the solution you provide, the impact you make, that is the best. That makes you unique in the marketplace.

But a lot of Nonprofit leaders have some resistance to making those claims out loud, especially with money and policy decisionmakers.

In this week’s episode, we get into how you can fully own that, in ways that are truly effective.

In this episode, we share:

• What the decisionmaker hears when you hold back from saying your stuff is the best
• How to identify and address the source(s) of your reluctance/resistance to making the claim that your stuff is “best in class”
• Practical questions to help you clarify exactly what sets you apart and makes you “best in class”
• How to strategically define the problem you solve, to reflect the aspects of your work and impact that are exceptional
• The most dangerous pitfall in defining the problem, and how to avoid it
• How to assert your “best in class” claim without naming or creating problems with others who are in your arena
• How to frame your results as an answer to the most common decisionmaker worries about money
• The one link you must make for the decisionmaker to help them get to yes

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast. Thanks!!