Failure. No one wants to admit it. We are bad with money, or food, or whatever. We screw up, we mess up. This is our own personal pain, because everyone else must totally have their crap together right?
They don't. No one does. Darn it, I wish it were true.
In CBT, you don't fix your issues, but work on accepting that you will always have issues.
Mind. Blown.
I went to therapy to get fixed. I want to be confident in myself, have way less FOMO, trust more, be less dependent on what others think, etc.
Guess what, ain't gonna happen. My job is to understand that we all have stuff we are working on, and to accept that I have flaws and always will. It is like Whack-A-Mole. Hit one issue or problem down, another comes up. I thought I was supposed to learn how to keep all of them down.
Yet when we admit our failures, or weaknesses, our losses, we become more human. Our honesty earns respect. We all have them, so when we share them, we are connecting ourselves more deeply to others. (When you are done reading this blog, read this and you will understand the power of sharing your shame.)
Your nonprofit is the same. Admitting what's wrong, saying where you failed, is the bravest thing you can do. And in being brave, you are going to get the attention you want and the loyalty of your supporters that you crave.
What if you produced an annual report about all the ways you screwed up? Engineers Without Borders did this, and it is so cool. It is different and bold. And I love them for it. Because what happens when we fail? We learn. And we do it better the next time. By telling stories of our failures, we are showing donors we are always learning to do it better. That is a story worth sharing.
Friday, May 20, 2016
Nonprofits are the worst holiday letter ever
So it is May, but let me take you December. Since we have Facebook to portray our perfect and wonderful lives to each other, maybe we don't get the holiday letter as much, but you all know exactly what I am talking about. The "my kids are better than yours, our lives are much busier, productive, happier than yours" letter. We despise them because we know they are not true. NO ONE is that happy or productive. It just reeks of insincerity. We get this on a daily basis with our Facebook friends who just LOVE THEIR KIDS SO MUCH, and their partner is SO DARN WONDERFUL to them blah blah blah.
What really attracts us to others and helps us form real relationships is sharing our whole self. The strengths, the "good enoughs," the stuff we are working on. It gives us our humanity. When we expose our weaknesses, we are stronger for it.
Our holiday letter this year could include how my son failed four classes this year. WHOO HOO what a kid! (My son, my love for you is not based on your GPA or driving record, thank goodness!) See how much more you liked me because I shared something like this. My son is struggling to graduate HIGH SCHOOL. There you go. We love blogs like Scary Mommy because they tell the truth about raising kids. We can relate, it is almost a relief that someone is telling it like it is.
Ya got me?
If all your nonprofit communications is like a holiday letter, you are coming across as fake. We are awesome, our programs are awesome, our people are awesome. JUST AMAZING. All the time. The messages we pump out are shiny, pretty and polished.
And when we do this, we think we are doing the right thing but it comes across as fake. We think we need to only be positive lest a donor find out we don't succeed at everything and run screaming to the next nonprofit that does. But really, that nonprofit doesn't either. All organizations have successes and failures.
People want us to be straight. Tell the truth. Tell the complicated story. Tell how you tried and failed. When we do this, we look secure and confident in who we are. Donors will love us for our honesty and transparency because donors are human beings (shocking I know) who want a real relationship, just like we all do. When we let the cracks show, we let people in. They trust and respect us more for the courage to share the truth.
Be brave enough to tell the truth about you and your organization.
What really attracts us to others and helps us form real relationships is sharing our whole self. The strengths, the "good enoughs," the stuff we are working on. It gives us our humanity. When we expose our weaknesses, we are stronger for it.
Our holiday letter this year could include how my son failed four classes this year. WHOO HOO what a kid! (My son, my love for you is not based on your GPA or driving record, thank goodness!) See how much more you liked me because I shared something like this. My son is struggling to graduate HIGH SCHOOL. There you go. We love blogs like Scary Mommy because they tell the truth about raising kids. We can relate, it is almost a relief that someone is telling it like it is.
Ya got me?
Okay, let's take this to an organizational level.
If all your nonprofit communications is like a holiday letter, you are coming across as fake. We are awesome, our programs are awesome, our people are awesome. JUST AMAZING. All the time. The messages we pump out are shiny, pretty and polished.
And when we do this, we think we are doing the right thing but it comes across as fake. We think we need to only be positive lest a donor find out we don't succeed at everything and run screaming to the next nonprofit that does. But really, that nonprofit doesn't either. All organizations have successes and failures.
People want us to be straight. Tell the truth. Tell the complicated story. Tell how you tried and failed. When we do this, we look secure and confident in who we are. Donors will love us for our honesty and transparency because donors are human beings (shocking I know) who want a real relationship, just like we all do. When we let the cracks show, we let people in. They trust and respect us more for the courage to share the truth.
Be brave enough to tell the truth about you and your organization.
You know the right way to do things, so why can't you do it?
Big day of beating your head against the wall learning
Last week I spent a lovely day with my friends from CSPRC at the Spectrum conference. It was a fabulous day full of eager nonprofit communication types looking to better themselves, their skills and their organizations. I did a talk on how not to create boring web content. It was fab, of course, but I told my audience something that I totally believe to be true: you are smart and capable and you know darn well what it takes to make compelling web content. So why can't you do it?
The frustration of a conference like this comes from learning a bunch of new stuff, getting all fired up, bringing it to your organization and having it die right there. It is hard to upsell new ideas from within an organization. So I am telling these smart, wonderful folks what they already know. The problem is, they aren't the ones I should be talking to. It's the people NOT in the room who really matter. The exec directs and board members that shy away (or hide in fear) from ever doing anything too controversial interesting.
Truth is, I can teach you how to tell your story better, but if your organization fears change, it is never going to go anywhere. Again, we have the Biggest Loser theory of change. Change behavior to change thinking. And that usually doesn't work. Those new ideas (behaviors) mostly die right there in the front lobby of your office because your organization has the same way of thinking.
What I want to teach you all is how to upsell a change in thinking. How to convince those in charge that being brave and courageous communicators will attract people to you, not drive them away. That's what we need. I know that my fine counterparts in nonprofits know they need to be interesting, compelling, strong in message, but man oh man how to you convince that buttoned up board that it is okay to do that?
Instead of teaching you how do do things differently, I am going to teach you how to think differently and in turn, how to teach your organization to think differently. This will lead you to put those new ideas in place. Without a shift in thinking, new ideas or ways of doing things are an exercise in frustration.
Friday, May 6, 2016
Why in the world would you read anything I write or believe anything I tell you?
Well I call myself the nonprofit marketing therapist. I think of myself as Stuart Smalley, the old SNL character. I am not a licensed therapist, of course, but I am a member of several 12-step programs!
Actually I have been a branding consultant, coach, teacher and writer for years at my home at 501creative. From this experience, and my experience with cognitive behavioral therapy and behavior change psychology, I have come to understand that teaching people how to communicate better is just treating the symptom. It is the Biggest Loser syndrome. I can put you on a restricted diet and work you out five hours a day, but it doesn't help you understand how you got to 400 pounds in the first place. We are treating behaviors, and thoughts and feelings influence behaviors. So in order to communicate more effectively, we need to change our feelings, which changes our thinking and then changes our behaviors. If we see our organizations as smart, stable, interesting, confident and strong, then we can begin to communicate more effectively. Same as our BL people. If they felt better about themselves, they will probably take better care of themselves. Let's look at the feelings and thinking FIRST, and then the behavior.
So this blog, and the subsequent book, will look at how to change our thinking to be more courageous and bold, and care a lot less about what people think. Believe it or not, some people will love you for that even more.
Imagine if our organizations were people. What would we be like? Would we be confident, capable, interesting, committed? Or would we be tentative, insecure, boring? If we had a friend who needed as much approval and had so many wonderful things to say as our nonprofit, we would hate that person. We are like one braggy holiday letter. Everything is so wonderful. We are so awesome. Please support our awesomeness.
Real relationships are formed when we are honest and authentic. That means good, bad and everything in between. Donors want to know us, because they are people and they want the truth. We are afraid of showing our truths because we perceive the risks to be too high.
The real risk is being boring and bland is having people underestimate you or look you over completely. This is a competitive world. How can we compete with the cute video of the momma cat who let the orphaned puppy nurse her kittens, or the latest Donald Trump meme or another one of those Delish recipe videos? We need to be that interesting. We can't be that interesting trying to say good stuff all the time. We have to have a point of view, we have to be a part of the conversation. We have to stand for something.
How to know if your nonprofit is codependent and why that makes your brand boring
Yeah so the blog is still getting its spiffy face on. But I can't wait until then because I have things to say.
Let's look at what codependency means. It means sacrificing your own needs for the needs of others. Simple as that. Those of us in helping professions tend to lean this way by nature. We want to do for others and make the world a better place. I totally get it. The issue is: at what cost? Because if we constantly put others ahead of us, then we will suffer.
Now that makes sense right? Like totally. Put your own mask on before helping others with their breathing mask. Isn't that what the flight attendants tell us? Practicing this though, can be challenging and it can be especially challenging for nonprofits at the organizational level.
We are in relationships with our donors, and these relationships are based on an exchange. We give them something of value and they give us something of value. Our something of value is to work on issues that they don't have the time or money or expertise to be able to handle. I can't rescue EVERY dog, although I would love to try. But Stray Rescue of St. Louis can do a much better job than me. I give them money, they get the dogs. Sometimes the exchange can be hard to see. It is challenging to feel we are on equal footing or to believe we are because we need those dollars so badly. We feel dependent on our donors. We don't always feel like we are in an equal relationship.
This is where the co comes into the dependence.
We tend to sacrifice our own needs for those of others. We want to make everyone happy. This is not a bad thing, for real. It only becomes an issue when we neglect our own needs.
We are terrified of criticism. How many of us held back on social media because we were so afraid of a negative comment? How many of us said no to an interview or to a specific speaker for an event because we thought they might make people mad? Our brands tend to be pretty blah because we want to please everyone. When we do this, we stand out to no one.
In cognitive behavior therapy, of which I am a huge proponent, and where the basis for some of these thoughts are coming from, says that praise and criticism are the same thing. How can this be? Well, because we should not need either one to feel good or bad about ourselves. We shouldn't be overly dependent on praise to make us happy and a criticism shouldn't send us over the edge.
Seriously though, I am not immune to criticism. It hurts, I am not denying that.
But we are so afraid of making someone mad or disappointing a donor or whatever that we tend to not take a stand.
A good leader will have a specific point of view and stick to it, though praise and criticism. Not that they are immune to feedback, but they take it and make it work for them, without derailing anything.
When we are so afraid of criticism, it gets in the way of sharing our message, that's codependence. I see it all the time, so if this rings true, you are not alone.
Being strong in your message means understanding who you are as an organization, and then accepting that. You are not going to appeal to everyone. And those people who get upset? Come on, they weren't that on board anyway. Your true supporters want an authentic relationship. You can tell them the good, bad and all in between. They will love you all the more for it.
So in this blog, we are going to explore how organizations become codependent, how they can find their authentic message and how they can use it to engage more supporters and move forward.
I swear. It's true.
Let's look at what codependency means. It means sacrificing your own needs for the needs of others. Simple as that. Those of us in helping professions tend to lean this way by nature. We want to do for others and make the world a better place. I totally get it. The issue is: at what cost? Because if we constantly put others ahead of us, then we will suffer.
Now that makes sense right? Like totally. Put your own mask on before helping others with their breathing mask. Isn't that what the flight attendants tell us? Practicing this though, can be challenging and it can be especially challenging for nonprofits at the organizational level.
We are in relationships with our donors, and these relationships are based on an exchange. We give them something of value and they give us something of value. Our something of value is to work on issues that they don't have the time or money or expertise to be able to handle. I can't rescue EVERY dog, although I would love to try. But Stray Rescue of St. Louis can do a much better job than me. I give them money, they get the dogs. Sometimes the exchange can be hard to see. It is challenging to feel we are on equal footing or to believe we are because we need those dollars so badly. We feel dependent on our donors. We don't always feel like we are in an equal relationship.
This is where the co comes into the dependence.
We tend to sacrifice our own needs for those of others. We want to make everyone happy. This is not a bad thing, for real. It only becomes an issue when we neglect our own needs.
We are terrified of criticism. How many of us held back on social media because we were so afraid of a negative comment? How many of us said no to an interview or to a specific speaker for an event because we thought they might make people mad? Our brands tend to be pretty blah because we want to please everyone. When we do this, we stand out to no one.
Seriously though, I am not immune to criticism. It hurts, I am not denying that.
But we are so afraid of making someone mad or disappointing a donor or whatever that we tend to not take a stand.
A good leader will have a specific point of view and stick to it, though praise and criticism. Not that they are immune to feedback, but they take it and make it work for them, without derailing anything.
When we are so afraid of criticism, it gets in the way of sharing our message, that's codependence. I see it all the time, so if this rings true, you are not alone.
Being strong in your message means understanding who you are as an organization, and then accepting that. You are not going to appeal to everyone. And those people who get upset? Come on, they weren't that on board anyway. Your true supporters want an authentic relationship. You can tell them the good, bad and all in between. They will love you all the more for it.
So in this blog, we are going to explore how organizations become codependent, how they can find their authentic message and how they can use it to engage more supporters and move forward.
I swear. It's true.
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