Feb 27 2012 in The Big Picture by Jonathan Ewing

Is Your Nonprofit More Like FOX or CNN?

Think of your organization as a cable news network. If you’re FOX or MSNBC, you have a responsibility to be as partisan as your audience can tolerate. If you’re CNN, however, you have a more difficult, nonpartisan task.

The Partisan Media Model (FOX/MSNBC)

Imagine you work for the American Red Cross. Since your audience already agrees with your mission, you don’t have to spend time convincing people to support humanitarian aid. You can relentlessly advocate for your agenda and ignore your skeptics.

If critics start saying, “You shouldn’t be providing aid to the Libyan rebels,” it’s best to ignore them. Don’t give their complaints credibility by respectfully providing counter-arguments. If their complaints become popular, continue to reject the merit of their positions. Be relentless in your ideology and committed to your worldview and your supporters will back you.

The Nonpartisan Media Model (CNN)

Now imagine you work for Planned Parenthood. Your audience is divided over the work you do. Since a third of your revenue comes from the government, you have to spend a substantial amount of your communications efforts defending your work.

When politicians say, “We need to stop funding Planned Parenthood because they provide abortions,” the correct answer isn’t, “Every woman has a right to an abortion.” It doesn’t matter if your supporters agree with you and rush to your aid with the same talking points; your critics have power over your mission. The right answer is, “Abortion only accounts for three percent of our services and zero taxpayer dollars.”

A Basic Model for Issue Advocacy

A political consultant and one of my college professors, Peter Loge, built a timeless guide for issue advocates:

1) Identify your objective.
2) Identify who can make your objective happen.
3) Identify what that person finds persuasive.
4) Do that.

When deciding what type of organization you are (which determines how you respond to your critics), consider #2. If your supporters have power over your objective, you can preach to the choir in your messaging. If your critics have power over your objective, carefully and respectfully respond to their complaints.


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Feb 20 2012 in The Big Picture by Jonathan Ewing

Meet Your Stakeholders

Meet your stakeholders, Joe and Laura Richardson. They’ve been married for 38 years and recently retired to a two bedroom house in upstate New York. Their older son, Nathan, and his wife Jessica are expecting their first child in a few months. Their younger son, Peter, is a second year resident at Johns Hopkins.

If you were writing a fundraising appeal for your mother, would it be any different than the appeals your organization sends out? Would it talk more about the things that motivate her, the issues that get her talking for hours?

When we don’t have an image of our audience in our heads, when we don’t have a history with them, we tend to generalize. We tell them about the things we imagine the average stakeholder would be interested in (or worse, we talk to our external audiences in the same way we talk with our colleagues).

Who are you designing your communications for? Are your donors just entries on a spreadsheet? Do they wish they could interact with you without being asked for money? Are they getting that interaction from another organization?

Becoming more specific, more targeted, more intelligent about how you communicate with your stakeholders starts with learning about them. Learn about their lives. Name them. Make cardboard cutouts of them. Instead of talking about “stakeholders” in meetings, talk about Joe and Laura Richardson. Stakeholders don’t read your appeals; Joe and Laura do.


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Feb 13 2012 in Reflection by Jonathan Ewing

The Curse of Knowledge

“Why do we have to dumb it down to the sixth grade level? Our donors are smarter than that.”

I confess to being stumped by that question before. I also confess to falling into the trap of answering it.

The Curse of Knowledge

I remember my first week in my current field. My boss had been fighting the tobacco industry for 42 years. Everybody there was fluent in the acronyms and the history and the key players. In every meeting, I would write down four or five terms I didn’t understand and people I hadn’t heard of, then rush to my computer to Google them and make flash cards.

Marketers are cursed with the constant search for “ROI.” Fundraisers will forever call their work “development.” International nonprofits are cursed with names like “NGO” and “civil society.” You cannot unlearn what you have already learned. You can never fully understand what it’s like to not know what you know. This is the curse of knowledge.

Dumbing It Down

As communications professionals, we guide how the rest of our staff talk about communications. If our work needs to be “dumbed down,” we set up a counterproductive power disparity. Suddenly, the staff not only have more knowledge than our audience; we’ve made them more intelligent than our audience, too.

Two things happen when we ask staff to dumb down their communications: 1) It’s insulting to the audience. Dumb things written by smart people often sound patronizing; and 2) It’s insulting to the staff. We work with experts who have made a career out of understanding complicated and nuanced things; how do we expect them to react when we tell them to dumb it down?

Make It a Challenge

We spend much of our own careers distilling complex policy, but we don’t tell people at parties that we dumb things down for a living. Dumbing things down is… dumb. Making complicated things simple is a challenge.

Challenge your staff to talk about their work in ways that people without their degrees and experience would understand. Help change their view of creating simple communications from being a burden to being an asset, a tool they can use to build support for their cause. They know everything about their field; now, they can use that knowledge to teach other people about their work, too.


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Feb 06 2012 in Lessons Learned by Jonathan Ewing

Don’t Tell Me I’m Wrong

By now, the damage to the Susan G. Komen Foundation’s brand has been cemented. First, they offended the pro-choice majority of their base, then they reversed course and slighted the people who had donated in support of their choice to defund Planned Parenthood.

What got most of the attention this week in the PR community was Komen’s many conflicting reasons for their decision. What made me more uncomfortable was the interview Nancy Brinker, Founder and CEO, gave to MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell.

Everybody tuning into the interview was a skeptic. Critical audiences were angry. Neutral audiences had only been hearing from critical audiences all day. Sympathetic audiences were looking for bold leadership from Brinker.

Brinker’s explanation failed all three audiences. Her first words were to accuse her critics of mischaracterizing the situation.

In the abstract, I recognize that I mischaracterize, misinterpret, misunderstand, etc., but if you ask me what I misunderstand right now, I can’t think of a thing. The bar is very high to convince anyone that they’re incorrect. On Thursday, the burden of proof was on Brinker.

This was her explanation of why people misunderstood:

In fact, we haven’t defunded Planned Parenthood.  We still have three grants that we’ve committed to, at least for another year, through the end of the grant cycle…

That explanation smells of misdirection. Brinker could have made a more compelling case for why we misunderstood, but if most of your audience is hostile, why accuse them of anything? If you make a decision that blows up and you have the chance to explain it, tell us why you did what you did, not how we could be a better, more reasonable audience.


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Feb 01 2012 in Stories by Jonathan Ewing

The Nonprofit That Cried Wolf

There was a nonprofit that diligently advocated for its cause in a crowded sector near nonprofits with similar missions. Its unrestricted funds were drying up, so it devised a plan to shore up its reserves. It overnighted a direct mail appeal crying, “Wolf, Wolf,” and the donors sent their funds. This pleased the nonprofit so much that a few months after, it tried the same appeal to its email list, and again the donors came to its aid. Shortly after this a Wolf actually did come out from the forest. The nonprofit cried on Facebook and Twitter, “Wolf, Wolf,” with more capitalizing and underlining than before. But this time the donors, who had been misled twice before, thought the nonprofit was again exaggerating, and nobody came to its aid. So the Wolf made away with the nonprofit’s sheep.

Adapted from Aesop’s Fable, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf.” Trans. Charles W. Eliot.


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Jan 30 2012 in Reflection by Jonathan Ewing

The Telephone Test

“This is a very … noisy world. And we’re not going to get the chance to get people to remember much about us. No company is. So we have to be really clear on what we want them to know about us.”

- Steve Jobs

Remember the telephone game you played as a kid? The one where you whisper a sentence in someone’s ear, and everyone in the circle giggles as the message starts to make less and less sense as it’s passed from person to person?

What will people remember from a conversation with you? When you explain your work, which details won’t stick? Tomorrow morning, will you have left a mark?

Does your elevator pitch pass the telephone test?


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Jan 28 2012 in Lessons Learned by Jonathan Ewing

Thematic vs. Episodic

The gold standard in news is a “thematic” story where a journalist ties a string of events together and says, “Yesterday’s robbery wasn’t an isolated incident. It was one of many in the same neighborhood caused by these five factors.” The opposite of a thematic story is an “episodic” story where you only learn about the robbery as an isolated incident.

What’s the lesson for nonprofits? Do the exact opposite. Unless you’re a community-based nonprofit, episodes of your work touching real lives are rare and compelling. Find those stories and talk about them. Your stakeholders don’t need to hear your statistics again.

As Save the Children learned, if you tell me about a malnourished child in Africa, I’m more likely to give you money if you don’t also tell me about how common her story is. We’re desperate to connect with someone whose life you’ve made better.


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Jan 27 2012 in The Big Picture by Jonathan Ewing

What I Believe

Every nonprofit can tell a powerful, emotional story about why its work matters, but we bury that story under statistics and factoids that dispassionately prove why our cause is important.

I come from a field where statistics are a daily hazard. Tobacco is the leading cause of preventable death and disease in the entire world. When people asked me about my work, I used to tell them that. Wouldn’t you?

They didn’t find it compelling. So I doubled down, “Take any five things you care about and add up their death tolls. Malaria? World hunger? War? AIDS? Alcohol? Still not enough to kill as many people as tobacco does.”

A year later, I heard a story about a tobacco farmer in Central Uganda that completely changed how I talk about my work. One person – Alfred – was more important than my data.

You and I are passionate advocates for our causes. When we tell people about what we do, we want them to care, we want them to see the same vision we saw when we first fell in love with our work.

This blog chronicles my journey to relentlessly strip away the jargon and the alphabet soup and everything else that gets in the way of simple, compelling narratives about the work we do and the lives we touch.


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