There's a mistake that every Nonprofit leader makes from time to time. In fact, we all make this mistake, not just in our work, but in multiple aspects of our lives. And if we can be attentive enough and fix it, we can absolutely transform our results and massively reduce our level of frustration.

Here's what I'm talking about. It's the curse of the expert. We know way too much about every aspect of the work that we do and the impact it has. And we correctly recognize that all those details are important. They all contribute to the overall success of the work that we do.

Unfortunately, that makes us really bad at paring that way down and zeroing in on the one or two details or messaging points that the decisionmaker we're talking to needs to know right now. Not in the end, not when we're all done, but right now.

We want to tell them all the details 'cause we know how important they all are. But when we do that, all we do is flood their brain with way too much information and they can't process any of it and they don't retain any of it.

So what do we do about this? How do you not only refrain from TMI, but how do you identify precisely what are the two or three things this decisionmaker needs to know right now, depending on where they are in their journey. Where do you, as their guide, need to take them next?

In this episode, we share:

• What I learned from teaching jujitsu that will help you build messaging that causes decisionmakers to “get it”
• The three-piece message scaffolding that is key to moving decisionmakers to invest fully in your work
• How to construct a high-level, impact-focused summary of your work in three sentences or less
• Why white papers and infographics often fail to improve decisionmakers’ understanding
• How to structure your messaging to cause decisionmakers to ask for the exact details they need
• The one thing you must train yourself to do when talking with decisionmakers

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One of my New Year's resolutions for 2026 is to make more mistakes. And I gotta tell you, it's been very interesting to see the reaction it gets when I tell people that.

A few people get it and cheer me on. But a lot of folks look at me kind of funny and ask, why on earth would you wanna do that?

That got me thinking about how much energy people put into trying to avoid mistakes and what that can wind up costing us. It also got me thinking about how this applies inside Nonprofit organizations. How important it is for Nonprofit leaders to have the freedom and space and support to make smart mistakes.

Action brings clarity. If we wait to take action until we have everything figured out, we're missing opportunity. And we're also very likely missing the chance to do something really brilliant.

In this episode, we share:

• How smart mistakes lead to the biggest breakthroughs
• What mistake-aversion could be costing you
• Three key principles to guide you in making valuable mistakes
• The four biggest obstacles to making the kind of mistakes that lead to big breakthroughs
• How to build a culture that supports and rewards making smart mistakes
• Two key questions to get you and your team started

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level and start getting next-level results? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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As Nonprofit leaders, we all have a relationship with power. But it's not something that we tend to take a look at much. And I think perhaps the reason for that is what a lot of Nonprofit leaders tell me – that they're not super comfortable with the concept of power.

Today I want to really dig into some questions that will help us all understand our relationship with power a little bit better, and perhaps begin to shift that relationship a little bit.

The thing is, our relationship with power is often pretty complex. What we don't always consider is that we're also walking around with a whole set of beliefs about power that shape that relationship.

Our beliefs about power in particular have been shaped over a lifetime of experience. But they’ve also been informed by things we heard growing up. And by the environment we're operating in now.

If we're operating in an environment with a lot of other Nonprofit leaders, and that's our primary thought ecosystem, what happens a lot is that we start reinforcing one another's beliefs about power. And what I've noticed is that a lot of times those beliefs may not always be serving us very well. In fact, they may be holding us back from the things we most want.

In this episode, we share:

• How and why our beliefs about power affect our actions and decisions
• The most common beliefs about power held by many Nonprofit leaders
• A simple exercise to help you uncover your hidden beliefs about power
• The most powerful questions you can ask yourself to rewire your beliefs
• How to change your relationship with power to one that truly serves you

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level and start getting next-level results? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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As we're coming right up on the close of 2025, I think it's always important to do a review and take stock of the year that's just gone by. And it might be more important than ever in this particular year, given what a wild ride it's been.

There's a lot of different ways you can come at a year-end review, and you probably already have a process in place in your organization. But I'd like to call out something specific that I think is especially important at the close of 2025. And that's to take stock of your wins. Particularly the kinds of wins that would easily be overlooked otherwise.

For some Nonprofit leaders, that feels like a stretch right there. How do you clock a win in completely chaotic and abnormal times? Our normal definition of wins may or may not apply. For some they will. For others, it's going to look a little different this year.

It would be pretty easy to just sort of heave a sigh of relief and say, thank God we survived this year. But that would be selling yourself massively short.

Here's the thing. No matter how you're feeling about the year and how happy you may be that it is almost over, there were wins. If you had some ginormous obvious wins, of course you are celebrating them. I celebrate with you.

But I also hope you'll use the questions I’m posing to dig into some of the wins that maybe aren't as obvious, but that are every bit as important as the great big showy ones.

In this episode, we share:

• The five categories of wins we might otherwise overlook, that matter more than we know
• Questions to help you investigate what allowed you to see opportunity in the midst of crisis and chaos
• How to uncover the organizational culture factors that caused some of your wins
• Key questions to help you recognize your team members for their roles in the wins
• The two hardest questions for most Nonprofit leaders to answer, that are a key to a successful 2026

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level and start getting next-level results? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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Why is there so much dumb public policy and what can we do about it?

There's government money to address a service need in just about every arena, which is great. But the flip side of that is the rules that are attached to that money. The rules about who can be served, how they can be served, under what circumstances, how money can be spent. All those rules, more often than not, get in the way of Nonprofits’ ability to provide a high-quality service that is going to actually solve the problem.

It happens so often that we start to think that's just the way it always is. I had a conversation recently with one of my clients who expressed this exact sentiment. She had been dealing with a number of really stupid public policy problems. And one day in exasperation, she just said, “public policy is just bad. It never works.”

My initial reaction to that was to argue with her. But the fact is, a lot of the time that's true.

The problem with operating from that frame is two things really. One, it presumes things can't be changed. And two, it keeps you operating under a set of limitations that are tangibly impairing your ability to deliver the exceptional outcomes you want to create.

It’s time to take apart why so much public policy is such a mess. And then look at what we can do about it – without devoting our entire lives to changing public policy. Because we have other work we have to do.

There really are things that we can do. And you'll not be surprised to learn that a lot of them center on our messaging and engagement strategies.

In this episode, we share:

• The three main causes of unhelpful, counterproductive public policy around funding
• How good intentions result in some of the worst policy decisions
• The biggest mistake Nonprofit leaders often make when trying to get decisionmakers to change an unhelpful policy
• Why your best policy analysis will likely be ignored if you offer it at the wrong point in the process
• The perspective shift we must be able to make in order to motivate the decisionmaker to help solve the problem they created
• How to create powerful metaphors that will help decisionmakers see the flaws in their policy

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level and start getting next-level results? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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I see three major mistakes that get made all the time among Nonprofit leaders when they're engaging decisionmakers. These mistakes will invariably cost you influence and results, especially funding results.

Now more than ever, especially in this environment, you need both your existing funders and potential funders to be investing in your work at the highest level. But lately, when you go to talk to elected officials or government agency people or foundations, a lot of times you hear things like, well, there's not really any money right now. We can't afford it. It's not the right time.

And you start to feel like all the stuff you came to tell them that explains why they need to invest is falling on deaf ears. They listen politely enough, but you can feel the resistance.

And every time you have one of these conversations, your frustration goes up another notch, and your worry level goes up another notch too. 'Cause if we can't break through with these people, if we can't get them to get it, where's the money gonna come from? And then what?

It's tempting to write off those decisionmakers or get mad at them. But if we really want their investment, we have to find a way in. If they're not getting the most essential pieces of what you do and the problem you solve, and the value that solution has, the impact that it makes, and the level of investment that is necessary in order to buy that impact.

If they're not getting all of that, and not feeling motivated to find a way to make that investment. Then somewhere your messaging and engagement are not doing as good a job for you as they could.

Chances are you may be making one or more of three very common and costly mistakes.

In this episode, we share:

• Why most introductions create distance and disengagement
• How to change up your introduction to pull decisonmakers in and make them want to know more
• How to weave points of alignment and relevance throughout the conversation to keep the decisionmaker invested
• The critical reframe you must make to counter decisonmakers’ claims of “there’s not enough money”
• The secret to engaging a decisionmaker around the problems they’re most concerned about
• The most common erroneous assumption we make about why a decisionmaker’s not “getting it,” and how that hurts us
• The times when we’re most vulnerable to the biggest engagement pitfalls, and how to stay alert to those

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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What I suspect is true for you is what I'm hearing from a lot of my clients – there's just too much noise in the world. And more and more, we want to be able to focus on the essentials of what's going to work.

When we're talking advocacy, there are two essential ingredients. If you don't have those two fully dialed in, your results are going to be disappointing. You'll keep finding yourself in that place where the decisionmaker doesn't fully get what you do.

And because they don't fully get what you do, and don't understand the complexity of the problem you solve, they also can't correctly value the worth of the work that you do and the transformational outcomes you create in the lives of the people you serve.

So we've gotta get them to get it. That's the bottom line. Those two critical ingredients for making that happen? If either one of them is not fully dialed in, chances are they're still not going to get it.

I want to help you get those two critical ingredients dialed in and working for you. To get the results you want every time you engage a decision maker.

In this episode, I’m sharing:

· The three reasons behind decisionmakers not “getting it” about the value of your work

• The top three things you need to do with your messaging to make sure decisionmakers do “get it”
• Why persuasion almost never works
• The key element Nonprofits often leave out of their messaging, that is costing them a ton of influence with decisionmakers
• The five core principles of successful engagement
• The multiplier effect of learning a full set of messaging and engagement skills
• Why the techniques that feel most uncomfortable are the ones you should work hardest to master

Ready to take your messaging and engagement skills to the next level? The wait list for my new coaching program is now open. Only 10 Founding Member spots will be available. Claim yours by sending me a message here:

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At the beginning of this Thanksgiving week. I wanted to take just a few minutes to share with you my five greatest sources of gratitude right now, and a little bit about why they’re so significant.

We're living in a time when it feels really hard to operate from a place of gratitude. There's a lot going on that is just not good for humans. And it's hard. Nonprofit leaders in particular are feeling super stressed and under attack in a lot of ways, and we're watching attacks on members of our communities. There's a lot of really bad, scary stuff going on.

In the middle of all that, it becomes much too easy to lose sight of what's good in the world. But it's the good stuff that keeps us going. It's the good stuff that gives us a reason to stay in the fight. And to show up for all the people who matter to us, and to whom we matter.

Those of us who are lucky enough to work in the Nonprofit universe, a lot of us are here because we feel called to this work. Whether we're in direct service or advocacy or doing both at the same time, it's a labor of love. We do this because we care.

So when we find ourselves being pulled away from awareness of that and being sucked into the vortex of doom, I think it's really important to take a step back and take a little inventory of all of the things that motivate and inspire us, that recharge us, and that keep us going and keep us sane.

In this episode, I'm sharing:

• What I’m doing (and not doing) to stay sane in crazy times
• Why I’m seeking out people who challenge me and help me grow – and the amazing results that’s creating for me and my clients
• The valuable perspective shift we can take from animals
• The unexpected advocates who are emerging as a powerful source of inspiration for me
• My Thanksgiving wish for you

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