Right now, maybe more than ever, it's so important for Nonprofit leaders to be as effective in our advocacy work as possible, while dealing with the fact that we have super-limited bandwidth. So anything we can do to be faster and more efficient and more effective getting to those results, the better.

I had a call with a client a few days ago that was a case study in all the things that can make us crazy when we're advocating with government decisionmakers in particular. Whether we're looking for a policy change or funding or both, it seems like the process and the path are rarely clear and certainly never easy.

A lot of times it can feel like a long and cumbersome process, especially if you don't have a full-time government relations person on staff. Which frankly, most nonprofits don't. I hear from a lot of clients their frustration with overly complex systems that have a million moving parts and are hard to decipher. Opaque decisionmaking structures where it sometimes feels impossible to figure out who's really in charge of the decisions you're trying to affect.

It's enough to make you want to give up before you even start.

I'm here to tell you that even when you're a full-time advocate, those roadblocks and challenges still crop up all the time. The difference is we know some tricks to cut through the fog and get on the shortest path to the results we want.

Today I'm sharing with you my three favorite shortcuts for doing just that.

In this episode, we share:

• The one place you should always start from to get faster advocacy results
• Two magic questions that will buy you more progress than any others
• How taking these three shortcuts can result in more and stronger strategic relationships
• The key to avoiding unseen holes in your dream policy that will come back to bite you
• How to use AI effectively in your advocacy work

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!!

We have reason to celebrate this week! And I want to celebrate with you. We all just experienced a profound demonstration of the power of collective action.

I hope you were able to participate in one of the thousands of No King's events this past weekend. I was there for the event in my community and it was awesome. Fantastic energy, lots and lots of people. A wonderful collection of friends and neighbors and people I'd never met before. All of us gathered together in common cause, and to leverage the power of collective action. It was beyond impressive.

I also hope that when you got home, you had a chance to look through social media and everywhere else to see all the images and video of the amazing events all over the country and the world. And I hope you took a moment to reflect on what that really means.

There are three major sets of powerful evidence that momentum is increasing for us. The biggest, most obvious piece of evidence is the ever-growing No King's attendance and the number and diversity of communities touched.

Over 8 million people in over 3,300 local communities, including many in deep red territory in every state in the country. All of them showing up to say, what's happening is wrong. We want better. We are joining together to call for better, and to commit to creating better.

What was maybe the most exciting to me, although there were a lot of exciting things, was that thousands of those who showed up said that this was the first time they'd ever participated in any kind of a protest. They'd never done anything like that before. But they looked around at what was happening and they said, I can't be silent anymore. I can't be standing on the sidelines. I need to stand up, show up, and begin to take action.

But as I said, that’s just one set of evidence. There’s a lot more and it’s creating some great possibility for 2026.

In this episode, we share:

• Three powerful sets of evidence that momentum is building toward a big change in our favor
• Two important lessons that tell us what we need to do next as Nonprofit leaders
• Why the right wing is worried enough to double down on voter suppression, and how we can counter that
• Two actions Nonprofit leaders can take right now to help ensure our clients and volunteers are able to make their voices heard
• One excellent tool that every Nonprofit leader can use to streamline that assistance

Link:

Handy look-up tool for all things voter registration: https://www.nass.org/can-I-vote

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 biggest challenges that we deal with is what happens when we inevitably fall short of expectations. The reality is it's going to happen. It happens to everybody now and again.

It could be expectations set by others for us, or expectations we set for ourselves. Either way, when we fall short of those expectations, that tends to carry a lot of emotional weight. And it's that emotional weight, and the stuff that unfolds from that, that can cause a whole lot of problems for all of us, and for Nonprofit leaders in particular.

It’s usually a combination of external factors and some internal factors that cause us to fall short of an expectation, regardless of whom it was set by. But instead of simply assessing the causes, fixing the problem, and moving on, we often get caught up in judgment about it all. And we beat ourselves up and get tangled up in what all of it means about us.

I bet I don't have to tell you, that only makes the problem worse.

It's inevitable that we will fall short of expectations from time to time. But how we respond to that makes a huge difference in our effectiveness, in our success, and I would argue in our wellbeing.

In this episode, we share:

• How fear of judgement actually makes it harder to fix things when we fall short of expectations
• The essential mental frame that will keep you out of self-judgement and self-recrimination
• What to do first if you find yourself unable to meet an expectation
• Four keys to defanging the experience of falling short
• How to set teams up for success even when one or more members fall short
• The superpower good leaders use to avoid the traps that cause most shortfalls

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!!

We all deal with the same essential obstacle to our greatest results. And the aggravating thing about it is it's an obstacle we tend not to be aware of.

Here's the thing. The expectations you set really matter. They will basically determine your outcomes. Think about it. When have you ever gotten great results by setting low expectations?

Of course, most Nonprofit leaders don't go around deliberately setting low expectations. But they can happen in the background without us realizing it. The reality is we're setting expectations all the time. The problem is we're mostly unaware of that happening.

We often set expectations based on our past experiences rather than our desired future. You can see how that might get us in a bunch of trouble.

Even more problematic, we're often operating from those expectations as if they were fact or truth. And because we view them as fact or truth, we seldom bother to examine them and to ask the questions: Are they really true? And are they serving us?

The unfortunate reality is that when we set expectations based on past experience, we often take actions that move us further away from our desired result.

If we want our expectations to align with our desired results, we need to interrupt what’s running on autopilot, and develop a powerful practice of setting expectations that serve us.

In this episode, we share:

• The one critical element at the center of setting expectations that will serve you
• Four clear actions to take to ensure your expectations align with your desired results
• Why your subconscious will try to lower your expectations, and how to outsmart it
• How to reset your expectations to take you directly to the results you want
• How to deal with well-meaning people who want you to lower your expectations
• Two powerful questions to help you stay on track to achieving your biggest ambitions

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 know how much work it is to score a big policy win. If you're working toward one right now, I am cheering you on. And I'm affirming that you're gonna get that policy win.

So the last thing I want to see happen is for you to make one or more of three common mistakes that can wind up greatly diminishing that win.

Whatever you're working on that's a policy change at whatever level of government. Getting that legislation or other policy that you've advocated for, getting that done, getting that to the finish line is a huge win. And it's worthy of a ton of celebration. It's a really big deal.

And, it's only the beginning of your advocacy work. Because now you need to make sure that policy gets implemented the way you intended.

The bottom line is that implementation is a critically important piece. If you want your policy to be implemented as you intended, it will take a lot of advocacy work to make sure that happens.

That's what I’m focusing on today. And I'm going to help you make sure that your big wins, stay big wins.

In this episode, we share:

• Four reasons why even the best crafted policy can fail to create the intended impact
• The three biggest mistakes that will undermine and possibly torpedo the successful implementation of your great policy win
• How to effectively monitor how your policy is working, and what to do to fix any problems as they arise
• Why advocates need to actively monitor, even when there’s an official monitor designated in the policy
• How to share the work of monitoring with the right allies, and benefit from multiple angles of expertise and perspective

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!!

When it comes to successfully engaging decisionmakers and getting them to invest fully in our work, it's all about skills.

Of course, no matter where you are in your messaging and engagement skill-development journey, there’s always a next level to master. But the real test of how urgent it is for you to increase your skills, is the results you're getting.

If every time you go talk to a decisionmaker, they're leaning in, they 100% get the value of your work and they can't wait to invest. I'd say you're doing great and you can probably invest your skill development time in something else.

But if you're not landing those results most of the time, then I would submit that really putting some effort in on increasing your messaging and engagement skills is a very smart investment of your energy.

Now you notice, I didn't say investment of your time.

We do have to put in the work to develop messaging and engagement skills if we want to see those big results. But at the same time, let's be honest. We're all having serious bandwidth issues. And the idea of learning a new set of skills, or taking our current skills to the next level sounds way too time consuming.

The good news is there's a way to weave skill development into your existing work without spending a ton more time. If you know how. That's the secret I want to let you in on today.

In this episode, we share:

• The four-step process to turn every interaction with a decisionmaker into an opportunity to increase your skill level
• The top three misperceptions about skills that will hold you back
• The brain science secrets to developing advanced skills
• Why practice doesn’t guarantee progress, and how to add the key “skill growth ingredient”
• How to use the skill of debriefing to catapult your messaging and engagement skill growth
• A simple yet powerful mindset shift that will free you from the most common traps that inhibit growth

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!!

A lot of us, especially Gen Xers, were taught a lot of things about how important it is to be modest. Don't brag about yourself. Heck, don't even talk about yourself. We were taught to regard modesty as a great virtue.

But there's a serious problem with that when we're talking about getting decisionmakers to invest in our work. Because they need to know how great our work is, and how great we are at making a huge impact through that work. They need to know how we're leading the field with our work.

If we struggle to talk about our work as the best, most effective solution to a particular problem, and if we won't own the identity of expert on the work that we do, why would the decisionmaker believe that our work is worthy of high-level investment?

This misplaced modesty is one of the biggest causes of underinvestment by decisionmakers, and it doesn't get talked about enough.

We have to be able to claim our expertise and we have to be able to claim our best/most status in whatever construct it is true. And we have to be able to do that with confidence and certainty if we want decisionmakers to believe us when we say it.

But you might have noticed there's often a lot of stuff that gets in the way of our being able to do that. What I've observed is that when these problems are showing up consistently for a leader, there's almost always something else going on beneath the surface.

Until we get at the stuff under the surface, our default modesty behaviors are likely to persist. And to keep costing us real money, both in lost investments and under-investment.

In this episode, we share:

• The two main ways counterproductive modesty shows up in interactions with decisionmakers
• The most common sources of unhelpful beliefs that drive counterproductive modesty
• The three key ingredients to taking ownership of your greatness
• Essential questions to help you identify areas of counterproductive modesty, and to rewire it
• Why you should beware of focusing on credentials
• How to avoid a common trap that discourages us from owning our greatness

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!!

We hear all the time about how important it is to tell client stories. But we seldom get much more guidance than that. And the truth is that number one, client stories are only a small part of the overall storytelling toolkit for Nonprofit leaders. And number two, even with client stories, simply telling them does not guarantee any sort of a result or impact.

Storytelling can be an incredibly powerful tool in your advocacy toolkit, IF you build your stories for results. Like every other part of our advocacy work, our storytelling needs to be strategic. And that means that every part of any story you decide to tell should be designed to produce a specific result.

How are you using storytelling in your advocacy work right now? If you're not currently designing your storytelling from that strategic perspective, this episode is for you.

In this episode, we share:

• The five most common storytelling mistakes you may be making that rob your stories of impact
• Four key ingredients to a story that produces results
• Questions to ask yourself to identify the strategic job(s) a story needs to do in a given situation
• How to create relatable imagery that will reliably engage a decisionmaker’s emotional center
• How to integrate your bits of data and facts into an engaging story
• The four-step process to build a story that gets results

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!!