Good thoughts from Seth Godin
Seth Godin kindly donated his time to Network for Good yesterday, presenting our most popular Nonprofit 911 call ever. Over two thousand people registered for it! You can listen here, but here’s my most favorite thing he said (and I paraphrase slightly): we have to stop spamming people for support. Stop trying to interrupt them and get them to pay attention. There are too many people doing it.
As Seth said, this not working as well as it used to. The number of people who are trying to interrupt audiences has gone way up. The noise has increased dramatically, so a lot of nonprofits are struggling.
If you take this approach, you have to talk to 100 people to get one donor or 1,000 people to get one trustee.
Instead, you should get your biggest supporters talking for you.
That changes the equation fundamentally.
So what do you do? The opportunity is to not to interrupt people. What you do is empower people who already believe in you to speak up on your behalf. Create ideas worth spreading.
People don’t talk about our causes for many reasons, from discomfort to laziness, so we have to change that by organizing our work to be worth talking about.
You can read Seth’s free publication on this - called Flipping the Funnel here.
Thank you Seth for your ideas and inspiration!
Katya,
Great insight on the 911 call.
I hope folks download and start implementing the eBook - it’s a very quick read.
I was speaking with a client yesterday about non-profit marketing and we agreed that NPOs have a unique challenge in that they typically serve at least two types of “customers”:
1 - Folks who will support the cause through donations (money, time, materials).
2 - Folks who are served by the NPO (homeless, poor, marginalized).
Seth’s paradigm shift can be applied to both.
Take care,
John Haydon
CorporateDollar.Org