Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Amy Eisenstein. Welcome to Ask the Fundraising Expert. Today, I'm so excited to have Seth Godin here with me, a well-known author, speaker, founder of multiple companies, and all-around marketing expert. Welcome, Seth. Thanks for joining me.

Speaker 2: Thank you. It's a pleasure to know you.

Speaker 1: Great. Well, let's get started talking about storytelling and nonprofits, and how can storytelling help nonprofits spread their word?

Speaker 2: Well, let's understand that when someone donates money to a charity, they're buying something. They're hiring that charity to solve a problem for them. The question we need to understand is, what are they buying? Too often, we get hung up on the problem to be solved, the charts and the graphs and the urgency. No, no, no. This time, it's urgent. That's not what anyone And when we talk about what we've done, when we talk about the charity we're supporting, what do we say? These come down to the story. And the story is, does it resonate with me? Does it resonate with the person I believe I am and my place in society? A short way of saying it is this. People like us do things like this. And every successful charity is successful at the fundraising end, because they have figured out how to be part of the culture, not all of the culture, a section of the culture, where people proudly say, of course I support them, because people like us do things like this. And the mistake that we make, because our cause is so good, is that we skip all that and try to get to the facts. Guess what? No one looks at the facts when they buy a chocolate bar. They don't look at the facts when they buy a car. And they don't look at the facts when they make a donation.

Speaker 1: Yeah, what a great way of putting it. Succinct as possible and powerful. So if you were in front of a non-profit board, what's one piece of advice that you would give them?

Speaker 2: I think the most important thing that board members have to understand is that we invented non-profits for a reason. And the reason is, it's okay to fail. That if it had to work, then you would be a for-profit company that had to make its dividends. But the entire reason we have non-profits is we don't know how to solve this problem. We don't know how to educate kids. We don't know how to make more entrepreneurs in Nairobi. We don't know how to solve this health problem. If we knew, we would have solved it already. You're here because we want you to be scientists, to explore, to apply a series of steps to a problem until the problem goes away. And too often, non-profits, once they get past five people, become defenders of the non-profit as opposed to eager scientists willing to figure out yet another way the problem can't be solved as we work our way to the way it can be solved. So creating tension is actually a good thing. The tension of this might not work. The tension of you can't work here anymore because your posture doesn't match our posture. The tension of making a donor uncomfortable with what you're about to do next because there are no comfortable problems left to be solved. All we're left with are the uncomfortable ones.

Speaker 1: Yeah, it's a good point. I think non-profits are often fearful of taking risks. They're afraid of taking risks because they think their donors might not be happy if they fail. So how do we get board members and non-profits in general to feel more comfortable taking those risks and, of course, explaining those risks to the donors?

Speaker 2: One of the memes that every non-profit needs to be aware of is the National Lampoon cover from the 1970s that said, buy this magazine or we'll shoot this dog. And the reason that it's such a powerful cover, besides the fact that it's funny, is the certainty involved. Buy the magazine, we kill the dog. Buy the magazine, the dog goes free. And non-profits have gotten sucked into an easy trope, which is give us money, we'll solve the problem. Switch your light bulbs, global warming will go away. That we've hooked one thing to the other for sure. And it's interesting the way we sidestep it. So we don't have fundraisers to cure breast cancer anymore. We have breast cancer awareness, as if awareness is the problem, right? So we use all these weasel words. Instead of saying, there's a problem over there. Do not avert your eyes. People like us look at this problem. And then people like us sign up, enroll, to go down a pathway to solving it. Then when we can say to our donors, this is difficult, this isn't going to happen tomorrow, but we will do it together, we have a credit card to go fail. But if we say to people, clock's ticking, we're going to solve this problem in an hour, well then of course you're stressed, because you just promised people that there was no risk. When in fact, there is no risk to donating, there is a risk to committing to solving it by a given day. We can't do that except for the endless emergency of poverty, which is why there's way too much focus on give us a bag of rice so this kid won't die today, they'll die tomorrow. That's a dead end, we know that. So what we've become as we get more sophisticated at this, are people who are willing to do the hard work of telling a donor the truth about where we're going to go next, because the best stories are true stories.

Speaker 1: That is such a good reminder for all board members and fundraisers to take the long view and to be as honest as they can, obviously, with all of their donors. Good, let's change topics for a minute and talk about what would you say to millennials or the new fundraisers entering the profession or the non-profit sector, what advice would you have to young people who want to join the non-profit ranks?

Speaker 2: Well here's the good news, if you can raise money, you're never going to have trouble getting a job.

Speaker 1: That's so true.

Speaker 2: More than anything I can think of, indoor labor, more than any indoor job I can think of, people who can raise money will never need to worry about a job. So the question is, how do you raise money? Are you just dialing for dollars from a list of strangers? Are you putting in mail to people who don't want to get it, spamming the world? Because if you do that, you're an interchangeable, replaceable cog. That's not the way you become a great fundraiser. The way great fundraising is done is by connecting the disconnected, by organizing tribes of people who want to hear from each other and you're at the center of it. When you can deliver anticipated, personal, and relevant messages to people who want to get them, when you are the drum major who is keeping the people in sync, not all people, just your people, raising money isn't a hassle. It's a privilege for these people to give you money because here's the big home run to remember. Anytime someone gives you $50, they are only doing it because they're getting $75 worth of value out of giving you $50. Because if it wasn't, they wouldn't do it. So when you think about it that way, you realize that what you're doing is you're having a 50% off sale. That when you show up and say, you can feel good for $50, they're saying, this is great because I just got $75 worth of value. And when you think of it that way, how dare you not reach out.

Speaker 1: That's right. It's such a good way of putting it. I always like to say that fundraising isn't about arm twisting. It's not about begging. It's about finding people who believe in the same causes you do to invest in your community and a cause. Last question. You're here because you are going to be the keynote at the AFP International Conference. So I was wondering if you would give us one tip or highlight from your speech that's coming up in a few hours.

Speaker 2: I guess I would remind people that we have all become weird. That the normal distribution with the big bulge in the middle of the people who give to the United Way and the Boy Scouts, that mass stuff for mass audiences doesn't work for hotels, it doesn't work for political candidates, and it doesn't work for fundraising anymore. That the curve is melting. That people given a choice take a choice. That on iTunes or Netflix or anywhere they get a choice, they take a choice. And so making average stuff for average people, doing an average gala for average people, making an average pitch to average people isn't going to scale anymore. We've got to find the edge cases, the people who care, the people who through their actions have already indicated this is something they are dying to get involved in. Those people are worth all of our time. Let the average people deal with someone else.

Speaker 1: Great. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 2: It's a pleasure. Thanks for the work you do.

Speaker 1: All right. Thank you. Now it's your turn to share. I hope you'll join the discussion and help others by leaving a comment below. Did this video inspire you to try something new? Do you have an example or story to share? Do you agree or disagree with today's advice? If so, please let me know in the comments. And if you found this video helpful, be sure to share it with your friends and followers. Finally, if you want to learn even more ways to supercharge your fundraising, visit my website, trypointfundraising.com. Join my list and as a thank you, you'll get two of my most popular eBooks for free. That's the end of today's episode, but I hope you're feeling inspired and empowered. Thanks so much for doing your part to make the world a better place. I hope to see you next time on Ask the Fundraising Expert.