Make it Transformational: A Blog for Champion Discipleship

I recently came across Elevator Pitches For Good Causes, featured in the April 16 edition of the Chronicle of Philanthropy, and it struck a chord.  The article features eight charity veterans sharing their pitches on video.  According to the article:

“Most nonprofit executives have an elevator pitch—a short speech that explains their organzations' work to people they meet on an elevator, at a social event, or at a conference. But even the most seasoned pro is usually looking to refine his or her pitch.”

Watch a few or all of them and see what you think.  My opinion is that the majority of these pitches represents a boring, traditional marketing brochure that has been memorized and regurgitated.  Most of these pitches, like ineffective marketing brochures, are:

-          Organization-focused, clogged with seemingly unimportant details such as staff size, client base, and years in existence

-          Mission-focused, meaning the emphasis is placed on services currently provided by the organization

-          Filled with jargon, academic language, or insider phrases that the average listener will not easily comprehend

-          Drawing a line between the expert staff who do the work and the listener who is relegated to the role of bystander

How would your pitch size up to the features listed above?  Assuming you are inspired to spend some time refining yours (you are inspired, aren’t you??), below are some thoughts on how to strengthen your elevator speech.  It should be:

-          Cause focused.  Listeners care about problems and issues in their communities.  Help them connect directly to the cause of teen pregnancy, drug use, homelessness, the persecuted church, etc.  Leave out the unnecessary details about your organization until you are asked about it.

-          Vision-focused.  Help your listener catch the dream of where you are headed and what you aim to accomplish in the future with respect to your cause; help them clearly see that you need their help – working alongside you - to impact the cause and get to this future place.

-          Simple to understand.  The fifth grader next door should be able to understand your language and generally repeat back to you the same pitch

If you want an excellent, in-depth look at how to effectively communicate about your work, check out the book, Made To Stick, by Chip and Dan Heath. 

Take some time to refine your elevator pitch!  And remember that the tips above apply equally to other communications like newsletters, appeals, and websites!

One of the byproducts of being an officer of a foundation is that I get included on loads of nonprofit e-mailing lists.  I don’t complain about this, in fact I encourage it, for three reasons:

1. I find these e-newsletters and e-solicitations to be a bottomless source of examples—both good and bad—for my work as one who trains nonprofits in fundraising
2. I become exposed to organizations that might be good recipients of an MIF grant, organizations that I otherwise wouldn’t know much about if I wasn’t included in their communications
3. I learn really cool stuff about the things I'm passionate about.

Unfortunately, of the dozens of nonprofits that send me their material, I can count on one hand (while holding chopsticks) the number of nonprofits that reliably land in the third category.

In the past month at Mission Increase Foundation, we’ve been training nonprofits on grantwriting, and one of the key lessons is to understand that foundations have a mission and a passionate commitment to a cause, so as nonprofit leaders you should become reliable and recognized sources of expert information in that cause.

But why is this so uncommon?

Sadly, nonprofit leaders are typically more committed to their particular organizations than they are to their cause, so foundation leaders have come to see them as provincial, and therefore biased in their communications.  And frankly, we tire of the organization-centric nature of most nonprofit communications—which wrongly assume that we foundations exist to give them money to carry out their work—so we’ve learned to ignore them.

One of the exceptions is the e-newsletter I get every month from Rudy Carrasco, an example of which you can read here.  Rudy mentions his organization's events and his speaking engagements, but he also includes links to items that directly impact his cause, which is Christian community-based development.  Rudy assumes if you are on his list, you care about these things too, so he wants to share them with you.  Then he includes a Bible verse and a cute photo of one of his kids. 

Does Rudy’s approach work?  Well, I can tell you I forwarded his email to foundation colleagues all across the country because I wanted them to read the “better vision for short-term missions” link.  These colleagues now know Rudy and his organization not because he did such a great job representing his organization, but because he pointed us to useful and stimulating information on the cause.  And because he does this consistently, I look forward to each of his e-newsletters, which is not something I can say for many organizations.

Marketing maven Seth Godin recently offered a blog posting on the Pareto principle, which you’ve no doubt seen applied in marketing theory, that suggests that for many events roughly 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes, by offering some interesting case studies from the book industry.Unlike Godin, I don’t have the #1 rated marketing blog as measured by Advertising Age, but permit me to take issue with his closing line:  “Don't treat people the same, find the ones that matter...

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Recently MIF taught a great workshop on the topic of marketing (you can see some of my prior posts on marketing here) so I guess it's still on my mind.  In fact, after seeing several blog posts across the web about some marketing Doctors Without Borders (DWB) is doing, I can't help but address it myself adding a twist of Transformational Giving (TG) thinking.DWB is getting a ton of press because of their recent video ad entitled "boy".  The scene for the entire 59 seconds is a bullet-ridden...

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In our Mission Increase Foundation workshops and labs on marketing, we asked the attendees to consider how everyday people—those who don’t necessarily know anything about the cause-- interact with the cause in their day-to-day existence.  Why is this important?  Because then you can design a signature participation project (SPP) in which you challenge new people to become active in your cause as the way to market your ministry.The question of how the cause intersects with everyday...

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