Finding Your Betty Whites

If you’re reading this, chances are you have all the heart eyes 😍 about the change you’re trying to make in the world. That’s wonderful! You should! But that also means you’re likely working hard. And Adam Grant has two maxims about your hard work:

1. Burnout is being overwhelmed by work.
2. Boreout is being underwhelmed by work.

This means that no matter how much you love your mission, if you want to keep moving that nonprofit needle for many years to come, it behooves you to find the sweet spot 🎯 between burnout and boreout—and that’s tricky. In this week’s blog I’ve got some tips and tricks on how to do just that.

This week’s rundown:

• Left Brain Marketing Methods:  Learn from Betty White how to help prevent burnout by investing your hard work in the minimum viable audience.
• Right Brain Marketing Moxie:  Learn how one of the Seven Principles of Influence, Social Validation, can help you find the holy grail of nonprofit marketing--when donors become your not-so-secret sales force.

Let’s do this!

Left Brain Marketing Methods: While Betty White did say that you should “Get at least eight hours of beauty sleep, nine if you’re ugly”, that’s not exactly the left brain marketing method I was thinking about—however, I do believe a well-rested marketer can help prevent overwhelm. 💤 So, it wouldn’t hurt to heed Betty’s advice--the number of hours is up to you! 😂🤣 But she also said, “Animal lover that I am, cougar I am not.” We can learn a lot from that statement! One of the hardest things for any nonprofit fundraiser to do is to decide who not to steward. I know, I know, you want to play the law of averages and communicate with as many people as possible in hopes that you’ll increase your opportunity for results. I get it. I’ve been there. It’s exhausting. And could easily lead to burnout. But there is a better way. Seth Godin speaks about it all the time—the minimum viable audience. Those are your Betty Whites. Who do you know for sure has a passion for what you do and the capacity to give what you need? Who has been giving to you for years? Who loves your cause as much as Betty loved, and spoke about, her love of animals? Those are your people.

Trust me, I understand that stewarding fewer people will be a hard decision to make. I was there in 2013. We had nary a plan for marketing to our donors. This was a week-by-week, fly-by-the-seat-of-our-pants decision. And our message was always watered down so that it could make sense to the masses. It took a lot of time. It cost a lot of money. To be fair, it was also an energy zapper because we had to extract passion and details that would have made sense to our most loyal donors, but not to everybody and their brother. It was a recipe for overwhelm, my friend. Seth Godin explains how to fix it:

“The solution is simple but counterintuitive: Stake out the smallest market you can imagine. The smallest market that can sustain you, the smallest market you can adequately serve. This goes against everything you learned in capitalism school, but in fact, it's the simplest way to matter.

When you have your eyes firmly focused on the minimum viable audience, you will double down on all the changes you seek to make. Your quality, your story, and your impact will all get better.

And then, ironically enough, the word will spread.”

If you’re afraid to market only to your true Betty Whites, that’s normal. But I’m here to tell you that it works—because I’ve done it. The first year we decreased the number of donations we actively stewarded, we increased our donations by 252%. We originally thought that must have been a fluke. So, we kept it up for a second year and, again, monitored the progress. The second year increase was 198%. We had found the secret sauce. It turns out that when you spend more time intentionally caring for the donors who care about you, they respond. The relationships deepen, their involvement increases, and your mission advances. Besides, Adam Grant, Betty White, and Seth Godin can’t all be wrong—that’s the ultimate trifecta if I’ve ever heard of one!

Right Brain Marketing Moxie: Ted Lasso said, “As the man once said, the harder you work, the luckier you get." Thomas Edison said it this way, “Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overall and looks like work.” I’m sure you’d agree that there’s nothing wrong with a hard day's work—especially if you love the mission of your organization. The problem here is that the wrong hard work can lead to Grant’s aforementioned boreout.

For whatever reason, in the nonprofit community, we’ve been led to believe that our communications should be serious, buttoned-up, and, like they say on the Great British Bake Off, stodgy! It’s as if we believe everything we do from 8-5 should be 8 ½ X 11, black and white, word walls that read like opening remarks in a court case. What we forget is that the donors who are receiving these 8 ½ X 11, black and white, word walls aren’t receiving them between 8 and 5. Shazam!

The involvement your donors have with you is on their own time—the time they want to be inspired, the time they care about how you make them feel, the time they get to choose how they'll spend it. So, give them the feelings they get when they watch This is Us, go to the movies to see the their favorite Marvel movie, attend Hamilton, sing a hymn with an entire congregation, or read a Tom Grisham novel. Besides, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, generosity is fun, a truly joyous part of our lives. To whatever degree, we get to take our time, talent, treasure, network, or knowledge and share it in a way that improves someone else’s quality of life—that feels good! Our communications should make them feel this kind of way!

If you abide by Seth’s Minimum Viable Audience logic, then you know you can’t make them feel any kind of way if you are creating average stuff for average people—or worse. Your right brain is all about creativity and you have the chance to craft something that you’d love to receive in the mail, something you’d love to open, read, and tell others about. Betty White was also a great example of this. Not only did she openly share her love of animals, but she participated in the Principle of Influence called Social Validation. This is when you do something because you see other people doing it. Not only did Betty talk about her love of animals and the specific charities she supported, but she encouraged others to do so as well, simply by talking about it. Social Validation is why we likely use the same toothpaste and laundry detergent that we those we trust use and also why social media is so powerful.

Betty even once said, “You know what the problem that animal activists sometimes have? They only concentrate on the heartbreaking things to the point where the general public thinks, 'Oh, here comes those animal folks again and I'm going to hear all the things I don't want to hear'.” You’ve seen the everlasting Sarah McLachlan animal cruelty commercials, right? There’s more to the animal story than that, but there trying to make the donors feel something. However, there’s more than one feeling to choose from—you should try many of them on for size.

To avoid reinventing the (marketing emotions) wheel you can easily look online for .gifs or memes that evoke emotion yet can relate in some way to the work that you do. That’s the crafty work of a marketer. You get the opportunity to give someone a hook to hang something on. If you know they understand a basic concept, then it’s easy to explain to them how what you do is similar. This is especially important if what you’re doing is complex, yet the donor needs to ‘get it' in order to take the action you desire. 

While I’m not saying that everything you do has to be funny, it does need to make people feel something. There’s an entire spectrum of emotions awaiting you and none of them are 8 ½ X 11, black and white, word walls. Find your Betty Whites and then thank them for being a friend.

Now you know…go forth and conquer.

All the Best,

dawn