Marketing Needs More Mermaids

It should be no surprise to you that my first career was teaching. I originally taught in the public school system in Texas—shout out to my Plano friends. I lived there for 8 years and when I moved back to Indiana, my husband and I brought back a little Texan with us. He just turned 26 and he’s the only Texan in the family; he has always loved that. In fact, he used to tell everyone that he was the Texan and his brother was just an American. LOL!

Anyway, my most recent teaching foray was 15 years at the collegiate level where I taught speech communications at my alma mater. It was always amazing to me to see how many Seniors I’d get in my classes as they had hoped beyond hope that they’d drop the public speaking requirement before they graduated. Alas, they ended up in my class.

Ironically, it was funny to see one of my lesson plans merging my two career paths together when I taught about a speech that former first lady Barbara Bush gave at a graduation ceremony for the all-girls Wellesley College in June of 1990. She was conveying a story she had heard from popular author Robert Fulghum. Many of you may have heard of him from the book, All I Ever Needed To Know I Learned in Kindergarten. And if you’ve been on social media lately, you may agree that it’d be a worthy endeavor if everyone remembered that poem or checked out that book annually—certainly couldn’t hurt.

However, on this particular day, Mrs. Bush was telling one of the stories from that aforementioned book called Mermaids. It’s a story about a young pastor in charge of a passel of energy-filled kiddos. To quell the chaos, he introduced a game to the younglings called “Giants, Wizards, and Dwarfs”—perhaps you’ve heard of it. It’s sort of a wear-them-all-out-by-running-around-like-chickens game of rock, paper, scissors. Since energy expenditure was sorely needed, the pastor explained that each child must decide whether they wanted to become a giant, a wizard, or a dwarf. But before he could go on further, a sweet girl tugged his pants leg and asked, “But where do the mermaids stand?”

Great question if you ask me. The pastor pauses, no ready answer coming to mind. After a moment he says, "Well, mermaids don’t exist." She disagrees and states, “Oh yes, they do. I am a mermaid. So, where do the mermaids stand?” Clearly, the mermaids are those who don’t fit inside the box--those who are creative or different or scrumtrulescent—but still very much want to be a part of the game.

Seeing that this young mermaid clearly wanted to play the game but didn’t feel like she fit into the pigeon-holed boxes of giant, wizard, or dwarf, he says the only thing he could think of that wouldn’t crush her spirit. He said, "The Mermaid stands right here by me, the King of the Sea!" So, together, they stood, hand-in-hand as they monitored the rambunctious confusion of the giants, wizards, and dwarfs.

I was reminded of this story recently as I was preparing for two major in-person presentations in my near future. I’ll be at the Iowa Council of Foundations in September and then in Kansas for the KACF Annual National Conference for Growing Community Foundations in October. I had a professional colleague of mine proofread my materials before I completed them and she reminded me of something that people ask me every single time I present, “How do you come up with all these ideas?”

It's also why I write this blog. You see, I'm not special. My education background is why I stick to the pedagogy of left brain marketing methods and right brain marketing moxie. But all the hands-on experience I’ve had since that time has revealed the ingredients to that secret creative idea sauce. And I’d like to share that with you today.

Left Brain Marketing Methods: This is where you line up the giants, the wizards, and the dwarfs. You go over all the rules. You bring order to the madness. And it’s needed! The chaos is what leads to the burnout of passionate non-profit leaders across the world. Let’s do whatever we can to prevent that.

Right Brain Marketing Moxie: Next up, mermaids! There’s always a place for the mermaids. So, where do the mermaids stand? “Answer that question,” Fulghum wrote, “and you can build a school, a nation, or a whole world.” And you and I both know that we’re in the school-building, nation-building, world-building business. And that kind of work takes all the mermaids you can get!

I love learning with you. You and this blog mermaid for each other!

Left Brain Marketing Methods:  Creativity comes from many places but I think part of mine comes from the left brain. Now I know that’s not the ‘normal’ answer to “Where do you get all your creative ideas?” But hear me out.

We have been executing our marketing and communications plan to steward our donors since 2013 with some remarkable results. You see some of those ideas in this blog and many others each Friday on my Frideas page. And while I’d love to say that I was able to come up with all those ideas on my own, that’s simply not true—my entire team dreams up all that cleverness. 

How do they do that, you ask? Well, we get all our left brain decision-making out of the way first. That’s it, that’s the sauce. For a secret sauce, it doesn’t feel that secret does it?  Kind of like when I tell people I’ve never had a Big Mac because I don’t trust their special sauce. They always say, “It’s just Thousand Island Dressing, like it’s no big deal.” As unspecial as that is, I’m still over 50 years Big Mac free. And as unspecial as it is, doing your left brain work first is the sauce!

So, yeah, that’s the not-so-secret secret, we do all the left brain decision making at the end of every year. Before we think of anything creative, we pull reports. We dissect donor records. We look at the success of what worked in the past year and what didn’t. We add new donors and subtract some donors—or maybe we add an entirely new donor segment. We look at the literal data and we make decisions about who we’re communicating with and when. We decide how often we’ll communicate and what message we want to convey. Anything that we can decide ahead of time using our left brain is all done in the matter of 2-3 weeks once a year. That’s it, that's the tweet.

It's the rules and the order that Fulghum discussed in Giants, Wizards, and Dwarfs. We need all of that. It puts the lines on the road and gives you a communications plan to follow throughout the year. Even if you know that the creative part comes next, you quell the chaos by planning your work first. And when chaos is quelled, that hair-on-fire stress dissipates, too. This is my wish for every nonprofit professional by the way.

Right Brain Marketing Moxie:  Now that you’ve planned your work, you can begin to work your plan. The secret sauce has been revealed and the left brain data-driven decision making has been done, freeing up the capacity of the creative right side of the brain to go hog wild the other 11 ½ months a year. When you’re not using both sides of your brain at once, your right brain takes over along with the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon. You see, we like to choose a theme each year—this year our theme is Space. And oddly enough, when all your data-driven decisions are made and your right brain knows that space is the theme, Baader-Meinhof kicks in and your awareness of all things space launches. Oddly enough, you even begin to think that there are more things being published about space than ever before. It’s a frequency illusion. There’s really no increase in memes or articles about space but we sure do notice them more. And the more we notice them, the more ideas we have on how to use them—I guess that’s just what mermaids, or mermen, do.

Elizabeth Gilbert talks about this in her book Big Magic. She says that if you get to a place where you can appreciate the creative process and even enjoy it, that you will draw more inspiration near to you. She believes that inspiration appreciates being appreciated, just like we all do.  And when you begin to appreciate the inspiration you get, more and more ideas will come your way.

So, with this in mind, I say, don’t worry about how creative I am or creativity comparisons at all, for that matter. Thinking that way, just stresses you out and that’s not a place where creativity lives. Don’t pigeonhole yourself as ‘not creative’. All the pigeonholing was taken care of with the left brain when we brought order to the chaos—that’s where it belongs. Gilbert brilliantly states, “Never delude yourself into believing that you require someone else’s blessing (or even their comprehension) in order to make your own creative work. And always remember that people judgments about you are none of your business.”

You see, the bottom line is that you need to have an excellent strategic plan for communications and you need to execute it beautifully. An excellent strategic plan (left brain) executed poorly (right brain) is a waste of your time because it won’t gain your donor’s attention or attraction—it will get recycled at best.

But a weak strategic plan (left brain), executed creatively (right brain) is a waste of time for your donors because the lack of custom touch will read as fluff, it won’t go to the right people, and it’ll come off as generic to those who may read it.

Use your brain, friend…your whole brain. There’s plenty of room in this game for the Giants, the Wizards, the Dwarfs, and the Mermaids—in fact, we need them all.

All My Best,

Dawn
[email protected]
dawn brown creative, llc. 

P.S.  It’s not true, by the way, that mermaids don’t exist. The King of the Sea knows one. In fact, he once held her hand.