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Lead Your Organization by Telling a Story

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tug of war

Get your people pulling in the same direction

Here’s a problem leaders face every day. You want to get something done. It will take everyone in your organization to do it.

How will you get them pulling in the same direction?

You could go around and have a heart-to-heart with each person in the organization. You could explain in detail the role each person should play and how they are supposed to do it.

That might work…if you have three people in your organization. In a larger group, you’d be spending a huge amount of time and you still wouldn’t know whether or not your people “get it” until you saw them in action.

You’d also be accused of “micro-management”—and your accusers would be right. Why tell other people how to do their jobs, which is something they might already know better than you do?

You don’t need to tell them how to do it. You need to make sure they know what needs to be done. And the best way to do that just might be through telling a story.

Find out how:

http://www.trippbraden.com/2015/03/13/who-is-the-hero-of-the-story/

How to Make Your Nonprofit the People’s Choice

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Who is Donald Berwick and why do I know his name?

Donald Berwick is one of five Democrats running for Governor of Massachusetts.  He’s not a career politician, and he hasn’t been in the headlines for years like some of the other candidates.  I know about him because of a story.

In their book Switch, Chip and Dan Heath illustrate their own model for bringing about change by telling a story about Berwick.

In 2004, 1 out of every 10 patients in the U.S. received defective medical care.  For instance, they “did not receive their antibiotics in the specified time.”  So, “thousands of patients were dying every year, unnecessarily.”  Dr. Donald Berwick set out to change that.

  • He proposed that the medical industry save 100,000 lives in 18 months, and he gave them six specific ways to do it.
  • He brought in a mom whose little girl had been killed by a medical error.  She told the hospitals, “I know that if this campaign had been in place four or five years ago, that Josie would be fine.”
  • He made it easy for hospitals to join the campaign (by signing a one-page form) and brought them together in conferences where they could see how others just like them were succeeding.

As a result. by the set date, the campaign had saved 122,300 lives, “the equivalent of throwing a life preserver to every man, woman, and child in Ann Arbor, Michigan.”

Because of this story, when Berwick decided to run for Governor, I knew his name.

There’s an election going on, and your nonprofit organization is one of the candidates.

You’re competing for volunteer time.  You’re competing for donor money.  Everyone in your community can choose from a slate of good causes and “cast their vote”–for you, for a similar organization, or for a completely different cause that also appeals to them.

You need name recognition to win.  No one will vote for you if they don’t know who you are.  But how do you make sure people hear about you, and remember your name?

Tell stories.

Tell stories that dramatize the problem you’re trying to solve.  Tell stories that give people hope that there are solutions.  Give them a chance to be the hero of the story by giving you their time or money.

When they choose between you and other organizations, make sure they know your name.  Then you’ll have a chance to get their vote.

Robin Hood Marketing, by Katya Andresen: a review

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You care passionately about something.  You want other people to get involved.  You want their time, money, ideas, commitment.  How do you reach them?  Do you send out mail?  Work on your website?  Go deep on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Instagram?  Sometimes it seems as if there’s a new way to reach out to people every day.  How do you figure out what will really work for you?

Robin Hood Marketing  Stop. Take a deep breath. Now, read Katya Andresen’s Robin Hood Marketing: Stealing Corporate Savvy to Sell Just Causes.Andresen, until recently the chief operating officer and chief strategy officer of Network for Good, has been a journalist, a marketer, and a nonprofit executive.  She doesn’t let the latest fad distract her.  She gets right to the point.  And the point is that good causes will not sell themselves–we have to use the most effective approaches to market them.Read the book for the “Robin Hood rules” she has robbed from the rich for-profit world and adapted for use by nonprofits.  Chief among those rules are “focus on getting people to do something specific” and “appeal to your audience’s values, not your own.”

Raising awareness is not enough: what action do you want people to take?  And making converts to the cause is too much, at least all in one step.  Get people to do something good for their own reasons (because of how the good action makes them feel about themselves, for instance).  They’ll be more likely to listen to your reasons later.  But even if they don’t, she asks, do you want to change minds or do you want to change the world?Read the book for a guide on how to plan your communications.  Step by step, Andresen shows you how to get to know your audience, your competition for support, and your potential partners, and how to shape your message to make a case that will connect with people and lead them to act.Read the book for excellent tips drawn from case studies and interviews.  Read it in order to ask yourself the right questions. For example:

  • What can we ask people to do that will be “fun, easy, popular, and rewarding”? (for supporters)
  • “Who wins when we win?” (for partners)
  • How can we supply information that is expert, fast, first, accurate, and tells a good story? (for journalists–they are a target audience too!)

I cannot give you a good enough sense of how rich this book is in a review.  It is so chock-full of detailed suggestions and examples that the best summary of the book is reading the book itself.  And it is very well organized, with bullet points up front, highlights marked throughout, and interviews at the end of each chapter.  I read the first edition of the book, originally published in 2006, and it still feels timely and up to date.  That’s what comes of focusing on the relationship between the organization and the audience and not on the constantly changing media.

My one reservation about this book is the same one that’s been coming up in my mind as I read a lot of books about communications, marketing, or psychology lately–even books I really like, such as the Heath brothers’ Switch and Made to Stick, and Beth Kanter and Allison Fine’s The Networked Nonprofit.  These books offer great ideas on how to change an individual’s behavior, or even a lot of individuals’ behavior.  But that is not the same thing as social change.

Social change generally means going up against entrenched structures of power.  Reading these books, you would never imagine that capitalism, racism, sexism, and tightly defined norms around gender affected anybody’s lives.  You would think that getting people to smoke less, use condoms, eat healthier diets, and donate to good organizations would revolutionize the way we live.

Perhaps it’s just that social change is outside the scope of these books.  But the authors market the books as if social change would come from better communications strategies alone.  That’s selling their books too hard.  They are worthwhile to read on their own merits.  People working for just causes need and should take advantage of the savvy that Katya Andresen supplies.

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