We've got ourselves a five alarm fire here, and not a lot of time to do something about it. If you currently have or are thinking of applying for any sort of federal grant funding for the work that you do, this is of utmost importance to you. 

The current administration's Office of Management and Budget has proposed a new set of rules around how federal grants will be handled that have the potential to have tremendously negative impact on Nonprofits, and on your ability to access federal grant funds to do the very important work that you do.

There is an opportunity to push back on these horrible proposed rules, and right now they're only proposed. But the deadline for public comments is July 13th. So fire up the laptop and get your comments going.

I'll walk through the basics of what's going on, why it matters and how it would harm Nonprofits and the people we serve. I'll also hook you up with some links that will help you take immediate action on three  fronts. 

If this is not already on your radar, I want to put it at the top of your to-do list for the coming week.

In this episode, we share:

• How the proposed rules could endanger both current and future grants 
• The types of nonprofits that are especially vulnerable under the proposed rules (hint: it’s a lot of them)
• How the new proposed rules around federal grants connect back to the DOGE debacles of a year ago
• Three quick and powerful actions you can take right now to help block the proposed rules

Take action to oppose the proposed changes by July 13, 2026:   

• Sign NCN's national letter  
• Submit a public comment here using NCN's comment guide which includes talking points, instructions, and more information.  
• Email your member of Congress and urge them to help protect nonprofit grantees and the communities they serve. 

If you want to do the deep dive, see NCN’s chart of key provisions or read the proposed changes in its entirety. 

Whether you love it or hate it, negotiating with decisionmakers is part of the job of a nonprofit leader.  You have to negotiate with funders, contracting partners, policymakers, and more.  Like most things, negotiation is a lot more enjoyable when you get good at it.  The secret of those who love negotiating is they’ve learned the keys to success, and developed the skills to use them well.

But there’s another piece. The reason a lot of folks have trouble with negotiation is not that the skills are so hard to learn. It’s that there tends to be a lot of emotional freight around negotiating. To get great at negotiating, we also have to rewire some of the most common beliefs about negotiation that are getting in our way, and to claim our power in the process.

In today’s episode, we’ll tackle all of that, and show you how you can rapidly improve your negotiation skills and success rate starting today.  

In this episode, we share:

• The two most powerful ingredients for a successful negotiation
• The most common mistake that will rob you of your negotiating power
• The three beliefs that will block your success 
• The most important questions to answer before negotiation begins
• How to make a successful counteroffer
• How to know when to say no to a deal

If you found value in this episode, please share it with other progressive nonprofit leaders.  And I’d be grateful if you would leave a rating and review on Apple podcasts, which will help even more people find out about this podcast.

Thanks!

I hear from so many nonprofit leaders that they struggle to figure out how to go after a particular policy goal, even when they're really clear about what they want. The problem is the path from here to there is not at all clear. 

There’s one piece of advice I give to every client who’s feeling frustrated by this problem. There's really one person you need to have that is going to make your life so much easier. And you want to start by finding that one person.

That’s the person who knows how stuff works. You need someone who understands inside and out the process for changing the specific type of policy you want to change. 

And that's the thing. It's not like there's just one way or one method or one process or one strategy. It depends immensely on the policy arena you're operating in. It depends on who the decisionmakers are that are involved, and what their openness to change and different ideas looks like. It depends on lots and lots of things.

But what never changes is that for any given policy change that you want to try to make, you're always going to be operating in some sort of an existing policy landscape, and some sort of an existing decision-making structure. With people in charge of stuff and people who have vested interests in stuff and all of that. And if you don't know that landscape, you're in a real bind.

The one person you need in all of this is a guide. You need the person who knows that landscape like the back of their hand, and that can take you through it to help you find the best pth to the policy results you want.

In this episode, we reveal:

• Where to find a great guide – even one who doesn’t expect you to pay them
• What a paid guide can do for you, and what they can’t
• How to use AI effectively as part of your strategy development
• Why your greatest champion may not be the best choice for a guide
• The three most important pieces of information you need to give your guide up front, to ensure the best results
• The five most powerful questions you should ask your guide 

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

Nonprofit leaders spend a lot of time selling to one kind of funder or decisionmaker or another just about every day of the week. We spend a lot of time selling, but we don't necessarily talk about it as sales. And I think that's a bit of a mistake.

And here's the thing. When you get into nonprofit leadership, people don't tell you you're going to be a salesperson. They don't tell you that's going to be a big part of the job. Part of what I want to do today is to first of all call out the actual sales work that we are all doing. And then to address what tends to get in the way of a successful sale.

What I've noticed again and again is that there are certain aspects of sales that can be especially problematic and challenging for Nonprofit leaders. We start getting tripped up and finding ourselves in situations with decisionmakers where we are either not getting the sale, or maybe we're getting the sale, but we're not getting the deal we want. They're not investing at the level that we really need them to, and we're settling for something less.

Today I’m uncovering the most common hazards that get in the way of a successful sale.  And to go with them, I’m sharing the four essential sales skills that will let you conquer those hazards. 

In this episode, we share:

• The biggest hazards that can trip you up and tank your sales conversations
• The four essential sales skills that will let you conquer those hazards
• How to make huge asks without fear
• How our money stories are driving our sales conversations, whether we realize it or not
• How to wire in the money stories that will cause sales success
• What to do (and what NOT to do) when a decisionmaker reacts negatively to your price

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

I hear from so many nonprofit leaders who want to establish themselves as thought leaders in their niche.  But the whole process around how you do that tends to be shrouded in mystery.  It’s time to demystify!  There are 7 basic ingredients, and today we break them down and give you a roadmap to becoming a thought leader.

In this episode, we reveal:

• What thought leadership can do for you
• Individual as thought leader vs organization as thought leader – how and when to choose
• How thought leaders think and operate
• The 7 essential ingredients to becoming a thought leader
• One thing you can do today to move closer to becoming a thought leader  

I would love to hear your story of your journey to thought leadership, and how it's going.

You can connect with me on LinkedIn or send me a message at the podcast website. Both are great ways to reach me, and I would love to hear your thoughts. 

Identity is one of those things that we really tend to take for granted. We often don't recognize just how much of an impact it's having on how we show up in all aspects of life.

When we think to ourselves, “I am…” or “I am a…” Whatever follows, however we finish those sentences, is far more important than we often realize. Because they speak to our identity as we see it. 

And our identity drives our perspective, our priorities, and perhaps most importantly, it drives how we show up. 

We tend to think of identities as fixed. They simply are who we are. But it's not so simple after all. The fact is, we can choose which identities we want to operate from. 

The identities we choose to operate from as Nonprofit leaders has a lot of implications for how we show up, and what kind of impact we have, especially in our advocacy work.

In this episode, we share:

• The four essential identities that make the biggest impact on your advocacy success
• Why those identities can often cause discomfort for many Nonprofit leaders
• Commonly occurring identities that will reduce your advocacy 
• How to identify any identities you’re currently operating from that may not be serving you
• How to begin to operate from the identities that will serve you most effectively as an advocate and as an leader 

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

There is no question that voting rights are under extraordinary attack right now in this country. And the people being targeted are pretty much one and the same as the people most of us serve.

This is not entirely new, as we know. There have been attempts for years to systematically erode people's voting rights. And there have been multiple attempts at voter suppression in all kinds of ways. We've watched that unfold across the news and in our own lived experience in many of our states.

But all of that voter suppression agenda, and not just voter suppression, but attacks on the very notion of allowing entire groups of people to have any sort of say in who their elected representatives will be. That level of attack has exploded in the wake of the most recent disastrous Supreme Court decision, dismantling key parts of the Voting Rights Act. 

It would be really tempting to just get super demoralized about all of that and say, this is depressing and overwhelming, and I can't deal. There's nothing we can do. We're toast. 

The only way that’s true is if we don't do anything.

The fact is there is quite a bit we can do. And our clients' votes have never been more important for how their future will be written.

In this episode, we share:

• The two main agendas driving voter suppression and attacks on representation
• Why mid-election redistricting may not work out the way its instigators are hoping
• Three things you can do right now to ensure that every client and volunteer will have their vote counted on Election Day
• How to make sure no one gets tripped up by ID requirements when voting
• The best one-stop resource for all the information you need to help your clients make sure their vote is counted
• How to put together a powerful set of voting resources for clients and volunteers, even when your bandwidth is limited

Link:

Your one-stop resource for all the important voting rules in your state:

Vote411.org

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

Last week, I tackled how to diagnose exactly what's going on when funders say they love you, but they're still not investing at the correct level. In that conversation (Episode 145) we laid some really important groundwork to help you map out exactly where the problem is occurring, how it’s manifesting with each decisionmaker, and what exactly is causing it.

Today, as promised, we'll get into how you fix it.

You won't be surprised to learn that this is almost entirely about messaging. But there's some really interesting quirks about how we adjust that, based on the diagnosis we arrived at when we were analyzing which causes of this problem are at play with any given funder. 

The good news is, we’re focusing on short bits of messaging that are strategically designed to address each of the common causes. With six key sentences, you can build the core of the messaging you’ll need to move those funders toward the high-level investment your work deserves.. 

In this episode, we share:

• Why some funders seem impervious to the information you’ve been sharing with them
• The most common messaging mistake you may be making as you to try to fix the problem
• How to create shorthand concepts that will help funders get the true value of your work
• Four key principles for creating shorthand messaging that sticks 
• How to disrupt the mistaken ideas funders likely have about your work
• The six sentences you need to turn around the misconceptions that are keeping funders from investing in your work at the proper level

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

I want to talk about a problem that is way more common than you might think. The one where funders say they love you, but still under-invest in your work.

Chances are good you know exactly what I’m talking about. You've got these various decisionmakers, and often this is particularly a problem with elected officials. But it cuts across all types of decisionmakers. Whether it's electeds or government agency decisionmakers, foundations, corporate funders, all of them.

They know something about your organization, they have some understanding of the work that you do, and they think it's a wonderful service that's important in the community. And they're really glad you're here. They love you to pieces.

But still, they continue to under-invest in your work. So what the heck is going on? What is up with that?

I’m going to help you get to the bottom of that.

In this episode, we share:

• The four main causes of under-investment when the decisionmaker says they love you
• The messaging strategy you may have been using that’s backfiring and contributing to the problem
• The two-part puzzle we have to solve to begin to fix the problem
• How to identify key patterns that provide the clues to a solution
• How to map those patterns so you can triage the most critical items that need your attention first

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!

We all know that stories are important when we're engaging decisionmakers. But we don't always know what story is going to be the right story. And how to tell that story in a way that is really going to pull that decisionmaker in, and actually move them closer to yes.

So often I hear from Nonprofit leaders who tell me they brought what they thought was their best story to a conversation with a decisionmaker, and it didn't really seem to shift anything. It's not that it didn't land at all, but it didn't seem to get any traction either.

We want every part of our messaging to be designed specifically to pull that decisionmaker in, and move them closer to yes. Your stories are absolutely no exception. In fact, they can be one of the most powerful tools in your toolkit, if you know how to use them to greatest effect.

In this episode, we share:

• The differences between a story that sells, and one that doesn’t
• How to make sure the story you tell is the right one for this particular decisionmaker
• The first thing you must do before you begin crafting a story
• How to use story to teach a needed lesson to a decisionmaker, that they will actually learn
• How to use story to dismantle a decisionmaker’s unhelpful beliefs
• How to create vivid metaphors that stick in the decisionmaker’s mind
• How to build an element of unpredictability into your story that keeps the decisionmaker engaged

Help spread the word! If you found value in this episode, I’d be grateful if you would leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen. Your reviews help other nonprofit leaders find the podcast.  Thanks!!