Fundraising Beyond Size: Secrets for Scaling Nonprofit Impact| James Misner | 644

And welcome, welcome, welcome. This is Peter Winick. I'm the founder and CEO at Thought Leadership Leverage, and you're joining us on the podcast today, which is Leveraging Thought Leadership. My guest today is James Meisner. He's with the Kipos organization and he is a thought leader extraordinaire. So instead of going into sort of a long bio, bio. He's got an interesting niche and an interesting organization that he runs that's got a big basis in thought leadership. So I just wanna talk to him about his story. So what's going on today, James? How are you?

Awesome. Thanks for having me on, Peter. This is great to be here with you. And what's going on? I don't know. A lot's happening in the world right now.

Yeah, a little bit.

A little, a little bit.

Give me the story, if you would, of what it is you do and then the importance and the role of thought leadership to get the word out, to get the message out? Yes, sir. That you want to serve?

Yeah, so we serve exclusively nonprofits. Okay. And we serve small and mid-sized nonprofits. I've been in the nonprofit space, you know, 25 years. And when I chose to leave my 9 to 5 and start the company, there was an idea that, that generated it. And that idea was that in the nonprofit space, bigger wasn't always better. It just meant that you were better funded. And over my 25 years have found that there are really innovative small and midsize organizations that are doing astounding, like world-changing work. And the only reason you and I don't know about 'em is because they don't know how to fundraise and they've not been able to scale. So we scour the nonprofit space to find those really innovative, successful, high-impact, small and midsize organizations, and then teach 'em how to fundraise so they can, you know, create beautiful stuff in this roomy American world you're living in.

In the nonprofit world, and people sometimes don't really understand that all a nonprofit is at the end of the day is a tax status, right? Correct. That's all it is right now. Most of us think of a nonprofit, and I think rightfully so, is they're mission-driven. They're, they're, you know, teaching literacy, feeding the poor, doing all these amazing and wonderful things. And there's so many founders that come up with some amazing, amazing missions and wanna really, really do great stuff. And the, you know, sort of the parallel that I use in, in the business world, in the world of thought leadership, they might stink at marketing and sales, which in the nonprofit world is fundraising, right? No money, no, like, if you don't have, you're not getting in the money in the door, you can't do the thing that you want to be doing. And it's a, you know, it's a critical piece that you talk about. Yeah. Like the big ARPs of the world and the American Red Cross, they probably don't, they've probably cracked the code on that, right?

Cracked the code on it. Hospitals have cracked the code, higher ed has cracked the code, but your, your food pantries, your, you know, your health centers, your, your rural Africa XYZ, fill in the blank, they haven't cracked the code on it yet. And that's what we're here to help them do and help them think differently about it.

So from a thought leadership standpoint, if I were to market a new product or service, one of the strong pieces that you think about is how much value I'm giving for the dollar. How much better am I than the competition? Why am I faster, better, cheaper, quicker? That doesn't totally play in the, in the world of nonprofit, right? So what's the parallel there? What's the thought leadership that if, if I were the founder of a cool smallish nonprofit that I need to be thinking about?

Yeah, so some of the things we put out in the thought leadership space are we really try to identify what their, their real felt pain points are, and then create content and leadership thinking around that. Now, whether if those should be their pain points or not, Peter, that's a completely different question, because some of these guys don't have a lot of business acumen and we need to get them there. But if their pain point is, I don't know how to build a team around this, okay, well, we created a comprehensive guide on that that we push out through all of our channels on how do you build a comprehensive fundraising and marketing team in the nonprofit space. Some of these guys, if you say, hey, what's your ROI against your, your marketing spend right now? ROI what? They have no idea. Because they came up on the program side of things. They've solved something that humans need, but they've not solved for the business. So we, we kind of create content to figure out where their pain points are, whether that's teaming, whether that is how to give a talk, whether that is how to ask a major donor for money. And we create content for that. And then when they start talking to us, we ask some questions that then hopefully in their mind create some more pain points of some of the things they need to be doing. And then we help them by solving those.

Right. And your business model is really a teach 'em to fish model.

Right. Teach 'em to fish. We don't do it for 'em. We teach them how to do it. So they don't need us forever and ever.

Right. So you've gotta help them develop those capabilities at the team level, at the organizational level, et cetera. So let's roll that backwards. What are the pain points you are looking for? 'Cause I understand, you know, I get the market that you're, you're serving. That's clearly and, and, and nicely articulated. At what point do they raise their hand and go, oh, James, we need to talk?

Yeah. So right now this is actually quite easy for us. So 60% of nonprofit funding comes from the federal government. Okay. So I don't want to get political on your podcast, Peter, but a lot of that money disappeared the past few months. So right now the pain point is we don't know if we're going to make it to the end of 2025. We need help with our rapid response crisis communication plan. So this is an era for at least our company where if you're not— in my industry, if you're not growing right now, There's something wrong with you, uh, because so many people need the help.

Let me ask the question differently, right? If you weren't selling snow shovels during a blizzard, if there wasn't a Blizzard app, how would you sell your snow shovels?

Yeah, how would I sell my snow shovels? I would create a really, really refined, small, really specific customer profile, ideal client profile. Yeah, I would make it almost restrictively small, which a lot of people say, why would you do that? Why would you limit yourself? But I would create thought leadership content just for them, for my persona that I create and target the heck out of it. Okay. Everything for them.

But I love that answer because oftentimes the answer we get from all sorts of thought leaders is go big or go home. And the reality is there might be 30 people, and I'm just making up a number, 30 people in the world. That if you really resonated with them vis-à-vis the thought leadership, it could be a game changer for your business. So before you worry about 30 million, you know, yep, that's right. 100 million or 3 billion or whatever, 3,000. Can you identify 30 people, 50 people, a relatively small number of folks that have, could have impact, could have leverage, could change the game for you? And I love that, that way of thinking, 'cause it forces you to get really, really specific about why they won't. Say yes or why they might not be interested or that you're, they're comp— you're competing with other initiatives or time or money or whatever. So I, I like that way of thinking. If you're enjoying this episode of Leveraging Thought Leadership, please make sure to subscribe. If you'd like to help spread the word about our podcast, please leave a 5-star review at ratethispodcast.com. /ltl and share it with your friends. We're available on Apple Podcasts and on all major listening apps, as well as at thoughtleadershipleverage.com/podcast. What about sort of community? Because I would imagine in your world, putting together a community of your clients, founders of nonprofits that are struggling or, or trying to figure it out. Might be of value to others like them?

Yeah, so we haven't done that as a company yet, but I was invited into somebody else's forum 2 weeks ago. Okay. It was 30 CEOs of relief and development organizations, uh, that ran the gamut from under a million to, you know, $2 billion in revenue. Okay. And it was for CEOs only. None of the other staff were allowed there. And the organization curated 6, what they called partners, AKA vendors, to show up. In different areas, and they surveyed these CEOs in advance, and then they put us into small groups. And our, our goal was each CEO was allowed to bring one problem to the conference.

Right.

And then we, then we helped to fix it for them and create them a game plan in real time. And a lot of other consultants that I work with would say, heck no, that's free advice. I'm not doing it. Do you know how many calls I have coming out of that? 2 and a half days where I just gave everything away for free. I have more calls than my assistant can handle right now.

Well, so stay there a minute because I, I think that lots of consultancies and organizations that their core asset is their IP have this silly mindset of don't give anything away. So you were just incredibly generous for 2 and a half days. You helped a whole bunch of people. You didn't hide your good stuff, right? You didn't say, well, let me give 'em a, I'll give 'em an okay idea. When they pay me, I'll give 'em a really good one. Like I, Assumed you put your best thinking towards it, and that leads to more and more and more. And I think that's really important because there are situations where you're gonna give certain things away for free. There are situations where you're gonna charge for it, and there are situations where you might charge less than you might like to or need to or want to. But I love, I love that mindset of being sort of generous with giving away the thought leadership.

I mean, part of it's just who I am as a person. Like if I, if I have a thought and it could help somebody, I actually don't know how to keep that inside. It could be a strength and a weakness at the same time. The other is, you know, we live in a world full of problems and suffering and brokenness. And okay, let's, let's help each other out. I forget, I think it was a Peter Drucker quote that, you know, uh, all you need to do what to do to get what you want in the world is help other people get what they want in the world. And I tend to, I tend to try to live by that.

That's great. That's great. And then oftentimes people don't understand when you, when you sort of give away the ideas and the principles, maybe in a talk you're gonna give away your 5 best things. Some folks have the mindset of saying, well, he gave it away, so why, you know, why would they pay me for it? Well, there's a difference in saying, okay, hey, I saw you speak, James, and that really resonated with me. Let's talk about bringing you into my company and Developing, implementing, and executing. Same ideas, same principles, right? But then you say, well, why would they pay you for that? They're gonna pay you 'cause most people don't follow through and do the things and want the expertise. And you know, it's a forcing mechanism.

Yeah. Change management is one of the hardest things that any leader does, right? Humans, especially the older we get, we do not like to change. And if you're leading an institution, great ideas are wonderful. Getting your staff to, to do the great ideas is a completely different thing. And sometimes you just need a really direct, honest person to get in there and be greased at the elbows. And that's kind of what I found works is you give them the great ideas and the content in whatever format they like best, then they're gonna need your help to implement it. So just be ready, you know, when they call, give it away and then be ready to help them actually do it. Thank you.

Let's talk about sort of modality format. So this might get a little wonky, but I think that Oftentimes different thought leaders have different ways of getting things out there that they prefer, right? If you're an academic, you're gonna prefer research. If you are someone that's more visual, might be graphics. What are the modalities that you play in and why?

That's a great question. I think the most visible modality I play in is probably LinkedIn. I post stuff there every single day and it's not cheesy or the what, Well, you, you could post a video, you could post an article.

Like, what is it? Short form blog?

How short? It's short form, probably 250 to 400 words. Here's a problem that I see. Here's how I would solve it.

Have you done video?

I have done video on LinkedIn, but I have found that since most people are doing it on their phones, even when you add the captions to it, you get much higher response rate when it's just plain text.

On LinkedIn, I think it depends how you define response rate, but it would be an interesting experiment here. We'll give away some thought leadership. We'll eat our own dog food here, right? If you were to go through your, your post and say, here's the 5 most popular, the ones that have resonated the most with people, and repurpose them, same, same exact stuff into video and repost them and see if it gets a similar response, different people, different ways. You know, don't do it the day after, but You, my point is, you know, the ideas that resonated in a format, put that in another format to sort of A/B test it a couple weeks, couple months apart. And I'd love to hear the outcome of that. Now, the outcome could be that did nothing, Peter, stupid idea. Okay. But it would be, I think it's an interesting A/B test.

I'm always a fan for experimentation. So we already know what our best performing posts were in 2024. It's not going to cost me anything to make 3 or 4 videos. That are 2 minutes long. So, hey, I'll do it. I'll let you know how it goes.

Great. So, well, actually, as, as we start to wrap up, what would you suggest to someone that's where you were 2, 3 years ago, earlier in the journey? What are the things that you've learned that you can maybe shorten the learning cycle for the next little pay it forward?

Stop waiting for it to be perfect.

So ship it.

Yeah. You, you're, you're just, just get it out there, get it out there into the world and see how people respond. Somebody somewhere's gonna like it. Okay. Learn from that. I think I waited too long, uh, to start writing articles and speaking and all of that, 'cause I wanted everything to be 100%. 90% today is probably better than 100% never.

Well, well, let me unpack perfect, 'cause I think there's two, two different ways I, I hear that. One is, okay, here's the piece I'm gonna write about X, and I just keep polishing and polishing and polishing and polishing and polishing it. Until it's perfect, which is kind of an excuse to hit send. And then the other is, I got a new idea. I don't know, maybe it stinks. Maybe like people are gonna think this is terrible. Right? Mm-hmm. So you're waiting to make something that, that is unknown known. Which, which one are you referring to?

I'm talking to the former one where it's just your excuse. You wanna make it 2% better. When it's a new idea, I probably would test little chunks of it at a time and, you know, smaller audiences and putting it out, you know, on the whole internet for the world to see.

Right, right. I think people overthink, like, okay, if you put something out and it's not so great, 5 years later when somebody meets you at a conference, they're gonna say, oh, James, you're the idiot that wrote that post in January of 2022, right? That's not gonna happen, right? It's gonna, like, I don't even remember what I read yesterday half the time, right? But if it has the makings of something that could be bigger, you're not doing it any service by keeping it on your hard drive, right? Ultimately, you gotta have the courage to hit send and the market, your market will tell you that resonates, that doesn't. And then the trick is what do you learn from that? Right? And what do you do with that?

With our clients, we're often encouraging the CEOs we work with to put out thought leadership into the world about their issue. They're often so concerned about how people will view them as individuals. There's a deep pride, right? When we put something out into the world. That it actually underserves their organization. They have these great thoughts, but they never hit post, never hit publish, never accept the podcast spot or the speaking gig because they're so afraid of how they'll look. And we work with them a lot on that to get rid of that, that fear and anxiety around self-perception.

Yeah, I mean, I think the one way to help them get over that potentially is to say, well, if your mission in this world is to shepherd these ideas out to help the people you're trying to help, get over yourself, right? Like, that's part of your purpose for being here is to get that stuff out there. And yeah, occasionally you put something out that you're not thrilled with, not proud of, isn't your best work, whatever. Who cares? We all do it, right? Like, not everybody's— every day at work is not your best day at work. Well, this has been a lot of fun, James. I really appreciate it. And I want to thank you for sharing your journey and your story with us.

Welcome. Thanks so much, Peter.

To learn more about Thought Leadership Leverage, please visit our website at thoughtleadershipleverage.com. To reach me directly, feel free to email me at peter@thoughtleadershipleverage.com. And please subscribe to Leveraging Thought Leadership on iTunes or your favorite podcast app to get your weekly episode automatically.