How to Market Your Nonprofit

Education Through Music teaches music to about 20,000 kids a week in New York City public schools. That work caught the eye of Taylor Swift. Swift's publicist called ETM with a $2 million gift. ETM hadn't applied for it or asked for it.  In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, ETM CEO Janice Weinman tells Lee Wochner about the moment the money arrived the next day. The office was "screaming and hugging and carrying on."  It wasn’t luck. Long before the call, ETM built the right relationships. Janice traces the gift back to a contact at a community foundation who knew ETM's work and a board member with ties to Swift's record label. Neither one was a fundraising ask. Both were people who could speak up for ETM when it counted.  Who in your circle could do that for you? You don't need an international superstar to make this work. Janice shares the everyday habits that make ETM the kind of nonprofit people speak up for, from bringing donors into classrooms to turning artists into ambassadors. Things you can do too. 

Last episode, we made the case that most nonprofit organizations could get better marketing results by subtracting and focusing: fewer channels, fewer tools, fewer asks.But what about you personally? How could you get more done by doing less? What we find over and over is this: Most nonprofit leaders don't need to work harder, but they do need to stop spending their best hours on the wrong things.Recently, two different executive directors confided in Lee that they're stuck. Both run organizations that do life-changing work, and they do it well. But both leaders have spent more than 10 years caught up in tasks instead of goals, and both said the same thing, unprompted: We could be doing so much more if we could get out of this rut.Lee knows the pattern because he's lived it. Twenty-five years ago he sat on 13 boards, panels, committees, and commissions at the same time. Thirteen. He now caps it at three organizations, and says he makes a bigger difference on all three.In this episode, Lee shares five signs you're doing too much, and what to do instead. Doing less isn't doing nothing. It's refusing to spend your best hours on work that doesn't require you.

Most nonprofit marketing advice adds to your list. More social posts, more email, more video, more tools, more data. In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, Counterintuity's Lee Wochner argues the opposite: If your marketing results aren't adding up, the fix may be subtraction. Drawing on decades of running nonprofits, serving on boards, and working with hundreds of organizations, Lee walks through eight signs your team is doing too much, and what to do instead. Fewer tools. Fewer metrics. Fewer choices on your website. Fewer asks, made better. Deeper relationships with the donors you already have, instead of an endless chase for new ones. Doing less is not doing nothing. It’s focusing on what your team and your budget can deliver successfully. 

Picture a small arts nonprofit. Somebody calls and wants to give $500 a month. A staffer writes down the card number, drops it into a spreadsheet, and next month a colleague pulls it up and runs the charge again. That's four things that would make Lauren Wu wince. Host Lee Wochner and privacy and compliance attorney Lauren Wu cover what to do instead: where donor data should live, what should never go into an AI chatbot, and the three things any nonprofit can do this week to protect the data it’s entrusted to hold. Lauren's advice is clear and doable, even for organizations that are already stretched thin. 

Most nonprofit leaders assume they know where their donors come from, which marketing channels are working, and what's standing in the way of growth. Some of these assumptions are right. But wrong assumptions can lead you down the wrong path, with your team optimizing the wrong things. This is part two of Lee Wochner's walkthrough of the discovery questionnaire that Counterintuity uses with nonprofit clients. This episode covers current challenges and friction points, marketing infrastructure and data, and how to define what winning actually looks like. One of the most useful questions Lee helps you answer is what single thing is preventing your organization from doubling its impact in the next 12 months? Not growing 10 percent. Doubling. Incremental targets produce incremental answers. Doubling forces you to name the real constraint. If you've ever relaunched a marketing tactic that didn't work the first time, aren't sure which of your channels is actually driving results, or think you might need to remap your donor journey from first contact to first gift, this episode is for you.