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Allen Thornburgh: Why Smart Organizations Stop Growing
38 Plays1 month ago
In this episode, Eric talks with Allen Thornburgh, a longtime marketing and fundraising leader who works with purpose-driven organizations to help them create experiences people actually care about.
Allen shares why so many organizations plateau despite doing everything “right,” and how over-reliance on data can quietly suffocate imagination. Drawing on his work across Fortune 500 companies, faith-based nonprofits, and global humanitarian organizations, he explains why growth stalls when leaders treat people as data points instead of human beings with inner lives, stories, and desires.
At the center of the conversation is imagination. Not as a buzzword, but as a practical leadership capacity. Allen describes how transformational work happens when organizations stop optimizing yesterday’s tactics and start designing meaningful experiences that reconnect people emotionally to a cause, mission, or brand.
They explore why direct response and digital marketing are necessary but insufficient, how organizations can fall back in love with their audiences by actually listening to them, and why creating moments of connection matters more than incremental optimization. Allen also walks through his human-centered process for sourcing insight, co-creating with audiences, and building initiatives that evolve over time rather than burn out after a single launch.
This is a grounded, experience-driven conversation for nonprofit leaders, marketers, founders, and executives who sense that growth problems are rarely technical and almost always human.
Topics Covered
- Why imagination matters more than optimization
- How data-driven thinking can unintentionally limit growth
- The difference between treating people as audiences versus participants
- Why most organizations underestimate the power of experience
- Falling in love with your donors, customers, or supporters again
- How to design initiatives that grow over time instead of stalling
- The role of storytelling, fiction, and imagination in leadership
- Why meaningful connection outlasts clever tactics
Episode Links
- Connect with Allen on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/allen-thornburgh/
- Allen’s Illumination Community: https://makehistoric.com/community/
For more episodes: https://unfoldingthought.com
Questions or guest ideas: eric@inboundandagile.com
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Transcript
Introduction and Background
00:00:02
Speaker
Alan, thank you for joining me. Where does today's recording find you? Today, i am down in my glorious basement office in the mighty Commonwealth of Virginia, first among states.
00:00:14
Speaker
I'm afraid this is the part where right out of the gate, I reveal that I'm a state snob and love Virginia like crazy. So here I am. Would you mind telling me a bit about yourself? Yeah, well, I've been in marketing and fundraising and you know sales for 25 years, um from Fortune 500 to nonprofits to agencies.
Career Ethos and Philosophy
00:00:36
Speaker
And what I describe myself as being is a leader of imaginative enterprise. And what I mean by... imaginative M-Prize is this, is that M-Prize is this really great medieval word that we don't use anymore.
00:00:54
Speaker
And what it means is like a really difficult challenge, like this immense worthy challenge that's going to take everything you've got, but it matters. This very chivalric idea. And I just love that it it is certainly conveys, captures what I believe I'm called to do and what ah leaders and organizations like to work with me on are things that feel that momentous and like they matter that much and that take going to take some daring but they're also going to take some real smart processes i'm curious about when you talk about m prize if you do you set it in opposition to some other prize like enterprise for example
00:01:39
Speaker
ah I don't know. I think enterprise, whatever its original and and clear and true meaning is, we have sort of taken that to mean any organization or any need doing or something. it's not It doesn't seem to me to have this sense of this is going to take everything I've got like Prize does. Like M. Prize in the medieval period, like say you know thirteenth century, 14th century,
00:02:08
Speaker
would have been used to describe the building of a cathedral. So if you've ever been to Notre Dame, um right, it's this thing that took a hundred years to build. The people who started it knew that they weren't going to see it finished. They weren't going to see it anywhere close to finished.
00:02:23
Speaker
um But yet it was so worthy of an effort that that they gave it all that they had and that they and then their successors came along and saw it through. That's the kind of thing that i'm that I'm talking about. Now, no one happens to want to bring me in to help them with cathedrals, oddly enough, but what are the things that matter that much to them for their cause and for their mission?
00:02:49
Speaker
It's interesting when I talk to people, you know, because of the podcast, people from different backgrounds and all of that, how often certain things come up and maybe it's because of mentioning cathedrals, but the One person that I talked to came to mind, this woman, Jess Deaver, who is an architect, but also a sci-fi writer and a teacher.
00:03:16
Speaker
And forget which episode that was. It was early on, though, probably episode 15 or something. And I saw her present on at an architecture conference on the architecture of sci-fi and how architects because in a way you're sort of building the future. You know, you set something in stone, pardon the pun, that will last for hundred years. And now with, if you do architecture for like a university or something, apparently the planning is that this library or this stadium or whatever it is, is only going to last 25 years or something.
00:03:58
Speaker
Whereas i would think if you're going to spend couple million dollars at least on some large building that you would be thinking it's going to last longer than that and okay so maybe it's great we can build things that are cheaper faster whatever but also thinking about you know alan the work that you or i are doing today in in our jobs is there some grander, higher value importance to our work, something that will outlast us? And then, you know, maybe it's a little bit more obvious, but we can go outside of our work, quote unquote. You could talk about your family, right? Like, is there some sort of legacy or how do you impact the future? And so as you're talking about some of this,
00:04:46
Speaker
It's just interesting how it comes up when ah across different conversations, when on the surface of it, you might not necessarily think that talking to you and then talking to an architect would bring up some of these same themes or thinking.
00:05:02
Speaker
Well, I kind of feel honored that it does because I have a certain awe for architecture. You're building something that human beings are going to live, walk through, work in, play in. And it matters a lot. Like, you know, even just simple safety things, right? This this is where people live and and life happens for them. And it matters. Yeah.
00:05:25
Speaker
Similarly, i do hope that that my work has that same kind of
Challenges and Innovation in Nonprofits
00:05:30
Speaker
value. Certainly the organizations that I tend to get to work with are organizations that are doing truly vital ah work in the world that that matters you know around the globe, here in the U.S., that matters a lot, that matters for human flourishing, ah that matters to provide relief to people.
00:05:48
Speaker
And so it's a true honor to be able to help them take bigger swings that ultimately is going to result in more people participating from a funding or volunteering or advocacy perspective and then end up in more people being helped.
00:06:05
Speaker
When you talked about the types of work that you've done or maybe the types of organizations that you've worked with, worked with you mentioned for-profit, nonprofit. i think you might have said Fortune 500 something of that nature.
00:06:21
Speaker
Is there either throughout your career, do you feel like there is a specialty or vertical or something that shows up? Or even maybe in the last five to 10 years, have you drifted towards one type of organization or another?
00:06:40
Speaker
Oh, sure. So I spent 10 years. so I did the whole corporate America thing after I got my MBA, which I i enjoyed. It was smart. And I loved it. Well-resourced, right?
00:06:52
Speaker
But ultimately, when I found out that prison fellowship had an opportunity that, gosh, just fit my skill set, I jumped on that and ended up working with at Prison Fellowship for 10 years, which were just a ah great 10 years. And I really fell in love with this sector, the nonprofit sector. I happen because I've worked with ah with a faith-based nonprofit.
00:07:14
Speaker
I know a lot of faith-based nonprofit leaders, and I'm a Christian myself. I do end up working with a lot of faith-based nonprofits, though not exclusively. ah There's just a lot of great purpose-driven organizations out there that are doing good work.
00:07:27
Speaker
And that's where i tend to to find the best synergy, the best connection between a client and me. You said the word imaginative earlier when I asked you to tell me about yourself.
00:07:41
Speaker
And having worked with a lot of nonprofits, i understand that it's not as simple as the generalization that a lot of people have about nonprofits have no money or they have a limited set of things that they can do or even Having done a lot of direct response work like I have done with nonprofits, it's easy to think that, oh, it's all just, you know, dollars and cents. Like I'm going to spend a dollar. I better get a dollar 50 back or whatever.
00:08:14
Speaker
I say all of that. And yet i think that for profit or nonprofit, it's very easy for CEOs or even their service providers to talk a big game about vision or imagination.
00:08:32
Speaker
And then for that not to be realized, you know, whether you want to talk about some sort of skunk works type testing or who knows what.
00:08:43
Speaker
So As you've worked with clients and you have focused around vision or imagination or however you might characterize it whether it's in nonprofit or any other clients, are there common challenges that you run into?
00:09:03
Speaker
Or do you find that the only people that work with you are the people who are willing to actually do the work to, you know, try try to build some sort of new world or new vision?
00:09:15
Speaker
There's some of that, of course. I mean, there's something of a self-selection. But it is very common for me to have heard over the last 10 years of working in agencies, someone say something like, you gosh, I wish that we could do something like Charity Waters, the spring sustainer program.
00:09:35
Speaker
Or gosh, I wish we could do something like the He Gets Us campaign. Or, oh man, I just so wish that like I could create something like the World Vision Chosen experience.
00:09:47
Speaker
And my answer to that is, you can and you should. like That's the job, right? We tell ourselves way too often this thing. I've so i've said it before, so i i'm I'm among the people who've done it, which is to say, let's not reinvent the wheel.
00:10:05
Speaker
Reinventing the wheel is the job, right? It's like no one wants the medieval cart, wooden cart wheel on their car, right? We're constantly reinventing the wheel. That's what you do.
00:10:16
Speaker
And that's what we need to be doing in our space. But people get nervous about it. Like you just said, there's an accountability. I spend this much and I know in advance I'm going to get this much back.
00:10:27
Speaker
A lot of that in in my particular sector with faith-based nonprofits can come in from this idea of stewardship. And even secular nonprofits sometimes use that kind of language and think about that the same way.
00:10:38
Speaker
This is about being good stewards of the money. I'm all for that. And that's a good thing. What's interesting is that even on their own terms, like if you were to say, what's the parable of the talents that these people are referring to when they talk about stewardship? It's the person who was really careful who is kind of condemned in that parable or who's pointed out as being an error.
00:11:01
Speaker
the The reality is that it's bad stewardship, ultimately, if what we say is we can only spend money on things where we already know the results.
Beyond Data: Human Connection
00:11:13
Speaker
Because ultimately, what that's going to lead me to do, and we can talk about the over-reliance on data and stuff at at some point if you want, but what that ends up with is, I'm just doing the same thing over and over and over again and making little tweaks and changes that I think matter a lot, but actually the audience doesn't notice.
00:11:34
Speaker
And the audience ends up being disenchanted, and then you've got to find the way to re-enchant them. When I see you posting on I think you just posted today, maybe about something or other with Charity Water.
00:11:48
Speaker
And, you know, as they I think they have some sort of experience that they provide for people or sort of bring their work to life. While a lot of people talk about being audience driven.
00:12:00
Speaker
It seems to me like you're trying to develop an experience and you're trying to develop a connection to between an organization or an effort and what really matters to that audience member.
00:12:13
Speaker
So I'm wondering with all of that preamble, What does it look like when we really understand our audience and we execute upon that?
00:12:25
Speaker
And what do many people tend to miss when they say they're audience driven, but you find it's just not there? Well, let's start with Tom Pratt.
00:12:37
Speaker
So Tom Pratt was the number two at Herman Miller. So famous design firm, right? Nobody knows the name of business furniture products, except everybody knows the Aeron chair, right? Because Herman Miller created that.
00:12:53
Speaker
So Tom Pratt came in as ah interim CEO while I was at Prison Fellowship. And he came in at this moment where I had come into Prison Fellowship, you know, young gun, knows everything.
00:13:08
Speaker
um You know, i've I've got data for everything. We're going to use data-driven techniques that I've learned in the Fortune 500 world really grow. um to to really grow And it's great.
00:13:20
Speaker
We do grow. we We grow and then we stop growing. So there's this moment of plateau where it's like, well, it's more than a moment. It's a plateau, which means it keeps going.
00:13:31
Speaker
And I'm throwing like, techniques that you'd use in the $10 billion dollars um consumer electronics retailer that I was working for at the time. Like, techniques we were using there, I'm using in a $50 million dollars nonprofit because I'm trying desperately to figure out why can't I make this thing grow.
00:13:50
Speaker
And that had been going on for probably 18 months ah when Tom Pratt arrived. um and took me under his wing. Now, I want to be really clear about what being taken under Tom's wing looked like.
00:14:02
Speaker
It was like this. I came to him on all this stress, and I'm showing him on my spreadsheets and all the analyses that I've done and the quantitative research that I've commissioned, and I'm laying this all in front of him, and he looks at this and just has this deep sigh, and he's like, Alan, when I was at Herman Miller, we never hired guys like you.
00:14:22
Speaker
And so it's just like, wait, what? this is This is the encouragement? Tom. But what he was ultimately getting at, and we had multiple rounds of this before I really got it,
00:14:33
Speaker
what he was really getting at. And he even articulated it this way at one point, a different meeting. He said, Alan, I'm trying to free you. And oh my gosh, Eric, that just went like right to my soul. And and it was it's this because I wanted to take big swings. Like I knew, just like the people that are the leaders that I talked to today, right? That are like, i i want to I want to do something like Charity Water this spring. I want to do something like He Gets Us. Like these things that are good and worthy. Right.
00:15:00
Speaker
But all my data-driven techniques couldn't help me do that. Like there was nothing that told me how to take a big swing. Data is always from the past. So data-driven techniques, and let me be clear, they're good and valuable. Like if you're not doing good data-driven marketing, good data-driven fundraising in the nonprofit, you're then fix that because you should be like, that's, you need that part of the portfolio. That's smart. That's the bottom of the the funnel, right? That's the, those are the things that we can measure and optimize and that should perform well for us.
00:15:32
Speaker
But my goodness, um, you know, we also have to, to understand that it's people, it's human beings that are going through the funnel. We think of it like this machine. And Tom's point was, Alan, you, you're just turning all these dials.
00:15:48
Speaker
You're treating people like data when they're much more than data. And all you're doing is doing stuff you've already done in a slightly different way, and they're bored. They might not consciously realize they're bored. They're still going to think about what we do as a good thing. But when something more exciting comes along from somebody else, they turn their attention to that.
00:16:08
Speaker
And he was spot on. And I've been working on that problem since then, you know, throughout my career. at the risk of bringing in something that might seem way out of left field, it feels to me like this is related to, was it Stalin that had the quote that, you know, an individual is a tragedy, but a million or whatever is a statistic.
00:16:32
Speaker
And it is, the way that this seems related to me that that we very rarely can we really speak to the individual audience members unique position or whatever i mean if you were talking about major donors or something then there's something to that there and a big game has been talked about hyper targeting and personalization and all of that in digital marketing for
00:17:03
Speaker
20-ish years, if not more. if we go back in direct mail, then you know you might be able to go back 100 years. But the this feels, or that came to mind because
00:17:19
Speaker
it sounds to me like, I suppose, what you have come to believe or what you've executed upon since then is you know, not commoditizing what you're offering or not setting it in stone such that we think what we do is this thing. And it's a very clear cut category when maybe the, I suppose, following jobs theory, sort of, the need that we serve needs to be evergreen.
00:17:52
Speaker
You know, if you if you're a bottled water company, then your time will pass. But if you're a hydration company, that will last as long as human beings last. And it sounds to me like some of that is getting down to that individual cares about something. They don't care so much about, you know, ah ah a certain percentage of their dollar going to programs and services.
00:18:17
Speaker
Yeah, that's interesting. so like So thinking about the niche that I am in, right, which is purpose-driven nonprofit organizations that are trying to attract donors. Yes, other type of people too, but let's stick with donors because it's a little bit simpler.
00:18:31
Speaker
What is it that they really have to offer donors, prospective donors? What they have to offer those people is a great experience. That's all they've got. It's other people who are being helped, right? It's not the donor isn't giving money to them because something is tangible or um clear-cut and desired is going to come back to them.
00:18:58
Speaker
They're doing it as an act of generosity. The experience that they get they have with you It's either going to be like just like everybody else's experience, or it's going to be an experience that is awesome and that they can't get anywhere else.
00:19:15
Speaker
And that's going to be what makes them come back to you over and over again. You can't discover that experience unless you actually do care to get down to the individual level and care about the people in the audience.
00:19:25
Speaker
And we can talk about that at some point in this conversation if you'd like.
Imagination and Innovation
00:19:29
Speaker
So how do you think about or how do you walk your clients through shifting from extracting, you know, support like that you direct response sort of thing to building that connection or building? i don't know if you said this exactly, but i I feel like building a movement or building a community, a sense of belonging.
00:19:53
Speaker
Well, I think it starts with back to experience, right? It's kind of like what they know is how to use data to get people to respond to offers.
00:20:07
Speaker
That's what they know. And that's good. That's what they should do. But what they love about it is that there's a process. There's a process. It involves data analysis. And then it involves setting up the A-B split test that I'm going to run, right?
00:20:23
Speaker
And then it involves making sure the creative is right. And then putting it in the market with, you know, true randomization so that when the results come back, I can know which one truly won.
00:20:34
Speaker
And then it measures statistical significance, you know, and and you rinse and repeat, right? And just ongoing, continued learning. And that's a process that they get that they that gives them confidence.
00:20:48
Speaker
what I find is they desperately want to take these big swings. They want to create remarkable experiences for their audience members. They know that that matters in the end. And, you know, again, we something else we could talk about is kind of like, what are the classic adjacencies? Because that's the kind of innovation where the real growth is. And they get that. They understand these adjacency strategies are ways that they can grow, but they don't know how to do it because there aren't...
00:21:15
Speaker
agencies and practices that are coming to them showing them how to do it the agencies and practices that are out there are in one of two things they're either in a direct response which you've already touched on or in digital which is subset of that or it's brand and both of these are great every organization should care about both of those and and have those but what they don't have is someone coming to them going hey, I got a process for how you can create an awesome experience.
00:21:43
Speaker
And that's the thing that I've spent the last 10 years building and working on, which is a, I call it human-centered everything. And it's always very tempting to to nerd out on that, but i will I will restrain myself at the moment. But there is this process, this four-stage process, where at the end, what the CEO or CDO or CMO knows is, oh, I see, the audience members' fingerprints are all over this.
00:22:08
Speaker
And actually my team and I got to be a part of the process in a co-creative way. So we actually saw it happen. We saw how these audience members were brought in as whole people and how we've adjusted to the inputs that we've gotten from them.
00:22:22
Speaker
And so that when we go into market with those data-driven strategies, by the way, you know, that's how that we bring it to market, then i already know it's probably going to work. Is it wrong of me to think that...
00:22:37
Speaker
of the people who, if clients or individuals or whatever it is, you know, that you might work with. I'm not asking about your specific clients as much as, you know, this larger set of people that have decision-making authority, have budgets, whatever.
00:22:55
Speaker
of all of the people who are actually willing to try something new, to develop an experience, build community, sense of belonging, any number of things that you know would have some large Venn diagram overlap and show up in a number of programs that you might work on, that a decent portion of those people
00:23:18
Speaker
lose interest after they, you know, do one project and, or they spend one year on it or they move on to the next organization. And now, you know, so the new leadership takes over.
00:23:30
Speaker
And so where a lot of projects, again, I'm not asking you to talk about clients as much as just generally where a lot of projects might be innovative or, you know,
00:23:45
Speaker
more creative let's say just to put it very generally that they lose steam or they don't turn into a real program or they don't really change the brand because focus shifts me being the client and I think of it as a one-time engagement whereas i think I assume that what has to come next after I work with you, for example, Alan, is, okay, we did the thing.
00:24:16
Speaker
We had a really great experience. we we We did a workshop with some donors and we developed some ideas and then we even rolled it out and it went awesome. But next, you have to kind of keep doing things along those lines so that it it's changing, so that it's a living thing.
00:24:34
Speaker
And so is it wrong of me to think that there's a large number of people who are interested, but not in a big picture vision sort of way, more like they're passionate for a time and their passion wanes.
Engaging Audiences as Individuals
00:24:48
Speaker
clearly you've been in the space a while, Eric, you know, what's what, uh, that's a very smart question. And you anticipate some things that I've had to learn along the way.
00:24:59
Speaker
But two things I think that that have helped keep um organizations wanting to to work with me and and working with my colleagues is this. that um First of all, there's just something awesome about encountering your audience members as people. Like you said this earlier, right? You said, well, yeah, you know your major donors, but you can't really get to know your mass donors in the same way.
00:25:24
Speaker
Really? Is that really true? I certainly used to think it was. And this was one of the things that came from meeting with Tom. was Tom really challenged me, like, do you know these people as people? you know as people And me being 30 something, whatever, i'm like, well, why would I talk to them? Like, why would I get to know them? Because I have data, Tom. Like, I've got data.
00:25:46
Speaker
But the reality is that so much, back to imagination, data tells you nothing about what's going on in their imagination. Nothing. And what's going on in their imagination is absolutely vital. And the the way part of the way to get to know what's going on in their imagination, what might change the image that they have in their mind about your cause that would make them engage in a fresh way that they're currently not engaging in,
00:26:11
Speaker
You have to get to know them as people. There's this great line from C.S. Lewis in the the third book of the Ransom trilogy um called That Hideous Strength, where he has Professor Hengist clearly channeling Lewis himself, says to the sociologist, says, you want to study men.
00:26:33
Speaker
I happen to believe you can't study men. You can only get to know them. And that's a completely different thing. And it is a completely different thing. And if you want to create something remarkable, then you get to know your audience members as people.
00:26:47
Speaker
That's what we do. we you know We have a certain minimum number of people that we've got to bring into this process at the outset, to help inform concepts, in the middle to react to our paper prototypes, the you know the concepts brought to life in a way, and then near the end with the, they've got to go through the live the through the live experience before we press go to make sure that we haven't missed something. And by the way, we nearly always have because we've all gotten so close to it.
00:27:15
Speaker
That process ah is vital four this for these kinds of projects working, and people love it. Just like me, I had 250,000 active donors, Eric, when I was at Prison Fellowship.
00:27:28
Speaker
And when Tom asked me if I've talked to any... no you know no i have it and when i talk to people now who are in the same position i was in back then you know leading marketing leading uh direct response fundraising and i ask that question they all say no and i don't blame them i didn't either but they love it when they get to do it and you just fall in love with your audience members and i could I could go on a tear about that, which i I'll restrain myself. But like these people are awesome.
00:28:03
Speaker
And when you get to know them, like not the polished ones, the polished major donors that you're going to meet at the event, but the hoi polloi, you know, run of the mill person making just, a you know, maybe not that much over the median household income, but who's just really generous. Like that's the best. It's so good.
00:28:22
Speaker
It's so good. And they're lovely people. So falling in love with your audience, which you do in this process, people kind of go like, I want more of that. So that's one thing that kind of keeps on coming back.
00:28:33
Speaker
The other thing is that because it's very important to, um you know, to run lean, to run agile and to get in market and and and not wait until you've put everything together,
00:28:48
Speaker
um One of the things that we have as one of our principles in the work that we do with experience development is, um okay, we're going to we're going to launch with the minimum lovable product.
00:29:00
Speaker
ah sorry minimum we're going to launch with the minimum lovable product Meaning this is the thing that we can create now. We can create some fresh new assets, but we've already got the story. We've already we've already got the the the basic content. or We've already got the the tech stack to support this kind of a launch. But we're when we choose the concept that we're ultimately going to create, we always pick what we can what we what is so big that it takes us 18 months to build.
00:29:29
Speaker
So we go into market with that minimum lovable product, but we know we're looking out 18 months out and going, but that's the thing that we really need to build because that's the game changer. This is just a good baby step in that direction, but that's the game changer.
00:29:44
Speaker
That's what we're going for. So I'd say those two things help to keep clients involved. And also a third thing would be, i just happen to have the most stinking awesome clients ever. I mean, that's just the reality is that I've got lovely, lovely people that I get to work with.
00:30:00
Speaker
When you talk about getting to know the donors or if, you know, you were selling some sort of product or service in the for-profit space, then, you know, we could say clients or customers or whatever.
00:30:15
Speaker
Is that an answer to, or one of the answers to how organizations stop using their own, i don't know, they're, they stop drinking their own Kool-Aid or using their own language to think about and describe themselves and instead start talking in a way that makes sense to, or connects with their donor or that audience?
00:30:39
Speaker
That's super good. Yeah, that's absolutely spot on, which is transcripts are vital. Transcripts from these interviews like we do, the first round interviews are 75 minute one on one interviews with these people. Right. So these are these are in depth, nonlinear. We have that we have different onscreen exercises and things.
00:30:58
Speaker
It what they say matters. But a lot of like body language matters. um reading between the lines what they don't say all of that matters and we've got different ways that we pivot during the interview to pull them the most out um there's also a second round interview in which we we get some of those same kinds of things out even though primarily they're reacting to concepts that we're putting in front of them at this point ah but especially those first round ah rich interviews i would say are really valuable for um
00:31:30
Speaker
Yeah, understanding what's what's how they think about something, hearing the language that they use, like, okay, how did they articulate that? And then doubling back on it. Why did you say it that way? That's such an interesting way of saying it. um You know, most people say it this way. Why do you say it that way? And like pulling those things out really helps. We had this one client that wanted our help on messaging for a ah politically thorny topic. Like they wanted to figure out how do I talk to it's an organization that cares a lot about policing policy. And as a former police officer, you know, I care about that thing a lot, but I've got to, in this, in this sort of situation, I've got to keep my, my priors out of it. Right. But they're like, you know, we figured out together that their goal is to be able to talk to center left, center, right.
00:32:18
Speaker
Of course, centrist people about policing. Gosh, talk about ah an emotionally fraught topic in our culture, the way it's been in recent years. Right. um And so, like, in this example, without getting into all the specifics, like, what we discovered together that was so interesting is that that even though both sides had very, very different sensitivities, where was the one point and of unity that when we tried out certain messages or made up stories, right, to get their reactions, where was this point of unity?
00:32:52
Speaker
The point of unity was always a story about or explanations about a police chief coming to the realization on their own that they needed to change certain ways that they did things, both for the safety of everybody in the community and also for the safety of their officer. like That story.
00:33:15
Speaker
is the one thing, like literally the one thing that we could use that seemed to bring people together. And we would not have discovered that at all if we hadn't cared enough to get with these people one-on-one and hear how they talked, um use that to formulate new ways of talking, play it back to them, play the new messaging back to them, and understanding the point of connection.
Steps for Engaging Audiences
00:33:38
Speaker
Am i imagining correctly that with some of the work that you're talking about, you, maybe not all the time, but often would talk to a client about, you know, being more innovative or trying something new or building a community or something of this nature.
00:33:58
Speaker
And you would do some sort of workshopping or facilitation internally, and then you would go and do interviews and you might or might not propose scenarios or product services at that time, but you're at least early on, you're more so gathering ah initial feedback, thoughts, or information.
00:34:22
Speaker
And then whether it's in that conversation or in a future conversation, you would have developed a a product, you know, like paper copies or, you know, slides or something. And then you're getting feedback on the look and feel or something.
00:34:37
Speaker
And you go through a couple of stages and eventually you're building the app, the website experience, the in-person experience. Is it, am I imagining that that is, roughly the flow of an engagement with you?
00:34:51
Speaker
It's something like that. Yeah. I feel like you're, feel like this is bait. Like you're trying to tempt me to give you all the stuff that I love and just start pouring out. And then 10 minutes later, you're like, gosh, I really wish I hadn't asked that question. So i'm going to restrain, even though i happily tell everything about our process.
00:35:07
Speaker
ah It's four steps. It's source. We're trying to source insights. right That's where we start out. What are the hypotheses that we have about the audience or that you guys have in particular? Because the client has this informed intuition that we can't replicate.
00:35:21
Speaker
We way too often, or you know people like us come into to clients as we're the experts. That's fine. Guess what you're not the expert in? You're not the expert in their cause. And they've got all sorts of experiences and experiences encounters with ah people involved in the cause that you don't have. And and their hypotheses matter a ton.
00:35:44
Speaker
So we're doing a lot of hypothesis collection with the with the client, turning those into these interviews i already talked about, and and collecting insights. um I'll keep that part simple.
00:35:56
Speaker
Then we get into second phase. Phase one was source. Phase two is what we call focus. Because we've got all these... um you know These ideas, these hypotheses, some of which have been confirmed, some of which have been um shot down by the the interviews.
00:36:15
Speaker
And we have you all these various possibilities, but they need to they need to be boiled down into something. So we have this very tight three-part structure for concepts because they all have to be comparable with each other. So we've created this this very simple structure concept type. and And what we do is, to your point about workshop, we get into um the what we call the concept summit, essentially a workshop, a day and a half, and we come in and it goes like this.
00:36:45
Speaker
the first couple hours of the morning let's let's get to know your audience members so we're going to look we're going to take a look at some profiles of them not personas that's one of the things that's really important for me is the value of a profile over persona i get the purpose of a persona but get to know your real people as they really are first So we're going to get to know these people together for a couple hours.
00:37:11
Speaker
We're going to understand their profiles. We're going to watch supercut videos of them responding to some of the most useful questions that we discovered for this round. And by the end of that two hours, people really identify with the with the audience members and they talk about them by their name throughout the rest of the time, right? That's just, ah they can't help it because they dig these people. You know, these are their people.
00:37:32
Speaker
So that's the first couple hours. Next couple hours is, you know, we come in with some of our concepts, right? I said, we got the structure and we go, we're modeling what it looks like to create a concept, but we're also bringing in some concepts that we think have got a real shot, right? This could be a killer experience for these people because what we're hearing is they want this and they want this.
00:37:52
Speaker
And so but here's the concepts that we're creating. And then the the last half of day one, first half of day two is here are Here's a design challenge. We're goingnna break up in teams and we're going to do some design challenges to create three more concepts, usually three teams, each one working on another concept. And it's helpful to have that kind of co-creative situation because they have that informed intuition and there's certain concepts that only they should be working on.
00:38:20
Speaker
um by the by the end of day By the end of day two, we have narrowed those concepts down and we know the four or five that we're going to take back to the audience members to get their feedback on.
00:38:31
Speaker
The next two phases, build and launch, are much clearer and you probably don't need much explanation there. But to your point about workshops and getting people's perspectives, that's how this works, yeah.
Embracing Imagination in Leadership
00:38:44
Speaker
You work a lot with nonprofits and you must generally, I assume you generally work with either the leader or executive team type people. I'm guessing if you're going to try something new, very often it's going to have buy-in from the top.
00:39:04
Speaker
So Some people do think differently or they question their priors or whatever else. But is there a question that you wish that nonprofit leaders would ask themselves or the market more often, but they're just rarely asking?
00:39:27
Speaker
So here's the question that I wish that they asked, but I don't blame them that they don't. And that question is, how can I become more imaginative? And the reason that matters is because imagination is key in all of this, and we don't talk about that. like It's not just in the nonprofit space that we don't talk about it.
00:39:46
Speaker
In the for-profit space, I've spent plenty of time as well. People aren't talking about the imaginations. The imagination, everybody, is everything. And if if you don't become more imaginative, you're not going to understand the value of the imagination.
00:40:04
Speaker
So I wonder... talk about two things real quick connected with that. One, um CEO of one of my favorite organizations currently working with right now.
00:40:16
Speaker
Back when we were taking a hike together in the Olympic Mountains a outside, what, two hours outside Pulswell, Washington, we where he was We had a long conversation and one of the things that came up was my own that the game-changing value for me in ah fiction.
00:40:37
Speaker
and like when i made ah I used to only read nonfiction for a longest time. write All the business books, everything is nonfiction. Then I read the Chronicles and nar of Narnia to my kids in my mid-30s, and I realize, oh my goodness, I am missing out. like These truths that I'm now seeing in a fresh way that otherwise just kind of bounce off my skull are now like penetrating and changing my imagination, and because they're changing my imagination, it's changing what I can believe might be true.
00:41:08
Speaker
And because it's changing that, it changes what I do. So we have to understand that the job of the marketer is not just to go out and attract the people who already want your thing.
00:41:20
Speaker
That's the easiest thing out there. That's what data-driven marketing does so well. And that's great. We need that. It's important. Don't leave that part on the table, right? But how is it that I can go upstream and change how people imagine my cause, change how people imagine my brand and the consumer space, change how people imagine their lives vis-a-vis my product,
00:41:43
Speaker
in such a way that now they are actually their imagination is changed. And because it's changed, they can now believe something that they didn't otherwise believe.
00:41:54
Speaker
You can't do that if you don't change the imagination. changing the Changing the imagination... You change what they might be able to believe. Change what they might be able to believe, and now you can change what they do believe and what they'll act upon.
00:42:07
Speaker
You remind me of some criticisms of digital marketing or a lot of advertising, which is, you could put it like this, I guess.
00:42:20
Speaker
If you had a promotion or your pizza shop, Where would you pass out your coupons to get the highest redemption rate? Well, it would be in the line at your pizza shop because these people have already said they want your pizza.
00:42:39
Speaker
So 100% of those coupons are going to get redeemed. And this probably is too silly or too distant of an example. But, you know,
00:42:53
Speaker
A lot of people don't buy, a lot the large majority of people don't buy pizza because it aligns with their values or whatever. But you can build a brand.
00:43:04
Speaker
You can build a reputation with people because, but but I mean, it's it's tied into the name brand. They think of you in a certain way. And so then they don't even question why they buy that kind of pizza or why they drink Coke and they don't drink Pepsi or whatever.
00:43:21
Speaker
It's, you know, there's, e they think of you in a certain way and you may have inspired them at some point. And if you might have inspired them, I should say. And if you haven't, then it's probably going to be really easy for them to switch. And i I guess I hadn't thought too much of that, but as it relates to nonprofits, but it would not surprise me if you know, whether you're the Salvation Army versus St. Vincent de Paul, or I don't know what they stack up against nowadays. But if you don't have some sort of deep emotional connection, then it's probably quite easy to be replaced.
00:44:06
Speaker
That's right. That's right. Deep emotional connection ah is
Final Thoughts on Connection
00:44:10
Speaker
spot on. That's one of, if you think about the power of moments, um which I think is one of the few business books I really paid a lot of attention to in the last 10 years.
00:44:18
Speaker
That's one of the the four um defining moments that they talk about. They talk about moments of um pride, moments of insight, and moments of elevation, and lastly, moments of connection, because those types, that connection,
00:44:35
Speaker
Matters a lot. But that means if you were going to under so you're going to create moments of any of those kinds of moments, you have to understand these these folks as people and understand what kind of thing will make them feel that.
00:44:48
Speaker
There's no survey in the world that can do that for you, right? But the reality is we're all in the experience game. We like to talk about a lot of different types of economies, right? The digital economy, the um you know the sharing economy, the subscription economy.
00:45:06
Speaker
That's great. These trends come and go. What doesn't ever go away is the experience economy. like That's life. that is That's been the economy for millennia.
00:45:17
Speaker
We're all in it. The question is, are you playing in that economy? Are you trying to succeed with experience? Because you want to understand what will be the experience that that fires the imagination of this person? What will the experience that they'll love, that they'll text their friends about because it was so great?
00:45:33
Speaker
That's what every business, every nonprofit needs to be caring about because human beings are wired for experience. We are running short on time. So I'm going to throw the last two questions at you back to back and then you can take them however you like.
00:45:50
Speaker
First thing is you and I are connected on LinkedIn. So yeah I suspect that a good place to go is still LinkedIn because I see some of your content there, but Also to learn about what you do or this kind of thinking, you know, learn, connect, follow, whatever, where should I go? That's the first question. The second question is whether we've talked about it already and you just want to underscore or emphasize point or something that we didn't get to and maybe we'll get to in a future conversation.
00:46:23
Speaker
Do you have final words of wisdom or things, Alan, that you would want me to think about after this conversation? Two things. One, LinkedIn is really is the place for me. And, you know, i love conversations on LinkedIn, ah but I also run this monthly community called Illumination Community.
00:46:43
Speaker
um And so if you hit me up at, if anyone hits me up at at LinkedIn, we can talk about joining that. Think of it as like 50 awesome purpose-driven organizations that get together ah every month for 82 minutes to explore together what's next.
00:47:00
Speaker
Uh, but that's a thing I've had going since 2018 and people love it. So it's a genuine community. It's not like, Hey, here comes the the talking head, but it's like, we're all in this together. Let's learn from each other. So it's a lot of fun. Uh, that's the first thing about where to reach me. Second thing, what do I want to leave with people?
00:47:17
Speaker
I want to leave people with the thought of Trace from Iowa. So Trace is lives on a farm in Iowa with his children.
00:47:28
Speaker
And I talked to him some years ago on behalf of Mission Aviation Fellowship, really awesome client um based in Nampa, Idaho. And they do missions flying, right? So they go into the most the most difficult to reach places all over the world where you know you can't get to except by this on these unbelievable aircraft and these super brave and technically skilled pilots who can fly in and land on these postage stamps. Essentially it's what, it's what they look like.
00:47:56
Speaker
And when we start our interviews actually though, so I'm interviewing trace. He's actually the first interview because they want to create this remarkable and monthly giving program. Um,
00:48:08
Speaker
And part of that, like I said, in the process is talking to their audience members. So we're talking to Trace, one of their donors, but he doesn't know that it's for MAF. And he just learned 10 minutes in that we're talking about aviation.
00:48:20
Speaker
So I've got this this way that we do these interviews so that we can learn different things at different points. So he's he's learning this about aviation. And he's like, oh, you know what? My son and i we just, we have played this game that's fun for us. We hear a plane, where're we're on ah ah air travel route on our farm. When we hear a plane fly over, we guess how many engines the plane has, what kind of plane it is, and who's the carrier.
00:48:47
Speaker
And, you know, it's just like a friendly competition. and i'm like, how, like, what do you do? Like, how? How do you figure out who won? Like, do you guys run outside and look up in the sky? He's like, no, we have, you know, he brings out his phone and shows me like we have these flight tracker apps.
00:49:02
Speaker
And, you know, all the insights work that we had done before that, all the hypothesis work, nobody brought that up like the flight tracker apps. his the heat Did he use it for anything important? No, totally frivolous. He likes to see you know that all these flights all over the world that you can see all the details about him. And when they fly over his house, he and his son figure out through the app who won. Like, that's the game.
00:49:26
Speaker
And we started I started going... I wonder if there's other people in this audience like that they care about flight tracker apps. Turned out they do in a big way, and it completely drove the experience that we created, this choose-your-own-adventure experience on your digital phone, which we used it at the launch of their sustainer program called Flight Crew, and it blew just totally blew up.
00:49:50
Speaker
And they ended up getting all the achieving all their year one goals in five weeks, et cetera, et cetera. The point is... The power in getting to know your to ah your audience, the power of getting to know your audience, your donors, your volunteers, as people, is the game changer.
00:50:10
Speaker
Alan, I appreciate you being here. i you know, I don't know if you have known this, but since we work together and i have been fortunate enough to go on and work with other people that are creative thinkers and question, you know, yeah are there other ways to see things and all that? I have thought very fondly of you and, you know, the sort of the approach that you take. So I really appreciate that you agreed to be here and, you know, when it fits into our schedules, maybe you'll be able to join me again.
00:50:48
Speaker
Awesome. Well, thanks for having me on the Unfolding Thought Podcast. That's really awesome, Eric. It's been a blast. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it, Alan.