Fifty minutes on the whole foundation: who you are talking to, how to reach them, what to actually say, what to ask for, and how to tell whether any of it worked. Recorded in January for the DC Dream Center network.
Marketing for Nonprofits: the Foundations · delivered live for the DC Dream Center network, Jan 27 2026
Want a second set of eyes on a real story?
Book a free Story AuditThat one question reframes everything else in this talk. Most nonprofit websites and social accounts read like a bulletin board: a gala in fifteen days, a funding goal at fifteen percent, sign up, give now, don't forget the gala. Come to us, help us, be with us. The common thread is that it is all about us. Marketing is communication, and communication is what builds relationships. That is the whole thesis.
And off the rip, everyone is not an answer. The four broadest categories are donors, board members, internal staff, and the people you serve. Your audience determines your message, which is why this comes first.
If someone has never heard of you, a text or a phone call is not the way. That is social media or your website. If they have signaled interest, a like, a comment, a newsletter signup, now you can email or DM. If they have given, or they are staff, or they have attended something, then email, text and phone are all on the table. How you reach someone should mirror how close you actually are.
The longest section of the talk. You have one to two seconds to earn a pause and about three more to prove it is worth watching. Six seconds, being generous. So the work is finding the story, writing it down, and leading with the problem for anyone who does not know you yet.
The biggest mistake here is doing nothing. A good call to action is simple, clear, and makes sense with the story you just told. Never lead with it, because you have not earned the right to ask yet. And roughly ten light asks for every heavy one, because anything involving a wallet should be used sparingly and with good timing.
Views, opens and likes are vanity metrics. They look good and cost the audience almost nothing. The real question is whether people are doing the thing you asked them to do, and the number worth chasing hardest is recurring donor retention.
Bring one real story and we will work on it together.
Book a free Story AuditYour best friend cares that you have an event coming up. They have probably already signed up, and they might be inviting people on your behalf. A stranger on the internet does not care that you have an event, is unlikely to sign up, and is very unlikely to invite someone to something they have never attended themselves.
The population of DC is around 702,000. Even just Wards 7 and 8 are about 154,768, roughly double the size of the Commanders' stadium. You can have a lot of influence and a lot of followers, and most people in your own backyard still do not know you. Yet online we speak as though everyone already does.
“It does not matter how good your message is or how powerful your mission. If you are communicating the wrong way, you will push away the people you are trying to reach.”
Three of the ideas that change the next thing you post, the next thing you write, and the next thing you measure.
Both of these make your communication flop, and the second one is the more painful of the two.
I had just come out of a long fundraising push, sharing the same pitch over and over, and in what felt like the hundredth meeting I heard the words every marketer dreads: who is it you work for again? The organization had nearly 3,000 staff, a presence in all fifty states and over a hundred countries, and had been around more than seventy five years. Real life change was happening. And still nobody knew.
The reason was our own communication. Social media that read like a bulletin board instead of a billboard of impact. A website from the early 2010s. Messages that were all about us instead of about life change. There were zero marketing roles at the local level, so we built it from scratch. Everything in this talk came out of that.
Marketing is about deepening the relationships you already have. That means:
No worksheet with this one, it was recorded as a live session. Bring a real story instead and we will work on it together.
Go find your list of names this week. Ask your people what moved them most in the last month, and write down the first story that makes you feel something.
Book a free Story Audit