The Nonprofit Power Podcast

We're a little more than 30 days out from the 2026 elections, and I don't have to tell you there's a lot at stake up and down the ballot. From Congressional and Senate races to state legislatures, and on down to city council, county board and school board races. All of them matter. And all of them have the potential to have a big impact on the wellbeing of your clients and their families. Hopefully, most of your eligible clients are already registered to vote, perhaps with your help. Yay! Reg...

If you’ve ever said to yourself, “If only I had a paid advocacy person/team, everything would be great,” you’re in good company. But you might be surprised by the path you need to take to get there. It’s not as intuitive as it might seem, and there are some common mistakes that often block that path. Here’s the thing. Even if a funder dropped a ton of money on you today to go do advocacy work, and you went out and hired a policy and advocacy staffperson. We can't just say to that person, “go do

I had a conversation with a client recently that surprised me. Then I thought about it some more and I realized it was something that a lot of nonprofit leaders struggle with. It's just that this client was experiencing a version of the problem that was a bit unusual. This client is a CEO who has decades of experience and accumulated wisdom and perspective. But one day, this CEO shared with me that although she was considered a big expert in her previous field, she didn't have the same expert r

If you’re like many Nonprofit leaders, you already have a big vision that you want to make happen. Taking that big, amazing vision and bringing it into being requires being able to bring along the influential and powerful decisionmakers who can help you make it happen. Even the most amazing visionaries don't bring their vision into reality in the world without involving other people. And for those of us in the Nonprofit universe, some of the people that we absolutely need to have bought into o

It's time we looked at a piece of your messaging that I haven't talked about enough. Our voice is our most powerful tool, quite honestly. If we are able to use it to its maximum effect. This is the completely secret ingredient that is not getting enough attention. But too often what's going on is that we're not using our voice to maximum effect. You know I am all about great messaging. Great messaging is essential to your advocacy success. But what happens a lot of the tim...

Whether you’re focused on it or not, the 2026 elections are just around the corner. This is a moment of golden opportunity to help make sure that every one of our clients who's eligible to vote is registered and has the opportunity to have their vote counted. There's a lot of moving parts to that, and a lot of opportunities for us as Nonprofit leaders to help our clients make sure their vote is counted. But today I'm focusing on one very critical technical detail, which is registration. The go