Podcast: Communicating In Chaotic Times – A Conversation with Seth Godin

Season 4, Episode 30

In this episode, marketing and strategy expert Seth Godin joins Amy Eisenstein and Andrea Kihlstedt from Capital Campaign Pro for a conversation about storytelling, outreach, and engagement.

Seth shares insights on crafting messages that inspire action and build stronger connections. This discussion explores ways organizations can communicate effectively, especially when clarity and trust are more important than ever.

Whether you’re refining your donor outreach or looking for fresh ideas to strengthen engagement, this conversation offers practical takeaways to help you connect with your audience in meaningful ways.

Tune in for an insightful discussion filled with actionable advice on strengthening donor relationships and creating messages that resonate.

Listen Now:

Amy Eisenstein:
Hi podcast listeners. Today we have a really special conversation for you. This week Andrea and I invited Seth Godin to join us for a conversation about nonprofits, fundraising, communication and the federal funding disruption that many of you have had to deal with recently.

Seth is a brilliant communicator and marketer and the author of 21 best-selling books and an outstanding blog. We took questions from a live audience via chat, and Seth gave us some great advice and inspiration. We hope it’s useful for you.

Strategies Nonprofits Use to Communicate During Challenging Times

Today we have a very special guest, Seth Godin. And Seth, as you know, is the author of 21 best-selling books. So today we’re going to talk about communicating to your tribe. I mean, Seth, that’s what you’re known for.

So I’m going to invite you, I think just to get us started by talking about some strategies that nonprofits might think about to communicate with people during these very unusual, challenging times.

Seth Godin:
Thank you Amy and Andrea. Mostly thank you to the people who are here. I’m here because of you. I’m here for the Q&A. I’m here to cheer you on. I was super lucky to grow up in a house with two nonprofit leaders and I was raised to believe it was normal. And I’m just so grateful for the people who show up to make things better. So thank you. And Amy and I go back a little ways talking about things like strategy and marketing.

Number one, strategy and tactics are not the same thing. And there are lots of people who will give you tactics and there are lots of meetings you will go to about tactics. I don’t want to talk about tactics, I want to talk about strategy. Strategy is the hard work we do before we do the hard work.

And an organization with an elegant strategy, an organization with a strategy that is sustaining them and their community has a much easier time than an organization that just keeps deploying tactics to get to where they’re going. Number two, it’s not for everyone. There is no nonprofit that is for everyone. And there is no fundraising campaign that is for everyone. And instead of apologizing or shading what we’re doing to explain things we need to celebrate, it’s for someone, the smallest viable audience, whereas the group of people that would miss us if we were gone.

And the next part of strategy is empathy. Nobody donates money to a nonprofit because it’s the most important cause in the world by a easy to measure rubric, that’s not what happens. Empathy is understanding that everybody you serve who is making a donation is doing it because it’s worth more to them than the money they’re giving you. And what is worth more to them isn’t what’s worth more to you. And one of the problems with being a fundraiser is if you’re talking to a high net worth individual about donating a couple hundred thousand dollars, you’re saying to yourself:

“If I had that kind of money, I wouldn’t give a couple hundred thousand dollars to us.”

But you’re not them and you don’t have that kind of money. And so we have to find the empathy to realize we are offering people an opportunity to achieve their dreams, an opportunity to get to where they seek to go by extending themselves in support of the work we do. And then back to where I began this loop, which is, you have a board to answer to and maybe a CEO and all conversations about tactics must begin with a conversation about strategy.

• Who’s it for?
• What’s it for?
• What’s the change we seek to make?

And if it’s not about those things, don’t engage. Don’t have a conversation about whether someone likes the color of your logo or not. It’s irrelevant. And whether you tweet at two o’clock in the afternoon or send your emails with a certain kind of form letter, these are tactics. And if your tactics are supporting your strategy, then they work. And if they’re not, then they don’t.

But getting your strategy right, the change you seek to make, who’s it for? What’s it for? Who has done this before? And what are the systems at play these things? That is why you’re on this call and that is why you’re an executive in your institution because your job is not to do the tactics better than yesterday. I got an AI for that. Your job is to ask hard questions about what the strategy might be. Back to you, Andrea and Amy.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Seth, thank you for that wonderful, wonderful introduction.

Changing Strategy Quickly to Adapt to a Fast-Changing World

Seth, one of the things that’s happened recently since the last election and since the change in politics is that strategies that worked quite recently all of a sudden don’t seem to work so well or may no longer be as appropriate as they once were. And the change has come upon us in our nonprofit organizations very quickly.

So my question to help us get going is what do you recommend for changing strategy quickly to go along with much larger global things or national things that are happening?

Seth Godin:
Okay. So the words matter here a lot, and this is not an emergency call even though it’s labeled as one. And if you try to change your strategy quickly, I am almost certain that you will fail. That what we are talking about here is systems that create culture. They do that to defend themselves because culture is what’s normal. What are things like around here? It’s easy to imagine 300 ways the world could have evolved in the last couple of hundred years that do not include talented, committed, passionate people, spamming wealthy people to implore them to give money to a nonprofit that’s going to make a change happen. That’s just the way it is.

But it didn’t have to be that way. It’s just the way it’s, there’s a system in place. Systems persist because we need interoperability because we need, when you meet someone in the street, if you’re in North America, you shake their right hand. If you went like this, that would be weird, right? That the right-hand handshake was invented because we needed a greeting. There’s all these things we take for granted that are built into the system. So with that said, I think where we have to begin is what do people want? And I think what people have a roof over their head and decent health want is one of three things always. One is status. Who’s up? Who’s down? Who eats lunch first? Two, affiliation. Who’s to my left? Who’s to my right? People like us do things like this.

So an NPR tote bag is an inexpensive symbol of status and affiliation. I have enough status that I listen to NPR so I’m smarter than you, and I have enough affiliation that I can carry this tote bag so that other people who are on the same team as me can identify. Status, affiliation. And the third one is the freedom from the feeling of fear. And it’s this third one that gives you a shortcut that will always burn out, which is creating an emergency. And we see this in political fundraising worst of all when we announce that the world is going to end at midnight unless you send us money, it works until people realize the world didn’t end at midnight. And so to answer your question, Andrea, I think we have to begin with these donors we are seeking.

Are we really going to do it the way the New York Public Library did by sending me an email that tricked me into thinking it was really something that it wasn’t? And that maybe since they stole my attention, they could turn around and get me to send them a hundred bucks. That’s lazy, that’s incompetent. No real fundraising with strategy is the more I do it, the better it works. And so who am I going to offer status to? What sort of affiliation and culture are we going to build around here? Because if you need to burn your furniture for heat, you can warm up your house for a little while, but then you’re out of luck. What you need to do is in this moment of transition, when systems are in stress, find a resilient strategy that you can explain to your peers and that you can repeat. And the more you do it, the better it works.

Reaching Donors on All Sides of the Political Spectrum

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, we’ve got several questions in when you have donors on both sides or all sides of this political spectrum, how do you communicate in a way that it resonates with various audiences?

Seth Godin:
Right. So universality is hard because the universe is a very big place and figuring out how to communicate in a way that builds culture and affiliation. People like us do things like this when people have been indoctrinated and pushed relentlessly to divide takes guts. And the four-word mantra I would put on the wall of your CEO’s office and yours is shut up and drive. That if volunteer firemen are called to the scene of a fire, there should be no discussion whatsoever about how the person they’re saving voted or how their fellow firefighter voted. Just like we don’t want to have a conversation about whether or not you eat meat because there’s a fire right here, right now.

And so this idea that we are going to do a thing here, get on this bus if you want to do this thing and if you want to have a conversation about these other things, please go do that over there. Not because they’re lesser, not because they’re not important, but because we do them over there. Over here, this is what we do. And so this posture that we have when we go to surgery with the mask on and the gloves, the surgeons do that partly to remind themselves and the nurses that they’re about to do surgery. And so who’s it for? What’s it for? If you are looking for a cause that will give you solace in a world that is changing and that isn’t about day trading between MSNBC and Fox, that’s what we do.

But if you’re looking for affiliation with people who are going to man the barricades, let me give you the names of three other places you can go to do that. We need enrollment. We need people who want to solve the difficult problem we are here to solve and that other stuff, we hear you, it’s really important, but we’re not going to talk about that right now because here to talk about this. That takes guts to do that. And the alternative, which is totally legitimate, is to say:

“Now we’re actually here to talk about this battle for our future, and that’s what we do here.”

But you need to choose. You need to have the ability to say no or to say yes.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
It’s a question that actually ties very much into this from someone who is with a Quaker organization, the publisher of magazines and videos and websites and people that are pushing them to be more activist, right? And it’s not what they do well, right? Then the question essentially as I read it is should we stay in our lane, right?

Seth Godin:
Right. So what’s the lane and what does it mean to do it well, because systems do change. And when systems change, the thing like… AT&T, for a long time, what they did well was a long distance phone call without echo. But as that became less valuable, if they had just said, “No, that’s our lane, that’s what we do,” AT&T would be gone. And you may have noticed the last time you picked up your Nokia phone, you didn’t have a Nokia phone because Nokia stuck to what they did well.

And we have to keep coming back to the change we seek to make and the people we are here to serve. If you believe as someone who is leading communities of people in the Quaker community that things are going to go back to, quote, “normal”, then you know what your strategy is. But if you believe that this is as normal as it’s ever going to be again, you probably need a new strategy. Because being really good at the old job doesn’t help you get to where you’re going.

Stifling the Discussion of Social Justice and DEI

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, somebody’s asking, “If we don’t plan to change our strategy, but we’re unable to use a majority of the words we were using to describe our strategy because we no longer can talk about social justice or diversity, equity and inclusion.” I would suggest that that’s actually a choice that you can and that you’re going to attract certain groups. But of course, Seth, really the question is for you, but I hope you’re going to push back on this idea that they can’t talk about that anymore.

Seth Godin:
So the deal is words have a purpose, and when you send me an email and I call it spam, my four letter word for what you sent me has a purpose. It just informed you of something and we can agree or disagree about what I think that word means and what you think it means. But if we are interoperating with each other and we’re using words that we understand productively, that’s what words are for. On the other hand, if words over time come to mean other things to other people like the British word for a pile of sticks, you probably don’t want to use those words because you are going to needlessly complicate conversations because people don’t understand exactly what you meant when you used the words you used.

So if you want to send a signal to people who are taking umbrage or Orwellian language policing, then you should use words that trigger that. On the other hand, if you are, for example, talking to a group of business executives that are keeping track of something else, then talking about the efficiency and productivity that comes from a diversity of opinion and background, which increases stock price is an appropriate way to skip an acronym that might immediately end the conversation. So back to strategy, what’s it for? If I’m going to take your moment by sending you an email or talking to you, why did I talk to you and what am I hoping will come from that? If it turns out when I talk to you using… if I speak to you in Esperanto and it doesn’t work, I should probably stop talking Esperanto.

Amy Eisenstein:
Yeah. So what that triggers for me is also choose your audience, tailor your message to your audience and that’s part of the strategy.

Seth Godin:
Correct. Also, and this is key, and I can’t believe we’ve gone 20 minutes and I didn’t bring it up yet. If you want to make a change happen, it helps to be part of an organization that’s making change happen. If you don’t want to make a change happen, then be very clear that you’re just here to keep the water calm. You’re not going to make a difference. If you want to make a change happen, you must create tension. If I pull a rubber band backwards, there’s tension, and if I let go, it goes across the room. I cannot make a rubber band go across the room without creating tension.

Tension is different than stress. Stress is bad, it’s wanting two things that you can’t have at the same time. Tension is positive, right? The Taylor Swift tickets are going to sell out in 15 minutes, better go run, tell your dad. That’s a positive tension that gets someone to go move forward. So what we have to do is create tension on purpose. And if that means that some of the people we used to serve say, “I’m moving on,” that’s okay. Because if everything you’re engaging with is tension-free, the best you can owe for is a tie. But we’re not here to make a tie. We’re here to make a difference.

Amy Eisenstein:
I like that. We’re not here to make a tie. Bring the people that support you and your work and your mission closer, and it’s okay if others drift away. Otherwise, your message is going to be neutral at best, ineffective.

Seth Godin:
Yeah. So here’s the Momofuku story.

Seth’s Momofuku Story

Many people have heard of David Chang and his restaurant Empire. It began with a little teeny tiny restaurant on first Avenue in New York City, and I was there on the day that David Chang became David Chang. My family and I used to go when the kids were little, we’d hop in the Prius drive down to First Avenue, and on Saturday afternoons have lunch. And I’m pretty sure it was David behind the counter, I can’t tell you for sure, but I would order the Brussels sprouts, no bacon, please. The reason I did that is I haven’t had meat in 40 years, and they would save money because they didn’t have to waste the bacon, and I would have a better time because I could eat it.

And the first three weeks, it was delicious. There was not a lot of things on the menu I ate, but I ate that and I liked it very much. Fourth week we show up and I order it, and he turns to me and he says:

“There’s a vegetarian restaurant three doors down, and we put bacon on the Brussels sprouts because we like it that way. So I really appreciate your support. The restaurant’s almost empty. It means a lot that you come here, but I think you’d be better off going to the restaurant down the street.”

That was the day it became Momofuku.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
I love that story, Seth, and it applies so well to many donor things that I think we in the fundraising business don’t often do. Don’t often take it kind of, Jeff, but there is true power in saying to a donor, “I don’t think this is the organization for you. I’m going to introduce you to my friend at the such-and-such organization because I think your values align better.” There’s such power in doing that, so it’s a great story. Thank you.

Small Nonprofits Should Offer Status

Amy Eisenstein:
Okay. If you’re a small nonprofit and can’t offer status or much affiliation back to your NPR tote bag story, what should we focus on?

Seth Godin:
Okay. Sorry, that’s nonsense. Of course, you can offer status. I have helped nonprofits that have one employee. Why do I do that? Why do I spend a day or a week or more of my life helping a nonprofit that is tiny? I’m not getting status in front of TED speakers for doing that. I’m getting status with you. And so what it is to earn status is maybe that donor, their family doesn’t listen to them, their kids don’t listen to them, their boss doesn’t listen to them, but when they show up at your office and you lean into their expertise in supply chain engineering, all of a sudden they get six inches taller.

This is their chance to honor the memory of their mom and to contribute in a way that they, and they alone can do. That is status. So the gala is the evil offspring of the desire for certain groups of people to have status. Who’s at the big table? Get rid of those, but understand status. Who do we see when we look in the mirror? That’s what you sell because if all you’re selling is efficiency, your donors should give money to river blindness prevention because river blindness prevention is a far more efficient cause than anybody who’s on this call. That’s not what you sell. What you sell is a chance to make things better with a story that matches what the donor wants to tell themselves.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Right. Seth, this goes back to your earlier comment about empathy, about the need to be able to empathize with a donor and understand what status means to them, right? Not to you.

Seth Godin:
Exactly.

Examples of Resilient Strategies for Nonprofits

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, so somebody’s asking a question about looking for examples of resilient strategies. The examples they give is for affordable housing or a homeless shelter that may be under fire right now with some new policies or the new administration. So what are some strategies to help stay resilient?

Seth Godin:
Okay, so let me describe what I mean here because we’re talking about fundraising, right? If I build a strategy in a community like Cleveland where there is a group of say, 5,000 upper middle income, middle-class professionals in areas like medicine, insurance, community stuff, things that remind us of the Rotary and the Lions and things like that. Where being an outspoken supporter of what we do raises your status in that circle. It’s resilient and elegant because the more I do it, the better it works. I don’t use it up. All right? It keeps getting better. So at the beginning, just to give you an example of a nonprofit that doesn’t do this kind of urgent social good work, when there were only 300 people at TED, giving a TED talk gave you status among that circle of 300 people. When TED got bigger, the TED speakers didn’t say, “Oh, it’s worse now.”

They said it’s better now because their status went up. When TED started launching videos, being a TED speaker got even better because their status went up. So the cycle was resilient. This is the opposite of cold emailing people because the more you cold email people, the worse it works, not the better it works. So if you are seeking affordable housing like the Fuller Center in New Rochelle, which used to be part of Habitat for Humanity, the Fuller Center started by going to organizations like banks that have a moral and marketing obligation to help the community. And they said to these banks, send some people for a day of service building a house. They will get something out of it. The people in the house will get something out of it. The community will get something out of it. All right? But that’s scary for the HR person to do that.

But the second time it’s less scary. Now the HR person knows their status is going to go up so you can do it again and again. Well, in Westchester County, there’s not a lot of room for new houses. So Jim shifts gears and says, “We’re going to rehabilitate houses.” Because by shifting in that direction, again, the more you do it, the better it works. It’s not a political conversation, it’s, “Will my day get better? Will my boss like me more if I say yes to Jim? Is more Jim a good thing?” And if the answer to that is yes, then you have a resilient strategy. When you find yourself asking a tactical question, this is a signal to you that you’re avoiding strategy questions. And this is why I had to write a whole book about it because the system doesn’t want us to look at it.

I talk to charities I care about, and I’m like, “You need to get rid of the gala. The gala is distracting the entire organization for three months.” And they can’t get out of that mindset because they’re hooked on the system that was there before they got there, and they didn’t sign up to join this important nonprofit because they wanted to change it. They signed up because they wanted to do tactics that would get them rewarded with status and affiliation.

But when it’s not working anymore, doing it more is not the answer. Taking a deep breath and realizing the world changed, right? There’s AI here. There’s unlimited forms of media here. There’s competitive pressures on people. The United way is not the be all and end all of everything. This is all in the last 20 years. So we need to find a new strategy in response to new conditions.

Where Does Strategy Start?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
So here’s a question for you, Seth, about developing strategy. Must that start at the head of an organization? Where best does that start and is it a continuous process?

Seth Godin:
Love this question. Okay, so there are certain things that should not be decided by a committee. For example, your logo. Everyone has an opinion about your logo. Don’t ask them, you just pick it. There are certain kinds of strategies that have to come from the top, but there are other strategies, strategies within strategies that come from people on the front lines. What you really want to do is announce and articulate a strategy and then empower the smart and caring people you work with to find tactics to make it work. And so if you think about the Four Seasons Hotel or one of those fancy hotels, their strategy is men and women serving men and women or ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen. That they are not offering a dark quiet room that’s cheap. They’re offering an experience that makes you feel like the kind of person that stays in a nice place.

Okay, great. What are the tactics? Well, every single frontline employee, the door person, the front desk person, the people who make up the rooms has a $250 budget to spend any time they want on any customer for any reason. Because if they see something that’s not working, 250 bucks is a bargain to solve it, give them free dinner, give them whatever, right? So it empowers people to play with the tactics. So I spent time with NPR before the podcast revolution and I was at WNYC and I said, look, here’s the deal. Podcasting is coming. You could win the whole thing that the new strategy is not, let’s defend our spectrum at 93.9 on the radio dial, which is worth a lot of money. We need a new strategy because the spectrum is about to become almost worthless. The new strategy would be instead of making one show at a time, give people a choice of a hundred shows, make a podcast player, and now you win the podcast world and now anybody who wants to make a new podcast can come through you and you can do all the things you’re hoping to do.

And I got all this pushback, not just from the top, but mostly from the people in the front lines because they didn’t sign up to work for a radio station so that people could make a choice about what to listen to. They signed up to be, quote, “program directors” because they wanted to direct programs. And they wanted to say at three o’clock, “This is what’s on. We decided for you.”

And it took years before NPR got out of their own way and started to take advantage of their huge head start in what became podcasting. But they didn’t do it when they should have done it because they were defending the old tactics and culture instead of leaning into possibility. So the answer is, a smart CEO will see this, and then she will take action on it, but if she doesn’t, somebody else can. And then you can present it to people and say, “I need your help with tactics.”

Deepening Strategy Based on Your Supporters

Andrea Kihlstedt:
Elizabeth has asked this question, can you comment on how strategy can be deepened by feedback we receive from our supporters?
Seth Godin:
Oh, this is great. Okay, it’s okay to say it’s not for you, and it’s okay to say, “Thank you, I learned a lot.” But it’s not okay to say something in between. So if you play avant-garde jazz and someone who likes Kenny G hates your show, “Thank you for telling me, ignore everything they say.” It’s not for you. On the other hand, if someone who loves avant-garde jazz says, “It’s not good.” Well now you’re in trouble. You picked your audience and your audience doesn’t like you. So what we have to begin with is the person who’s this for, what do they believe? What do they dream of?

What do they want? What’s their worldview? When I find one of those people, their feedback is precious. And so if you look at reviews on Amazon, even the most beloved books like To Kill a Mockingbird have one-star reviews. Harper Lee should not lose any sleep if she’s still paying attention to Amazon in the great beyond for a one-star review because all that says is this book isn’t for me. Not, this isn’t a good book. So we need to listen to the people who are ready to give us a four-star review. What did they notice about our tactics that didn’t match what they believe in because now our empathy can improve?

Amy Eisenstein:
I think that’s such good advice and for better or for worse, I think a lot of nonprofits get led astray, especially in a boardroom when one board member is listening to somebody that maybe they should be tuning out. So I’m wondering if you have any thoughts or experience on how nonprofit leaders should engage board members in determining their strategy?

Seth Godin:
Yeah, I was on one of those boards. It was absolutely fascinating to watch the CEO so brilliantly and generously organize a divorce between this board member, a major funder and the institution because it was clear that while the board member had money and opinion, the work the board member wanted to do wasn’t going to match the mission that the institution had signed up for. And that’s okay. What’s not okay is keeping that person and hoping that things will get better. That one of the things that we see in great board meetings is there are no surprises.

The way you have a great board meeting is you pre-meet with everybody you need to meet with before their meeting happens because we’re not taking all these people’s valuable time to have a scrum. If you want to have a conversation, let’s have conversations all the time. And when the board meeting shows up, because the CEO has created the right kind of system and culture, everything goes great.

And if it turns out that in solo conversation where status isn’t the issue, the board member isn’t finding what they need from what you are doing, we only have two choices. Change what they’re doing or change what they need or else one of you has to go.

Getting on the Same Page with Your Board

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, you all heard it here. I just want to reiterate, no scrums in your boardroom, right? One-on-one conversations beforehand. Let’s answer all questions. Let’s get on the same page before you get into a boardroom. I say that until I’m blue in the face. Seth’s going to elevate it for us.

Seth Godin:
We didn’t rehearse this at all. We didn’t go —

Amy Eisenstein:
We did not rehearse this at all. I am thrilled. And second piece, quote of the day, you can divorce your board members. You can divorce your board members. If they’re not helping your organization move in the direction that you’re moving in, it’s okay even if they’re a big donor, especially when they’re a big donor, if they’re causing more difficulty from you. Andrea, why are you shaking your head?

Andrea Kihlstedt:
No, I’m tickled by this conversation. We have certainly seen, Amy, in our years working together and long before that, major donors who really think that they own the organization and think that with their money they can take the organization in whatever direction they wish. And universally, the organization is sunk when that happens, right? That everything goes awry.

So we see what happens when people follow the money and not the vision and the strategy is not clear, right? It’s so sad and it’s so hard for people to resist it.

Seth Godin:
Also, I think it’s worth, first of all, celebrating the fact that somebody who didn’t have to show up and donate and give time did. There’s a lot to be said for that. And most of the time back to status and affiliation, they’re not actually seeking to be the head of mission for your institution. They’re just looking for a way to put their time and money to work to increase their status and affiliation.

So there’s absolutely nothing wrong with putting them in charge of the gift shop or putting them in charge of some trip that they organized with seven people to go into the field and do X, Y or Z. There are lots of things that an active board member can do besides be the person in charge of your strategy.

Andrea Kihlstedt:
There are many of these questions, as you pointed out, Seth, that are tactical questions. Should we get rid of the words’ diversity, equity, inclusion? There are lots of tactical questions here. So I want to ask everybody on the call really that if you had 10 or 15 minutes individually with Seth, could you articulate for him what your organization’s strategy is? Would you know it? And if not, where would you turn to begin to develop one?

Seth Godin:
Yeah, I love this. So let me give you some examples. Microsoft stole their strategy. You should steal your strategy if you possibly can. Microsoft stole their strategy from IBM. IBM’s strategy was no one ever got fired for buying IBM. What did that mean? It meant, “We don’t have the fastest computers, we don’t have the cheapest computers, we don’t have the most powerful computers, but we have enough salespeople and support that your boss isn’t going to give you a hard time if you buy IBM.”

Microsoft did the same thing for many, many years, and only under misguided Steve Ballmer did they lose their way, and now they’re back. As long as they do that, they do fine. That is a simple strategy. Apple’s strategy is we help people of means develop better taste around the luxury good that is digital. Meaning that an iPhone isn’t better being a phone than an Android phone, but it is better at signaling things to your peers.

Every time does something like that, they do better. And so now you could imagine being in any meeting at Apple and giving a judgment about what show should be on Apple TV and which one shouldn’t because the strategies… one more, Starbucks helps privileged people in certain hemispheres go from a pre-caffeinated to a caffeinated state every day in a setting where they feel like they belong. And the more they do that, the better they do, right? Opening another Starbucks doesn’t make Starbucks worse, makes Starbucks better because it matches that simple strategy. My friends at Acumen, their strategy is simple. They empower the poor by helping them engage with entrepreneurs who build market opportunities for the poor to get what they want. The more Acumen does that, the better everything gets.

So when d.light comes along with solar Lanterns, it’s obvious that Acumen should invest in them. Same thing with VisionSpring and Lifespring and many of the other companies there that I’ve worked with. It’s a very simple thing. Charity: water says:

“We don’t actually spend much time building wells, but we know there’s a whole class of people in the United States who are digital who will be able to satisfy their philanthropic goals by engaging with us in a social way that gives us money that we can go use to build wells and give people water. That’s what we do all day long.”

That’s their strategy. Does it mean that the tactics don’t change? They change all the time, but the strategy doesn’t have to be a buzzword, but it has to be, the more we do this, the better it works.

Final Words of Wisdom from Seth Godin

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, Seth, before we let you go in a couple minutes, I’m going to ask you for some final words of wisdom or final thoughts that you want to share, but somebody’s asking, they didn’t want to admit it with their name. They’re asking anonymously if they haven’t read any of your books yet, which one should they start if their focus is fundraising and nonprofits specifically.

So which of your 21 bestselling books do you want to highlight for this particular audience? And then some final thoughts for the day.

Seth Godin:
So I don’t want your money. Feel free to read my blog. There’s 9,000 posts there, it says, stop blog.

When I work with a nonprofit, I give them two books. I give them This is Marketing, and then I give them, This is Strategy. If you read This is Marketing, and then you read This is Strategy and you don’t understand what I just talked about today, then I did a lousy job of writing those books, but I wrote those books so that people who do work I care about would have a head start.

Amy Eisenstein:
All right, so final thoughts. These nonprofit leaders and fundraisers are heading back to their boardrooms and their bosses, and they want to report back on what they learned in the last 45 minutes. What are the key takeaways from you? What are the most important things that you want to highlight?

Seth’s Key Takeaways

Seth Godin:
Well, the first thing is I think you would report that I was on fire ranting and ranting and ranting because I care so much about you and the work you’re doing. I hope I was.

I think the takeaway is we need to ask just a few hard questions:

• Who’s it for? What’s it for? What’s the change we seek to make? As specific and simple as we can.
• What are the systems that work that are helping us do this?
• And what are the systems that we have to keep working against, fighting?
• Where is time? What game are we playing?
• Do we have empathy for our donors and for the people we serve?

If we can just keep asking these questions over and over again, we’re smart enough to answer them. But instead we get indoctrinated or snookered into day trading our emotions and worrying about what happened four minutes ago and reading breaking news.

The thing is, the arc of the universe really is long, and people on this call keep making it better, and we cannot get distracted by people who want to divide us or distract us.

Amy Eisenstein:
Excellent. Seth, thank you so much for joining us in this very important moment we’re in.

So let me just say we have a lot of new friends who are on the call today, of course, because Seth was here. So I do want to give a shout-out to what we do here at Capital Campaign Pro, and that is we provide strategy and strategic advice for organizations that are heading into and leading capital campaigns.

So if you are thinking about doing a capital campaign or planning one or getting ready for a feasibility study, I do hope that you will seriously consider us and our team at Capital Campaign Pro. If you go to our website, capitalcampaignpro.com, you can sign up to talk to us for free — no obligation, but we’d love to hear about what you’re thinking about and what you’re planning and how we might be able to support you and your team.

And all day long, we discuss strategy and making strategic decisions and having a plan so we can help you. And right now, we’re helping our clients navigate this at various stages of their campaigns because we’re working with organizations that are at the beginning and planning, doing feasibility, who are in the quiet phase and even in the public phase of their capital campaigns. And they’re all navigating these hot button issues right now, and we’re coaching them through that.

So I do hope you’ll visit our website and look forward to you joining us for more of these thoughtful conversations.

If you want to read more from Seth, be sure to visit him at sethgodin.com. And if you need more thoughts and advice on the present moment, all of these conversations on the federal funding emergency are on our website at capitalcampaignpro.com/emergency.