Are You Using Your Power or Giving it Away?

This article is drawn from our Designing Tomorrow podcast, Season 2 - Episode 06. Season 2 episodes are conversations between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler. The conversation has been edited for brevity and readability.
 

Too many social impact organizations are unintentionally giving their power away. There's this tension between a hat-in-hand approach to being a social impact organization and a more confident approach around knowing your value, the impact that you're creating, and the purpose and need for your work as a social impact organization. This healthy tension exists between the generosity that powers so much social impact work and a need for social impact organizations to build power and leverage their power skillfully. 

How did we get to this current state as a sector? What does this look like? And how can brand building help you more effectively utilize the power that you have, build more power, and create a bigger impact?

What We Mean By Power

Power is a meaty topic — and the word power has a lot of connotations. We could be talking about power dynamics, collective action, structural power, or influential people who have financial power. There's all kinds of flavors. 

Power is the ability to influence behavior in one way or another to change the course of events. At the end of the day, power can be used to literally shape the future. 

In the social impact space, there's been a lot of conversations around power dynamics as it relates to fundraising and individual donors. There’s even conversation around the structure of some of the larger foundations, institutional philanthropy, and how that money gets spent and invested in overhead and all kinds of thorny topics.

We want social impact organizations to be better at using the power that they have, to build more power, and to not fall into some of the traps that are prevalent within the space — even on a subconscious level.

For Executive Directors, major donor fundraisers, and marketers, the questions of power can pop up when you’re in dialogue with influential stakeholders. This includes prominent board members and funders — whether that's a private donor or a foundation — where their power could move the needle pretty significantly for your organization. The question becomes: Is that individual's or foundation’s vision for the impact you seek in close enough alignment to where you’re going to proceed with this partner and this partnership.

It's worth mentioning that power is not equal and it's not always fair. And that's obviously wrong. There are a lot of really great people and great organizations working on issues of equity and racial justice. And we need to acknowledge that that is a dynamic of power. 

You Give Away Power by Maintaining a Scarcity Culture

Let’s start by thinking about how to best leverage the power that you do have, starting with the hat-in-hand approach to social impact. It’s something you likely experience most with boards and major donors — and to a certain extent — foundation funders as well.

What we’re describing is governance power. We're talking about the board or an influential donor or customer having the ability to control you because you need the resources that they have. But we’re also talking about something even more intractable, which is the general perception of the social impact sector at large needing support from their community.  It’s a ‘Please help us do this’ scarcity culture. The generosity that fuels this sector is beautiful, but it can go too far.

There are things that are historic and systemic that are hard to control. And then there are things that social impact leaders do in their day-to-day work that they have control of and could change.

Why are social impact brands giving their power away? How are they doing that? What are some of those conditions? 

You Give Away Power through Transactional Marketing & Fundraising

One of the big ways that social impact organizations give their power away is by practicing transactional marketing and fundraising — where they're making short-term plays because they're trying to meet their fundraising goals or their sales goals. And they're doing that effectively in the short term. 

You're teaching your supporters and funders that they're no more than a checkbook. They're a transaction. There's this urgent need. Then wait a minute. There's this urgent need over and over and over again. Is it truly urgent anymore? This transactional approach to marketing and fundraising is actually a long-term way to unintentionally give your power away.

Avoid Making Your Marketing About Yourself

Another side effect of too much transactional marketing is that you make it about your own organization rather than making it about the impact that you seek. One example is seeing Volunteers Needed on an organization’s site. You need volunteers. Understood. Why? How will volunteering create impact and benefit society? 

Let’s look at donations. Why and for what? You need to be clear that it's not about you. It's not about your organization. It's about the community you serve or the impact you seek. When you make it about you, you give away your power and then you get into the situation where you have to essentially beg for support. There's a balance here. You want to ask for support, you want to invite support, but you don't want to beg for it – regardless of who you're begging from. 

Because you need them to keep the lights on. Because if you lose that next donor that you counted on, then you have to lay off part of your staff. Or if you don't hit your fundraising goals from your large network of donors, then you're going to have to shut down a program. 

So you get stuck in this starvation cycle where you don't have enough buffer of resources that allow you to say ‘no’ to a donor that doesn't align with your values. You can’t launch a fundraising campaign because it's not a culturally good time to do that. Whatever the reason might be, you’re unable to hold onto your power and wield it a little bit more skillfully.

You Give Away Power When You Compromise Your Values

As a CEO or ED, you're sometimes faced with a large gift that you may have a spidey sense about — that this is going to make you sacrifice or compromise your values or your focus in some way. Yet at the same time, you have people that work for you and whose livelihoods depend on you. 

There is this natural balance that any human being is going to experience where you think, “I could take this gift and figure it out, and now everybody on my team and their families are in good shape. Or I could turn it down because I know that something's smelling a little fishy about it. But I know that that puts my team at risk.” That's a really hard decision to make.

At Cosmic, we’ve been in a place where we need to bring on a project to make payroll — knowing this isn't going to be fun, or this isn't going to align as a bullseye client, or this project isn't really within our core skillset. Luckily, we're in a position now where that's something we don’t typically have to do anymore. But especially in the early days, those are sacrifices that sometimes we had to make even though we knew that it was going to lead to some pain. 

So, we have empathy for all the reasons you might find yourself in this situation. One of the reasons Cosmic has stayed small is to allow us to say ‘no’ to all kinds of stuff. We say ‘no’ to a lot of things that come our way because it's not a good fit or the budget's not there. And the power that we build from that is that we get to choose projects that we think are going to be wildly successful, that align with our values, and where we know we can really help our client. It took 15 years to get to that point. 

It's not to say that it's easy to get there, but with social impact organizations, we've seen a lot of organizations struggle with this.

You Give Away Power When You Lack a Brand Building & Marketing Strategy

Another way that social impact organizations are leaving power on the table is by not having a solid brand marketing and communications approach to their work. And the reason we say that is because we've seen how much power effective branding and marketing can build for your organization. You can use your brand and your marketing to connect people, to make a case for your work, to generate engagement and support, and to raise money. All of these things can help you build and maintain power and move away from some of that transactional urgency non-relationship-based marketing approach. 

The flavor of power we're talking about here is horsepower — the ability to fuel impact and fuel your mission and really get it moving quickly and powerfully.

Build and Focus Power Instead

So let's talk, in a little more detail, about how investing in brand building, brand marketing, and communications for your social impact organization can actually help you build more power. Here's one way that’s often overlooked. 

If you do branding well, you’re going to have a clearly defined niche that you own — clear positioning and differentiation for your organization. And that immediately gives you more power because you can be more efficient, you can be more effective, you have more clarity around what you say ‘yes’ to and what you say ‘no’ to. It’s a power concentrator.

It's almost like being a big fish in a small pond. If you can focus those elements — your vision, your mission, your purpose, and all those things — and you can get those down really tight, then your ability to be influential within your sphere will proportionally grow. Social impact leaders are sometimes guilty of seeking the next bigger, broader way to have an impact when really sometimes the most powerful way to seek that depth of power and impact is to get smaller and get more focused. More focused, but deeper with your impact. And this doesn't require that you build any more power than you already have. It's just a way to focus that power in a better way.

Use Brand Building & Marketing to Capture Attention

Another thing that we've seen branding and marketing really help with is capturing attention. When attention is used skillfully, it’s a form of power because you can convert attention into engagement, into action. You can build a movement literally around your cause if you do this well. 

This is where a lot of organizations get stuck. They have a meaningful mission. They're doing legitimately good effective work, but because they don't have the branding muscle and the marketing muscle in place, they're just not getting attention. They're not getting attention from donors. They're not getting attention from potential employees and staff members that they need to fill key roles. They're not getting attention from really good board members who could help advise on how to take things to the next level. 

Pay Attention to Your Passionate Supporters

While we’re talking about attention, don’t forget to pay attention to yourself as a leader and to pay attention to the people or the audience you’re getting attention from. Really know whose voice you're hearing and decide whether or not that's the voice or a group of voices that you need to pay attention to. 

For example, you might have a loud and passionate group of people who feel a particular way about a project, but ultimately, you know you’re not doing a project for them. You still need to pay attention to their input. Pay attention to the points they're bringing up, validate those things, and factor them into your decision making. But constantly remind yourself that you’re not doing a project for them.

Brand Building can Grow Your Reputation

One other big thing that building a solid brand and marketing muscle can do is deepen credibility for your organization. It can help you garner a reputation. 

Marketing alone cannot build a reputation for you. But when you come through in the real world on any promises that you make as a brand and are authentically true to those promises, it can help plant the seeds. If not, you're just doing cause marketing. 

But when you deliver on your promises, you build credibility. You build reputation. You build authority within your niche that gives you power as well. It gives you power to stand out. It gives you power to have an influence on your issue area ecosystem. This opens up all kinds of avenues for opportunity and resources and power in a way that I think is underutilized and underappreciated in the social impact space.

You Give Away Power Through a Lack of Credibility

There are two main ways. 

1. Putting out marketing and communications messages that they fail to deliver on in the real world. Cause washing is an example of this — putting out messages about the social impact that you're having, but you're not actually coming through on promises you’ve made. It's less common than number two. 
    
2. Not building a reputation in the first place because you're essentially doing your work scrappily behind the scenes. Maybe you're even proud of that and you're not telling your story. You're not getting your message out there. You're not figuring out how to capture and sustain attention and convert that attention into meaningful action for your cause. 
   
   This is by far more common, either through not investing in it or because it’s hard to do and you haven't built the skills, the experience, or the curiosity to do it well.

The Importance of Language and Framing

How you’re communicating subconsciously or consciously really affects how people perceive you as an individual or as an organization. So when you use words and phrases such as: We need your support or Please help support us. This, again, is a hat-in-hand charity style of language. 

Again, generosity is important in the social impact space. We respect generosity. It empowers a lot of what we do in the sector. But we should strive for more confident language that proves that our work is important and invites people who believe in that work to take part in creating a better future for humanity.

So what does it look like to use confident language as opposed to hat-in-hand language? Let's run through an example. Let's say you’re collecting backpack donations for a school drive. How would we phrase that in a confident way to drive participation and interest in that — versus a way that gives up power or loses credibility?

You focus the language on the positive impact. Let's say you had a goal of trying to get 200 backpacks donated. You could say something along the lines of, “Help us give 200 kids new backpacks this year.” It's still very clear that you need help, but you're reframing it in a way that's showing how your supporters can be part of the change. This distinction is subtle. But as humans, we’re trained to pick up on these subtle signals. Over time, you’re building a story about what kind of organization you are.

There's so many directions you could go once you make the shift to let's make a difference to these kids. Let's improve their school experience in some way. That's an invitation, but it's also a tease about the impact that this drive is going to have. It's serving two purposes. It's also aspirational, it's exciting, it's invitational, and if you start to write copy and tell stories in this way, it feels more like a partnership. 

Build Power Through Partnerships

What we're talking about here at the end of the day is that it should be a true partnership between your organization and the people who want to get involved in and support you.

When you create space as a leader for others to contribute to your impact, that’s actually a way to garner power. You're essentially creating a team of people — whether they're on your payroll or not — by enlisting more people into the cause. And that‘s inherently space making in a way that builds power.