How to Sell a Vision Before It’s Real

This article is a summary of Episode 47 of our Designing Tomorrow podcast. Each episode is a conversation between Jonathan Hicken, Executive Director of the Seymour Marine Discovery Center, and Cosmic’s Creative Director, Eric Ressler.

Today we’re going to talk about something that many social impact leaders have direct experience with — how to sell a vision when you're not yet delivering on the work.

What Does It Mean to Sell a Vision You're Not Yet Delivering?

What we mean is: as a social impact leader you've got this big idea for where you want to take the organization, or your big idea for the impact that you want to have or the world that you want to live in. And you look at your organization and you realize you're not actually yet doing the work to get there. But you know what it's going to take to deliver on that new vision. How you’re going to rally the support. How you’re going to rally the team. How you’re going to rally all the resources you need to get to that vision at some point. That's a really, really hard thing to do when you're not yet doing the work.

This could be something a new ED sees when they have an opportunity for somewhat of an impact shift or a pivot in an organization they are joining.

How often are social impact leaders or organizations facing this question or a similar one? All the time. Almost by definition, no one's really delivered on their vision — or it's no longer a vision, right? It's just reality. But you're usually somewhere along that journey. You might be at the very, very early parts of where you have that vision and it's a brand new fresh idea, a new insight, a new realization, a new opportunity, and it just starts in your head.

One way to think about this sometimes is that it's a vision or an idea of a new way of what could be, but what is not yet true. And then there's a whole vision life cycle essentially from that moment — that insightful moment, or maybe it's a combination of moments that leads to that — all the way through realization of that vision. So it really comes down to where are you on that path? And it's a very fluid thing.

The case we're talking about here is one where you look around at the actual work being done by your team and you're realizing that that work is not advancing towards the vision, and you need to rally the resources to get there, to start doing the work, to start moving in that direction.

Startup Mode vs. Reinvention

If you think about the nonprofit life cycle, you could think about this as being the startup mode. You've got a vision, you're about to launch a new social impact venture and you need to sell it. Oftentimes nonprofits also get to this point of reinvention or sort of needing to recycle back to the beginning — there’s a moment of transition and transformation, and there is space for this new vision to emerge.

Let’s talk about that moment when you’re not really doing the work yet. How do you rally the resources?

To spell this out: There's a new vision. It's in the head of the executive director or the board chair or the leadership team. But the day-to-day work that's being done is not actually moving towards that vision. It's moving towards a different vision or an older vision. And so how do you go out there and sell that vision to a funder, to a partner, to maybe even a new team member you're trying to recruit? That's what we're talking about.

Tip One: You Really Have to Believe

The first thing in selling your vision — and we think it's the most important — is that you as the executive really believe in it. And we're not talking performative belief, where you're putting on a good face as the ED and showing that you believe in this thing. We're talking about really, truly, deeply believing — within yourself — in the potential for this to make a difference.

That has to be true, because otherwise it's not really an authentic vision. It's a marketing ploy. It's a packaging of an appeal to a donor. And in the space, we hear that we need to have a vision and a mission statement. In our experience, that's sometimes the origin story of a vision, which is exactly backwards. The process of creating a vision statement should be translating a vision from the head of a leader or a group of leaders into a discernible and recognizable rallying cry. 

What we've experienced more often than not is that those vision statements — and sometimes even those mission statements — get an outsized amount of attention as the statements themselves. We would much rather organizations spend more time on actually having a compelling vision and mission versus how you describe that mission. That might sound a little counterintuitive, given that we do messaging work.

We write a lot of vision and mission statements for organizations. And what we've experienced, at times, is that when we really start to dig into how to craft these statements, what becomes clear is that there is no coherent vision or mission for the organization, or there's not consensus around what that should be. You could say that's just part of the process, but what we've also experienced is that when there is a very compelling vision or a very compelling mission that supports that vision, those statements kind of write themselves.

How This Played Out at Cosmic

We went through a vision shift at Cosmic several years ago — going all in on social impact after being a generalist agency. It really did start with an internal belief from Eric, our founder, that this was the right move. A lot of time went into thinking deeply about that move and other moves we could have made instead. That was a collaborative process. Eric owned it as the founder and Creative Director at Cosmic. Ultimately, defining and picking a vision is the responsibility of the founder. But the team was included along the ride, and we explored multiple different avenues, multiple different directions or paths that we could have taken as an organization. But ultimately we landed on this vision because of a belief that it was the right move to make.

So to break this down further, there was the decision that this is what we're going to do. And then there was the question of how do we explain that to the team? How do we rally the team around that? Although they were part of the process, ultimately Eric had to make a choice had to get everyone on board with that choice. That experience went really well. But it doesn't always. There are times where that decision might mean parting ways with some team members who aren't on board with that new vision. That can be okay, and sometimes maybe even a sign that it's a strong vision.

When thinking about how to package this to the team, and then more so to the marketing strategy and the messaging strategy as an organization, it really did start with: The organization leader needs to believe this is true. That’s what happened with Eric. From there it started to trickle down into a series of strategic moves. How does that affect the story that we tell to people when they're reaching out to us? How does it affect our website and our messaging and our positioning on the website and elsewhere? It kind of trickles down from that clear core idea. And the idea was really clear and really intuitive. It was — We are going to focus on serving social impact organizations, and that is our target market.

There's a corollary between the vision for Cosmic — and we consider our organization to be a social impact organization, even though we're not a nonprofit. But our success is measured and valued based on how much of an impact we're making for our clients alongside how sustainable and profitable the business is. And so in certain ways it is a similar trajectory to a social impact nonprofit, and our new vision really did start with that core belief. 

A Unique Advantage: A Team Already Capable of Doing the Work

If your organization and a team or teams of people capable of doing the work that you know needs to happen, that is a unique advantage. The leader of the organization is bringing new visions to the table, but you have a leg up if you have people on your team who can execute on this new vision.

At Cosmic, our team was very capable of delivering the creative work and the strategic work and the technical work. So the motions were the same, but there was a lot of learning to do about understanding this niche and the distinct problems of that niche, the distinct opportunities, the way the culture operates in the sector, and the specific challenges that these organizations face on a daily basis. We had some theories and some experience with that because, before this move, we had worked with nonprofits and social enterprises and even some government organizations and funders. But they were a subset of our client base. So we had some foundational knowledge of the space, but we were not category experts when we first made this choice. We had to rapidly learn and study.

We did that through research, through reading, through listening, and pretty quickly through additional experience. Building expertise is a lot about identifying patterns and matching them — seeing that a lot of these organizations struggle in the same way with a specific thing. If we didn't have that niche understanding, we never would've seen those patterns to the same degree. So we had, we'll say 75% of the expertise and capabilities that we needed, and we had a strategy to quickly build the rest of that capacity and expertise to meet the specific strategy that we outlined.

Tip Two: Be Really Clear About the Why and the How

Your why and your how can be both internal and external. Opening up about your thought process —in this particular case — is a powerful use of transparency. It’s where you're saying, “Look, this is where we're going. This is how we think we're going to get there. But it's going to take all of us, and so let's work on it together.”

This applies whether you're talking to your team or talking to a funder. If you're talking to your team, you're asking them to do slightly different work. And so you need to make sure that they understand what that means for them and their lives. But also it means making sure that funders understand where their money's going and the impact that their money's going to have.

The nature of the conversation shifts a little bit depending on who you are selling this vision to, but this is one of those cases where the why and the how really matter to be able to sell a new vision when you're not delivering the work yet.

A Surprising Advantage with Funders

This can work to your benefit for certain funders. In our experience, funders get really excited about those early days where they get to be a keystone funder in a new exciting project. And sometimes actually be a little less excited about funding work that's already proven and just needs additional scale or additional resources. It's a less sexy funding opportunity. 

Now, of course, this is funder dependent — some funders specialize in that kind of funding. But you look at some of the proven models out there, you look at some of the global work around malaria, for example, where it's literally buying nets — the least sexy kind of funding you can do — but it's a proven model. It's one of the most effective ways to spend money to make a global impact on humanity. And it can be hard to track that funding, whereas spinning up a new think tank for a new progressive organization might get more attention, because the funder gets to be part of something new. There's this excitement of creating something new. So it kind of cuts both ways.

Jonathan has experienced this exact dynamic at the Seymour Center. There are programs that have been running for 25 years that are incredibly effective. It's harder to fund those in some cases, whereas selling a new vision catches attention. And there's a conversation that starts immediately.

So whether it's with your team or with your funders, you need to be really clear about the why and the how. And in some ways, that's the hardest part. When you have a new vision, you might not always know exactly what it's going to take. But you've got to at least put something out there. You've got to make an educated guess about what it's going to take.

Tip Three: Acknowledge the Risk

You have to acknowledge where things could go wrong. There's trust building that happens there. When you're selling a new vision, you need to be honest with yourself about the fact that if this happens, we're going to need to shift where the work's going.

One way to think about risk taking is almost like these bands — upper band and lower band — that trigger certain decisions to happen. If the line goes above a certain mark, it's going to trigger additional investment. If the line drops below a certain mark, you're going to pull back. 

This is similar to pitching a new company to a VC, where one of the common things you'll put in a slide is the risks — what are the risks or the unknowns. Investors want to know what the risk profile of the investment is. In the VC world, there's the philosophy — or traditionally there's been this philosophy — of knowing that nine out of ten investments are going to flop, but the tenth one, if successful, will more than pay for all of those failed investments. Social impact doesn't work in that way, but the corollary there is that yes, acknowledging where there are risks or where there are some unknown potential pitfalls in the new vision — as an investor or a funder, we would feel comforted by acknowledging that, because it feels authentic and grounded and not this kind of pie-in-the-sky vision.

There's a balance there, because you want to be inspirational and magnetic in your vision crafting and authentic in it. But if you go too far, funders can become skeptical — and that's a reasonable response. Because there are no sure bets. If the vision's big enough, there's always going to be some level of risk. And so if you can include some of those in the presentation or the pitch or the narrative, to a reasonable degree, it just builds credibility for you.

Knowing When to Raise the Risk — and When Not To

There's a time and a place for talking about this particular piece. Getting up on stage to sell a new vision in front of a huge audience and then spending a ton of time on what the risks are is probably not the move. But behind closed doors with a potential funder, you need to be prepared to talk about those things.

To make this conversation about risk a little more concrete: at the Seymour Center, the pivot was toward being more solutions oriented and more locally oriented in the kinds of stories being told through different channels. The words ‘climate change’ come up a lot in this conversation because the local community is experiencing the impacts of climate change, and it's real and it's tangible. One of the risks identified pretty early was: are people really going to want to go to a science center that's just talking about climate change the whole time? That sounds like kind of a bummer.

That risk was acknowledged, and they actually started testing what was working or not in terms of the language. And indeed, the term "climate change" is not something that motivates somebody to go to a science center. So they had to determine how to talk about climate change without talking about climate change.

So they identified that risk pretty early and weren't sure how attendance would react. The good news is that the Seymour Center set attendance records last year, so there are some positive results from this. But the risk was identified early on.

Reframing the Story

The solution or pivot in the messaging was to skip straight to facts about what Santa Cruz is experiencing. A concrete example: just a few months ago, there was a huge storm that came through, produced some massive waves, and it destroyed the Santa Cruz wharf. That was a big deal for the community. So rather than saying climate change is causing these bigger waves, the Seymour Center went directly to: there were bigger waves and it destroyed the wharf. That is indisputable, and here's what we're doing about it. 

It's almost as if they make the assumption that people know — at least in their community — that there's a certain level of belief in this concept of climate change, and we don't really even need to start with that education. It's assumed.

Tip Four: Test, Experiment, and Demonstrate

Testing and experimenting may be the single best way to sell a vision when you're not yet delivering on the work. Start experimentation and prototypes and demonstration projects.

The way it was handled at the Seymour Center: there wasn't a huge budget to be building really complex science exhibits. So the decision was to get in whatever could be done with what they had, so that when the community and donors and supporters came in, the Seymour Center staff could point to it and say, Here's where we're headed. Imagine if we had the resources to make this a world-class science experience.

This is the MVS (minimum viable strategy) framework in action. 

Even when you have a new vision, socializing it is actually a form of early testing, just getting feedback. And then getting into prototypes is the next step.

There's always a risk of going too far and not easing people into the change — especially for an organization where there's a perception of the brand and what it stands for and the vision and the mission of the organization that people have in their brains. If you start to do something on a new vision and people aren't up to speed on that new vision, they're not in the loop so to speak, that creates this dissonance of like, wait, why is this organization doing this? This is not the organization we know and love. Why are they doing these things? We don't understand.

So there are two takeaways from that. 

1. Even more burden on effective, consistent communication that actually cuts through, and having an apparatus for that so that you can educate people along the way. 
2. Bring them along for the ride, doing these kinds of prototypes or smaller steps to start to plant the seeds for the new vision instead of just going all in on it all at once.

Show, Don't Tell

It's a show-not-tell approach. You could stand up and try to sell someone on advancing local solutions. And a donor or supporter might think that's all great, but they're going to ask what that actually looks like. So the approach is: let us show you. Let us show you what a great exhibit looks like, but with our budget — and imagine what we could do with yours.

And that's a great strategy for funding too. Have demonstrations in place. So when the question comes — are you capable of doing this? What does it look like? — you have the demonstration. We have some proof to say, yes we can. And here's the impact of that work. Now again, this is minimum viable strategy. And in some cases, it's a minimum viable product too. In the case of the Seymour Center, DIY exhibit experiences, just so that they could show where they are headed.

What Was Learned from the Seymour Center Prototypes

How did the community respond to those? So far so good. They've been getting feedback on their first set of prototypes. They heard from people that they actually want some more text. They were too light on the amount of information they were including. That was totally shocking — you wouldn't have guessed that. So they started adding some more written content, and that has been helpful.

They also learned about interaction dynamics — the kinds of things people want to touch and feel and experience when they're learning about their community. They made some assumptions about what those interaction types might be. They were right about some of them. They were wrong about some of them. Now, each time they roll out a new exhibit, they’re incorporating the feedback learned from the previous ones.

When Do You Know It's Time for a New Vision?

One thing that we think about in our client work is: how do you know when it's time for a new vision? And do you reach your vision before you change it? The answer is no. If your vision's big enough, you change the vision before you reach it.

We started this article off by saying that part of the nature of a vision is that you never get there. And so it's probably worth changing it before you get there. 

If your vision is small enough that it's basically just a fancy mission, maybe that can happen. But a bold, interesting vision that was hit a hundred percent, jobs done, let's go home — that just doesn't really happen. Even the vision at Cosmic of repositioning and focusing on social impact — you could say that we reached that — but before we were fully “done” with that vision, there was already a new one: what does the next level look like? We were on track to check that first box, that first vision. But we didn't just sit there and wait to start thinking about the new vision until that one was a hundred percent. That's just the nature of how we think. What's next? What's next? How can we get deeper on this? How can we elevate it? How can we do better at these things? It's a fluid thing more than anything.

Same Audience, New Vision

An interesting contrast between Cosmic and the Seymour Center in this case is that Cosmic did, to a certain degree, change its customer or client, whereas the Seymour Center kept its audience the same and asked: how can we best serve this audience with our assets? That's where the vision shifted — because there was a new opportunity to have more impact on the existing audience.

But we wonder, did the Seymour Center’s audience change, or is it going to change slightly? The target audience might not change, but who actually shows up and feels most drawn to the vision will probably shift a little bit. They think about local families with kids in grade school as their bread and butter. But there are going to be people who come in and continue to just go straight to the aquarium because they just want to see the fish and that's okay. But now they're offering something else that's intended to mobilize and activate the community.

At Cosmic, there's a different kind of vision shift happening over the last six months or so. And in that case, it's actually a lot more like the Seymour Center example, where we are not changing who we're trying to reach, but we're reinvisioning how we actually partner with clients — to partner with them more deeply, more holistically, to work with fewer clients and to support them beyond some of the foundational work that we do. That's a revisioning of the agency. It's actually a really big one from an internal perspective. And navigating that vision shift has been definitely one of our most challenging.

Tip Five: Access Your Patience

A closing tip: access your patience. Because especially in a time and space where we're looking for that instant gratification, where we're looking for the quick hits — these vision shifts take time. And sometimes it feels like one step forward, two steps back. Other times it's two steps forward, one step back. 

That's absolutely relatable — because impatience is not a quality that has always served us well, though it has served us well in life in certain ways. There's an interesting transition that happened: a lot of time went into getting crystal clear about the vision for this pivot for Cosmic. And then we got there and said, we've got it. We can see it so clearly. And then it was: but now you have to actually make it happen. And that was discouraging as impatient people, because the feeling was, we're ready, we just want to be there now. We just want that to be what it is to run Cosmic now. We've had to reset expectations around what the transition time might look like to make that transition fully.

Impatience as a Visionary Quality

Sometimes impatience is a good quality. You have to balance this. You have to have that drive, and that impatience can serve you. Take a new vision — you think about examples like Steve Jobs, who had this kind of famous reality distortion field people call it, where he just didn't accept reality. That is a visionary quality. Now there's also a lot of accounts of Steve Jobs not being the best person to work for and having a lot of personal flaws that were the double-edged sword of that reality distortion field. Maybe it's that you want to be impatient, but also realistic about the fact that this isn't going to happen overnight. Still, being impatient is a good visionary quality.

Yet, the experience at the Seymour Center draws from three years of architecting this change. And they continue to believe they're heading in the right direction. If they rewind the clock three years and told themselves back then that this was going to take at least three years to get done — that might have scared them off. They might have said, forget it, let's just stick with the program. We'll make a great aquarium. 

Ultimately they're really glad we didn't get that foresight and that they remained patient, because it's still possible. They still think it's going to happen.

Steadfastness Over Perfectionism

Maybe the word isn't patience — maybe you could think about it as being steadfast, or just really committed, believing in it, and knowing that the obstacles are impermanent. 

As we've been trying to make this transition at Cosmic, there are also business realities that face us around keeping the pipeline going, keeping cashflow going, being able to make payroll, all the core business functions. We've found ourselves having to veer off our intuition. 

What we would love to be able to do is just put blinders on to all those business realities and just focus a hundred percent of our energy and time on realizing the new vision. And it just doesn't work that way. You can't do that. Maybe if you're starting from scratch and you have a brand new vision, but there are going to be obstacles there too. So you have to find the right mix of those things. It's a tough thing to do.

At the Seymour Center, they weren't willing to break the things that were working in order to get to the vision — which has slowed them down. But they also didn't break the impact they were having as they made this move.

We've said this before: move fast and break things is not a good social impact strategy. It might work for Silicon Valley, but when the things you're breaking are true impact that the world needs, or people's jobs and livelihoods — you have to be realistic about not just totally scrapping what you've got. And so maybe there is a little bit of patience that comes in there, or just understanding that it's going to take a little more time than you'd like it to.

That said: we still believe that some impatience is a good vision quality.

For all you leaders out there — have that bold vision and do what it takes to sell it, even if you're not delivering on the work yet.

Check out the full conversation on our Designing Tomorrow podcast.