Visibility Beats Impact

There's a quiet belief running through the social impact space that being too visible somehow cheapens the work. That good organizations should let their impact speak for itself. That humility is a virtue worth protecting, even at the cost of funding, talent, and reach. This episode makes the case that it's a belief most orgs can no longer afford.

The provocative claim at the center of the conversation: organizations that are consistently good at visibility outperform those that are really good at impact. Not because impact doesn't matter, but because without visibility, there's no flywheel of attention, trust, and resources to sustain the work at scale. The most funded organizations aren't necessarily the most effective ones. They're the most visible, and that visibility was almost always deliberate.

So what counts as visibility, and who actually needs to see you? For some orgs, it's a national audience. For others, it's 10 donors over dinner. The answer depends entirely on who you're trying to reach, but there's a simple test: ask your board, your funders, and the people on your periphery what you do and what impact you have. If the answers are vague or inconsistent, you're looking at a visibility problem, a messaging problem, or both. And if you had to pick one to solve first, visibility wins, because at least it opens a door.

The practical path forward doesn't require a massive budget or a media team. It can start with two articles a month, a single newsletter, or being deliberately visible to one person who represents the audience you care about most. One organization launched a video podcast four weeks ago and already has 15,000 views, guests receiving donations, and a three-month booking waitlist. The flywheel builds from the smallest possible action, but only if you take it.
 

Episode Highlights:

[00:00:00] Eric's claim: visible orgs outperform high-impact orgs 
[00:02:30] The humility trap and the "scrappy org" fallacy 
[00:03:30] Why the most funded orgs are the most visible, not the most effective 
[00:04:00] The Obamacare vs. Affordable Care Act branding lesson 
[00:08:30] Visibility as the most underleveraged strategy in social impact 
[00:10:00] The visibility test: can people describe what you do? 
[00:14:00] If you had to pick one: visibility or messaging? 
[00:17:00] Building visibility into every program from the start 
[00:22:00] Starting from zero: one client's two-articles-a-month breakthrough 
[00:25:00] Jonathan's journey from skeptic to podcast host 
[00:27:00] 15,000 views in four weeks and guests receiving donations 
[00:31:30] Using media to scale your face time with future donors

Notable Quotes:

[00:01:05]: "Orgs who are consistently good at visibility outperform and are more successful, generally speaking, than orgs who are really good at impact." Eric Ressler 

[00:02:25]: "There is just some sort of moral objection to maybe if we're too visible that devalues the sincerity or the authenticity of the impact. There's a sort of humility thing in there." Jonathan Hicken 

[00:02:50]: "I think that era is over. I would not bet on that strategy if I were you." Eric Ressler 

[00:14:00]: "Visibility, man. At least you get the chance. You're opening a door and people could maybe dig in on their own. If you have no visibility, you don't even have a chance." Eric Ressler 

[00:24:35]: "Literally be visible to one person. Pick one person that you think represents the kind of people that you want to be visible to and be visible to that one person." Jonathan Hicken 

[00:32:30]: "You're almost certainly under-indexing on it. Take it seriously and reap the benefits." Eric Ressler 

Resources & Links:

• Seymour Marine Discovery Center — Jonathan Hicken's organization at UC Santa Cruz
• Science Solutions Santa Cruz — Jonathan's new video podcast.
• Gallup Poll: What's in a Name? Affordable Care Act vs. Obamacare
• Obamacare/ACA polling data — Measures of public opinion of the Affordable Care Act (ACA)

P.S. — Struggling to align your message with your mission? We help social impact leaders like you build trust-building brands through authentic storytelling, thoughtful design, and digital strategy that works. Let's talk about your goals »

Full Transcript:

Eric Ressler [00:00:00]: Sometimes the nature of your work is complex. It's nuanced. It's behind the scenes. The impact that you do might take years or even decades to really show up. We've talked about this before on the show. Not an excuse. You still have to figure out how to make your work visible.

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:15]: The biggest question in there is who are you visible to?

Eric Ressler [00:00:20]: Yes.

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:20]: That's a question I'm asking myself right now at Seymour Center is who are we visible to and why? And what is the result that I need to see as downstream [00:00:30] of being visible today?

Eric Ressler [00:00:30]: I'm Eric Ressler.

Jonathan Hicken [00:00:30]: I'm Jonathan Hicken.

Eric Ressler [00:00:35]: And this is Designing Tomorrow. So Jonathan, lately I've been working with clients and this happens to me, I feel like in fits and starts a little bit, where sometimes the clients are a little bit reluctant to be visible about their work. There's a couple different reasons why this shows up, which we'll get into. But it irked me enough that I felt like I'm going to bring this into the pod for this week and I'm going to make maybe a little bit of a provocative claim here, which is that orgs who are consistently good at visibility outperform and are more successful, generally speaking, than orgs who are really good at impact.

Jonathan Hicken [00:01:15]: Spicy. I've been thinking about this a lot lately at Seymour Center.

Eric Ressler [00:01:20]: And just to be clear, I'm not saying you shouldn't be good at impact. What I am saying and my claim here is that you also have to be equally good, if not better, at figuring out how do you make your work visible.

Jonathan Hicken [00:01:30]: Let's break this down.

Eric Ressler [00:01:30]: So a couple things. There are good reasons why visibility is hard in our space, and I do want to acknowledge some of those reasons. So sometimes the nature of your work is complex, it's nuanced, it's behind the scenes. The impact that you do might take years or even decades to really show up. We've talked about this before on the show. Not an excuse. You still have to figure out how to make your work visible. Sometimes it's capacity. We don't have the staff. We don't have the time. We're so busy doing this. Not an excuse. You have to figure out how to make your work visible. So I hear all of these reasons, and they're valid reasons, but I am going to passionately defend. I don't care about those reasons. This is so important. You have to figure it out. You have to figure it out just the same way you have to figure out and get creative and get scrappy or whatever word you want to use to actually make an impact as an org too.

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:20]: I think you've missed one of the reasons why some of us in the space might avoid being visible. And that is just some sort of moral objection to maybe if we're too visible that devalues the sincerity or the authenticity of the impact. There's a sort of humility thing in there.

Eric Ressler [00:02:40]: That's a big one. The we're a scrappy org doing good work behind the scenes fallacy.

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:45]: Yeah. I don't-

Eric Ressler [00:02:45]: No, not an excuse. 

Jonathan Hicken [00:02:50]: It's not good enough. I agree. Not good enough. I agree.

Eric Ressler [00:02:50]: I think that era is over. I think that there used to be, and maybe there's still some corners of the social impact ecosystem where you can get away with that, but I would not bet on that strategy if I were you.

Jonathan Hicken [00:03:00]: Now, when you say that an organization that is better at being visible than one that's not outperforms, what does that mean? What do you mean by that?

Eric Ressler [00:03:10]: That's a good question because by what metric, right? Largely resources. And so resources matter in this space. One of the biggest barriers of impact work is not having the proper resources to match the scale and the ambition of your mission, especially when your mission is really ambitious or big. So what I've noticed is that a lot of orgs who get the attention, who get the funding, who attract the right teams and the staff to do their work, there are also the orgs that are the most visible. Begs the question, what came first the chicken or the egg? Are they visible because they are so good at their impact that they naturally become visible? And I don't think so.

Jonathan Hicken [00:03:50]: No, no, I don't think. I mean, maybe there are a few cases of that being accidental, but I think in the vast majority of visible organizations [00:04:00] were deliberate about it.

Eric Ressler [00:04:00]: Yeah. So let's talk about, I have a sort of weird political parallel here that I think is interesting. So you know Obamacare/the Affordable Care Act, right?

Jonathan Hicken [00:04:10]: I certainly do.

Eric Ressler [00:04:10]: So even at a national politics level, when we're talking about reaching everyday citizens for an issue that matters to basically everyone, healthcare, they did polling and they, I don't know, we'll look it up and put it in the show notes, but I distinctly remember this, where people pulled very positively overall for the Affordable Care Act. And those same people pulled very negatively for Obamacare.

Jonathan Hicken [00:04:40]: The branding of Obamacare.

Eric Ressler [00:04:40]: Yes. Just the name, just even Obama. And there's political polarization and whatever in the mix there for sure. But my reflection here is that Democrats have traditionally been not very good at making their work as visible as they could or should. And that is one of the problems that they are facing as a political party and movement right now, just at large. There's obviously a huge, there's lots of disagreement and differences in the Democratic Party and Democratic leadership and whatnot, especially in this moment. On the contrary, Trump is very good at making his work visible even when, and maybe especially when it's awful. And maybe that's because it's like bull in a China shop style visibility where it's just like you can't look away or a slow motion car wreck. But even when you think about what's going on with a lot of his policies, it's almost like spectacle as policy. I think I probably stole that from Ezra Klein. But the point being that we need to make our work visible at every scope and scale from the national level all the way down to community level. Because if the work isn't visible, then you can't build that flywheel of getting attention, educating people, creating behavior change, getting the resources that you need, reaching the right people who are either partners or funders to get that flywheel going and get the resources you need to actually have your mission scale and make the impact that you want to.

Jonathan Hicken [00:06:10]: In the political sphere, there's this New York mayor, right? He's a Democrat and he's getting good at making his work in New York visible. And that I think that probably explains a lot of this attraction across the country for him. Mahmdani, I think is his name.

Eric Ressler [00:06:25]: That's right.

Jonathan Hicken [00:06:25]: But I have to ask you, right? In that example, would you then say Trump is more effective than Obama because he's more visible?

Eric Ressler [00:06:40]: Well, again, by what measure, right? Trump, for all of his faults, I'm obviously not a supporter of Trump. One thing he is really good at is getting media attention and media visibility. And so by that metric, I think he beats pretty much every politician ever. Is he more effective, was the question?

Jonathan Hicken [00:07:00]: You used the word outperform.

Eric Ressler [00:07:00]: Outperform. Right, right, right. Well, if you look even, and I don't know how much we can really attribute success around fundraising to his visibility only, et cetera. But yeah, I mean, he's been extremely successful with fundraising as well. So if you want to look at it from that metric. And if he were also competent, he would be able, he would have the resources and the setting and the scenario to actually take that visibility, take those resources and apply them in a strategic way. And you can argue that in certain cases he has whether you are for or against his policies. But yes, I do think he's been very effective at harnessing attention and being able to turn that into at least directional policy action, even if he's incompetent at actually creating change in a meaningful way, because he's essentially sidestepping all the legislative processes that will make his change durable over time.

Jonathan Hicken [00:07:55]: That's one of the world's biggest stages. And the point carries over to one person, tiny little nonprofits too, right? Even if you're at the smallest of scales, being visible is a critical component to you being able to deliver impact. That's the argument I think I'm hearing you put forward.

Eric Ressler [00:08:15]: Yeah. Let's bring this back to our listeners here and our audience to your point. And I do agree that yes, this matters if you are a two person nonprofit or a 50 person social enterprise. If you're doing work in the social impact space, visibility is what I've noticed, probably the single most underleveraged strategy for creating social change. And I'm passionate about this. I have an agency built to solve this problem to some degree, but I think maybe what we should do next is talk about what do we mean exactly when we say visibility? Because I think that's a word that can connote different types of things. And I think probably the first thing people are going to think about is media attention, being written up in media or having large social followings or getting lots of likes and comments on your social posts or having a big newsletter, that's a form of visibility. And I actually think that's quite important because so much information and so much relationship building does happen through digital channels these days. But another opposite form of visibility that could actually in certain cases, depending on the type of org that you are, be even more effective or successful would be a dinner with 10 people who matter and making sure that they understand who you are and what you do and the impact that you've had too. So there's not a one size fits all. So there's maybe a little bit of a test that you can do as an organization to say, "Hey, do we have a visibility problem here?" So here's a test you might be able to run, ask a couple different cohorts, what do we do and what impact do we have in the world? And let's say maybe you should ask your internal team this, you should ask your board of directors, you should ask aligned funders who you've worked with before. It'd be great to, if you could, pull people who have tangential understanding but aren't deeply in your world yet. And if you notice that there's not a cohesive, somewhat consistent, clarified answer to those questions, more often than not, you have two problems, a visibility problem and a messaging problem, they go hand in hand, which we can break down in a little bit more detail, but that's a good way to test, do I have a visibility problem at my organization?

Jonathan Hicken [00:10:35]: The biggest question in there is who are you visible to?

Eric Ressler [00:10:35]: Yes.

Jonathan Hicken [00:10:40]: I think that's a question I'm asking myself right now at Seymour Center is who are we visible to and why? And what is the result that I need to see as downstream of being visible to them? And so in your example, maybe there's an organization out there that wants to be state or nationally visible for whatever reason. For us, Seymour Center, we care about being visible within Santa Cruz County, right? We're a very local and regional organization, so I care about that, but another organization might not care about that at all and they may care about those 10 donors or the 10 most important policymakers or whatever, but the point is you got to make sure that those people you care about most can answer these two questions consistently.

Eric Ressler [00:11:25]: Exactly. So to your point, you don't need to be visible to everybody depending on the type of org that you are. If you're a grassroots advocacy org, yeah, the more visibility, the better, right? But if you are, for example, one of our clients works only with state legislators. And I remember in our listening session that we did with them recently, they were very explicit about we do not need to be a household name in America for everyday people because those aren't the people that we're trying to reach here. We are upstream of that. So that's one example. Or to your example, you might care a lot about being visible in a particular region or a particular community. You probably don't care what people in Kansas think about the Seymour Center as much as people right here in our community. Now, could national visibility be a net benefit to you?

Jonathan Hicken [00:12:15]: Sure,

Eric Ressler [00:12:20]: Sure. But if you're going to have to prioritize, yeah, I do think it's worth thinking about who are the most important for me to be visible to as an organization.

Jonathan Hicken [00:12:25]: I wonder though, you said if we're talking to donors, we're talking to funders, maybe we're talking to several, we do your exercise, we do your test, right? And we talk to all these different groups and they're giving us different answers. There's nuance in interpreting those answers. And I don't know if we want to do that right now, but you kind of expect these different groups to give you slightly different answers.

Eric Ressler [00:12:45]: I think that's true. Are we expecting those different groups to recite your elevator pitch and your perfectly crafted mission and vision statements? No. But if they can't answer, maybe here's a good way to think about it with enough specificity where they're like, "Well, I know Jonathan's doing something in the Marine space, but I don't know if it's conservation or advocacy or I think you can go see a whale there or something." That is a sign that you're not doing a good job with either your visibility and/or your messaging. So maybe let's actually, if you don't mind, let's break down that distinction because I think I've seen it both ways. So I've seen orgs that have really dialed messaging, maybe because they worked with us or maybe because they did it on their own, but no solid visibility strategy, that doesn't work either because there's just not enough of the right people who have the opportunity to even see that message to understand it. The flip side problem is that you get a lot of visibility, but your messaging is so vague and so jargony and so unclear that people are like, "Yeah, they're over here doing something in this space, but I don't really understand it." I would say that that latter example is a little bit more common.

Jonathan Hicken [00:14:00]: If you had to pick one to do well and one to do poorly, which one-

Eric Ressler [00:14:00]: Visibility, man. Yeah. All right. Visibility, because at least you get the chance. You're opening a door and people could maybe dig in on their own. If you have no visibility, you don't even have a chance.

Jonathan Hicken [00:14:10]: Yeah, fair enough.

Eric Ressler [00:14:20]: Hey friends, real quick before we continue today's episode, I'm Eric Ressler, founder and creative director at Cosmic. Cosmic is a creative agency, purpose built for nonprofits and mission-driven organizations. [00:14:30] For the last 15 years, we've helped leaders like you nail your impact story and sharpen your strategy, but we're not here to just leave you with a fancy slide deck and a pat on the back. We roll up our sleeves and help you bring our ideas to life through campaigns, creative, and digital experiences. Our work together helps you earn trust, connect deeply with your supporters and grow your fundraising and your impact. If you value the thinking we share here and want it applied to your biggest challenges, let's talk at designbycosmic.com. All right, back to today's conversation.

Jonathan Hicken [00:15:05]: I think about this in terms of sequencing and how much effort I'm putting into certain arms of the business at any given time. And actually, I think back to my time at tech and I worked at this company that was doing usability testing and it was a platform where people could sign up and take usability tests and earn 10 bucks for 15 minutes of their time. And there was this balancing act where we needed to get enough customers to run the business, but we also needed to get enough testers on the panel to meet the demand. But if we had too many testers, then they'd drop off because they didn't get enough work. And if we had too many customers. So there's this balancing act where it's, what are we building at any given time? And I actually think of this work similarly. If we take impact and visibility as these two things to balance, I think that organizations need to start with the impact, but they're going to need to turn their attention towards visibility for a while. But then I'm anticipating, at least at Seymour Center, I'm in this visibility mode right now, but I'm anticipating, once that really gets cooking, I'm going to need to turn back to impact and ramp that up. And it's going to be this ladder, climbing up the ladder of visibility impact little by little.

Eric Ressler [00:16:30]: I actually want to challenge that thinking a little bit because I think that's actually a common way to think about it. And I think there is a new strategy to consider that we've advised some clients to take that has been really successful, which is to build visibility into every, however you break down your work, every program, every initiative, so that visibility is built into the planning from the beginning. Now, we've seen this sometimes with major grants have a communications budget attached to them or something, right? And naturally you're going to have to prioritize, and you're in a mode of visibility right now, which I do want to give you a chance to talk a little bit about that. But one way to get started on this visibility play or this visibility strategy is to start to think about every time you are spinning up a new program or assessing a program, there should be a visibility arm or element to every bit of what you do. So if you think about your programs at the Seymour Center, education, exhibits, now we have Seymour Studios, visibility should not be necessarily always an equal amount of your work in each of those things. Some things are naturally going to have more opportunities for visibility or be a very visibility first play. But I'm going to argue and claim that everything that you do should at least be considered through a visibility lens because I think sometimes what happens is that we talk about this with clients and they're like, "Okay, but I just don't know what to talk about. There's nothing new going on or there's nothing exciting." And then you realize or re-realize through working with them that you might think that thing is boring, but that's actually exactly the thing that you need to talk more about. Maybe sometimes that's a build in public behind the scenes and we're working with an org right now who's in a little bit of a pilot experimentation mode. It's like, "Well, we don't have any impact yet." Totally fair, right? We don't want to make up impact. That's not the idea here. So instead, let's shift into a mode where it's like, "Hey, here's our thesis, here's what we're seeing, here's what we're observing in the space, and here's what we're learning along this journey so far. And we're going to take you along for that ride and say, hey, this is what's stopping us right now. Here are the challenges and here's how we're thinking about solving them." I think some orgs do that in a really interesting way and that build in public, behind the scenes style of visibility and content and storytelling can be really magnetic to your supporters.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:00]: I just went through this little journey as you were going through that. My first gut reaction was like, no, dude, it doesn't work like that. You can't build visibility into every program, especially if you're a small organization, that's just impossible. The dollars don't add up. The dollars and cents don't add up. And then I corrected myself and I was like, no, actually you can do small things.

Eric Ressler [00:19:25]: It doesn't have to be huge.

Jonathan Hicken [00:19:25]: It doesn't have to be huge. And so even we have volunteering, we have our youth school programs and stuff like that. And we actually, I'm realizing in real time, and maybe this is a little encouragement for listeners, yeah, we build that in because we know that in volunteering, folks that are retired and college students are the people who volunteer the most. So we make sure that when we're recruiting, we hit those audiences. And our school programs, I actually think of teachers as being our constituent In that program. So we're like, okay, how are we communicating with teachers? So yes, it is possible. It doesn't have to be huge, but you do have to be deliberate about it.

Eric Ressler [00:20:00]: That's a good word, deliberate or intentional. I think my challenge to listeners is throw those assumptions away and just thought experiment, how might we make this part of our work more visible and what's our visibility strategy? And look, even if you walk away and say, "You know what, there's not really much there. There's not much juice to squeeze out of that program." Great. At least you tried, at least you went through that exercise because I think what ends up happening is orgs will just default to the obvious solutions, but then you get stuck telling the same stories over and over and over again. And a lot about publishing consistently, having a point of view, being visible in your work is figuring out how to tell similar or the same story over and over and over and over again in new and interesting and creative ways. So I think that if you look in the corners that you haven't looked at, there's sometimes some storytelling gold there.

Jonathan Hicken [00:20:55]: And it's so funny because sometimes I feel like that's my whole job, is telling this story a thousand times the day with slight little tweaks depending on who I'm talking to, but I'm just repeating this vision and this impact and the story over and over and over again.

Eric Ressler [00:21:10]: Yeah. I mean, let's not forget that you hear that story more than anyone in the world, right? And so sometimes you're like, "Well, we already did that piece. We already did that thing." I mean, I've been talking about brand for 16 years. You think I don't get bored about it, but it's like I constantly find new ways to think about it and to repackage and retell the story.

Jonathan Hicken [00:21:30]: I actually think you don't get bored with it.

Eric Ressler [00:21:35]: Yeah. Okay. I don't really get bored with it, but I do sometimes feel like, "Oh, we already did something on that." And even some of these ideas in this podcast we've covered in various ways and past ones. Sure. So look for those opportunities. I do want to speak to something else you said, which is, we don't have the dollars or cents for this. And you already alluded to this, but if you're a listener right now and you're like, "Okay, Eric, I'm convinced I need to be more visible. I'm going to take visibility more seriously in my work, but how do I even get started? It feels overwhelming. We don't have the dollars. We don't have the capacity, whatever the constraints might be." I think you just need to start, right? You need to start and just do one thing and commit to that and then build on that because my claim here and what I've observed over and over and over again is once you start, you might not see success immediately, but you'll be surprised, especially if you're going from zero to step one, how much impact even just a little bit of visibility might have. We, for example, had a client that we did a rebrand for, they were a brand new org. We started so simple. We're going to write two articles a month and we're going to send two newsletters a month. And at first they didn't hear much. And then they went to a conference and everyone at that conference came up to them and was like, "Hey, I saw that article about that thing you did." It was so good. And they were like, "Oh my God, people are reading our thing." I mean, even our podcast, sometimes I feel like we publish into the void. And that's the nature of podcasting as you see downloads, see views, but you get some feedback. But I commonly will get people who are like, "Hey, I listened to that episode and I thought it was really great." I was like, "Cool, maybe hit like next time." So you have to remember that, and this is a little bit of a content point of view, but there's so many people who are lurking and are not participating, but you are creating signal. And so I think that if you're in this position of, well, how do we even begin? First of all, just consider visibility as core to your strategy and think about for every program, for every initiative, for every area of our work, how might we build some sort of visibility strategy into that work and then begin. And then if you do that consistently and you build out that capacity, that skill, that muscle, what will you start to see? Well, now people start to understand your impact. They start to understand your story, start to understand what you do more that leads to opportunities to funders, to partners, to staff who you really need that you couldn't have attracted before. It is this flywheel effect. And now, oh, we actually have some capacity. We actually have some more resources than we did last year. Let's not just put all that straight back into program work only. Let's make sure now that we are investing in brand, investing in storytelling, investing in visibility at large, and then that's how it becomes this flywheel effect.

Jonathan Hicken [00:24:25]: For anybody out there that's still thinking, "Okay, Eric, that all sounds good. You keep telling me just start, but how?" I would say literally be visible to one person. Pick one person that you think represents the kind of people that you want to be visible to and be visible to that one person. And that's just doing the reps. That's just building the muscle. Pick that person and be visible and then it'll grow, right? And then you'll start reaching more people like that and stuff. So I would say literally one person.

Eric Ressler [00:25:05]: Yep. So I remember season two or something when we still had seasons on this show, I claimed, Jonathan, you need to be your marketer at the Seymour Center. And at the time you're like, "No, dude, I'm not doing that." I convinced you on that one. You've come around.

Jonathan Hicken [00:25:20]: I'm fully in, man. I have drank the Kool-Aid full blown.

Eric Ressler [00:25:25]: So now I want you, before we wrap up today, to just tell a little bit of a story. We've built this Seymour Studios out here at the Seymour Center where we're recording today. You've launched your show, Science Solutions Santa Cruz. It's like what, week three of it being out at the time we're recording this, something like that?

Jonathan Hicken [00:25:40]: Yeah, four weeks,

Eric Ressler [00:25:40]: Four weeks in

Jonathan Hicken [00:25:40]: And almost 15,000 views.

Eric Ressler [00:25:45]: So tell me about how good my idea was here. No, I want you to make an honest case and reflection of how this visibility has affected your business so far. And obviously it's still early, but I'm really impressed with how successful the show is so far.

Jonathan Hicken [00:26:00]: Yeah. I mean, look, I did the thing where it was just get started. And to be fair, we had the resources to go bigger.

Eric Ressler [00:26:10]: Sure.

Jonathan Hicken [00:26:10]: We had the time, we had the team, we had the resources and we had a clear idea of the story we wanted to tell and who we wanted to tell it to. All of that was pretty clear to us when you pitched this idea to me on our walk along Westclef. So just acknowledging that all of those pieces were already in place for us. We had the space, right? There was a lot of reasons why we were set up for it. I just took the plunge. I knew going into it that I didn't know if this was going to be successful and it's still early. There's still a lot to learn. But four weeks in, we've got 15,000 views. I'm already booked out three months with guests. I have people in the community reaching out to me asking to come on the show. I'm getting people writing emails to my guests. In fact, we just got an email today from someone that's in one of my guests' universes saying how much they appreciated the perspective and advocacy and stuff. And so-

Eric Ressler [00:27:05]: Guests are getting donations?

Jonathan Hicken [00:27:10]: Yeah. And one of my guests called me saying that she had gotten a donation as a result of the podcast we did together. And so I mean, it was scary and it felt very risky. And to be honest, it still does, right? I mean, we're seeing some really cool, honest, exciting early results, but every time I sit down on this chair to interview someone for the show, it feels like a risk. And I think a big part of it was just taking that plunge and taking that first step. And so-

Eric Ressler [00:27:40]: So it's a risk in that there was upfront investment. And by the way, listeners, do you need to build out a pro level podcast, video podcast studio to build visibility? Again, no. No. It's a good strategy if all the conditions are right, I think creating media like this, I think is an important strategy in our current media environment, but there's that upfront risk, right? But there's also the bigger ongoing either risk or trade off of a lot of your time and energy now is spent on this kind of work, which means you are not doing other things that you did before, right? You have a certain amount of time as an executive director. So I'm wondering if you could talk about how you think about that trade off. And you even mentioned earlier, okay, we've been really focused on visibility. Now I'm worried about impact, but I want to challenge, I don't think those two things are a zero sum game. I think they feed on one another.

Jonathan Hicken [00:28:35]: Yeah. I mean, my vision for the program that we're producing is actually that I'm building it so I don't have to be the host. That's my vision here is that ultimately somebody else is in this seat. And frankly, I envision launching multiple shows and having this network of media, frankly, where I then get to step back and point my attention as executive director to other areas that need my attention, but it was, and I believe it continues to be the right use of my time. Now what's really important, the thing that I'm trying to turn on is the fundraising results. For me, the visibility has to lead to fundraising results. And we're so early in on this program that I haven't seen those yet, at least that I'm aware of. And so that's my next focus is turning on that connection. And I'm confident that it's going to work because the results are so impressive that I think the donors in my network are going to see real impact and real meaning in that, just like I do.

Eric Ressler [00:29:41]: I think one way to think about this, and I think about this in our business also is, your next cohort of donors have maybe not even heard about you yet. And I think about this in the nature of our work being transformative. We work with clients over multiple years, but every year we work with the new cohort of clients too. And so the clients that we work with three years from now might be listening to this episode today and I don't know that this episode is going to be that first touch point. So this is just brand building 101. So I think not to say you might not get a viewer of a show like this that then is already in a place that they're already really keen to donate or to make an investment in an org like yours and that visibility instantly leads to a donation, that'll happen too. But more commonly, you need a certain number of just visibility touchpoints to build trust, to build credibility, to build a relationship over time. So a good way to think about visibility as a strategy is you are paving the way for, in your case, next month's donations, next year's donations, five years from now donations. And if you build that visibility machine, you're just creating more opportunities for those conditions to build that. And it's the same for me as well. And so it is a bit of a long game, right? Visibility. It doesn't have to be. There's short game visibility plays you could do as well, but you do have to be patient at some level and you have to be willing to play that long game for it to work out.

Jonathan Hicken [00:31:15]: One of the things that we knew about fundraising is that we, in terms of major donor fundraising, we got the best results when I personally had time with the individual or the family or whatever, and that was producing results. The challenge is it's hard to scale one person's face time with a lot of major donors.

Eric Ressler [00:31:35]: Yes.

Jonathan Hicken [00:31:35]: And so the way I think about the show is actually scaling myself with donors that I don't even know about yet, giving them a chance to get to know me, get to know the questions I'm asking, the kinds of people that I'm working with week in and week out, and having this fantastic starting point. So when I do meet that donor, they know me a little bit.

Eric Ressler [00:32:00]: Yes, yes. I think I say this a lot when we work with clients and we work with their development directors or development teams. It's like, we do our job well and your job gets significantly easier because we are building awareness, trust, credibility so that by the time you sit down for an in-person meeting, you're not starting at zero anymore. You are three or four meetings ahead that you would otherwise have to do in person. So yeah, I think to me for listeners, the big takeaway [00:32:30] today is visibility matters. You're almost certainly under-indexing on it. Take it seriously and reap the benefits.

Jonathan Hicken [00:32:40]: Start with one person if you have to, but get started.

Eric Ressler [00:32:40]: Okay, Jonathan, this one was fun.

Jonathan Hicken [00:32:40]: Thanks, Eric.

Eric Ressler [00:32:45]: If you enjoyed today's video, please be sure to hit like and subscribe or even leave us a comment. It really helps. Thank you. And thank you for all that you do for your cause and for being part of the movement to move humanity and the planet forward.