Hello. I’m Jane Pfeiffer, founder and president of Fieldtrip. Thanks for watching Mission Multiplier, where we spend just a couple of minutes together talking about the ways nonprofit leaders and leaders of purpose-driven organizations can achieve their mission with a little less friction. What we’re doing today is continuing to break down the three pillars of self-awareness or self-evaluation that we at Fieldtrip typically use when we’re speaking with prospective clients or new clients.
Last time we talked about awareness. On a scale of zero to ten where zero is don’t know you never heard of you. Ten is I know you. I know what sector you’re in. I can describe that and recognize your name and logo and put you in the right spot. We’re going to build on that today. If you can pull out your number lines from last time, we’re going to use the same audiences, one at a time.
Here’s where it gets a little tricky. If you take your first audience, I think we used legislators or policymakers as an audience. Our scenario was you scored them a five, so you can draw a number line from zero to ten. But the right half of that is going to be somewhere between zero and five because if only 50% are aware of you, even fewer can align with you.
Alignment being at a zero means I don’t believe in what you do. I don’t believe you’re the organization to solve this problem. I don’t believe this problem can be solved. Maybe I don’t believe that the challenge that exists, it just shouldn’t even need the support of charitable work. The ten is I do believe. I believe in you.
I believe in the work that you do. I believe that you make a difference. Those are your scales. Now take that first audience in my hypothetical between zero and five. Of that 50% that know you what percent between zero and 50 actually would align with you, know and believe in what you do?
Now break that down scoring for every single audience. Think about your community, think about your employees, think about your beneficiaries and all the subsets of groups in there, you really can’t get too granular. Community leaders, civic leaders, partners, insurance payers whatever is needed for your organization, score each one separately on both the awareness criteria and the alignment criteria.
When you have alignment, you’re focusing on one audience and that one audience is your beneficiaries, those who need your help. Because when you focus on that audience, in almost everything you do, the other audiences believe in you and will come along. It’s not that you’re focusing and excluding others from the conversation, it’s that you’re demonstrating your undeniable focus on the people you serve. Because you’re so focused, because you get them, because you understand how to do the work and deliver the mission, others will believe. That’s a much stronger place to be in than to simply “be aware and know you exist.” We need to strive to make people believe. Next time we’ll talk about the third pillar, and that’s “Advocate.” Thanks for watching and visit wearefieldtrip.com/nonprofits to subscribe for weekly videos and more.
