060 – Get Into the Minds of Your Donors: Communication Hacks, with Jason Thomson

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about having effective conversations and communicating clearly with Jason Thomson.

For more than two decades, with a thousand some odd projects, he’s been a speechwriter, storyteller, and pitch specialist. Jason Thomson has been hired to passionately win over audiences and sell ideas through content, writing, and storytelling.

He’s an avid hat collector and a super Lego enthusiast. Jason, I have to ask you, which do you have more of? Hats or complete Lego sets?

Jason Thomson: Complete Lego sets by a country mile. I have every single Lego architecture set that has ever been produced. And listen, the thing is, you can bankrupt yourself with Lego and forget those RSPs people.

If you really want to make money, buy Lego sets that are about to retire because they skyrocket in value. As a good example, the Taj Mahal that was first produced (I believe, in 2006) went on sale for about $400. Now, to buy that new inbox on eBay is about $8,000 US. So there is your real investment.

David Pisarek: There you go. All the non-profits, forget about investing the money. Donor brings you money, buy some Lego. And I’m just kidding. Well, maybe I’m not kidding.

Jason Thomson: I don’t know. There’s a story about a guy who bought a bunch of Lego sets and then flipped them after they retired and bought a real house, cash.

David Pisarek: Wow. That is a solid plan. So the key is to be tuned in to what’s happening in the marketplace and the Lego sets. That’s solid.

Jason Thomson: Drop me a line, and I’ll get you hooked up.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Jason, I go back a few years… He’s a super awesome guy (so happy to have you here on the show). We’re going to be talking about content. So let’s talk about conversations. To hold better conversations, what do communicators need to do? What are they doing wrong?

Jason Thomson: They’re doing a lot wrong, but the primary way that I describe it is we are misconnecting with audiences.

Oftentimes, we look at a connection we’re trying to make or a communication that we’re trying to make, something we push out, like an email, social media campaign, or a conversation that we’re having with somebody one on one, and our objective is the wrong objective.

Oftentimes, it’s like, “I got to say, here’s what I got to say”. Listen, I’m a speechwriter and a speaker coach, and it’s the number one thing that I get at the very beginning of the journey for anybody who is putting together a presentation, is “here’s what I want to say”, and it’s actually the wrong thing to focus on.

You need to understand what your objective is, what you’re trying to get out of that conversation, and what you need to give your audience to be able to get there.

And so that is the art of connection. You’ve got to spend less time worrying about yourself and more time worrying about them. So if you make that goal that, “what does a strong connection look like?”, that’s going to solve so much. Everything from an external facing thing like a campaign, all the way down to your spouse.

Oftentimes we get into this whole idea of who’s right in a conversation, and it spirals out into an argument.

The thing is, your whole focus is, “you know what? How do I better connect with this person?”. The whole game changes and it’s not about who’s right.

The other thing that is really interesting, is that we’re not recognizing in communications just how much content we’re shoving at somebody.

So I’ve just talked for about, let’s say, two minutes. I could hit you with 400 words. What do you remember? Well, you’ll remember what gets repeated.

That’s one of my favorite lines, “what gets repeated gets remembered”, which is misconnection. If we misconnect, then we have a problem. I like that better than “disconnect” because disconnect is what an audience does, is they’ll just give up on you.

Misconnection empowers you to be able to do the things that you can effectively drive a conversation in a way that is fruitful for both you and the other side.

David Pisarek: That’s awesome. I love the idea of spinning it and understanding, “okay, misconnection means you can still reframe it”. You can still reconnect. You can still try to create that meaningful bond, that emotional connection with somebody else to have a real conversation. So why is that so important?

Jason Thomson: Why is that so important? Because we’re pushing a lot of junk at the world that is already overloaded. And with that overloaded world is the response is rarely what you imagine.

One of the biggest issues with social media is we don’t respond, we react, and reaction is not generally positive unless it’s something that… You know, your small community. You’re preaching to your community, “I did this, I voted”, whatever that is. Everyone’s like, “Good for you, good for you”, which, of course, is endorphin rush and all that thing.

But the truth is: if you really want to test the impact of empathy, see how much empathy you have for someone when they disagree with you.

And elections are a really great way to demonstrate that, right? If there’s somebody who ran for election… Let’s use our favorite piñata: Donald Trump.

You hear from somebody who voted for Donald Trump. Now, if you’re on one side of the spectrum, you’re like, “Yeah, good for you. You know what? We’re going to make America great again”. And on the other side, you’ll get, “You’re an idiot”.

Both of those are a reaction. Neither of them is a response. If you disagree with someone voting for Donald Trump, you can’t just simply categorize them as something, label them. Your goal is to be able to understand them.

Why? Someone said to me this great thing around communication: if somebody says something that doesn’t sit right with you, your first response is to become a detective and to be curious, and to understand why.

Now, when it comes to something like not-for-profit, that is really about understanding the audience. Why are they not engaging with you? Why are they not buying into the campaign you’re creating? What does it take to activate them? That’s a big part.

Like I said at the top:

Instead of asking, “what do I want to say?”, what you really want to do is, you want to start by saying, “what do I want to achieve?”

Then look at the audience to say: what can you give them effectively that helps you achieve that? To let them trust you, to build that relationship, because that’s what you’re doing.

In an overloaded universe, it’s very difficult to get a quick response in the exact way that you want it. You need to build this over time. That’s relationship building and that comes through connection as opposed to communication.

David Pisarek: There’s a lot to be said for applying some business strategy around it. You have leading and lagging indicators. So you know you need donors, you know you need volunteers, you know you need participants in your programs or people signing up for your services, all that type of stuff.

If you look at project management methodology, what’s the work back schedule for that? What do you need to do? How many people do you need to connect with to get one donor? And as you multiply that up, as you amp that up, as you connect with more people, you’ll be able to refine what your messaging is.

You’ll be able to refine how you connect with people, the platforms you connect with people on, whether you pick up the phone or send them a message or do some ads and target them. And you’ll be able to directly understand, “Okay, if I’m doing this over here, the end result, the net result is going to be this”, and then you can increase that dial as you work on that.

Jason Thomson: I do a lot of audience profiling and pitching. In pitching, it’s interesting because you generally are doing it to a small group of people (5, 7, 8 people), but these things scales are up.

Oftentimes when I pitch, I ask the organization that I’m leading the pitch to tell me about who you’re pitching to, and they can’t. What they can tell you about is their idea, their feature set, all of that thing.

The truth is that audiences don’t buy your feature set, they do not care about you. What they care about is them, and so your job is to really build that connection so that you demonstrate how you are the wind beneath their wings.

One of the things that make me bristle about the internet is the “About Us” page. Nobody cares about us, they don’t care where you went to school. What they care about is “what can you do for me?” and that does extend for sure to not-for-profit because what you’re trying to do is activate an audience that has time or money in a way that gets them to shine their light on you.

So let’s take a simple example, I live north of the city, in Bradford. One of the causes that I like to support is our local food bank. Why do I do that? How are they able to connect with me? Well, for one is: it starts with me. What are the things in my values that are important? Feeding a community is something that’s really, really essential.

Then the question becomes “how do you take them?”, much like what you just described, which is a sales cycle, “how do you take them along the journey to where they begin to execute?”. That is a smart move by the food bank to be able to look at me and say, “Well, here’s how I’m going to move you along that journey”.

You move me along that journey by being what I call MERV: Meaningful, Interesting, Relevant, and Valuable. That’s MERV. That’s what audiences want most in any way, shape, or form.

I do, like I said, a lot of presentation coaching. I even do this on my own radio show that I’ve got. Really, to get people on the show, I hit them where they are. “What is it? You’ve got a book to promote?” That’s what people want to be able to do.

And when you’re trying to develop community or that approach of basis what you’ve got to do is: you’ve got to think about your audience first. They are everything and everything that they want, and we know that.

We say it till the cows come home until the moment becomes, that we have to put that “About Us” page together. And the “About Us” page is about all the great things that we do.

Again, it’s not about us, it’s about them, and it’s about empowering them to be extraordinary and getting them on board with our journey.

David Pisarek: 100%, you want to create that emotional connection, that reason why somebody wants to help, and it’s different for everybody. I think there are some main categories in there.

Maybe if you’re focusing on Alzheimer’s research, maybe somebody in their family or a friend has been affected and that’s what’s driving them. Maybe it’s just something that their parents or grandparents were involved in and that’s why they’re doing it. It varies from everybody to everybody.

Really understanding here are the main reasons why people are involved with your organization, why they give, why they care, why they donate their time, why they show up in an event, and why they gave $5 last year.

Jason Thomson: That’s why one of the reasons that the SickKids VS campaign is so good, is because what they’ve done is that they have taken families that feel that they are victimized by health issues.

And listen, I did storytelling coaching as a SickKids parent for years. There are a lot of tears, there’s a lot of emotion involved in that, and they twisted it in a way that said, “yes, I can be empowered. I can feel strong. I don’t have to feel like a victim, and I can participate in this extraordinary journey”.

They tapped into something that existed that nobody else was tapping into, and that’s a beautiful way to connect.

David Pisarek: And they were able to stand out with it. They understood the persona of the person, the psychographics of the person, not the geographic.

Obviously, geographics plays a bit in it, but not necessarily the demographic, but the psychographic.

What is it that people care about? What drives them? What motivates them? Where do they spend their time?

And really getting into that idea will help you understand (what I’m going to call) your customer base, but really it’s your donor base or your participants.

Jason Thomson: I want to push you one step further because, in traditional marketing, we look at demographics and psychographics. Those are great to be able to begin to profile an audience, but it’s a third category.

There’s a guy out of Vancouver who runs a company called Value Graphics, and what he says is people do not make decisions based on demographic and psychographics, generally speaking.

You can make the argument around the community, et cetera, but they do tend to make buying decisions based on values.

And he tells this great story. The story is there are three friends, they go out for dinner one night, and at the end of the night, they’re on their way home, and they walk by an alley. And what happens is the first person whose primary value is adventure says, “oh, shortcut, let’s go”. The second person whose primary value is safety says, “you know what? This looks sketchy. Why don’t we go back to the bar and call an Uber?”. And then the third person whose primary value is friendship says, “You know what, guys, we can work this out together”.

What ends up happening is that I’ve told you all of that about how they make the decision, but what I haven’t told you is anything in the demographic or psychographic space. And so this guy, David (I’ve forgotten his last name), what he has done is… What’s that?

David Pisarek: David Ellison.

Jason Thomson: Do you know David?

David Pisarek: I do.

Jason Thomson: So David (who’s probably the best keynote speaker I’ve seen in the last couple of years), has actually gotten several hundred thousand data points that he can pull from that will help you look at those values.

David Pisarek: Yeah, his valuegraphics.com, if anybody is interested in it (we’ll give him a little shout-out on that). He’s absolutely phenomenal, in the work that he’s done. He’s got an email list signed up for it. Lots of great value that he sends out from that, for sure.

The one thing that we can do better as communicators would be obviously having meaningful connections with the audiences that we want to connect with. Is there another top one that you would say, “Hey, everybody, you need to focus on this!”

Jason Thomson: We’re getting into tactics now, and there’s really… I’m not going to give you one. I’m going to give you four.

The first one is the number one recommendation I make in every workshop and every keynote that I give:

Learn to speak in headlines, which sounds a little glib, but we live in a headline world now.

There was a great study done on users for Reddit a few years ago that said, in the comments section on Reddit, what happens is if you post a link to an article as the subject of the story that you’re trying to get across, people will comment on that story, and 75% of those people who comment on that story never read the article, they only read the headline.

We can bray against the fragmentation and the attention span of our audiences, but honest to goodness, you’re not going to get anywhere. We live in a headline world.

You look at everything from social media posts to the conversations that we have. If you can get at the headlines quickly and effectively, then you can get your audience to buy in. I did that with this answer. I said there are four things that you need to pay attention to. That’s a listicle, and there’s a reason for that, is that now you have a bookmark in your head that you might not be conscious of that says, “Okay, he’s going to go through three more. The first one is headlining”.

Get great at headlines. In the world in which you live, the headline should be about context, not necessarily content. Don’t just tell me “what”, tell me “why” or “how”. That’s about empowerment.

The second thing that you have to understand is that audiences don’t read, and they don’t listen. They scan.

This is something that has really risen, and one of the things that we’ve seen as a change in audiences over time is that they look for a hierarchy.

Your place to learn about great communications is your favorite app because look at the way it creates hierarchy, and visualization. A magazine article is the perfect example of the way that works.

Headlines, sub-headlines, poll quotes, pictures. How do you do that in any communication, including just having a conversation? By giving a summary upfront.

So scannability and headlines, that’s one and two.

Number three is true storytelling. And what I say that true storytelling is… Often when we use narrative storytelling, beginning, middle, and end, we give a case study: here was the problem, here was the solution, here was the result.

In the corporate world, the issue with case studies is they’re bereft of emotion. The reason storytelling works, the reason that storytelling lights up the entire brain versus data points (which just light up the small language processing center at the front of the brain called the Broca’s area), the reason that it lights up the entire brain is that it makes emotional engagement.

So what do you need to do? Well, you need to pick a moment in time, that’s the easiest thing that you can do. Then you can take your audience and put them in the story almost like it’s your movie, and they’re the extra standing around the movie.

If they can see it, they can feel it, they can visualize it, and they can buy into it a whole lot more easily.

That detail is what makes a massive difference for a person saying something as simple as, “I was sitting on an airplane, they were getting ready to close the doors, and I was on the phone call of my life”. I can empathize with that. I’ve been on the phone call of my life on a plane where the door is about to close, and you’ve created an emotional connection.

The last one has been my weird hobby over the course of the pandemic, which was behavioral economics and how you move an audience.

The thing is that we push these walls of words of people like I’m doing right now, and we’re not doing it in any way that is conscious about what we’re barfing at them.

And using the word barf is actually deliberate because it’s a word that rakes up an audience when they’re… “Did you say barf? What?” And I’m back in, right? The number one thing that I say from behavioral economics that you can do effectively is: associations and triggering.

People remember stories because they’re a triggering mechanism. I use something called a human high lighter, which is to say, “Listen, if you’re going to write one thing down, write this down”.

That’s triggering because what you do is: you remember that one thing, and then it unpacks all of the other stuff. So there’s your four: better headlines, scannability, true storytelling, and associations and triggering.

If you focus on those four areas in any type of communication that you give, again, one on one conversation, mass mail campaign, whatever that looks like, you are actually on your way to meeting the new audience where they are.

David Pisarek: One thing I wanted to mention, if anybody’s watching this, you might have seen me go off-screen for a second. I went to grab a book that I’ve got. It’s pretty short, it’s under 100 pages by Ian Harris.

It’s called “Hooked On You”, and this is a super amazing read. It is, I don’t know, like $5 on Amazon if you want to go and grab it. It talks all about storytelling and the power of it and how you can do it and how you can bring that into everything you’re doing from the simplest email to mail list to presentations to podcast episodes to whatever it is that you happen to be doing. I highly, highly recommend it. It’s a quick read and it’s well worth it for sure.

Jason Thomson: Fantastic.

David Pisarek: I’m running out of time right now. We’ll have a link to that in the show notes, for sure. We’re talking about storytelling, we’re talking about connecting, we’re talking about empathy and being able to bring people into the conversation.

A lot of times in non-profits, we need to make presentations, whether it’s to the board of directors, whether it’s to potential big donors, whether it’s at a gala, whatever it happens to be. You spoke a little bit about presentations and bringing people in. Do you have any other thoughts around who cares? So, “yeah, you’re doing a presentation, but who cares? What is the value of this to me?”

Jason Thomson: The biggest thing with presentations (and this is what I spend most of my day doing) is to get off of autopilot.

We have learned early in our careers a set of skills, like how to write an email, how to run a meeting, how to attend a meeting, how to take notes, and how to give a presentation. And like Jurassic Park, where we freeze the mosquito in the amber, we stick with that. You have a new presentation that you’re giving, you look back at the last deck that you wrote, and then you start pulling slides, and you build your narrative from that perspective.

The issue becomes: your foundation was faulty, to begin with. If you want to be effective in presenting, you have to start with… I call it the sugar stack. The name of my company being: “Speak Up, Get Results”, the sugar stack is five steps, and here’s the quick Coles Notes version of the five steps:

First, you have to sit down and say, “Why am I presenting? What am I trying to get out of this?”

And be careful here because, in a lot of my coaching, I’ll say, “Well, what are you trying to get out of the presentation?” They’re like, “Well, I’m trying to get people to learn about this product or service”. That’s not what you want, what you do want is: you want people to email me at the end of the presentation, and you want them to connect with you. How do you trigger that?

And that’s the second thing, is: you have to look at your audience and what they need. We have to remember that any presentation is not the full conversation, it’s the beginning of a conversation, or it’s the end.

You are looking to create curiosity or closure.

That is what you need to focus on, so you don’t need to say everything. We think we need to say everything in a presentation, but the presentation’s job is to drive a sales cycle forward.

The third thing you’d focus on is structure, which is “what is the narrative that you get out?”, and I create something called a blueprint, which is literally what’s the story that I’m able to tell in a way that’s effective, that meets the audience for what they need, which then delivers what I need. So you see, I’m working backward.

The fourth move is engagement: what tools can you apply? I always say that at the end of creating a blueprint, you have a presentation. It’s a boring presentation, but it is a presentation.

Now you need to color it up like a coloring book where the lines are the presentation. Now you put those colors inside, and the key then becomes “how do you use things like storytelling and headlines and association and triggering and navigation, scannability?”

I have a deck of cards that has more than 51 tools that you can use, and there are hundreds that you can use to engage an audience. That’s really pivotal to get to that MERV approach of meaningful, interesting, valuable, and relevant.

And then the last thing is about your performance. When you speak to or coach somebody, they think it’s entirely about the performance, but there are a number of things that you need to know, the number one of which is to rehearse more.

You’re not rehearsing enough, and you’re not rehearsing effectively. You don’t need to do everything linearly. Just rehearse once, find the rough patches, and get better at those rough patches.

The number one place you want to get better at, of course, is your first minute. You have four seconds to make an emotional engagement with an audience in a presentation. Don’t waste it by saying, “Good morning. It’s great to be here”. Of course, it’s great to be here. Of course, good morning.

Give me something. Give me that headline right from the get-go. So those are the five steps of the sugar stack, that whole idea of understanding what you need to do, then understanding what the audience wants, getting to that idea of structure, engagement, and performance.

When you walk through those five steps, you have a better shot at connecting with the audience, and that’s the secret sauce. You’re getting past that misconnection.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really great. One of the things that people don’t really think about is, “Okay, yes, so you’ve got presentations”, you’re in the boardroom, you’re on stage, whatever it happens to be, you’re meeting with somebody at their home, whatever it is, what people seem to forget is their website.

So you’ve got your website, it’s up, it’s online, it’s presenting your organization all day, every day to anybody that hops onto it. What are some, I guess, key ideas that people can grab from the sugar stack to implement, maybe on some key pages in their website?

Jason Thomson: Okay, if you want to make a website more engaging, again, start with your audience.

What is it that they need or want from you? What can you give them that will keep them interested as you move them along the sales cycle?

So imagery, storytelling, headlining. Headlining will become a really important thing.

They are making decisions and landing on your page for fractions of a second, sometimes. You got to give them clarity and the reason to be there in the first place. And I’ll tell you straight up, worked on my own website a lot.

I’ve done SEO and the feedback that I get from my team is, “listen, you aren’t keeping people on the page”, and the question became, “well, why? Why am I not keeping people on the page?”, and one of the things we learned really quickly is: they have no idea what you do.

You started (and I did) with just this idea of “are you misconnecting?”, which creates intrigue, but then I need to pay that off almost immediately. So we dropped in a key headline that shows how sugar delivers keynotes, workshops, master classes, and things like that that make you better at pitching presentations and conversations. There’s the story really quickly and the value.

The other thing, of course, is we take it one step further, which is “why do I think this is important? Well, I want to win more pitches. I want to win more business. I want to win over audiences. I want to win in a conversation with my spouse”.

Whatever that looks like, is: that winning is the triggering effect that keeps people there. So the headlines will become a really important thing, get that copy shorter. I’m a copywriter. Say less, more often, if you can do that, that’s a really effective way that you can do that. And then the third thing is to draw into that storytelling.

Again, true storytelling will get the audience engaged in a way that’s interesting.

I remember working on a program for one of the hospitals for a couple of years. This was a pitch situation.

One of the things that we did was we said, “Recast your website like it was a documentary. Pull back the curtain. Show me what the day of a surgeon is like when the surgeon is getting ready to meet with my kid”, for example, and suddenly that’s a very valuable thing because you’re giving the audience from that MERV approach, something that’s interesting, something that’s valuable.

Years ago, I worked with a lawyer who was doing a presentation, and she was getting ready to do a presentation with a bunch of mall walkers in New Market, and I said, “Okay, well, what are you going to talk about?” (because she asked me to coach her), and she goes, “Well, I’m going to talk about the wills and the states and what we do”. I’m like, “Yeah, these people are in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. They don’t have a lot of time left. You want to make the most of their time”.

And we transformed that into five things a lawyer will never tell you about developing your will. “Oh, intrigue! I want to learn. I have value”. Eventually, that meant that she increased her business as a result of it.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. Absolutely. And one thing I want to add to what you’re talking about with the headlines is you want to have the headlines about the people you’re talking to, not about yourself. So it’s not like “we help fight dementia and Alzheimer’s”…

Jason Thomson: “You can help fight dementia and Alzheimer’s. Be the difference in the fight against dementia and Alzheimer’s”, and that’s it. It’s the judo flip, right?

Oftentimes, we’re talking about what we’re doing. It’s not what you sell, it’s how they buy, that’s the important part.

Again, and I hate to be so blunt, but the honest-to-goodness truth is as human beings, what motivates us most is, “is it important to me right now? and to make it important to me, don’t tell me about you, tell me about me.”

David Pisarek: You want to give them that intrigue, give them that, “Yeah, I’m in the right place. I want to deal with this. I need to help with this”.

By making it about them, you’re drawing them in and making them feel like they’re already part of what you do. That’s right, and I think that’s really key.

Jason Thomson: I think that’s really key as well. Again, I call it hyper-empathy. Hyper-empathy will get you a lot of places in life.

I’ve been reading recently a number of relationship books. I’m scouring anything to learn about communication as I’m working on my own book, and relationship self-help books are incredible at demonstrating that in relationships, we tend to focus on (I’ll call it the first layer) the superficial layer of a conversation.

You left your socks on the floor, and then that blows up into a two-hour magnum opus argument. The thing is that it’s never about the socks on the floor, the socks on the floor have triggered an emotion in your person across.

So how do you get to the emotion? You address the emotion through connection.

It’s like someone says, “you left your socks on the floor”, your first response shouldn’t be, “Yeah? Well, you…”, and it should be, “oh, you know what? I hear what you’re saying, and I have a feeling that that’s creating frustration for you. Let me go pick up the socks”, and that could be the end of it. It is to say, “I was inconsiderate”.

In that type of connection or relationship, you need to stuff down your desire to react and then respond to what you’re seeing there. What you’re really responding to is not that superficial layer. It’s the next layer down or the layer down from that, which is identity-based. Which is, “you know what? You were late for picking up your son”. What I might hear is, “Hey, you’re a bad parent”.

In presentation coaching, there’s the guy that I’ve worked with, and he has the most incredible exercise, which is: when you finish rehearsing a presentation (and you can do this for anything, any type of communication), hand over an advertorial that you create, and have someone read it.

At the very end of it, what you say to them is, “Turn over the advertorial, look me in the eye, and tell me: what do you remember?” and that is what they take away.

The number of times that I’ve seen in one-on-one communications where I say to somebody, “What did you hear?” When they repeat it back, I always like, “that isn’t what I said at all. So I need to be better at my communication for that”.

David Pisarek: Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Jason, amazing thoughts. I love MERV, I love sugar. You’ve got some awesome stuff and insights around the power of communication and what people should be doing versus what they’re potentially already doing (likely what they’re already doing).

I hope people listening to this have been able to get some great advice and pointers from you today and what we’ve been talking about, and I want to challenge everybody that’s listening to this: just take one insight, that’s it.

Talk to one person in your organization, colleague, coworker, somebody in a different department, higher up, lower down, whatever it happens to be, and tell them about what this one thing is that you took away from today.

Jason Thomson: What’s the one thing you’re taking away from today, David?

David Pisarek: The one thing I’m taking away from today is: I need to rethink my webinar a little bit. I think I’ve got it pretty good. I’m going to connect with you later on about that, but I think I can definitely move to improve that: what my goal is?

Jason Thomson: Actually, you just brought up a really great thing. When you started doing webinars a couple of years ago, I immediately started pitching you things you can do.

You don’t want to hear that. What you want to hear is, “Hey, David, where are you? What response are you getting? What are you loving? What are you hating about your webinar?”, and then suddenly, because I’m making it truly about you, you are engaged.

And that’s the thing. In connection, you want somebody to take away your stuff and make it their own because now you triggered that inside. That’s the easiest way to convince somebody of something, is: don’t convince them of anything. Have them convince themselves of things.

David Pisarek: That’s the Jedi mind trick.

Jason Thomson: That’s the Jedi approach.

David Pisarek: There you go. 100%. Take one thing, talk to somebody about it, mention it, and have a two, or three-minute conversation about it if you can. If you can’t, take one thing and just implement it.

Take a look at your website, take a look at a brochure, take a look at a presentation, or take a look at an email that you just sent out to a prospective donor. What can you change the next time that you send that out? So, Jason, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Jason Thomson: Three ways: if you want to find me on LinkedIn, that’s always a great place. Jason Thomson, I publish a ton, a metric ton of content every week and I try to get people to have those better conversations.

You can also drop by speakupgetresults.com, that’s where you can see the sugar stack and all of the things that we provide.

But it’s not simply about selling you, remember when I talked about MERV? There’s a blog area, and in the blog area, everything from the episodes of the radio show that I run right down to infographics, a big fan of infographics and giving you tools and skills that you can go and do.

And of course, while you’re there, if you check the show notes, I guess, I’m going to give away one of the products that I sell, which is, I mentioned the card pack, the sugar packet.

So these will be 51 engagement tools, and I’m going to give away three of these. If you check in the show notes, there is a link there that’s going to take you to a page, the page is going to ask for your email address, but it’s really, really valuable to get that email address because I sent out this monthly email, which is, here’s an awesome infographic and that stuff. I sell through value.

And I’m going to give away three packs of these cards, and hopefully, we can build a relationship that’s going to be helpful to you going forward.

David Pisarek: And these cards are absolutely amazing, you can use them in meetings, you can use them as you’re working on your content, or you can use that to help drive your communications and your connections forward in a way that you might not have thought about doing in the past.

Thanks again, Jason, for joining the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources that Jason provided or that I spoke about, head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com/podcast. Click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful.