143 – Stop Losing Supporters With Confusing Messaging with Russell Van Brocklen

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast, brought to you by wowdigital.com, your best place for non-profit websites and design, now including fractional CMO support. Are your website visitors feeling overwhelmed instead of inspired to take action? Russell Van Brokclen shares how simplifying your messaging can make your content more accessible, more impactful, and more effective. So stay tuned and let’s turn clarity into conversations.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David, and in this episode we’re going to be talking about accessibility, clear messaging, and writing specifically for impact. And I’ve got Russell van Brokclen with me. But before we continue, I just want to mention that our podcast does need your help and support. If you find this episode or any of our others insightful, interesting, or helpful, please like, subscribe, share, and comment. It really does help our podcast.

Russell Van Brokclen is a dyslexia researcher and educator who created The Writing Method, a brain-based approach that helped dyslexic students achieve rapid gains in writing and literacy. Russell, thank you so much for joining us today on this episode and in the show.

Russell Van Brocklen: Thanks for having me.

David Pisarek: I guess let’s jump right in. How do you get started in what you do?

Russell Van Brocklen: I was never supposed to be doing this with my life. I was supposed to be a bureaucrat in state government. It was the late ’90s. I wanted to know how laws were created, not some class. I wanted to know. So I signed up for the New York State Assembly internship program, but I showed up with a neuropsychic evaluation showing I had a first grade reading and writing level.

So I couldn’t do the internship as it was designed. The Speaker’s Office accommodated the living daylights out of me. Complete just immersion, everything possible they did. They sent back a recommendation of 15 credits of A- to the State University of New York Center at Buffalo, political science department. They looked at the massive accommodations, says, “We don’t like these, so we’re lowering your grade to 15 credits of F.” They flunked me because of the accommodations the speaker’s office came up with.

So at that point, I went to my professors and I said, “Where can I go to force myself to learn to read and write in grad school?” They said, “Well, based on your history, it’s easy. Law school, where you learn to read and write more than anybody.”

So, second day of contracts, I was called on by the professor. And what they do is they use the Socratic method. You don’t know the answer, which nobody does the first week. They embarrass you publicly until you eventually adapt. That didn’t happen to me. I answered as his equal, not as a student. We went back and forth for 15 minutes.

After that, it took me about a month to learn to read, about a couple of years to learn to write. Then I went back to the New York State Senate. I wanted them to fund my dyslexia research program, which after years of working with the Education Department, we eventually did. We went to the Avril Park Central School District right outside of Albany, New York, our state capital. Highly motivated, highly intelligent college juniors and seniors reading and writing at the middle school level. One class period a day for the school year, their writing increased to the average range of entering graduate students.

David Pisarek: Wow.

Russell Van Brocklen: They all went out of college. They all graduated, GPAs of 1 point— of a 2.5 to 3.6. We were under $900 per cost per kid compared to the best of Selective College at the time. We were 3x as successful for less than 1% of the cost. They were over $100 grand. We were under $1,000. And that’s how I got started.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. Such an inspiring story. I’m sure there’s plenty of people that listen to this episode that are somewhere in that neurodivergent audience space, right? It’s, I think, a lot more common. And nowadays I think a lot more people are openly talking about it and seeking help. And there’s lots of people out there, lots of organizations, businesses, individuals that have guidance and can help.

Russell Van Brocklen: Yes. But one thing that I’ve learned from that is how to apply that process. What I do now is, the professors and colleges around the world wanted a book called The Craft of Research. It’s basically how to do your doctoral dissertation. It’s based on context, get everybody on the same page, coming up with a neat problem statement and a solution.

And I combine that with Overcoming Dyslexia from Dr. Sally Shaywitz, where the dyslexics have a 2.5 times neuroactivity in the front part of the brain dealing with word analysis followed by articulation. And what I want to do today is to apply that for non-for-profits and to just tell you how can we market our message much easier to be much more effective online with all of this AI and all this other stuff.

And people get really confused by it. They get frustrated by it. We’re gonna cut through all the non-sense and just give you a very effective process. And we’re gonna do that using something called a universal theme. All right, so I’m going to give you a— this is going to come — seem like it’s coming out of completely left field, which is a very typical dyslectic solution.

It’ll make sense very shortly, but we’re going to start off with a movie review. I want you to think about a movie that you think is one of the best of all time. You know it intimately, and everybody’s seen it. What’s the name of that movie?

David Pisarek: I, I’ve got like my favorite movie, which says a lot about me, but nobody really knows about it. So let’s go with The Matrix.

Russell Van Brocklen: Okay. Which one?

David Pisarek: Number 1.

Russell Van Brocklen: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you something very difficult. I need you to reduce The Matrix to a 1-word universal theme that best represents the movie.

David Pisarek: Truth.

Russell Van Brocklen: Truth. Okay. You see how that took you some time?

David Pisarek: Yep.

Russell Van Brocklen: Let me show you what’s going on. This will help your audience when, when they have to do this for their non-profit. This is the top book in the field of dyslexia. This is what dyslexia is. You see that massive neural activity you have in the back part of your brain and the dyslectic has next to nothing. See how the front part, the dyslectic has about 2.5 times the neural activity.

David Pisarek: Yeah.

Russell Van Brocklen: Coming up with what that universal theme is, is something dyslectics are just naturally much more gifted at because that’s the part of our brain that’s 2.5 times overactive. So what I would like to advise your not-for-profit listeners are, if you’re having issues with this, see if you have an employee that you trust. You have to trust them, who’s dyslexic, ADD, or ADHD, and have them help you. You’ll find out that they’re really good at this process.

Okay, so you said truth. Now, if we’re gonna write our movie review, what we would do is we’d go to the major actors that you think are important, and you ask, how do they do with the universal theme of truth? How did the director do? How did the screenwriter do? You write up your review, people would decide if they want to see it or not.

If they decide they want to see it, they will actually learn something that’s helpful because now they know who to look for and for what. Okay, you have enhanced their experience. You haven’t destroyed it by saying “This happened, this happened, then this happened.” Does that make sense?

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

Russell Van Brocklen: Okay. Yeah. So then next, what we would do is now that we looked at the benefit of that, we now have to look at the problem. The problem with truth is it’s such a broad brush.

Communicating that method back, you know, in the 1990s, it’s not a problem, you know, because we would have the big papers, we’d have, you know, the big TV stations, radio stations, and we’d just blast it to everybody. But nowadays we have to get much more focused, laser focused. You see the problem?

So now question is, how do we go from a broad brush to something much more specific? So I’m gonna traumatize your audience for a moment. For some of them, it’s only a moment. We’re gonna go back to high school English into Shakespeare.

David Pisarek: Okay. All right, everybody-

Russell Van Brocklen: Just for a moment.

David Pisarek: Don’t panic. Don’t freak out. All right, here we go. Let’s, let’s go back in time.

Russell Van Brocklen: Let’s go back to high school. Shakespeare. Some people love it, some people freak. All right, why am I doing that? Because I want you to— because in the English language and communication, Shakespeare is generally considered the absolute top person as far as effectiveness.

So let’s look at his— any play that he’s ever written that you, you did in high school. You have a hero. The hero wants to do something based on one or more universal things. Then there’s an ultimate villain, a person, a character, a concept, a universal theme or themes, some combination thereto, that tries to prevent the hero from accomplishing their goal. They have a conflict in Act 1, it goes crazy, escalates in Act 2, resolves in Act 3. Sound familiar?

David Pisarek: Yep.

Russell Van Brocklen: So let’s simplify that. And we’re going to add word analysis followed by articulation from the front part of the brain of the dyslectic to make this drastically more effective. So what I’m about to explain to people, this is my explanations for adults. Not kids. They do this manually. You don’t because you’ve been through your education and now we’re out there in the real world and AI can actually help us.

All right. I’m just going to assume people are using ChatGPT. If you are using that, spend the $20 a month to really get the most out of this. Currently, that’s 5.5. You want to not ever do instant, put it on thinking, but not only thinking on the right side. Click on it and go to Extended Thinking. This is what I used to spend $200 a month for them on for the Pro-model. Now I just spent $20 a month on this and I’m getting better results from what I got last summer.

So what you’re gonna want to do is, first of all, you’re gonna have to figure out as your organization, you are the hero. Now you need to tell ChatGPT to work with it to write as many paragraphs as possible, but I’m talking 20+ paragraphs on what it is that you want to do.

What’s your mission? What are you trying to, not only just in your, we can start off with your mission, but afterwards to come back and try this for specific projects. Okay. But let’s just start off with what your mission is. Write out as many paragraphs as you can. I would prefer over 20. Remember, the AI’s doing this, so you’re just guiding it. It’s not doesn’t take up much work.

Then for each sentence, you’re going to tell the AI, pick out the most important word per sentence and to create custom definitions for each one. And then based on, that’s, it’s, that’s each sentence, most important word for each sentence in each paragraph. Then you want to tell it based on what the hero wants to do, what are the top 10? Or if you really want to go longer, what are the top 20? Most important words with their custom definitions.

Then you as the human have to decide what that most important word is that best represents what your charity is trying to do. And then you’re going to run into the same problem that you came up with truth with The Matrix. It’s a broad brush.

So then what you’re going to do is you’re going to tell the artificial intelligence to get you 100 synonyms with custom definitions. Then you have it listed. This is where using extended thinking is important because you’re going to get much better results if you do that.

It lists them all out, then ask it to again, find the top 10 or 20 of those synonyms that best represents what your organization is trying to do. Then you as the human have to make that decision. Does the specific word, because we need to get something much more specific when you’re trying to find one that matches what’s in your head. This is not a committee. This will not work in committee. This is the one person that you’re trusting to do this. Usually it’s the director. Okay?

And then you pick out the best word. Does that match what’s in your head? It’s never gonna be perfect. Is it clear enough? If not, tell it to make 100 synonyms of that one with custom definitions. Run— what are the top 10 or 20 again? You pick and keep doing that until you get something you really like.

Now, I’m— I’ve had people say I— they’ve done this 6, 7 times until they were happy. With AI, they were done usually in less than an hour. It’s worth the time. Now that you have that specific word, can you see we can now use that as a lens to go ahead and to try it to get your message.

So what we would do is then say, “what is it that we’re trying to do?” Let’s say it’s our big picture, what we’re trying to communicate. All right. Use that lens, that, that word is a lens to say, tell the AI, “This is the lens. This is the word we’re gonna— that best represents what’s in my head. We want to come up with what is the best message for our overall organization,” and it’ll come up with things.

Now at this point, people think, “Wow, this is great, we’re done.” But you can do so much better. I want you to now think of using this lens as a concept to create different concepts. For your message. So then I would ask the AI to go through and say, what, let’s use that. “What are the different concepts that we can come up with?

Give me a list of maybe 5 or 10, about a sentence or two per one.” And then you pick, you want to narrow it down to about 3 and then keep doing that and use those concepts to refine when you say, “Here’s what I want you to use this universal theme as our, as a lens. And here are 3 concepts I want you to put through. Now tell me what our message should be.” It is far clearer.

And then you want to do that for all your campaigns, and that’ll get you a very good rough draft. And you need to understand AI never gets things done perfectly. It gets you a very good draft. You then want to bring that draft back to your people for a brainstorming session to rip it apart, rewrite it, make sure it’s yours. But it gets you that, it gets you over that creative hump to have something to speak to directly.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and I think a lot of people struggle with the, how do I even just get started with this?

Russell Van Brocklen: Mm-hmm.

David Pisarek: And so I love using AI in terms of brainstorming. These are some interesting techniques in terms of like digging in deeper. One of the things that I like to do when I’m on a call with a potential client is to keep asking them why, like, why is this what you’re looking for? Why? Right. And just like, let’s get deeper and deeper and get into the real cause, the real thing that’s at the start of all of it, right?

And then we can go from there. And this sounds like a similar kind of idea and approach to it in really understanding, okay, how can we extrapolate insight and get support through the AI platforms? And if anybody wants to try this in ChatGPT and then try it in Claude, I would encourage you to do that. As well. Claude, we started using Claude back in February from ChatGPT for some of the stuff that we’re doing, and we found there’s a much stronger output that we get from there. So worth, uh, worth experimenting on that side as well.

Russell Van Brocklen: Oh, I’m— I spent $200 a month on Claude. What I would tell people is do not use 4.7. I would use Opus 4.6 Extended Thinking because what you need is that extended reasoning. To get it done. And this adaptive reasoning is horrible.

All right. So either way, so what the whole purpose of this is to do is to come up with a doc, some ideas that they can turn into, that they can debate amongst themselves. So then when they come to you, they’re much more prepared and you can be far more effective as a consultant.

I do that all the time. I have a web coach. I meet twice a week for an hour a week. I do stuff like this all the time. And when I show up, I say, okay, here’s the issues, here’s what it is. What do you think we should do with this, that, and the next thing? And I’m getting so much more valuable out of this because I’ve went through this process.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So definitely encourage everybody listening to give this a try. Find, I don’t know, a half an hour, 45 minutes, an hour in your calendar over the next week or so, block off some time and spend it playing. With this and see what it actually can do for you, so that way you can improve what you’re working on and get better at what you’re doing.

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Just visit wowedigital.com/consult to get started. You’re going to walk away with clarity, practical next steps, and real ideas that you can use right away. Okay, back to the episode.

Russell Van Brocklen: And if people ask you, where’d you come up with this? You can literally walk through the process and they can go look back and say, well, how about we move this way? It is an organizational process that allows you to discuss things through universal themes. People understand universal themes. We have a very hard time with concepts.

But if you’re saying, like, for example, you know, I have some of my kids just, they, they throw temper tantrums all the time because literally we’re asking you to do things that their brains can’t do. And then I explain to the parents what the universal theme is of how to get, of what they’re interested in, how to do it. And they immediately get it.

But sometimes the kids are just lazy. And they don’t want to do anything. So I always have the parents, when we’re doing sentences, tell me 10 things the kid really likes and 10 things they don’t like. I take the chore that they hate the most and have the parents have them keep doing it until they decide to do the work, which the parents also find quite amusing because the look on the kid’s face until they go ahead and do it.

But it’s the understanding of communicating through universal themes that I find to be the most powerful. And when you can articulate that in a very specific universal thing that, that best matches what’s in your head. That’s the key that I find that really makes effective communication so much easier.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Being able to find that common link that people can latch onto, understand, think about experiences in their own life, either current or past, that they can create that emotional connection with. And I think that that’s something so important. non-profits, charities, et cetera, to, to do is to create that emotional connection, to be able to pull at the heartstrings so that people really do understand what it is that you’re doing, what you’re trying to do, and how you want to help.

Russell Van Brocklen: Yes. It’s just a way of doing it. Please modify that process too. It’s not set in stone to help you go through that. And, you know, let me know if there’s anything else I could help you with, but that’s, I think, I think what’ll help you with your communications messages quite a bit.

I’ve tried it with a lot of people in the non-profit world, and as they said, it gave them a very good base discussion draft where they could discuss things. When you go into that discussion, it does get refined a lot, but it, it just allows you to get past the creative, I don’t even know where to begin to what to say. That’s what it’s designed for.

David Pisarek: So when you take a look at non-profits and charities, at their websites and, you know, the language that they’re using, their content that they’re producing, whether it’s email, web, social, etc. What are some of the mistakes that you see them doing?

Russell Van Brocklen: Oh, the main issue is they try to use the copy from ChatGPT instead of going through Claude Opus. And a lot of them are asking me, well, how can I use all of this AI stuff? Because they’re just buried in work. So I’m one of those people that does more than 10x work with AI.

And here’s, here’s the basic secret that I found. I use ChatGPT 5.5 Extended Thinking as the brain. It is really a massive jump over 5.4, like to such an extent it’s, it’s just, it’s amazing. And then I get a lot of my work done in Cowork. Again, I do not use 4.7. It’s a mess. So I use 5.6, I’m sorry, 4.6 Opus.

And I’ll tell Claude, create, go ahead and find what we’re looking to do, create the prompt, I stick it in. And then this is what drives people nuts, but it’s just work. This saves you a lot of time, but it’s still a lot of work. I would then take the results, put it back into ChatGPT, and I’ll say, I tell it, I don’t care how well we did, I am not happy. Go through what you, the prompt you wrote, go through what needs to be corrected line by line, find all the holes, do extensive internet research how to fix it.

And then what you want to do next is I tell it I want to get it to 9.9. Tell me exactly what that is and then give me a new prompt. And I’ll go back and forth until it hits 9.9.

Then once it’s done, I created 3 modes in Opus 4.6. One is what I call a catastrophic mode. What is it that we completely missed that should be in here? Go ahead and fix that until you get 2 passes of zero. The next one is what other things should be included that are not. And then finally I do a full polish mode and I run it through all of that and then I’ll dump it back into ChatGPT.

I’ll say, we keep correcting this until it’s at a 9.9, then I’ll send it back in one more time over at Claude. ChatGPT takes out too much, but it also sees things that it missed. We run that through one more time for all three modes, and then I send it off to a senior human to review it, and then we publish it. Or I just tell people, this is at 90%. And I just publish it.

As a dyslexic, I can’t do the final check, but people are telling me I’m giving them really good drafts and there’s not much work, and it, it just finds all the holes that should have been— that should have been fixed. And you don’t have to do this as the director. This is what assistants are for. This is what volunteers— she’ll get— create the process and give it to one of your volunteers, one of your assistants, and you, you would be amazed at how much work you can get done.

David Pisarek: I think that’s a really cool process and I’m going to, uh, the next time I’m putting content together, uh, later this week, I’m gonna run that through. One thing I do wanna mention is by the time this episode does air, there’s probably gonna be like 17 new model versions between what Russell’s using and, um, and what’s available. But typically they’re getting better and better. Give it a try.

Okay. So back to, to this. So we’ve got this content, this draft that’s produced. It’s at an 80, 90%, maybe higher. The one thing that we need people to be doing in non-profits is guiding people towards an action of some kind, whether it’s to donate, to volunteer, to subscribe, to share, to whatever that happens to be. Those are the four kind of top main ones there.

But from your perspective, how could a non-profit that’s using these kind of systems design websites, create content that guides visitors towards taking that action?

Russell Van Brocklen: First thing you’re going to want to do, and when I keep going back through this over and over again, I don’t care if it’s now or 5 years from now, you’re probably going to find it’s generally about the same thing. These models, whether they’re good and whether they’re bad, are pretty much baked in.

What I would do is, first of all, you’re going to have to create an avatar of what you’re looking for. And 5.5 Extended Thinking is by far the best one with that right now. But you’re going to have to have it redo it. Have it keep looking at what it’s doing and say, is this at 9.9? Break it into various parts. And if not, go back and redo it.

All right. I literally will tell it, are you at 9.9 again? Then what? Then I say, then what, do I have to babysit you? I put it in a loop. It hates being asked if I need to babysit it. I mean, both of them hate it. Okay. So then they will actually go through and do that. Finally come up with a 9.9 avatar and then run everything through it.

Okay. And that’s what, and 5.5 will find problems that Opus will miss. It’s just a drastically more advanced model. Opus has one out there called Mythos that they’re not gonna probably ever release to the general public. ChatGPT is. All right, so I bounce them back and forth. The final one I do run through with all the edits through Opus. Okay?

And then I, I will take that. And if you’re really that pressed for time, look it over, make sure it hasn’t done anything stupid. ‘Cause as a human, the number one thing you need to know is in your bones, what looks good, and if it doesn’t look good, how do you fix it?

Once— a lot of times people just tell me they didn’t do the final deep human review. They just threw it up there. And what I’m getting back is through that process, it’s about 90%. And for most things, it’s good enough. As you remember in school, going from a B to an A took literally 3 times the effort with a hard teacher. Okay, if it’s that important, run it through the senior humans. If it’s, if it’s something that’s a smaller thing, You can put it up and check, check back later, but that will get you really good results.

The problem is people just do one or two things with the AI and they think it’s done. It’s not.

David Pisarek: Exactly right. And that’s why people are here. That’s why people study journalism. They become editorial. They go into that field is, you know, obviously, you know, pre-AI. AI is a very, very new thing.

But in, in the world of AI, you can do that brainstorming, you can do that initial stuff, and hand it off— very much to your point, Russell— to the senior humans. Not necessarily old humans, they’re not necessarily seniors, but, uh, hand it off to somebody that is very experienced in the field that can run through it and make sure that it, it makes sense, that it didn’t create circular references, that it’s appropriate for the audience, that the persona, the avatar that you’re going to, that you’re, that you’re writing this for to connect with.

Russell Van Brocklen: If you go through the process that I showed you properly, that never happens to me. I never get back that much constructional problems. What I get back is, well, this sentence could be a little tighter with this one. Maybe this point would be a little better in 3 paragraphs ago.

And you’re talking about a level of clarity that most people honestly will miss, but the people that really know how to get the workflow done— I have had so many people in the non-profit world I’ve shown this, this process to, and honestly they said they just looked it over quickly to make sure there’s nothing obviously stupid, and which hardly ever happens, and they, they made a few small tweaks and they just sent it up and it was, it did what they wanted to.

And they took an editorial process that used to take weeks and months and they knocked it out to what they were doing that morning. Okay. But the editorial process of constantly going back and forth when you’re, when you have to have a prompt written, have ChatGPT 5.5 Extended Thinking actually write the prompt for you. Okay. And then when the results aren’t what you’re looking for, tell it to go back, look through everything line by line.

Find all the holes, and then write a new prompt, and then do it. And I have to do that time and time again until it’s what I’m looking for. And people are like, this is annoying. I said, yes, but if you had human technical experts do that, instead of you knocking it out, something good this morning, you know, they’re going to spend a week on it.

It seems that even with all these AI tools, it’s not making the workday easier. It’s making it more stressful because every time I turn around, I’m doing 3 things at one point during those sections of the days, and I don’t have a chance to breathe, and I’m just getting so much more work done. That’s what’s coming.

That’s one of the other things you need to understand is you need to take time to breathe because this thing will— I mean, it’s always there. It’s always demanding. It’s always the next thing. And I see people putting in 14-hour days, and there’s only so long us as humans can deal with that.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. So one last question that I have for you here is, mm-hmm, what would be a common misconception about dyslexia or accessibility that non-profits, from your perspective, are getting maybe totally wrong?

Russell Van Brocklen: Okay. If you wanna deal with dyslexia, what we need to, again, very quickly, those are the dyslectic brains. My brain is the exactly opposite of yours. So the first thing, if you want to have anything to deal with dyslexics or ADD or ADHD, is you have to find out what the individual specialty is, their area of extreme interest and ability, and you need to stay in that space. You step out, our interest drops to almost nothing.

Number 2 is I’m going to give you 2 assignments that happen in, in high school. That causes the dyslectic just to want to hide under their desk. Okay, so when you’re communicating with a dyslectic, what you need to understand, if you ask them in their specialty, in their area of extreme interest and ability, do they have ideas flying around their head at light speed but with little to no organization, they’re going to say yes.

So I want you to understand that we’re in a constant state where our brain is on turbocharge and the organization is non-existent. So how do we deal with dyslexics in the neurodiverse community? If you ask a dyslexic in high school, for example, what effect did Martin Luther King’s famous I Have a Dream speech have on the American civil rights movement of the 1960s?

Big picture, eventually getting the details. For 80+% of the population, that’s perfect, because that’s how their brains work. Dyslexics are opposite. We’re like trying to grab fog. It’s horrible. We can’t do anything. We have to switch that around. We have to ask a very specific question out to the general. What personally compelled Martin Luther King to want to give his famous speech? We know exactly where to go, what to do.

And then the dyslectic, then with that answer, comes up with a question, which gives us an answer, which gives us a question, which gives us an answer. That forces our brain to organize itself by using writing as a measurable output.

But for a non–for-profit, I want you to think about what this does. You start a dyslectic off on a very specific question, and then they get an answer. Then they automatically can come up with a good question and get another answer and have a stream of thought that allows them to continue that sequence far past what most general education people can do. And that’s where the real value we have. So the main difference is for to just understand, you gotta be in our specialty.

And you gotta start off at a very specific point and then go outward, which is the exact opposite of what you’re used to doing. Love it.

David Pisarek: Thank you so much, Russell. Some amazing thoughts around neurodiversity, leveraging systems and platforms, and how to be able to actually connect with people in a way that’s meaningful. And ideally, you know, saving time through the various systems and, and the process that you walked us through.

And I hope The people listening have been able to get some really great advice, some pointers and tips. I know I have, and I’m going to take those back to my team today, later on when we meet.

Now, I like to put my guests kind of in the hot seat for a hot— for a quick moment and ask you if you were to issue a challenge that you want anybody listening to this to do within 24 hours of listening to the episode. What would that be?

Russell Van Brocklen: You have to be much more laser focused with your messaging now, or you’re just going to get drowned out. So the process that I gave you, I would go through it. I’d go through it very carefully. I would take it to your team, run through, then run through the process again until you’re happy with your messaging.

And then literally I would take it the way I told you to go through the AI. Yes, you’re going to have to spend $20 a month on OpenAI and on ChatGPT. I’m currently spending $200 a month on Claude because that’s how much I use it. All right.

And then go back and forth to get it up there, make things, just use it to become drastically more productive, but then realize, take some breaks. If you’re doing 5x the workload you used to do, which can happen with this, it’s okay to take an hour or two off. You’re doing so much more. Take a chance to breathe. Otherwise, you can’t keep this pace up long term.

David Pisarek: Love that. And you do have an offer, right? You’ve got a basic sentence builder mini course. Why don’t you tell us about that?

Russell Van Brocklen: Well, what we do is the biggest problems parents have is their kids are writing a bunch of randomly placed misspelled words. So we have a learning course up on a platform called Skool, S-K-O-O-L.com. Just type in dyslexia classes and you’ll find us.

And we work with parents. Our teacher, her name is Angela. She’s a certified elementary school teacher in the state of Texas. And she walked her son August through this process. And it’s how far we go. Our most advanced student right now is Grayson. He wants to get his PhD and then work for NASA to literally terraform Mars.

So we’re working with him to teach— his parents are teaching him to start off with advanced body paragraphs. We’re teaching him then how to submit an article for publication for peer review, that entire process. Grayson’s not dyslexic in the least. He’s in the 99th percentile for math and science, and he’s a little bit on the young side. He’s 10.

David Pisarek: That is outstanding.

Russell Van Brocklen: So we take students all the way through from basic sentences all the way through for submission of an article for peer review, which is something you normally do when you’ve finished your dissertation after a doctoral program. Yeah. And why can Grayson do that at 10? Well, he’s just that bright.

I’m not doing the teaching. We train parents to teach their kids because otherwise the tutoring bills get to be— I mean, it gets up there with your mortgage payment. It gets ridiculous. So we try to keep it at an ugly cost everybody can afford. We just work with parents that way and it works out best for everybody.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, Russell, what do they need to do?

Russell Van Brocklen: Best thing to do is just go to school, school.com. And then just click on, and then just communicate with us through there. Just type in Dyslexia Classes and you’ll find us.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Russell, thank you again so much for joining. It’s been great having you here on the non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you want the transcript, the links, resources, we’ll have a link to the school page that Russell was just talking about. Just head over to our podcast page at non-profitdigitalsuccess.com. Success.com. Click on this episode for all of the details. And until next time, keep on being successful.