How To Be Remarkable with Seth Godin

In this episode, I sit down with Seth Godin to discuss the future of nonprofit fundraising, how to reach more donors with your message, and how his new venture GOODBIDS is turning charity auctions and fundraising upside down and inside out.

Seth is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and speaker. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he's written 21 best selling books, including the Dip Linchpin, Purple Cow Tribes, and what to do when it's your turn. And it's always your turn. His book and my favorite of his "This is Marketing" was an instant bestseller in countries around the world.

Though renowned for his writing and speaking, Seth also founded two companies, Squidoo and Yo Yodine, acquired by Yahoo. By focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership to the spread of ideas and changing everything, Seth has been able to motivate and inspire countless people around the world.

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Transcript

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Did you know that email marketing drives a very significant chunk of online revenue for nonprofits, roughly 26%. And that for every $1 invested in email, nonprofits see an average return of $42? Well, my brand new mini course, mastering email marketing for nonprofits, will teach you how to capitalize on these compelling numbers. In this four hour online course, you'll gain the skills to craft emails that people actually want to read, grow your email list, determine timing and frequency of your emails, and track and understand the essential metrics that you need to continuously improve your campaigns. So you can sign up now@nonprofitemailcourse.com. That's nonprofitemailcourse.com dot class starts May 23. But if you can't attend live or if the date has passed when you're listening to this, no problem. When you register, you'll get all of the recordings and materials sent directly to you. Hope to see you there. Hello and welcome to nonprofit Nation. I'm your host, Julia Campbell, and I'm going to sit down with nonprofit industry experts, fundraisers, marketers, and everyone in between to get real and discuss what it takes to build that movement that you've been dreaming of. I created the nonprofit nation podcast to share practical wisdom and strategies to help you confidently find your voice, definitively grow your audience, and effectively build your movement. If you're a nonprofit newbie or an experienced professional who's looking to get more visibility, reach more people, and create even more impact, then you're in the right place. Let's get started. When Seth Godin's team reached out to me to see if I would have him on the podcast, I could not have been more excited. I have been a huge Seth Godin fan going on two decades now. Having devoured all of his books, followed his daily blog, listened to his podcast, and watched his TED Talks and his thought leadership on marketing, freelancing, bootstrapping, and entrepreneurship have shaped my professional life in too many ways to count. And his influence in shaping the past, present and future of marketing is unmatched, in my opinion. So when we got on to record, we jumped right into the interview and I realized that some of my listeners may not be familiar with Seth and his work. So I will read his bio. Now. Seth is an entrepreneur, bestselling author, and speaker. In addition to launching one of the most popular blogs in the world, he's written 21 best selling books, including the Dip Linchpin, Purple Cow Tribes, and what to do when it's your turn. And it's always your turn. His book and my favorite of his this is marketing was an instant bestseller in countries around the world. His latest books are the song of significance, also fantastic, and the practice and creatives everywhere have made it a bestseller. Though renowned for his writing and speaking, Seth also founded two companies, Squidoo and Yo Yodine, acquired by Yahoo. By focusing on everything from effective marketing and leadership to the spread of ideas and changing everything, Seth has been able to motivate and inspire countless people around the world, including yours truly. Now let's get to the episode welcome to the podcast. I'm thrilled to have you here. Well, thank you for doing it. Showing up and showing up and showing up. It's harder than most people realize, and I am grateful for you doing it. Well, I am thrilled to have you here today. And we're going to talk about a lot of things. Because when I was formulating the questions, I was thinking of my audience, primarily nonprofits, nonprofit marketers, nonprofit fundraisers. But then I was also thinking, what would I want to ask you as having been a freelancer, a bootstrapper, and an entrepreneur? So we're going to kind of go all over the map here. But the first question I want to ask, and I want to say congratulations on the recent launch of your charity auction platform, good bids on the website. It claims to turn charity auctions and fundraising upside down and inside out. So for those of us who are hearing about it for the first time, can you give us sort of a brief origin story and what gap it fills in the nonprofit space? I'd be happy to. So my parents were both in the nonprofit space. I grew up thinking that philanthropy and nonprofits was normal. And I've spent my career behind the scenes working with important nonprofits that do systemic change. One thing that everyone agrees on is that galas are stupid, and that fundraising is endlessly difficult, and that the more successful a nonprofit is, the more money they have to raise. They didn't sign up to raise money, but they need to. And I wanted to address that pain point. And part of the challenge is that when we seek to raise money from people who have a different relationship with money than we do, which is everybody, it's easy to say you should support this because I think it's important. But I think it's more important to bring the empathy to the table and be able to engage with people in a way that makes them understand that every donation to charity is a bargain. It's a bargain because it's worth more than you donate or else you're not going to do it. And charity auctions are this subset of fundraising. They usually happen at a gala. They usually work best if people are a little drunk and they're really difficult to pull off. And I'm an Internet person from way back. I invented email marketing in the 1990s. Thank you for that, by the way. I'm kidding. I'm not responsible for. No, I do thank you, genuinely. I'm not responsible for the spam part. Anyway, so I invented something new called a positive auction. And it really does turn your brain inside out. So bear with me for a second. Forget everything you know about auctions. Here's the way it works. There are incremental donations, a $10 donation, a $20 donation, a $30 donation. These are donations. These are non refundable, tax deductible donations to a charity you care about. And the last donation gets a reward. So Taylor Swift tickets in Amsterdam. The last donor. The donor who donated the most on their last donation gets two tickets to Amsterdam, plus a travel budget to get there. So the bidding started at $10, and people looked and said $10. Of course I'll put in $10. Who knows? Maybe I'll be the winner. Well, the. So far, we're up to $20,000 raised on two tickets that someone could buy for a couple thousand bucks because the top bid is only six, $700 right now. Because when you add up all of the donations along the way, it keeps getting to a bigger and bigger number. So the idea here, it's not live in person, it's no one's drinking, it's not at a gala. It's simply, here's a cool prize, here's a really cool cause. Let's go. Alert all of our fans that if they want to participate in this because it's fun, they might get a reward. But either way, they'll be supporting a cause they care about. That's what good bids is trying to do. What I personally like about good bids, and you have written about this in your blog, is you talk about how sort of uncomfortable it is to ask your friends to make a donation. But with good bids, when I ask people to make a donation or make a bid, I get a free bid. So there's an incentive there for the donor as well. Can you talk about that? Right. So now we're getting super in the weeds, which is exciting to me. We needed a way to make it so that people would talk about it. Because here's my experience. In my experience, it's awkward to talk about your nonprofit with other people because they feel ashamed. They feel on the spot, it's awkward. So we don't. And what we realized about the reward cycle that I described, the positive auction is if I give you, Julia, a free bid and you use it in an auction, it doesn't cost the charity anything. It actually inflates the scale of the auction. So the person who bids after you, if there is one, just put in $10 more than you did. So the charity actually come out ahead. So what we do is we say to the backers of a charity or anyone who participates, if you're one of the first three or four bidders in an auction, we're going to give you a free bid. That's a reward for going first. If you refer a friend to any auction and they donate any amount, even $20, you get a free bid. The free bid might be worth 1000, we don't care. And so there are people who are now carrying around in their wallet these free bids for our site, waiting for the moment that they can juice up an auction toward the end. And sometimes they win. And if they win, that's great. If they don't win, that's great. The nonprofit comes out ahead and they had a reason to talk about it. I love that. And they feel good about making the donation as well. And I think that's the huge piece of the puzzle that might be missing when you just go to a charity auction and you kind of sign up for $25 or whatever it is that you sign up for. So shifting into the overall landscape of giving, not really going into most of the data, but it's not very good. It's not very positive and optimistic. So the total raised is way down and decreasing. But to me, what's alarming is that the number of individual donors is decreasing. So in your view, why is this happening? And what can fundraisers do to slow this leaky bucket? I know exactly why it's happening. We've seen this before in ways that might surprise people. So when I was at Yahoo, it was not unusual for a banner ad on the Internet to get 1% click through rate, which meant that every time you showed the banner to 100 people, one person would click it. Now it's one in a million people click on a battery. It used to be when we were doing email marketing that we had a 75% open rate and a 33% response rate to the emails. Now it's 1000th of that for a lot of spammers because people race to the bottom, they just churn it and churn it and churn it. And what we've done is we've set up fundraisers online, particularly for this gruesome, thankless job. Turning the crank and turning the crank and turning the crank. Making people feel guilty, hassling them for money, sending them a note every day, sending them two notes a day, creating another emergency. Well, no wonder you're burning out. You're not treating people the way you want to be treated. You're part of a system, a system that doesn't care about people and is just racing to the bottom. And nonprofits say, yeah, but it's a good cause. And everyone else is racing the bottom. I have no choice. And so we have burned out the goodwill of a lot of people, and we've created this need for yet another emergency. Because when there's an emergency, we can get people's attention for a minute. And then. And so we're surrounded, not just nonprofits, but in general, by a media that's filled with emergency breaking news. Right? It's not breaking news that Larry King broke his toe. I'm sorry, it's not. But you needed to call. Did he break his toe? I made that. No, that's not breaking news. It's news about a break, but it's not breaking news. So what's the alternative? The alternative is, in this country, every day, nonprofits raise about a billion dollars. In total, 300 billion a year. It's an enormous amount of money. It's a testament to one of the very good side effects of our capitalist economy. Good people wanting to make a difference. But the donations that matter are from people who didn't just show up today and are going to disappear tomorrow. They're from people who see your success as part of who they are, who see that you culturally are aligned with who they seek to be. They would miss you if you were gone. The fact is, I'm on who knows how many lists. And if I never got another email from that library asking me for another donation, I wouldn't miss it. Right? I just don't have the guts to send it to spam, but I wouldn't miss it. You want to be missed? If you were gone, and you do that by forgiving the 90% of the people on your list who just aren't in it for why you're in it, just thank them and move on. But the 10% of people who care, who you've earned permission from, who you can see, who can see you, who you can dance with and create change, those people are eager to give you more money because it's worth it to them, but it's not worth it to them because you hassled them and sent them an emergency note in the middle of the night. And politicians are the worst of this. It's worth it to them because you are them. They see their parents in the mirror when they look at you. And honoring that, that is why you got into it in the first place. And we need to find the guts to do that again. I teach my clients, I do digital marketing and social media marketing for nonprofits, and what I teach is exactly that. Stop focusing so much on donor acquisition and start really preaching to the choir and shun the non believers, which is something that you've said or, you know, shun the naysayers. So what do you say? This is actually a conversation that I just had with a client this morning, and I'm so interested to hear your input on this. What do you say to the executive director that says, I hate fundraising? Yeah. Well, there are two parts to what you just said, so let's do the second part. First, I get that you hate fundraising, and that's not why you signed up for this. It would be imperative, though, for you to find someone who loves fundraising, because fundraising is a gift that when we are offering people a chance to donate to our cause, we are giving them something we are not taking from them. We are giving them an opportunity to be part of something, to be seen to be appreciated. And if you view that as hustling people or hustling them, then you've put it into the wrong container. So the maitre D at a restaurant, their job is not to send people away. Their job is to make the people who arrive feel welcome, like they're in the right place. That's a gift that you're offering people. And if you sign up to the system of churn and burn, you don't get to give them that gift. But if you can figure out how to engage with people where they need to be, you will become part of their trusted circle, their family, and in exchange, they will happily donate, because it's an expression of who they are seeking to become. An expression of who they are seeking to become. I love that you have said, and this is a quote I use a lot with my clients, that marketing is no longer about what you sell, but marketing is about the story that you're telling. So what are nonprofits getting wrong in their storytelling? So my dad was the volunteer head of the United Way in Buffalo, New York, in the seventies, and Buffalo used to be a very important city in the United States. Not so much anymore. But there's a legacy there, a legacy of philanthropy, a legacy of wealth, a legacy of middle class, hardworking people who are making a difference. And when he took over, he did the math, and he saw that people who made donations of over$1,000 were capable of making a big impact, because you need a lot of $10 donations to make up for a $5,000 donation. So he made a list of all the people who give him more than $1,000, and then he made a list of all the people at all the private clubs and stuff who could easily give more than $1,000. And he would go to their homes, and he wouldn't say, the Boy scouts are really important, and this cause is really important, and this emergency is happening, and these people have athlete's foot, and this is important and everything else. He went to them, and he said, you know what, Max? Last year, Jeremy was on this list of 400 people. I'd love for you to be on the list, because it's a list you belong on. And he'd say to Jeremy, you know what, Jeremy? Thank you for being on the list last year with these 400 other people, but we're adding a $5,000 list. I think you belong on that list. Now, it was taken for granted that the United Way did worthwhile stuff. That wasn't what he was there to discuss. He wasn't there to say, good people give money to the United way, therefore, you're a bad person. He was there to say, do you belong in this list? Because I can offer you a chance to be on the list, and I think you would find it worth it to be on the list. The end. And if we think about how the wealthy in this country act, almost everything they do is about being on the list. They have a big boat that they never take out because people like them own big boats. And so that's a story. I'm not saying it's the only story. I'm saying we need to get away from how hard the work your nonprofit does, get away from how urgent to how much trauma there is, how much injustice there is. It's all true. We need to bring empathy to the table and realize that person across the table from us, they need to hear a story about, what was it like at the dinner table growing up. They need to hear a story about when your parents were raising you, what dreams did they have for you? They need to hear a story about what do your kids ask you at night when you come home from a hard day of work, what would matter to you? What would light you up? When they hear a story like that, they want more of that, and they will pay for it. That goes into the concept of practical empathy, um, which you wrote about in, this is marketing. And I think this is a very important concept, especially for fundraisers, and the fact that it's impossible to be appropriately generous to everyone. So how can nonprofits apply practical empathy in their fundraising and marketing strategies? Okay, so the first part of practical empathy we just talked about, which is, you don't want what I want. You don't see what I see. You don't believe what I believe, and that's okay. Like, my dad didn't care about being on the list of$5,000 donors. Most of the philanthropy he and my mom did was anonymous. My dad was on the board of the Black Baptist Church in Buffalo, and he wasn't baptist or black, and he was there quietly in the background because it mattered to him. So you can bring a different story to other people that need to hear a different story. Right. But the second part is the smallest viable audience, which is if you think everyone should be your donor, you have just announced that no one should be your donor. And what we have to do is say, we have some stories that we are comfortable with. We need to find people who like those stories. And if those stories don't work for you, we forgive you. Thank you very much. You should call these people instead. And the story I like to tell about this, years before the Internet, going to have dinner at a friend's house in a small town. My mom taught me, always bring something. I had forgotten to bring something. So I stopped at the local card and gift store, and I said, is there a florist in town that's still open? And the person behind the counter, who I think was the owner, said, nope, you want to buy a card? And I said, no, I don't think I can bring a card, but thank you. And I left, and two doors down was a florist. The card shop guy was just trying to persuade me that I wanted to buy a card, even though I didn't want to buy a card. And he would have earned my trust if he had said, actually, Bob runs the flower store two doors down. I'll call him to make sure he's open. Do you want a card to go with that? I would have happily bought a card from him in that moment, because he'd earned my trust. But leaving aside selling me a card, it cost you nothing to say. There's a florist down the street. So if you've got a donor that's busy saying, I need you to sing and dance for me, I need results in 3 hours. I need you to put my name on the building. I'm going to hassle you all the time. And I have $500 to donate. You're allowed to say, I hear you. That's fantastic. That's not the kind of people who are backing our nonprofit. But thank you for your time. Because when you pick your donors, you pick your future. I love that. And I think there's a great scene in miracle on 34th street where there's the woman that goes to Bloomingdale's and she wants to find a fire truck, and they're sold out. So they sent her to macy's. Or maybe it's vice versa. And then she is so happy that that happened because the whole point was getting her child the right present for Christmas that she started referring all of her, all of her friends and family and her network to. I think it was Macy's or Bloomingdale's. I don't know. Someone will correct me. I think Gimbles was involved. Yes. Gimbals. Oh, my gosh. Someone is going to kill me in the show notes. Don't worry. Kimball's out of business. No one's got an axe to guard. But that's the whole point. Okay, so practical empathy, and I completely get that. But speaking of trust, so you. I love that survey that you shared from the Brookings Institution. And I follow the Edelman Trust barometer. And there's so many studies that show that trust in nonprofit institutions and institutions in general is way down. So we know that trust is paramount to fundraising, getting people engaged, getting people on board. But it's also decimated. So in your opinion, how can we, as a sector, start to build up this lost trust? I would take some of these surveys with a grain of salt. We have been pushed and battered to trust nothing. And so people are looking for a way to say they don't trust, but they still go to the hospital and let someone put them under and cut them open. Because when it comes right down to it, civilization is about trust, as much as some people would like to deny it. But what is trust? Trust is making a promise and keeping it. And so the question is, what's the promise? If you're environmental defense and you promise you're going to heal the earth, and ten years later, the earth is less healed than it was when you started, there's a challenge here because you didn't do anything wrong, but you made a promise that you couldn't keep. And when we think about the story we are telling and who we are telling it to, the trust is not going to come simply from the transparency of a spreadsheet. It's going to become come from the clarity of what did we say we were going to do in the first place? And if we're saying we're going to save the whales, and then we don't save the whales, the next time you say, give us money, it's an emergency, or all the whales are going to die, we're going to say, the whales already died. That you made an easy promise that was dramatic, but harder to keep. What we find, for example, in resilient physicians, the ones who don't get sued, is they don't say, I'm going to cure your disease. They say, there is a process. I will teach you the process. We will do the process the best the process can be done. We will make intelligent decisions together as we go, as the odds shift, as the probability cloud moves. But I'm not going to promise I'm going to make you better. I'm going to promise I'm going to work with you for you to get better together. And that is a good way to build trust with a certain mindset. Other people. A four year old want to hear Santa Claus is real. There will be presents here on Christmas. If there aren't presents on Christmas, then don't be surprised if they don't trust you next time. I broke that trust with the tooth fairy several times that have to be that my daughter, who is now 14, will never forgive me for. But no, that's making a really important point. But I actually want to kind of expand on that. So what if you are working in systems change work and something like eradicating homelessness, or changing the narrative around homelessness, or working on issues of food insecurity, something that's not going to be solved in our lifetime. So you're talking about showing donors that you are in this process with them and that it is a process, but you're not making a promise that it's going to be ended in their lifetime. Remember the practical empathy thing? Some people want to be part of a 10,000 year process. Some people, there's actually a foundation called long now. They just built a clock in Texas that will run for 10,000 years. They wanted to sign up for something that's in the long run, but many people don't. Many people want to feel like they succeeded. And so that's why a town will put up a building, even though there's something less visible that they could have used the money for. Cause now there's a building. There wasn't a building. Now there's a building. We have a better town hall. So if I was trying to raise money from a certain kind of person who is interested in eradicating homelessness, I might say we are this close to having the money to build six houses. And once we build six houses, there will be 18 people that the fuller center have taken off the streets. 18 people who you can visualize are going to have a home this Thanksgiving because of you. That's a promise I can keep. On the other hand, I can say to somebody, and I have said it when I worked on this as a volunteer full time for a very long time, we can't solve climate tomorrow, but we can do stuff today that ten years from now, people will say, when I read that book, it started me on the path to where I am now. If that's the kind of work you'd like to sign up for, that's the work we're here to do. But we got to tell the right story to the right people. That's the pushback I constantly get from people that want to hire me to do digital marketing or digital fundraising. It's, well, we can't make that promise. We can't say, I want to. I can house ten people. We can't say this. We can't say this, like the making up of excuses. And I think that brings me to my next question. So how can the sector, how can we get over our collective fear of saying the wrong thing, offending people, not saying the right message, and really create these kind of messages that are remarkable. Yeah. Okay, so there's three parts to what you just said. I want to clarify the first one. It may be that the right way to eradicate homelessness is not to build six houses at a time. I'm not arguing that it is. Maybe what we need to do is change legislation for this to happen. Okay, how many votes do we need? We need 80. How many people can we put through our education process where after they go through it, they change their vote? Right now, I've done the same thing. We need to make this incremental thing happen. We can point to that and say it works. So that's the first. Okay, what does remarkable mean? Remarkable means worth making a remark about. That's all it means. It doesn't mean it's got a gimmick. It doesn't mean it's hip. It just means people want to talk about it. So the good bids. Taylor Swift auction has 71 people watching it. When it started, it had zero. We didn't tell anybody about it. The people who were in it told other people who told other people. It's remarkable because it makes you look good to tell your niece, who's a Taylor Swift fan, that this is going on. That makes it remarkable. Okay, so it's not clear that most nonprofit work should be remarkable. That's not what it's for. But if you look at the Ice bucket challenge, which raised nine figures for a nonprofit that treats a very small number of people, it didn't spread because people cared about that disease. It spread because it was fun to talk about the challenge. The remarkability was built into it. And so when you hire Julia to do work for you, don't bring her something that people don't want to talk about, because it will make it much harder for her to do her job. Bring her something? Yes, please. Where the people who she reaches, their status and affiliation will go up if they tell the others. And that is what marketers do. It's not necessarily what the people who do the on the street work of a nonprofit signed up to do. They're not necessarily the same thing. And we have to acknowledge that they're not the same thing and then figure out who is our smallest viable audience. So I spent. I've been part of acumen since almost the beginning with Jacqueline Novogratz. And a big part of acumen's message is, this is a nonprofit for smart people who are patient. And if you want us to show you a simple picture that can be solved in five minutes with $20, we're going to send you somewhere, somewhere else. I could name some of those charities. There's nothing wrong with those charities. But if you want to do decades long work to fundamentally shift the system of how the people at the bottom of the pyramid engage with the capitalist economy with respect, with dignity, and without corruption, this is the journey we're on. That's what we do around here. Once you find those people, you're great and you don't have to do a lot of promo. And so early on, Jacqueline had the chance to pursue going on Oprah, and I persuaded her not to do that, because if you go on Oprah, you're going to get a whole bunch of $20 checks in the mail, and you're going to get hooked on that. And then you're going to want to do it again. And suddenly you're not. Patient, thoughtful, complicated strategy for smart people. You are in the business of everybody else. So pick. Pick who you are. Pick what you stand for. Pick who needs to be on the bus, and forgive the people who don't want to get on the bus. Wow. Okay. If you're listening and not watching, you can't see me shaking my head vigorously. So I have two more questions, and we're coming up to time. You're doing great, Julia. I'm really flattered and honored that you would have me, and these are great questions. Thank you. How can we make the case for investing in marketing and innovation at our nonprofit? Oh, so I didn't answer the innovation part. Right. Nonprofits get a tax break for only one reason, because you haven't figured out how to solve the problem. If you had figured out how to solve the problem, we would have solved it already. You are explorers, you are artists, you are scientists. You are here to solve a problem where we don't know the solution. And what that means is you should eagerly publish your negative results. You should eagerly tell everyone you can find, we tried this and it didn't work because, a, that reminds us that you are exploring and doing science, which is what real scientists do, and b, it makes it more likely they won't make the same mistakes you made. It will get everyone in the organization okay with the fact that you need to try something that might not work because if you're only going to do things that do work, you're stuck because you don't have anything that works because you want to solve the problem already. And so the challenge we have going forward is to find supporters and donors who a, understand that if they can make this problem go away, it's worth whatever it costs to spend on marketing. Because marketing isn't evil. Marketing is simply the means to solving this problem. And b, they're pushing you to do things that might not work because if you don't, how are we going to solve the problem? So I'll tell a short story. My mom was the first woman on the board of trustees in the museum in Buffalo. When I was growing up. She worked there, and she and her partner came up with the idea before the antiques roadshow of calling Sothebys and saying, do you think you can get a couple of appraisers to come to Buffalo? So the idea was get people who dont usually come to the museum to come to the museum and build it around antiques and old artifacts and they promoted it a little bit in the paper. And the night before, my mom said to me, maybe no one will come tomorrow. And then she said, but if no one comes, no one will know. No one came. That's a really good point. And we got there early. The next. This chokes me up. Oh, I can't wait. Oh, my gosh. People. There were more than a thousand people waiting in the. It might not work. Oh, my gosh. Have you seen Kane's arcade? I don't even know what that is. Okay, I will choke up if I talk about it. It's a video. C A I n e s arcade. Yes, yes. About the little boy in Los Angeles. Spends his summers at his father's auto body shop and builds a cardboard arcade. And a videographer comes in to get his car fixed and then makes, like, a bunch of promotional videos about the little boy. And they have thousands of people that come to his arcade, and it's like, you just want to choke up thinking about it, but it's just like you said, they think if no one shows up, then no one would have known. Cain would have been happy with ten people showing up. But the word spread. And also that proves my point that I usually make to people where they say, how long should a video be? Well, that video, I think, is 30 minutes. And I watched every single second of it. And if it had stopped in the middle, I would have, you know, been leading a riot to try to find out what happened. So the whole point is not really length. The point is the story. The point is creating something that people want to share and remark on. So thank you for that. And I know we are at time, but my last question, and I'm asking it kind of for myself as well. But if you could suggest one habit for nonprofit staff to build, whether daily or weekly, what would it be? So you said nonprofit staff, not people who are just. Well, no, but I'm framing my answer, not just the fundraisers. So for nonprofit staff, I would say the following. Every week there should be a meeting. I hate meetings. Every week there should be a meeting where each person says some generous, brave thing they did last week that did not work. And knowing you have to bring one to the meeting next week is making it more likely you're going to find one. And if it were, my organization would be asynchronous. Everyone would have to email it to me, and then I'd send a newsletter to everybody with everyone's list, and I would celebrate the people who did the most generous, bravest thing that didn't work every week, because that's what you're here to do. Generous, brave things that don't work. And if you're not that lucky, it'll work, and that'll be fine, too. You won't get to claim it in the newsletter, but you just made a good thing happen. More concretely, if I was anywhere in the fundraising part of it, I would call three donors a week, not ask them for money, just ask them, how am I doing? How are we doing? What's on your mind? What are you dreaming of? Have those conversations 150 times a year. Get to know intimately these people who that are currently just clicks on a screen because when you can recognize them. There was a video that Google did years and years ago, and they went to Union Square talking to ostensibly smart people who didn't know the difference between a search engine and a browser, and they needed to remind themselves that they're so into it that they all understood. Chrome is a browser. Firefox is a browser. Google is a search engine. People didn't know. No clue. And understanding what people don't know is a really good way of educating the people you're not talking to. Yeah. The curse of knowledge. We have the curse of knowledge, and I call it also the curse of passion, where we have so much passion around what we do that it's so hard to believe that other people won't have it. Exactly. But having, creating that empathy, asking those questions and looking at it from the lens of someone that is not in your same position, it's refreshing, and it's incredibly important. So what are you reading? Binging. Listening to right now that lights you up? Okay, so the best audiobook ever made is called just kids read by Patti Smith. And, oh, yeah, I think you wrote. A blog post about this. I haven't gotten it yet. If that doesn't touch your heart, you don't have one. Okay. Just kids. And the two books with confusing titles that people should listen to or read right now and hand to everyone they know are the war of art and the art of possibility, and they will change you in really useful ways. My most recent book is called the song of significance. And I hope you can work to build an organization that reminds you of the ones I'm talking about in that book. Thank you so much again for being here, Seth. This was just fantastic. Always such a wealth of information. So I really appreciate your time, and I appreciate your body of work and your generosity with your expertise and your knowledge. So thank you so much. Thank you, Julia, go make a ruckus because it matters. Well, hey there. I wanted to say thank you for tuning into my show and for listening all the way to the end. If you really enjoyed today's conversation, make sure to subscribe to the show in your favorite podcast app, and you'll get new episodes downloaded as soon as they come out. I would love if you left me a rating or a review, because this tells other people that my podcast is worth listening to, and then me and my guests can reach even more earbuds and create even more impact. So that's pretty much it. I'll be back soon with a brand new episode, but until then, you can find me on Instagramuliacampbell. Seven seven. Keep changing the world, you nonprofit unicorn.