Nonprofit Launch Plan Podcast for Startup, Small, and Growing Nonprofits

Your donors aren't giving to your programs they're giving to create impact on people. They wanna know who their gift is helping and what difference it makes in that person's life. And the clearer that you are about who your nonprofit exists to serve, the more powerful and compelling your story becomes.

Listen, when you can put a face and a name and a story to your mission, you don't just attract resources, you create real connection, and that all starts with one essential step, getting clear on who your target beneficiary is. That's what's coming up on this episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startup small and growing nonprofits.

I'm glad you're here.

Welcome to the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast. This podcast is here to help you build your nonprofit from the ground up on a strong foundation. And in every episode, we give you frameworks and tools and the personalized guidance that you need to be able to create lasting impact. My name is Matt Stockman.

I'm your host. I'm a nonprofit growth coach, and I'm glad you're here. A nonprofit launch plan. We believe that every nonprofit has to be operating at peak performance in six key areas in order to be successful. Those six areas are leadership, fundraising, marketing programs and services operations and finances.

So. Every episode of the podcast, we talk about a topic that is core to at least one of these six areas. Now, before we dive into today's podcast, if you are tired of the constant stress and worry over money for your nonprofit, where it's coming from, how you're going to cover the cost of all the impact that you wanna make, it means that fundraising is a struggle.

We get it. And can I say you are not alone. A lot of nonprofits are in the same situation and we are here to help. I want you to take a quick moment to head over to my website and get the free Fearless fundraising mini course. It's a workbook and five short videos that go along with them that will walk you through step by step how to come up with a game plan to build your fundraising messaging with clarity.

Here's one thing I know to be true. A hundred percent believe that most nonprofits struggle and sometimes even fail, not because of lack of funding, but because of lack of clarity in messaging. Listen, no matter the size of your nonprofit, if you've got a team of one person, it's just you. Or it's a hundred team members.

If a potential donor doesn't understand instantly what you do and how their gift can help, they won't give. And I encounter all different size and shape organizations every day that it's next to impossible to know for sure what they do and how they help, because they just. The clarity they need. The Fearless Fundraising Workbook will help you get that clarity you need and get you more donor dollars quicker so you can make more impact.

Get the Fearless Fundraising workbook and the videos that go along with it absolutely free on my website right now. Go to nonprofit launch plan.com. Again, nonprofit launch plan.com. So today we're diving into one of the most important questions that you can ask. When building a growing nonprofit, who exactly are you helping?

Because the reality is this challenges and suffering, it's everywhere. And as long as there are problems in the world to be solved, we will always have and will always need. Nonprofits just like yours. And if you're like most nonprofit leaders, your heart definitely goes out to everyone. You wanna be able to meet every need that you see.

But the hard truth is this, A nonprofit that tries to serve too many people and meet too many needs usually ends up serving none of them particularly well. This is why this matters, particularly focus, clarity creates impact. Let me give you an example. During the day. When the sun is out, it warms us all up.

It provides light and it provides heat, but thankfully the sun isn't so hot that it randomly sets things on fire. But when you take a magnifying glass and you focus the sun into a single potent beam, you are narrowing its power to be able to cause a fire to start. And that's exactly how it works with your nonprofit.

The more you focus, the greater the impact. Narrowing your focus doesn't limit your compassion, but rather it strengthens your effectiveness. So first, before we get into the details, a couple of clarifying uh, points for the purpose of our conversation. Today, I'm using the term beneficiary to talk about a person or even an organization that your nonprofit exists to help.

You might call 'em clients or kids or families, or. Or something else, but we're all about getting clear on who your target individual that you help is. And for the purpose of this exercise, I wanna plant a seed in your mind that you think about as it's one person or it's one family, or it's one organization, not the masses.

So. How do you identify that beneficiary? Well start with three simple but really powerful questions that will clarify a lot of it. And if it's just you, here's what I recommend you do. Get on a sheet of paper or open a doc in your laptop. Or if you've got a team, gather everybody around, walk through this exercise.

Work through these questions getting as detailed and specific as possible. So here's the questions. Number one, who is the exact person or family or organization that your nonprofit is here to serve? If you've been doing this for a while, you've likely already got a person or a family in mind that if there was a picture in your office to kind of capture the overall feeling of this is why we do what we do, or this is.

Who we do what we do for their picture would be in that frame. And if you're just getting going, I want you to just be as specific as possible, writing down everything that you can think of about the ideal beneficiary and the more detail. The better. Then number two, that's question one. Number two is what are their specific needs?

Again, write all this down as detailed as you can, and I encourage you to go even deeper than physical needs. What about the emotional needs? What about the psychological impact the relational needs? The point of all of this is not to create a bigger list of the different ways that we're gonna all of a sudden try to meet this person's needs, but rather what we're doing is we're just trying to get as much of a 360 to.

Degree, view of their life, their way of thinking, their fears, what keeps them up at night, their hangups, et cetera, as much as you can. So that's number two. And then question number three to ask with you or just your group is what problem are you solving for this individual or for this family? And specific is important.

The more specific, the better. So answering these questions should be somewhat of a brain dump. I just don't want you to overthink it. Just write everything down in a Google Doc or on a sheet of paper. You just sort of get it all out as much detail as possible. Then step two of this process. Is to create what I call a target beneficiary profile.

All this is, is a detailed description of the person you most want to serve, and you keep this person in mind. Whenever you design a program, you write an email, you launch a fundraising campaign, pretty much everything. It's gonna influence a lot of decisions from here on forward. Now, let's make sure I'm clear on one thing.

I'm in no way saying that if you do this and your target beneficiary is a single mom with two kids and a single dad with one kid walks into the front doors of your nonprofit asking for help that I'm somehow telling you not to help them. This exercise is really just to get your brain thinking about how to clarify and refine your messaging, and I promise it will make more sense by the end of our time together.

Okay, here are a few things to include as you build this target beneficiary profile. You wanna start to arrange all of the details that you wrote down in the first part of the exercise into these different sort of subcategories, including things like their age or life stage. Then another column with like their family and community context.

Then another column with the biggest challenges that they're facing, and then. What's their day-to-day life look like? And then their emotions or struggles that they carry on the daily and what success or hope looks like for them. You wanna create these columns and then put all those details underneath those columns and sort of separate them out.

And then last you synthesize all of this information into a paragraph or two. And if I were you, this is something that I'd actually solicit chat, GPT or another AI tool to help with. Putting all those data points in and getting chat GPT or another AI tool to kind of help synthesize and organize it is a really great way to use a platform like that.

So you end up with something like this, a paragraph that goes as an example, Maria is a 48-year-old single mom of two teenagers. She works two jobs, but she struggles to cover the rent and the groceries. And she has to make difficult financial choices every week. She often skips meals so that her kids can eat.

Maria feels exhausted. She's stretched thin in too many directions and actually feels hopeless at times like she's doing a terrible job at being a mom. She struggles with asking for help. So that's kind of the paragraph you end up with. Now, there are many people who are beneficiaries of your work that don't fit the exact Maria mold.

I, I'd argue no one is exactly like that, but doing this. Makes Maria something more than just a statistic. She's a person you can picture and that makes it a whole lot easier to design effective programs and to communicate your mission in a way that moves people to action. So as the leader, why does all this help?

Here's why this exercise matters so much. When you know exactly who you're helping, your messaging gets sharper. Donors can picture the lives they're impacting, and you can paint that picture so much clearer for them. For example, knowing what we know about our target beneficiary, because we've done this profile, we've created this paragraph.

Do you think a donor might be more inspired to make a gift if they hear your $50 provides two bags of groceries for somebody who's hungry today? Or your $50 helps to restore a sense of dignity in the mind of somebody like Maria, who because of your generosity, no longer has to choose between feeding her kids and herself next, your programs get better, your meeting real needs.

Instead of assumed ones, because you've done this kind of work and your resources go further, you're not wasting time or energy chasing every possible need. You don't have to serve everyone. You just have to faithfully serve the one that you're called to. So here's my challenge for you this week. Take some time to create a detailed target beneficiary profile.

Write it all down. Give this individual a name. Describe their needs, the problems they face, and exactly how your nonprofit is helping them. Then share it with your team. Put it somewhere visible. Put it on a whiteboard someplace where everybody can see it. Let it guide your decision making, your messaging, your fundraising, everything you write.

Everything you create. Everything you do. Alright, so to wrap all this up, identifying your beneficiary is about serving with focus and making a deeper lasting difference. When you know exactly who you're helping, you can lead with clarity, you can inspire donors with confidence, and you can change lives more effectively.

So let me ask you and leave you with this question, who are you helping? Before we wrap up this episode, if you or somebody you know is still in the dreaming phase of launching a nonprofit, I have got a special freebie. It's a PDF resource, I call it from dream to action, your nonprofit pre-launch checklist.

10 essential steps for moving from nonprofit idea to impact. It's 10 things to think about as you start to crystallize your dream for a nonprofit. This tool is gonna take you through 10 easy first steps to move your dream for a nonprofit toward a launch plan that gets your dream off the ground. So this checklist is gonna walk you through your why.

It will help you consider your first teammates. Honing in on who your beneficiary is, kinda like what we talked about today. Choosing your nonprofit's name, your IRS application, and a whole lot more. And with each one of the 10 steps, there's an easy to do action step for you to consider That will start to bring your dream for a nonprofit into a much clearer focus when you've completed it.

Now. If you want the free PDF from Dream to Action, your nonprofit pre-launch checklist, 10 steps for moving from nonprofit idea to Impact. You can do a couple of things. Number one, email me at matt@nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Again, matt@nonprofitlaunchplan.com. Or you can look for the pop out on my website.

Again, that's nonprofit launch plan. Dot com and don't forget about the other free resource that's there for you. The Fearless Fundraising Mini course. It's the workbook and the five short videos that go along with it that take the fear out of asking people to partner with you financially. You go through the mini course, you come out with a game plan and a fundraising messaging script that will work for your organization.

It's free on the website right now@nonprofitlaunchplan.com. That's all for today's episode of the Nonprofit Launch Plan podcast for startups, small and growing nonprofits. Thank you so much for watching and listening and tuning in. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss out on the next episode. And if in any way at all you found is helpful, please share it with another nonprofit leader who you think might benefit from it.

Until next time, thanks again. Keep making a difference.