Joan Garry, host of the popular Nonprofits Are Messy podcast, says nonprofit leaders need to get bolder on brand and much better at storytelling.

BrandStories’ CEO Marcia Stepanek caught up with Joan to interview her for an installment of a five-part series on nonprofit leadership that we curated and co-produced with Columbia University’s School of Professional Studies, pre-pandemic. We’re re-posting it here today; her insights remain especially relevant today as we head into a new season of intensifying political and economic challenge.

Joan began her career in 1981 as part of the management team that launched MTV, and then had another successful run as an executive at Showtime Networks.  In 1997, Joan was named the executive director of GLAAD, one of the largest gay rights organizations in the United States, which she led out of a deep financial crisis into a place of prominence, focusing on the power of the media to change hearts and minds. She now serves as a leadership coach and popular podcast host. She is the author of Joan Garry’s Guide to Nonprofit Leadership (2020).

What follows is an edited transcript of our interview.

STEPANEK: What would you say are the unique challenges of building and leading a social brand?

GARRY: Underlying the word “brand” is the thing that nonprofits need to focus on the most, which is clarity of purpose and a unifying vision. You can have the most fabulous website on Earth, but if you have no unifying vision that calls people into action, it will be very hard to ignite that light inside a person who is socially aware and who is looking to get out of the stands and onto the field.

“I believe the key to introducing someone to a nonprofit is storytelling. It is, in my mind, the most powerful tool a nonprofit leader has to invite you to do more for an organization. It also happens to be one of the single most difficult things for a nonprofit to do well.”

Joan Garry, Host, Nonprofit are Messy podcast

GARRY: It’s crazy important to elevate the role of marketing and communications, and that’s not just for the here and now, but for nonprofits in general. First, we live in a world of wall-to-wall clutter, and constant bidding for our attention. We have a responsibility to market the hell out of our nonprofits, because we, particularly now, live in what my neighbor, Stephen Colbert, calls a broken and broken-hearted society, and there are massive numbers of people who are so damn hungry to do something. Therefore, we need to be in the invitation business. Nonprofits need to be inviting those people sitting up in the stands to get down on the field, into action. You have no power without constituents. I call it “building the army of the engaged.” If I haven’t figured out a way to create engagement with people, I won’t have an army, nor power, nor the ability to make an impact.

STEPANEK: Why do you think that so many nonprofits have found it to be so difficult to engage others in their causes?

GARRY: The nonprofit sector is still not comfortable living in the digital space. We have an age problem. An overwhelming percentage of people who run nonprofits are Boomers who still think social media is the job of an intern and that marketing is overhead they can’t afford. A lot of other nonprofit leaders are still fearful of digital media. They’re risk-averse. They see the need for tightly-controlled messages but they are not in any way nimble. They still think that anything digital is a storefront, something to use to tell people about their organization rather than to find out more about you as someone they’re trying to reach. They’re not allowing for messaging that could be bold, provocative, that could go viral, because—God forbid, then somebody might say something that might ignite the other side, right? But that is exactly what they need to do.

I think digital media can run sort of like an antithesis to the way nonprofits have originally been structured, because digital media is, in many ways, about stirring up the pot. Nonprofits were founded to stir up the pot—but once you build an institution that has leaders who see themselves as being overly beholden to funders, it tends to make nonprofits way more cautious than they need to be, and therefore, too often, largely ineffectual.  

There’s also another thing that is a systemic problem in the nonprofit sector. It’s called marketing money equals overhead. So, I’m sitting there as the communications director of a nonprofit and I’m talking to my executive director, and I’m saying, ‘We’ve really got to invest in online engagement.’ And the executive director pushes back and says, ‘I hear you, but that’s going to increase my administrative costs, and my top funders are not going to like that, not one little bit.’ There’s this horrifying mandate from funders that we spend less money on overhead.

If we want to make a difference in the nonprofit sector, we actually have to reframe marketing as a program expense. It’s a program of an organization to create an engaged army. That’s not an overhead thing. It’s critical to my being able to identify how I’m making an impact, engaging people in my work as a donor, as a new staff member, as a board member—and as somebody who might send an email or go to a rally. That’s not overhead. It’s the real work of the organization. I think until the nonprofit sector starts to see marketing as a critical program expense and starts to reframe that with funders, we’re going to continue to get frustrated every time we look at a nonprofit website and see a storefront.

STEPANEK: Nonprofits are also well-known to be very risk-averse. We’re in a divided climate. What’s the opportunity for those nonprofits seeking to share better narratives?

GARRY: I think the nonprofit sector is uniquely poised to identify stories that are neither red or blue, black or white, gay or straight—and so forth. I believe there is a third story and third voice that people are dying to hear. Most people are sick and tired of hearing how the ties that bind us are drastically frayed. They want to see and hear voices of people who are bringing us together, and I think that’s the kind of messaging and framing that nonprofits have a unique opportunity to create—but only if they begin to see marketing and communications as the delivery mechanism for storytelling that stokes action, passion and power. And truth.

_{PHOTO: Image of Joan Garry, top, photographed by Cheryl Senter}

— Marcia Stepanek