If you’ve got great messaging and it’s still not causing decisionmakers to engage with you, chances are you’re dealing with one of the most common advocacy pitfalls that happens to a lot of nonprofit leaders: We worry so much about what we're going to tell a decision maker, and we don't spend nearly enough time thinking about what we want to ask them.

Questions are incredibly powerful tools, and they can really work magic in a conversation with a decisionmaker. They can create engagement. They can create an opportunity to go deep, to get information that the decisionmaker wouldn't volunteer otherwise. You can get advice. You can get all kinds of valuable intel, and at the same time build a connection with that decision maker, and have them leaning in and engaging more with you.

The magic of questions is that they engage other people's brains. We can't help it. When we're asked a question we have to engage. We have to stop and think about that question. If someone's just telling us stuff, it’s easy to lose focus, and not really hear what’s being said. But as soon as a question shows up in the conversation, our subconscious makes us pay attention. We get engaged. Decisionmakers get engaged.

But here's the thing. Not all questions are created equal. The fact is, the smarter your questions, the better your results are going to be. The trick is to come up with really smart questions that are going to yield high-level results for you.

In this episode, we share:

• How low-value questions work against you, and how to avoid them
• The essential advance work that sets you up to ask higher-value questions of decisionmakers
• The two most important questions to ask yourself before you ever meet with a decisionmaker
• Key characteristics of high-value questions that trigger engagement
• How to turn a request for advice into an even higher-value question
• How to use AI to do advance research and craft higher-value questions
• An easy hack to boost your effectiveness as you develop this skill

Link: Episode 67 – Three Keys to Finding the Right Decisionmaker in Any System

I'm preparing to launch a group coaching program that will focus specifically on helping you craft messaging that will shift decisionmakers’ perspectives and get them on board with sustaining and even expanding your funding. This will be a coaching opportunity for a limited number of people to come in and be part of a group. There'll be some training, but most of it will be coaching and helping you to get your messaging dialed in so that you can address this pressing need.

What I'm seeing right now is there's nothing more important than this. If that sounds like something you'd like to be a part of, message me through the podcast website or on LinkedIn.