https://nonprofitgrowthinstitute.com/

Lori Bower - BowerComm, 210 E 30th Avenue, Hutchinson, KS (2026)

08/27/2026

Last month, I was in Wichita speaking to a room full of arts leaders at the Kansas Arts Network conference about The Awareness Gap.

As we worked through the four reasons good organizations can stay invisible, you could see the lightbulbs going off around the room. The problems people thought they had weren’t necessarily the culprits.

One person had a board that kept bringing her communication ideas and wanted a way to help them understand what good actually looks like. Another had several people communicating on behalf of the organization, but everyone was operating in a silo. Someone else had a board pushing for more Facebook posts — right after we’d looked at data showing how little of their potential audience an average organic post was actually reaching.

And several people zeroed in on the Communications Capacity Scorecard because it gave them something they hadn’t had before: language for describing where their communication was actually breaking down.

Instead of “we need to do a better job of marketing,” they could start identifying whether they had a clarity problem, an audience and relevance problem, a reinforcement and relationship problem, or an implementation capacity problem.

By the end, people were circling which category matched their own organization and jotting down what to fix first.

That’s exactly the kind of 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗿𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲 𝘄𝗲’𝗿𝗲 𝗯𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗺𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝗼𝗳 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲–𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳, including several that community foundations, private foundations, and associations can bring directly to their nonprofit partners and members.

𝗠𝗢𝗦𝗧 𝗥𝗘𝗤𝗨𝗘𝗦𝗧𝗘𝗗 𝗦𝗘𝗦𝗦𝗜𝗢𝗡𝗦 𝗥𝗜𝗚𝗛𝗧 𝗡𝗢𝗪

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗚𝗮𝗽: 𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗚𝗿𝗲𝗮𝘁 𝗢𝗿𝗴𝗮𝗻𝗶𝘇𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻𝘀 𝗦𝘁𝗶𝗹𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗴𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗼 𝗕𝗲 𝗦𝗲𝗲𝗻

This 60-minute session helps organization leaders diagnose four common reasons awareness stays low: the outcome is unclear, the audience is too broad, communication stays inside the echo chamber, or there is no real system behind the work.

Participants also use our Communications Capacity Scorecard to start identifying where their own gaps lie and what deserves their attention first.

For community foundations, private foundations, and associations, this works well as a learning session for grantees, nonprofit partners, or members at very different levels of communications sophistication — because everyone can diagnose their own organization and leave with a clearer next move.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗔𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗲𝘀𝘀 𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲
For foundations and associations that want to make a deeper investment in nonprofit communications capacity, Build Your Awareness Engine moves from diagnosis into implementation.

The experience begins with a half-day workshop, delivered in person or online, where nonprofit leaders work on their own organizations as they build a clearer, more repeatable approach to communication.

The workshop is followed by two one-hour virtual Launch Labs, giving participants a chance to put the work into practice, come back with questions and challenges, and get help moving their plans forward.

Rather than sending nonprofit leaders home from a workshop with a notebook full of good intentions, the format gives them some structure and support for actually getting started.

𝗔𝗰𝘁𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗼𝗮𝗿𝗱 𝗮𝘀 𝗔𝗺𝗯𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗮𝗱𝗼𝗿𝘀
Board members usually want to help. The problem is that they aren’t always sure what to say or what useful communication support actually looks like.

This session gives nonprofit leaders practical ways to equip board members with the language, tools and confidence to talk about the organization clearly and naturally in the community.

𝗢𝗧𝗛𝗘𝗥 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟲–𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟳 𝗟𝗘𝗔𝗥𝗡𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢𝗣𝗜𝗖𝗦

𝗪𝗵𝘆 𝗣𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝗪𝗮𝗻𝘁 𝘁𝗼 𝗪𝗼𝗿𝗸 𝗧𝗵𝗲𝗿𝗲
How mission-driven organizations can communicate culture, purpose and identity in ways that attract aligned staff and volunteers.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗣𝗮𝗿𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗶𝗽𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻 𝗣𝗶𝗽𝗲𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗲
How to move people from passive awareness into deeper engagement with programs, mission and opportunities.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲-𝗠𝗮𝗸𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝗠𝗲𝘁𝗵𝗼𝗱
A 12-month storytelling system that helps organizations build awareness and trust by sharing two strategic stories each month.

𝗧𝗵𝗲 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗿𝘆𝘁𝗲𝗹𝗹𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗖𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗟𝗮𝗯
A hands-on session where participants turn one real organizational story into social, email, website and other useful content.

𝗕𝘂𝗶𝗹𝗱 𝗬𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗕𝗿𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗙𝗼𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘁𝗶𝗼𝗻
How audience profiles, brand archetypes and core messaging work together to shape a brand people understand, remember and trust.

Bailey Ramsey and I are booking these learning sessions and workshops for 2027, with a few dates still available in late 2026.

If you’re thinking about what kind of capacity-building or learning opportunities to offer your nonprofit partners or members next year, reply to this email. We can talk through what you’re trying to accomplish and which format would make the most sense.

08/21/2026

My 11-year-old picked our vacation this year, which is how I ended up on Icon of the Seas.

The ship is huge, and what fascinated me most was the operation behind it. They serve 15,000 meals a day, and for the most part, nobody seems to be waiting around for food.

One night in the main dining room, I ordered pecan-crusted salmon with garlic mashed potatoes and asparagus. On Latin night, I had jerk chicken and a Colombian take on crème brûlée. That was also the night they encouraged everyone to wear white, and somehow thousands of people actually did.

(I can’t get my own family to agree on matching pajamas for a Christmas card, but this ship got thousands of people into white on a Tuesday.)

Obviously none of that was figured out that afternoon. The menu, staffing, quantities, timing, service — all of it has been worked out months ahead of time, based on learnings from thousands of cruises over decades.

That same menu isn't just for one week. The next group of passengers gets on and they do it again. Then another group gets on and they do it again.

For the passengers, it’s a brand-new experience. For the crew, it’s a process.
That’s a pretty good comparison for communications work in a nonprofit.

You get a new donor. You need another story. Year-end comes around. The annual report is due. An event needs promoted. None of those things are new, but a lot of teams still end up rebuilding them every time.

When I worked on a lawn and garden equipment business 20 years ago, we used to joke that they were surprised every year when the grass started growing.

The opportunity is to get more deliberate about what happens next time.
If you figured out a good donor follow-up, keep it. If you found a good way to collect stories, make that the way you collect stories. If last year’s campaign timeline worked, don’t make yourself recreate it from memory next year.

That doesn’t mean every donor gets the same message or every campaign looks the same. It just means you aren’t wasting time re-solving the same problems.

For a small team, that matters.

That’s a lot of the work we do with our clients — helping them figure out what needs to be thoughtful and custom, and what can become a repeatable process so they have more time for the things that actually require their attention.

The grass is going to grow again next spring. Year-end is going to show up again next December. And another boatload of people is going to get hungry next week.

Some things really can be planned for.

What’s something your team does over and over that still feels harder than it should?

____________________________________

**What if you could get a grant for communications?**

If your team needs more communications capacity, funding may be part of the answer. Watch our free webinar, How to Get a Grant for Communications Capacity, for practical ideas on making the case for communications support and pursuing funding to help pay for it.

-->Message me for a link

_____________________________________

**Put Communications in the 2027 Budget**

If becoming better known and valued is on your wish list for next year, now is the time to figure out what kind of help you actually need. That might be a few hours of consulting, a planning process, help executing a specific project or an outsourced communications partner.

We can help you sort through the options and figure out what makes sense for your goals, team and budget.

--> Message me to book a free discovery call

07/26/2026

Saturday morning was the pig show at our county 4-H fair. I sent my husband and the kids ahead at 6:30 while I finished packing the last of their other exhibits.

On the way to the fairgrounds, I realized I had time to stop for iced lattes for everyone. By the time I arrived, they were well into getting the pigs ready without me.

After eight years of hauling feed and washing pigs, I'd finally graduated to coffee duty.

My daughter's going into her sophomore year; my son is 11 and in his fourth year of 4-H. When they first started, they could do a job if you told them exactly what it was and stood right there while they did it. Fill this bucket. Wash this pig. Carry that feed over there. Spray them down, it's hot.

After a while, they could do those things without me hovering. Then they started remembering them on their own — the pigs need feed and water in the morning, there's a whole checklist before the show, and if it's hot, you cool them down before anybody has to say so.

My daughter's past that now. She's the one telling me what feed to buy because she's mixing it differently for pigs gaining at different rates. If we're going to be gone, she can hand my parents the whole plan and trust they'll follow it.

Pretty soon I'll be out of the pig business entirely. I'll just pay the bills and deliver the coffee.

There's a progression in there.
First you can do a task with help.
Then you can do it on your own.
Then you start seeing what needs doing before anyone tells you.
And eventually you can decide what matters most, tell other people what to do, and own how the whole thing turns out.

We take that progression for granted with kids. Nobody would hand my 11-year-old the entire pig operation, walk away, and check in once a week. That would be a bold management choice, likely resulting in a gadget-filled pig pen and a swine crime scene.

I see organizations do this with their communications staff.

They hire (or contract) someone who can write, or design, or shoot photos and video, or post on their social accounts. They expect that person to walk in and immediately know what the organization should be saying, what matters most, who needs to hear it, what can wait, and how all of it fits together.

Those aren't the same skill. Someone can be terrific at producing the work and still not have the experience to run the function. That gap is where the frustration starts.

After a couple months, the executive director thinks, “Why am I still deciding what needs to happen, filling in all the background, setting the priorities, and reviewing every draft? I hired someone to handle communications.” The employee thinks, “I'm doing exactly what I was asked. Why does everything keep getting rewritten?”

Sometimes it's the opposite problem. The employee has plenty of ideas and initiative but doesn't yet know the organization well enough to tell which ideas actually serve the bigger goal. So the director spends as much time steering the work as they'd have spent just doing it themselves. One person needs constant instruction, the other needs constant correction, and either way the director never gets promoted to coffee duty.

And it costs the organization more than a little frustration. While everyone waits for that person to catch up, communications are willy-nilly. The organization's program work stays every bit as good as it was. It just stays invisible.

At BowerComm we say it takes about two years for a new person to really hit their stride, and we warn them not to take a do-over too personally. They're producing good work well before then, but what takes longer is the judgment. It takes time to learn our clients and our standards, to know which questions to ask, to notice when something's off, and to hear what a client's really trying to accomplish even when they're not explaining it well.

I'm thankful that 10 of our 15 people have been with me more than five years. (It's the reason I can take an annual two-week vacation.) These days they're the ones telling ME what I should be doing. That kind of judgment takes years to build; you can't hand it to someone in their first week.

The tricky part is that organizations hire based on the level they can afford and expect the level they need.

The fix isn't to decide junior people are bad hires because you’re annoyed. It's to be honest about what level you actually hired and what support that person will need. Did you hire someone who can do specified communications tasks? Someone who can run familiar work without much hand-holding? Or someone with the experience and judgment to own the whole function? Those require very different levels of experience and judgment.

And sometimes the honest answer is that the level you need costs more than the budget currently holds. That's a fundable gap. Grantmakers are starting to treat communications capacity as exactly the kind of investment they'll back, whether you use it to hire up or bring in outside help.

None of this happens in a week. My kids and staff both needed years. But it happens — and when it does, you can finally set down the bucket and pick up the coffee.

07/17/2026

The frames for our Windom mural are painted and ready for the installer now. Not long ago, they were sitting unpainted in my livestock trailer, and I wasn't sure we'd make the deadline.

We got the grant last year — $4,000 from the Kansas Department of Commerce Kansas Arts Commission, an Arts Everywhere award. The goal was to have everything wrapped and reported by June 30th, when the state's fiscal year closed. Coordinating a school, a design, and a whole town just takes longer than that.

The mural itself came together fast, relative to everything else. Kaycee Sutter, our Little River-Windom school district art teacher and an outstanding muralist in her own right, sketched a couple of concepts, the Windom Community Fund advisory committee picked one, and the art classes painted the bulk of it this spring. Kaycee finished the details and weatherproofing herself in June.

Then our original plan for the frames fell through. Fab Works LLC bailed us out — owner Dylan Baldwin lives right here in the Windom community, and he built and donated every one of them. We would not be cutting a ribbon on July 27th without him.

Which left painting the frames themselves, on a deadline, with the installer waiting. I recruited an emergency crew: my 80-year-old dad, my uncle Dave (self-described as "older than dirt"), and my 11-year-old. Aunt Eileen mentioned Dave needed a project during their week visiting, and I did not let that opportunity pass me by.

They finished. What's left now is the installer setting the frames, the ribbon cutting, and getting the grant report to the state by July 31st.

Making the mural was only half the project, though. We also needed the frames fabricated and installed. And most importantly, we need a crowd for a PR photo.

Windom has about 90 people in it, no stoplight, no gas station, and most of who's left is older and already stretched thin. There's no natural crowd waiting around Main Street to walk up on a mural on its own. So a major question has been how to get people gathered to unveil it during a time when school is not in session.

So we picked July 27th. It's the night of Windom's monthly covered dish dinner — this month's theme is hot dogs, so everyone calls it hot dog night — and it happens to beat the deadline too. Windom calls itself the Covered Dish Capital, and one of the mural panels pays homage to that tradition. Hot dog night is the obvious time for it to happen.

There's no guarantee anyone turns out for a ribbon cutting on its own. But the covered dish dinner already pulls a crowd, every month, without fail. Our best shot at people being there is timing ours to land on theirs.

I see this also in client work. Plenty of organizations do the hard, real work of making something worth people's time — a program, a fix, a piece of art — and then invent an entirely new occasion to unveil it, instead of finding one that's already there. Nobody can guarantee a crowd. But you can improve your odds enormously by finding the night people already show up, and timing yours to land on it instead.

Ribbon cutting's July 27th, 6:30pm, at the Windom Community Center. Hot dogs, the whole town, and a mural. If you're anywhere near central Kansas that night, come hungry — I'd love to see you there.

Little River Activities/Athletics
Fab Works LLC: https://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=61573969858724
McPherson County Community Foundation

07/02/2026

I was at The Wesley yesterday, and it took me straight back to my grandparents.

They were born in 1918 and 1920 and spent most of their lives half a mile from us as part of our farm operation, so I saw them most summer days in my childhood. July was the one month that gave us a little room to breathe, once planting and wheat harvest were both behind us (even though my own July was usually swallowed up by 4-H fair prep). Somewhere in the middle of that, we’d still find time to drive to Kansas City for a Royals game, usually timed around my grandfather’s birthday at the end of the month.

In the mid-2000s, they moved off that farm and into what was then Wesley Towers, a senior living community in Hutchinson (KS). It’s called The Wesley now. We handled their rebrand a couple years ago, and walking through their campus this week reminded me how we helped them avoid a mistake a lot of organizations make without realizing it.

The Wesley has been around since 1964, when it broke ground as The Methodist Home. Its first resident in 1969 was a woman named Bessie Good, who moved in at the age of 103. For decades after that, the organization was built for (and largely built by) a generation that grew up in the Dust Bowl and weathered the Depression. It looked and sounded the way that generation expected a senior living community to look and sound: steady, formal, a little reserved.

That’s not who’s walking through the door anymore. The residents The Wesley is recruiting today are more likely to be avid travelers who socialize through the Corvette Club. A name, a logo, and a palette of colors that made complete sense in 1964 (or even in 1999) doesn’t automatically make sense to someone retiring now, and pretending otherwise is how organizations end up talking past the very people they’re trying to reach.

The identity had slowly stopped matching the audience it needed to serve, and the rebrand was about catching it up. “Wesley Towers” became “The Wesley” – shorter and less institutional. But the work didn’t stop at the website and the letterhead, which is where a lot of rebrands run out of steam. It made its way into the wayfinding signage and the physical campus, so the people living there now, and the families touring as prospective residents, experience the new identity in the campus itself instead of just reading about it in a brochure.

The mark that came out of that work is a hummingbird, which isn’t exactly the expected choice for a senior living community. But it fits. Hummingbirds are quick and bright and a little restless, and that’s a far closer match to the actual energy of people planning to spend their retirement on a Harley than a quiet, institutional crest ever could have been.

I asked the CEO yesterday how residents had responded to the change, and he told me he hadn’t heard a complaint (lol). If you know this population and how firmly people can dig in over even small changes to routine or signage, that’s remarkable. It suggests the new identity felt like them, which is a much harder thing to pull off than most organizations realize going in.

Updating a logo file is easy enough. Walking every single touchpoint back through the new identity and asking whether it still holds up takes real, sustained work, and most organizations stop somewhere around the website makeover.

Finding this kind of gap early is an important piece of our Journey to Yes process. One of the first steps is a round of stakeholder interviews and audience profiles, because you can’t design an identity for people you’ve only guessed at. That’s how we found out who was actually walking through The Wesley’s door now, instead of assuming it was still the generation the building was originally built for.

My grandparents’ Wesley Towers and today’s The Wesley are serving the same mission with many of the same services and buildings. They’re not serving the same generation, though, and the brand had to catch up to that fact or risk spending years talking to people who’d already moved on without it.

If you’re looking at your own organization’s materials and client experience this week, ask yourself whether the person you actually need to walk through your door would recognize themselves in what you’re showing them.

06/17/2026

The Santa Fe Trail passes through our pasture about 500 feet from my front door.

When I was a kid, school buses would occasionally pull up our driveway and deposit a group of curious locals who would tromp out through the grass to look at the ruts. I watched this happen more than once, which is probably where I first got the sense that whatever was out there was worth seeing.

My parents would walk me out and say, “here they are.” I nodded along for years, pretending I could see something. I was expecting wagon wheel tracks — two narrow parallel grooves, like something out of an old Western.

What’s actually there is nothing like that. The swales are highway-wide. Multiple parallel routes run side by side, worn into the earth by thousands of wagons traveling the trail between 1821 and the 1860s. The ground rises and falls in a broad, grassy band, and you could walk straight across them and have no idea what you were standing in.

We joined the Santa Fe Trail Association this year (which has always felt a little AARP-adjacent—no offense). Their quarterly publication arrived in our mailbox this week, which reminded me that our local chapter chair asked us to put up a sign — a big historical marker that says “Nelson’s Swales” so people driving past know what’s on the other side of the fence line.

She sent me a letter a year ago, but I haven’t done anything about it. Getting the magazine reminded me why it’s important.

Every week I hear the same thing from multiple organizations: “We do such great work, but nobody knows about it.”

They have the Santa Fe Trail in their pasture. They just don’t have the sign and tour guide.

And it’s not only the sign missing. People don’t know what they’re looking at even when they’re standing in the middle of it.

The swales aren’t invisible. They’re right there. Once you see and understand what created the broad, grassy paths, you can’t unsee it.

(Neither did my husband until this morning, and he’s looked straight at them every day for 17 years.)

For most organizations, people drive past their work every day and don’t recognize it. Their neighbors, if asked, couldn’t tell you what the organization does, who it serves, or why it matters to them personally. Without consistent communication that helps people understand what they’re seeing, they walk past and see tall grass.

Now I just need to remember where I put that trail sign paperwork before the chapter chair sees my confession here...

06/10/2026

My 11-year-old son decided he wanted a Hereford pig for 4-H this year.

If you're not in the livestock world, that might not mean much. But in Kansas, where the show pig circuit runs pretty predictably on certain breeds, a Hereford is a choice that isn’t easy to come by.

So we did what 4-H parents do. We looked until we found one, and we ended up buying a pig online from Indiana. Between the pig and the Livestock Express shipping fee, it was a chunk of dough. My child has been doing 4-H long enough to know that it was a pretty big investment for a show animal, but it was his money and his choice.

“Mike” came off the trailer with an air of Winnie the Pooh — red with a white face and floppy ears. We got him settled. We were excited.

A month later, after a trip to the county extension office for tagging, we noticed a limp on his right front leg. Within weeks he was a tenderfoot on both front legs, walking on his toes instead of striding out.

One look from a pig expert, and the verdict was clear: that's genetic. He's built that way. It didn't come from the trip or a stumble off the ramp. It's just how his legs work.

With show animals, soundness is the number one criteria. If your pig can't walk right, it isn't going to place. We've got about seven weeks until the fair, $850 committed, a feed bill still running, and a pig that is just not put together right.

However, with an 11-year-old, there is no such thing as a lost cause. So we ordered the recommended supplements with Hyaluronic Acid, Methylsulfonylmethane, Glucosamine and Chondroitin — the cocktail that is, I will note, essentially the same thing humans take for bad knees. We are putting the supplements in the feed and hoping 120 days' worth of improvement will somehow compress into seven weeks.

We are, in other words, putting lipstick on a pig. Literally.

And all but one of us have accepted the truth:
you cannot supplement your way out of a structural problem.

The pig's legs are built the way they're built. We can make him more comfortable. We can try to mask the situation. But no amount of well-intentioned additives changes the underlying architecture.

This story is akin to what I hear from grantmakers.

They invest real money into nonprofits with real potential — organizations doing work that communities genuinely need — and then they watch those organizations struggle to build the support that would let them do more of it. The mission is good. The work is real. But donors aren't growing. The community doesn't quite understand what the organization does or why it matters. And the people running it are so deep in the work itself that they don't have a system for bringing anyone else along.

What drives funders nuts: grantees are afraid to be honest about where they are.
They’re scared that if they admit their communications are inconsistent, their donor base is stagnant, and their credibility outside their own walls is thin, then the funding disappears. So instead of saying "we don't have a system for building support," they post something on Facebook and call it outreach. They send a newsletter when they have news and go quiet for months. They apply for grants describing impact they can't actually demonstrate because they've never built the infrastructure to capture and communicate it.

The foundation, wanting to believe in them, keeps funding it. And nothing actually improves.

Wishing your nonprofits will figure out how to build support on their own is not a strategy. Neither is a one-day workshop. You wouldn't hand a youth sports team a playbook and tell them to go win the championship without a coach and practice. Yet that's essentially what happens when we fund organizations without also investing in the communications infrastructure and ongoing support that would make them effective.

The nonprofits doing the most important work in your region have a problem that won't fix itself with a social media tip sheet or a single training. They need a real system for telling their story, reaching the right people, demonstrating their impact, and building the kind of trust that turns into sustained support. They need someone who will be honest with them about what's broken and walk with them toward what works.

If this resonates with what you're seeing in your work, I'm doing a free webinar on Thursday, June 11, at 1:00 PM CST — Building Nonprofit Communications Capacity — specifically for foundations and funders who want a clearer framework for identifying the gap and structuring support that actually helps. Register at bowercomm.com/webinar.

Hope is not a strategy. And despite an 11-year-old’s greatest wishes, supplements won't fix the legs.

06/03/2026

Three years ago today, I learned the hard way that if your jeans have been sitting on the closet floor, you should shake them out before you put them on.

I did not do that.

I put them on, walked into the kitchen to make coffee, and felt what I can only describe as a hornet-like sting in my groin.

I scrambled out of my pants, and a highly venomous brown recluse spider fell out.

So now, by the power vested in me by absolutely no one, I declare June 3 a national day of observance:
National Shake Your Pants Day.

That morning had started like any other regular workday. I was getting dressed, making coffee, and mentally running through the list of things I needed to get done. I had pulled the jeans off my closet floor, which was clearly mistake number one, but at the time I was not thinking about spider habitat. I was thinking about work.

My husband, who has more sense than I do in medical situations, told me I needed to go to the doctor immediately. I, on the other hand, had already been nibbled by a brown recluse once before. That snack-sized bite had not turned into anything dramatic.

So I made what I now recognize as a classic Lori decision: “I’m sure it’s fine.”

Which is really just Midwestern for, “I do not have time for this.”

Within 45 minutes, my eyes were starting to swell, and a bruise was forming, so I capitulated.

The doctor’s office gave me a steroid shot and an “it might help but we don’t really know” leprosy drug to help preserve my cells. They also directed me to take two antihistamines. That sounds like the beginning of a very strange vacation, but it was actually the beginning of one of the most painful things I have experienced.

The next five days were awful. The only way I could sleep was to keep ice on it around the clock. My blood oxygen dropped into the mid-80s. And because I am, apparently, both optimistic and ridiculous, I still tried to work.

Over the next two weeks, the bite became a five-inch by two-inch eggplant-colored area that started to liquefy. There is probably a more delicate way to say that, but there is not a more accurate one.

And because timing is a beautiful thing, I had a business trip to Chicago during this process. So there I was, trying to walk through airports and attend meetings like a normal professional woman while part of my upper thigh was essentially staging a horror film.

By June 30, I finally ended up at a hospital wound care clinic, under the care of someone who knew exactly what she was looking at. She cleaned out the dead flesh, which was every bit as fun as it sounds, and then the nurses taught me how to grow skin.

That is not a sentence I ever expected to write.

But it turns out skin does not grow because you want it to, because you are impatient, or because you have a lot to do and would really prefer for your body to move this situation along.

Skin grows when you create the right conditions.

I had to eat a ton of protein. I had to keep the wound covered so it could find its own moisture and temperature sweet spot. I had to not mess with it just because I was curious or annoyed or wanted to see if it was “better yet.”

One of the things they told me was that every time air hit the wound, it could set the healing process back by about four hours.

That fascinated me, and also made me deeply regret every time I had peeled back the bandage to look at it like a raccoon inspecting a trash can.

The nurses were weirdly excited to have me as a patient because most of their patients were older people with diabetic wounds. I was younger, relatively healthy, and aggressively eating protein, so my skin was growing much faster than what they were used to seeing. They would
come in and say things like, “Oh wow, look at that granulation tissue!”

Thank you? I have been working on it?

I documented the whole thing with photos, because once something becomes that gross, it also becomes scientifically interesting. I will not include them here because I want you to keep reading my posts, not file a police report.

But the whole experience exposed the obvious: growth is not magic. Growth is conditions.

We often want growth to happen on demand. We want to send one email and have people respond. We want to launch one campaign and have people care. We want to post one story and have people give. Mostly, we want the audience to be warm the moment we need them.

But that is not how trust grows.

Trust grows when you feed it, protect it, and show up consistently. It grows when you keep the relationship covered with useful, relevant communication instead of exposing it to long stretches of silence and then ripping the bandage off every time you need something.

Yes, that is a gross metaphor. I also think it is a pretty accurate one.

If the only time your audience hears from you is when you are asking them to give, register, attend, vote, approve, volunteer, buy, or share, then you are asking for action from tissue you have not been nurturing.

That might work once in a while, especially with people who are already deeply connected to you. But if you want more people to care, understand, act, and stay with you over time, you need more than a campaign. You need a nurture system.

A way to keep giving your audience the “protein” they need: stories, clarity, proof,
encouragement, useful information, human connection, and reminders of why the work matters.

A way to build trust before you need to put weight on it.

At 7:30 that morning, I did not know I was in a crisis. I thought I had a painful inconvenience.

By 9:00, my body was making it clear that something much bigger was happening.

This happens with organizations, too.

A donor audience goes quiet. Event attendance softens. A campaign does not get traction. People stop opening the emails. The community does not understand the decision. The board assumes “people know what we do.” The staff realizes they have not communicated consistently for months.

At first, it may not look like a crisis. It may look like a small problem, a weird dip, a busy season, or a thing to deal with later.

But trust, attention, and engagement are living things. They need care before there is an emergency.

So, on this third anniversary of the spider-in-my-jeans situation, I offer you two pieces of advice.

First, observe National Shake Your Pants Day with the seriousness it deserves, especially if you live in a geography with venomous spiders.

Second, take a look at the audience relationships your organization is counting on. Are you nurturing them consistently? Are you feeding them what they need to understand and care? Are you creating the conditions for trust to grow? Or are you waiting until you need something and
hoping the relationship will be strong enough to carry the ask?

Because whether we are talking about skin or strategy, growth does not happen just because we want it to. It happens when we build the system that allows it – and stop leaving important things on the closet floor.

Lori Bower - BowerComm

08/27/2026

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