https://nonprofitgrowthinstitute.com/

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

05/21/2026

When Taylor Swift announced the Eras Tour, our digital director Jo was determined to get tickets. And by determined, I mean the entire BowerComm office somehow became emotionally invested in the Ticketmaster lottery process. There were updates, strategy discussions, moments of despair, renewed hope and probably more workplace conversation than should reasonably happen over concert tickets.

And somehow, Jo ended up getting tickets to back-to-back nights in Kansas City. (The same weekend Travis Kelce first came on the scene.)

So yes, we were fully locked in.

Since then, the Eras Tour has become part of our office culture. It’s usually playing on the office living room TV on Friday afternoons while we wrap up work.

This week, I finally watched the 6-part documentary about the tour. What struck me was that Taylor did not design the Eras Tour as a tribute to herself. She designed it as a gift to her fans.

This included the way the concert moved through each era as a distinct world, with its own sound, color, mood, costumes and memories attached to it. The surprise songs changed every night so fans could speculate for months ahead of time. The tiny visual callbacks only longtime fans would fully appreciate. The “22” hat. The old Taylor versions trapped in glass boxes during “Look What You Made Me Do.” The friendship bracelets. Even the pacing of the concert itself.

The entire experience was built around what the audience would recognize, anticipate, talk about and emotionally connect to.

And honestly, I think that is where many organizations struggle in their communications.

Most organizations communicate from the inside out with a constant stream of “we, we, we.” Here’s our initiative. Here’s the update. Here’s the thing we need people to know.

But when you frame it as, “How do I engage an audience on their terms?” rather than “What’s the recap of our event?” you produce a completely different piece of communication.

People are busy. Distracted. Skimming emails between ballgames. Deciding in seconds whether something feels relevant enough to pay attention to. They are not emotionally attached to your internal structure, your strategic priorities or the wording of your latest announcement.

The organizations that connect best understand this. They think carefully about what the audience will experience before they think about what they want to say.

Years ago, when we helped our local Sexual Assault/Domestic Violence Center rebrand to BrightHouse, we knew we did not want the name reveal to feel like a typical nonprofit launch event. So instead of centering on the organization, we centered on the audience experience.

The executive director had recently read about a gallery exhibit of outfits that victims of assault had been wearing at the time of the incident.

So for the brand launch, we extended this idea into a “What Were You Wearing?” runway event at our local art center. Survivor stories were read while models walked the runway in ordinary clothing: sweatpants, cheerleading uniforms, work clothes and children’s clothes.

My daughter walked the runway representing the story of a 6-year-old victim.

I still remember the silence and tears in the room when she walked out.

People were not thinking about logos or taglines that night. They were thinking about the stories. About assumptions. About people they knew. About the reality behind the organization’s work.

That experience changed how people understood the organization long before they ever processed the new name.

Experiences like that do not happen by accident. They happen when organizations stop thinking only about what they want to announce and start thinking about what another human being will actually feel.

That shift sounds simple, but it is the difference between remembering the message forever or forgetting it five minutes later.

That’s part of what we’ll be talking about during our June 11 webinar for grantmakers: Rethinking Communications Capacity Building for Nonprofits.

The organizations people remember are rarely the ones communicating the most.
They are usually the ones designing experiences people can actually feel part of.

05/12/2026

I've spent the past two weeks reading scholarship applications, which always gives me a window into how people think about the future.

Some students know exactly where they are headed. One applicant laid out a very specific path to a PhD in ruminant nutrition. Others chose colleges based on the best offer to play a sport and are, very reasonably, still contemplating the world of career possibilities.

When I was a senior in high school, I didn't know either. I wasn't much clearer as a senior in college, which is how I ended up with a degree in German. (To be clear, I did not have a grand international career in mind. What I had was a lot of credit from being an exchange student in Germany for a year, and I was ready to be done.)

At some point, not deciding also becomes a decision.

Organizations do this with their communications. They know they want people to understand them better. They want more support, more participation, more of the right people engaged. So they start telling stories. They post on social media, send the newsletter, say yes when a media outlet comes calling. And the stories are often good.

But ask what those stories are supposed to accomplish, and most people don't really know.

My first question to new clients is, “What are you hoping to accomplish with your communications?” At least twice a year, people break down in tears because they are overwhelmed trying to figure it out.

Last week we kicked off four organizations in an Awareness Engine cohort sponsored by a private foundation, exploring how to support storytelling in rural communities. On the surface, that sounds like a storytelling project.

But the first question isn’t “What stories should we tell?”

The first question is: to what end?

Are the stories meant to attract new residents? Build pride among people who are already there? Help local employers talk about the region to potential recruits? Encourage former residents to reconsider what’s possible back home? Give civic leaders and funders better language for why investment in rural communities matters?

Those are all real goals. They’re also not the same goal.

In a sports analogy, the first question is to know what game we’re playing. Football, gymnastics, and curling all require discipline and real commitment. But the playbook and movements are quite different.

Storytelling works the same way. A food bank making the case for a capital campaign is not telling the same story it would use to recruit corporate volunteers. A health nonprofit trying to reach a new service area is not telling the same story it would use to retain existing donors. A story written to build pride among current residents may not be the same story you would use to recruit a family from three counties away. A story meant to help employers talk about the community may not be the same story you would use to help a funder understand what rural investment could make possible.

The story needs a job.

This is where a lot of communications work — and a lot of well-intentioned communications investment — drifts. Organizations start collecting good stories before they’ve defined what those stories are supposed to support. So they end up sharing content everyone agrees is meaningful, but nothing seems to change.

If you’re leading an organization, the question worth contemplating is what your communications are supposed to help happen. Not “raise awareness.” That’s a category, not a destination. What specific shift (what behavior, what decision, what change in understanding) needs to happen for your work to gain real traction?

A story without a job is just a nice story.

It may be true. It may even get compliments.

But if no one can say what it’s supposed to help change, it’s very hard to know whether it’s working.

04/28/2026

It hasn't rained much since Christmas. On our farm in central Kansas, that is not a minor inconvenience.

Over the past two months we reworked our fertilizer strategy because the kerfuffle with Iran sent prices skyrocketing. The wheat is running four weeks ahead of schedule because it has been so warm. That’s not a bad thing on its own, but a smaller crop than we'd hoped because the ground has been so dry. Right now we are waiting on rain so we can plant corn.

Farm policy touches all of it: the fertilizer markets, the crop insurance, what next season looks like. These are not abstractions in our house. They are Tuesday.

So when I spent the better part of the last few days helping the Barry Flinchbaugh Center for Ag and Food Policy get their podcast content about the Farm Bill in front of the right people, I had a personal interest.

In January, they added a podcast to their communications plan.

Before I tell you what we did with it this week, I want to say something about podcasts in general — because I think there is a widespread misconception about their role in the nonprofit world.

Podcasts are sexy right now. Boards love proposing them. They feel modern, credible, like a real platform.

And they can be all of those things. But here is what I have observed working with nonprofits: almost none of them break through a handful of listens.

Building a podcast audience is genuinely hard. It’s akin to starting a YouTube channel and expecting to become a star overnight. It takes years, and it requires a very different strategy than most nonprofits have the capacity to execute.

Nonprofits generally aren’t trying to monetize their podcast—they’re trying to spread information. So the standard measures (downloads, subscribers, growth rate) are mostly beside the point. And yet those are exactly the numbers boards ask about, which sets up a quiet sense of failure around something that was never supposed to win that way.

The better question is not whether to start a podcast. It is what a podcast makes possible that you could not do as consistently without it.

For the Flinchbaugh Center, the answer to that question was clear. They are a young organization still building their body of research and published work. They needed a regular, disciplined way to generate something credible and substantive — a mechanism that would bring in experts, create a real conversation, and give them something worth distributing on a consistent basis.

The podcast is not their product. It is their content engine.

That is a meaningful distinction. And once you name it, the next question — “How do we promote it?” — has a much cleaner answer.

This week’s episode was about the Farm Bill. They recorded Friday and wanted it out immediately because legislative action is happening in Congress this week.

The 5-person discussion was genuinely great. Real insight from people who have spent careers inside this process.

And then came the question: how do we promote the podcast?

The first thought is to post the link, write a caption, maybe send an email. Watch the episode. Listen here. Check out the replay.

Unfortunately, most of your audience doesn’t. For those who do, the majority will drop off after the first few minutes.

Even if you promote it, the math isn't great. An email list of 2,500 people. A 30% open rate means 750 people saw it. A 3% click rate (which by industry standards is exceptionally good) means roughly 75 people went any further. And of those, most won't make it past the first few minutes of a 45-minute conversation.

Now compare that to turning the podcast discussion into a policy briefing email. Same list. Same 30% open rate. But now 750 people actually consumed the information. Not a link to it. They didn't have to commit 45 minutes.

And to be clear — a list of bullets recapping what was covered is not the same thing. That is still asking the audience to do the work. The goal is to extract the full story and give them something complete enough to read on its own.

The central insight from the Flinchbaugh conversation was not “listen to our Farm Bill podcast.” They want people to know that the process for making farm policy has fundamentally changed — pushing short-term fixes ahead of longer-term policy design, and widening the gap between what farmers actually need and what the policy framework provides.

That idea became a policy briefing blog/email, social posts with a key points carousel, and a YouTube short linking to the full episode.

I know this list looks overwhelming to a small staff. The point is not to do all of it. The point is that the idea deserved more than a link and a caption, and even one or two of those formats would have gotten it further.

The full episode is still there for anyone who wants to go deeper. But the ideas inside it are no longer dependent solely on someone who prefers a podcast format to hit play.

Many organizations are already doing the hard part: recording the conversation, hosting the webinar, running the panel. The insight is often genuinely useful. What gets skipped is the earlier question: not which format to choose, but what that format is supposed to make possible.

When you can answer that, the distribution strategy stops being an afterthought.

On our farm, the Farm Bill is not daily entertainment. It is part of how we plan. We actually need that information placed in our hands. And when zero of the three farmers in our operation are podcast consumers, assuming they’ll find it on Spotify is risky business indeed.

We are still waiting for rain.

(That curious little guy in the photo is now 11 with feet bigger than mine.)

04/21/2026

A wind farm project near us was scrapped this week, and the most revealing part was not the policy debate itself or even the formal decision.

It was how clearly this became a story about who had the microphone, who knew how to extend it, and who did not have any real way to get the word out in the first place.

For two years, the wind company had focused primarily on private conversations with landowners to secure leases. Public support was a much weaker effort. They had only recently begun negotiating with residents adjacent to some of the proposed infrastructure.

This might have been manageable if those conversations had stayed private. They did not. Copies of the offer letters surfaced on Facebook, and what may have looked strategic inside the company started to look sneaky outside of it.

At the same time, two residents in the area of the proposed wind farm, both well-known teachers at our local high school, figured out how to move the conversation beyond the immediate room.

As a part of this effort, Grammy-winning country songwriter Nicolle Galyon got involved. She lives in a community on the edge of the proposed site and has relationships across Nashville. Soon John Rich, one half of Big & Rich, began posting about it as well. At that point, this was no longer an ordinary local land use conversation. The frame had widened, the audience had widened, and the company was no longer shaping the story people were hearing.

With this effort came a website with a map of the landowners who had signed leases and the locations of the proposed turbines. Wichita news stations showed up for the public meeting hosted by the wind company, which was canceled with such short notice that the catering cookies were left in the parking lot. (Not exactly the visual you want attached to your business.)

The formal outcome was that planning and zoning placed a one-year moratorium on a decision, and the company then scrapped the project in a very public way. But that was really the trailing indicator. By then, the more important shift had already happened.

What made this even more noticeable was that I had a separate conversation this week with someone on the opposite side of the issue, a strong advocate for renewable energy. While the substance of that conversation was entirely different, the frustration underneath it was not. It was not just about not having the microphone at that moment. It was about not having the people, process, or system in place to build reach before the moment arrived.

This person was talking about how hard it is to even know where to begin when you are trying to shape public opinion with a tiny staff, very little budget, and no real system for reaching people beyond the small circle already inclined to agree.

I sit on planning and zoning board in the next county over, where the transmission line would have come through, so I can feel the practical weight of a decision like this. But the part that interests me is larger than this one project.

Community organizations run into this same problem all the time, just in different forms. Most are not dealing with wind farms, but many are working in areas where public money, public priorities, or community tension are involved. A food pantry, a youth organization, a city department, a housing group, a local nonprofit, a foundation—any of them can find themselves under scrutiny at some point, whether they expected it or not. Good intentions do not prevent that. They do not create understanding on their own, either.

By the time the key moment arrives, the organizations that can shape the conversation are the ones that already have some combination of people, process, relationships, and communication in place.

The wind company assumed that securing leases was the hard part and that broader understanding would follow. It did not. On the other side, there were people who believe deeply in renewable energy but are still trying to figure out how to build even a basic system for sustained reach and reinforcement. And then there were the people who understood something very practical: how to use the microphone. They knew how to bring in voices with reach, widen the audience, and mobilize an entire community in their favor in a matter of days.

That is the part organizations miss. They think they are managing the decision itself when the conversation around it has already moved somewhere else.

Building the amplifier does not happen overnight. Neither does being in a position to take hold of the microphone when the moment comes. That takes people, process, and communications long before the key moment arrives. By the time many organizations realize that, they are already reacting inside a conversation someone else built.

04/16/2026

Why do nonprofits’ visual choices, stifle public awareness?

Different fonts. Different colors. Different look every time you show up. Internally, that can feel harmless. Externally, it creates confusion. If you want to see other ways organizations accidentally stifle awareness and understanding, watch the free on-demand webinar: https://www.bowercomm.com/webinar-awarenessengine

04/13/2026

Yesterday, about 45 minutes before we needed to leave for a wedding, I was trying to cut my son’s hair.

He wanted a fade. I had limited skill, limited time, and an 11-year-old offering heated commentary with nearly every swipe of the clippers.

My husband was next, and much more cooperative during his five minutes in the chair. He sees a bad haircut as annoying but over in two weeks. His basic position is that if it goes badly, I’m the one who has to sit next to him at the wedding, so it’s probably more embarrassing for me than for him.

If the roles were reversed, I wouldn’t be taking the “annoying but temporary” view. I’d be considering a full season of social withdrawal.

It did get me thinking about consistency. If I wore a different hairstyle or wig every time I left the house—or heaven forbid, let my kid wield the scissors—people might have a vague sense that they’d seen me before, but they’d have a much harder time knowing for sure it was me.

A lot of organizations do some version of this.

Earlier this week, I was walking an executive director through the communications plan we’d put together for their organization. Part of what I had to explain was that their visual inconsistency was creating confusion and slowing their progress in a new geography.

Across their website and materials, the fonts changed. The colors changed. The design elements shifted from one piece to the next. It didn’t read like one organization showing up repeatedly. It read like a series of disconnected choices.

I was met with a blank stare.

To be fair, he has a financial background, not a communications one. Why would he assume that fonts, colors, and design consistency are doing strategic work beyond making things look nice? Most people outside communications don’t think that way until someone shows them the consequences.

Internally, this kind of inconsistency can feel harmless. Sometimes it even gets defended as creativity. People want room to make things “look fresh.” They want to leave their own mark, often because it scratches a personal creative itch.

In organizations with multiple departments or locations, that instinct gets even stronger. Hospitals do it. School systems do it. Civic entities do it. One department makes its own flyer. Another creates its own event graphic. Another decides a different color palette fits the program better.

Each choice makes sense to the person making it.

But the outside world doesn’t experience those as separate creative decisions. It experiences them as one organization sending mixed signals.

That’s why this only works if there are actual rules, and if someone is willing to enforce them. These are the fonts. These are the colors. This is how the logo is used. No, this department does not get its own brand because someone likes teal. No, this program does not get to reinvent the look because it wants to feel different.

That can sound fussy until you look at what inconsistency does from the outside.

People are simply not paying that much attention to you. Even your most attentive board members aren’t registering every piece of information you put in front of them. Your audiences will only consume a fraction of your communications, so the visual signal matters.

What if United Way changed its font to Comic Sans in pink for one fundraising appeal, then used something teal and corporate the next time, then sent an event email that looked like it came from Target?

What if your city water department changed the return-address logo on its billing envelopes because they thought it was cute?

People would not experience that as creative range. At some point, they’d start wondering whether they were looking at something official or whether they were being scammed.

That may sound dramatic, but it really isn’t. People are sorting through too many messages from too many sources, and they are more cautious than ever about what feels legitimate. When an organization keeps changing its visual signals, it introduces doubt. Often not enough for someone to name it out loud. Just enough to make them pause.

And pause is costly.

Visual consistency is not just about looking polished. It helps people recognize you quickly, trust that what they’re seeing is really from you, and connect this touchpoint to the one they saw last week or last month.

When organizations improvise too freely, they are often not creating freshness. They are creating confusion.

So here are three questions to ask yourself this week:

1. Do we actually have visual rules, or do we just have graphic files people use in whatever way feels reasonable at the moment?

2. Are those rules enforced across departments, programs, locations, and fundraising efforts, or is everyone quietly leaving their own mark?

3. If someone who didn’t know us well looked at our website, our emails, our event signage, and our social graphics side by side, would they immediately know they came from the same organization?

These are not small questions. They are fundamental in whether people trust that what they’re looking at is real.

04/06/2026

I’ve been accompanying choirs and groups on the piano since high school, which means I’ve had many years of practice in the fine art of being essential and not the main attraction.

That felt especially relevant this week.

It was Holy Week, so I was at the piano Thursday night and then again on Sunday. On Thursday, I came straight from a five-hour strategic planning workshop and sat down to cram on liturgy I hadn’t played in a while. In four sharps. (You pianists know this is brutal.)

Piano accompaniment teaches you a few useful things.

One is that the role matters a great deal. Another is that if the accompanist suddenly decides to become the star, things tend to deteriorate quickly.

I bring up a version of this in workshops fairly often, usually with a different example: Yoda and Luke Skywalker.

I usually start by walking through the basic arc of a story. There’s someone the story is about. That person wants something, is facing something, is trying to figure something out, and needs help getting from one place to another.

A lot of organizations tell their story as if they’re Luke. They’re at the center. They’re the focus. They’re the one the whole story is about.

But most of the time, that’s not the most productive role.

People are in their own little worlds. They are the heroes of their own stories. When you cast yourself as the hero, the audience has to work too hard to see themselves in the story.

You can usually hear that in the first few lines—they’re thick with “we”:
• who we are
• what we do
• how long we’ve been here
• what we provide

Stories tend to get stronger when you think of your organization as Yoda. The guide. The one helping someone else make sense of something, make a decision, take a step, or do something difficult with a little more clarity and confidence.

In practical terms, the strongest stories usually put a stakeholder in that central role:
• A donor who found a way to make a meaningful gift.
• A parent who got the help she needed and could finally breathe a little easier.
• A volunteer who stepped in and discovered they had more to offer than they realized.

Once you do that, your organization’s role becomes clearer. It is there to support the movement, provide structure, remove friction, and help the whole thing make sense.

The accompanist has an important job. But if I butcher a hymn, let’s hope that’s not the story people are telling after church.

03/22/2026

We just got back from spring break. Family ski trip (year four), and for the first time, all four of us could ski at roughly the same pace. Which means this year was the first year that actually felt like a vacation rather than an elaborate exercise in family conflict management.

Getting here took a while.

Our first trip was in 2021, when the kids were 6 and 10. We put them in all-day ski school at Keystone, giddy with the prospect of a full day on the mountain (adults only!).

At 11:34, we got a call to come pick up our little guy, who had a “stomachache” and was done for the day. Day two was spent negotiating with this very strong-willed, crying kindergartener on a bunny hill that was barely a hill. And my husband came home from the trip with COVID.

Year two, we fared poorly in ski school negotiations, conceding to a half-day instead of a full one. Thankfully, the now first grader stayed the whole time and could manage the bunny hill by the end.

Year three, we let the kids skip ski school because they protested loudly enough and we were tired. What followed was a lot of snowplowing — which works, technically. You can get down the mountain. But it's slow, it's effortful, and it has a ceiling. There's only so far you can go when the technique itself is the limitation.

My husband would offer a tip on paralleling — a perfectly good tip, delivered with genuine expertise — and it would land somewhere between "ignored" and "actively resented." There is something about the parent-child dynamic that makes instruction almost impossible to receive, no matter how good the instructor or how much they love you.

FINALLY, this year they were far enough along (and apparently motivated enough by the prospect of going faster) that they actually wanted to improve. When my husband offered the same tips he's been giving for four years, they listened. Slightly. But enough. By the end of our trip they were trading “pizza” form for “french fries,” keeping up with us on real runs, and having what I can only describe as actual fun.

The difference wasn't a new technique appearing out of nowhere. It was that they'd finally built enough foundation and desire to be ready for the next layer.

But honestly, we could have gotten here sooner. Ski school in the early years gave them the fundamentals, and had we kept them in it instead of caving to the protests, we probably could have skipped two years of slow, painful snowplowing down runs that weren't particularly fun for anyone.

They got there eventually. They just spent an extra two years doing it the hard way — and so did we.

On our 9-hour drive home across the plains, I was thinking of this in the context of communication.

Most organizations are producing more than they were a year ago — more emails, more social posts, more events and updates. And when you look at any one of those pieces, it's usually fine. Sometimes it's really good.

But when you step back, it often doesn't add up to clearer understanding. Sometimes it adds up to entirely the wrong point.

People still struggle to explain what the organization actually does, or why it matters, or how the different pieces connect. The board keeps saying "no one knows who we are." And internally that's genuinely confusing, because people can see how much effort is going out the door.

The problem isn't that the snowplow isn't working. It's getting you down the hill.

The problem is that it has a ceiling, and no amount of effort in that same technique is going to get you where you actually want to go. What's missing is a structure that builds. Where the same core ideas show up consistently across channels and over time, and each touchpoint makes the next one more meaningful rather than starting from scratch.

Without that, understanding never makes it up the hill and off the lift. And adding more content in the same pattern doesn't fix it.

If you watched our Awareness Gap webinar, you already have the diagnosis — the four reasons awareness stays low even when effort is high. The Awareness Engine program is where you build the fix. We structured it as a 90-day cohort because we've watched a lot of organizations leave a one-hour workshop with good intentions and solid notes, and then return to the exact same pattern two weeks later. Not because they didn't want to do things differently, but because there was no structure to hold the change.

Awareness Engine is that structure — built in sequence, with coaching, so that by the end you have a working system rather than a plan that lives in a binder.

Our next cohort kicks off April 1. (Comment "Details" if you want the scoop.)

And if it takes four years to get there — well, the mountain isn't going anywhere.

Lori Bower - BowerComm

05/21/2026

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