How to Market Your Nonprofit

Hosted by Counterintuity

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Oct 2026

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About the show

In this time of enormous change, your nonprofit is more important than ever — sustaining and lifting up people and causes that need some help and some inspiration. On every episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, nonprofit leader and marketing agency owner Lee Wochner and his guests dig into the how-tos of building awareness, increasing donations, making use of powerful new tools, tackling challenges, managing for success and other critical needs for nonprofits. Please join us.

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60 recent

October 29, 20261 hr 2 min

$300 I didn't plan to give

Lee Wochner went to a nonprofit event as a guest and left $300 lighter. Happily. The donation wasn’t in his plans for the night. So what happened? Dan Wempa, a strategic consultant to mission-driven organizations, breaks it down into three parts: a clear story, told visually, with a way to give right there in the moment. And all of it was ready before Lee walked in. In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, Lee and Dan talk about the groundwork behind moments like that. They cover why you need more lead time than you think, how a simple process beats last-minute heroics, and why so many strategic plans never leave the shelf. If your team runs on all-nighters and good intentions more than they should, this one will help you plan the moments that count.

October 15, 202648 min

What to do when Taylor Swift calls

Education Through Music teaches music to about 20,000 kids a week in New York City public schools. That work caught the eye of Taylor Swift. Swift's publicist called ETM with a $2 million gift. ETM hadn't applied for it or asked for it. In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, ETM CEO Janice Weinman tells Lee Wochner about the moment the money arrived the next day. The office was "screaming and hugging and carrying on." It wasn’t luck. Long before the call, ETM built the right relationships. Janice traces the gift back to a contact at a community foundation who knew ETM's work and a board member with ties to Swift's record label. Neither one was a fundraising ask. Both were people who could speak up for ETM when it counted. Who in your circle could do that for you? You don't need an international superstar to make this work. Janice shares the everyday habits that make ETM the kind of nonprofit people speak up for, from bringing donors into classrooms to turning artists into ambassadors. Things you can do too.

September 17, 202626 min

Stop spending your best hours on the wrong things

Last episode, we made the case that most nonprofit organizations could get better marketing results by subtracting and focusing: fewer channels, fewer tools, fewer asks. But what about you personally? How could you get more done by doing less? What we find over and over is this: Most nonprofit leaders don't need to work harder, but they do need to stop spending their best hours on the wrong things. Recently, two different executive directors confided in Lee that they're stuck. Both run organizations that do life-changing work, and they do it well. But both leaders have spent more than 10 years caught up in tasks instead of goals, and both said the same thing, unprompted: We could be doing so much more if we could get out of this rut. Lee knows the pattern because he's lived it. Twenty-five years ago he sat on 13 boards, panels, committees, and commissions at the same time. Thirteen. He now caps it at three organizations, and says he makes a bigger difference on all three. In this episode, Lee shares five signs you're doing too much, and what to do instead. Doing less isn't doing nothing. It's refusing to spend your best hours on work that doesn't require you.

August 21, 202627 min

Do LESS marketing (but GET MORE)

Most nonprofit marketing advice adds to your list. More social posts, more email, more video, more tools, more data. In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, Counterintuity's Lee Wochner argues the opposite: If your marketing results aren't adding up, the fix may be subtraction. Drawing on decades of running nonprofits, serving on boards, and working with hundreds of organizations, Lee walks through eight signs your team is doing too much, and what to do instead. Fewer tools. Fewer metrics. Fewer choices on your website. Fewer asks, made better. Deeper relationships with the donors you already have, instead of an endless chase for new ones. Doing less is not doing nothing. It’s focusing on what your team and your budget can deliver successfully.

July 22, 202650 min

If you collect it, protect it: privacy and cybersecurity for nonprofits

Picture a small arts nonprofit. Somebody calls and wants to give $500 a month. A staffer writes down the card number, drops it into a spreadsheet, and next month a colleague pulls it up and runs the charge again. That's four things that would make Lauren Wu wince. Host Lee Wochner and privacy and compliance attorney Lauren Wu cover what to do instead: where donor data should live, what should never go into an AI chatbot, and the three things any nonprofit can do this week to protect the data it’s entrusted to hold. Lauren's advice is clear and doable, even for organizations that are already stretched thin.

July 2, 202635 min

Stop guessing, start knowing

Most nonprofit leaders assume they know where their donors come from, which marketing channels are working, and what's standing in the way of growth. Some of these assumptions are right. But wrong assumptions can lead you down the wrong path, with your team optimizing the wrong things. This is part two of Lee Wochner's walkthrough of the discovery questionnaire that Counterintuity uses with nonprofit clients. This episode covers current challenges and friction points, marketing infrastructure and data, and how to define what winning actually looks like. One of the most useful questions Lee helps you answer is what single thing is preventing your organization from doubling its impact in the next 12 months? Not growing 10 percent. Doubling. Incremental targets produce incremental answers. Doubling forces you to name the real constraint. If you've ever relaunched a marketing tactic that didn't work the first time, aren't sure which of your channels is actually driving results, or think you might need to remap your donor journey from first contact to first gift, this episode is for you.

June 18, 202639 min

Words that work

Part 1: Who you are and who you're for If a stranger asked why your organization deserves to exist, could you answer in one sentence? No grant-speak. A real answer, one that stops them in their tracks and makes them want to help. Most nonprofit leaders can't effectively answer that question. Not because they don't know their organization, but because they’ve never sat down and put it into words, out loud, in plain language, with no jargon allowed. In this first episode of a two-part series, Lee Wochner walks you through a version of the discovery process that Counterintuity uses before a single word of copy gets written. Eight questions that focus on who your organization actually is and who you're trying to reach. Do this work first, and everything that follows, the website, the campaign, the fundraising appeal, is built on a solid foundation. Skip it, and you end up with marketing that's technically competent and strategically hollow. Grab a notebook. Let's get into it.

June 3, 202652 min

Focus is your superpower. Here’s proof

How one nonprofit leader's absolute focus, discipline, and determination are winning the day despite enormous challenges.Nikki Beasley, executive director of Richmond Neighborhood Housing Services, has spent 10 years turning a dormant organization into a force for housing equity in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this episode, she walks through how RNHS helps first-time homebuyers bust the myths holding them back, why she launched the Emerging Developers Program to build a pipeline of community-based developers of color, and how the "Protect Your Legacy" initiative ensures generational wealth actually transfers to the next generation. Nikki also gets candid about the funding pressures shrinking the DEI and philanthropic landscape, how she models an intentional leadership transition, and what she means by "carrying something is not caring." Practical, honest, and full of lessons any nonprofit leader can use.

May 21, 202632 min

Your best donors don't know you exist (yet)

If your nonprofit's funding isn't growing the way it should, the problem may not be what you think it is. In this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, host Lee Wochner makes the case that most fundraising challenges are really marketing challenges in disguise. The organizations that raise the most money have simply reached more of the right people: donors, funders, and advocates who heard about them long before any ask arrived. Lee breaks down why working the same donor list harder produces diminishing returns every year, what it actually takes to reach the right audience, and one question every nonprofit leader should be able to answer but often can't. If your mission is strong and your work is real but the funding isn't keeping up, this episode will show you where to look.

April 27, 202632 min

How AI is changing nonprofit marketing (and what to do about it)

If your website traffic has softened, your email open rates have slipped, or you're wondering whether your Google Ad Grant is still worth it, you're not imagining things. The marketing landscape has fundamentally shifted, and AI is driving most of it. Counterintuity CEO and Creative Strategist Lee Wochner cuts through the noise to explain what's actually happening and what nonprofit leaders can do about it right now. He covers the "zero-click universe" and what it means for search, the honest state of the Google Ad Grant, and five practical tactics you can act on today. Your mission, your community trust, and your real human stories can be competitive advantages in the AI era. Lee walks you through how to use them.