The People Who Multiply Your Story

I was just in Phoenix for AdNet, a conference for community foundation development and communications folks. The weather alone felt like a professional development opportunity—93, sunny, and no Kansas wind.

One topic surfaced repeatedly in sessions, in side conversations, and more than once while wandering past plants that looked like they could survive a small apocalypse.

Professional advisors.

By that I mean lawyers, financial planners, and accountants—the people many families rely on when making major financial decisions.

In one conversation, someone mentioned that more than 75 percent of their foundation's assets traced back to referrals from those advisors. I'm talking tens of millions of dollars.

Which explains why foundations spend a fair amount of time thinking about that group.

Advisors are not just another audience. In many cases, they’re the people who introduce the idea of bequests to a client in the first place—and sometimes the ones explaining how something like a community foundation works.

I think of people in that role as multipliers.

Professional advisors are one example, but almost every organization has people like this. Board members are multipliers. Major donors are multipliers. Community partners are multipliers.

They’re the people who end up explaining the organization at a dinner table, in a board meeting, or halfway through a conversation that begins with, “So what exactly does your organization do?”

Last week I wrote about the temptation to communicate to “the general public.” Multipliers are almost the opposite problem. Instead of trying to reach everyone, you’re relying on a relatively small group of people to carry the story into other conversations.

Which means the communication challenge changes a bit.

People in multiplier roles have to clear two hurdles.

First, they have to feel comfortable raising the topic at all. In the case of advisors, that means bringing up charitable giving with a client during a conversation about investments or taxes.

Second, they need enough clarity to explain the options.

A presentation from the Greater Memphis Community Foundation shared a statistic that stuck with me. Research shows that 76 percent of clients say they would like guidance about charitable giving, yet only about 36 percent actually receive it from their advisors. And only 5 percent of advisors say they feel very confident discussing philanthropy with clients.

Those numbers explain a lot.

If the person in the multiplier role isn’t comfortable raising the topic—or explaining the tools—the conversation often stops before it really starts.

And when that happens, the story doesn’t travel very far.

Which is a useful reminder about the real job of communication.

It isn’t only to make people aware that an organization exists. It’s to make the work understandable enough that other people can explain it without feeling like they’re about to get something wrong.

Because at some point your story has to travel without you in the room.

When that happens, it spreads naturally through conversations you’re not even part of. When it doesn’t, every introduction starts from scratch.

This is one of the structural reasons awareness often fails to accumulate the way organizations expect it to.

On Wednesday I’m hosting a short Zoom session about why that happens—and what changes when communication is designed with that reality in mind. If this dynamic feels familiar, you’re welcome to join us.

Lori