Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 554. How It's Built: The 4 Core Pillars of a Movement that Sustains Itself - Bryan Funk

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554. How It's Built: The 4 Core Pillars of a Movement that Sustains Itself - Bryan Funk · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: Hi friends, welcome back to how it's Built, a series where we explore the intricate and often overlooked elements that go into crafting impactful change brought to you by our friends at Allegiance Group and Pursuant.
• 0:12
  Speaker 2: Yes, they're fueling nonprofit missions with innovative solutions in digital ads, websites, technology analytics, direct mail and even digital fundraising too.
• 0:20
  Speaker 2: If you need a partner in amplifying your brand, expanding your reach and fostering that unwavering donor loyalty, visit teamallegiancecom.
• 0:27
  Speaker 2: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:30
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky, and this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:43
  Speaker 2: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:51
  Speaker 1: So welcome to the good community.
• 0:53
  Speaker 1: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 1:02
  Speaker 2: So let's get started.
• 1:03
  Speaker 2: Oh, Becky.
• 1:06
  Speaker 1: Grinning from ear to ear favorite human alert in the house.
• 1:11
  Speaker 2: I mean, we have a lot of good humans come through this chair, but sometimes we get to talk to friends that we've spent real life you know, shared life experiences with too.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: And today we get to introduce you to our friend, brian Funk, and I'm telling you you're going to, on the surface, see that he has had this beautiful life of developing and growing these community movements and these strategies that we could kind of geek out on.
• 1:34
  Speaker 2: But at the core, when you know Brian, when you get to be in his orbit, you come into a level of care for you as a person and he just believes deeply in the power of actualization this heartwork about centering and helping others realize just how powerful they really are.
• 1:49
  Speaker 2: And when you hang with Brian, you start to feel that and we feel that in our just being in the orbit of our friend here.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: So he has spent the last 15 years leading global peer-to-peer fundraising campaigns.
• 1:59
  Speaker 2: He's raised millions of dollars.
• 2:01
  Speaker 2: He's forged and aligned partnerships with influencers and nonprofits, mobilizing thousands of people across so many different cause areas, including human rights, peace building and enhancing civil society and mental health.
• 2:12
  Speaker 2: I mean his passion for mental health just reverberates so strongly and he's just one of these people that we go to for wisdom and a connection and just a person that we deeply trust.
• 2:21
  Speaker 2: And so to have Brian in the house at this moment of transition for him, just welcome to new baby Marina into the world.
• 2:27
  Speaker 2: He's making this transition.
• 2:29
  Speaker 2: After spending four years being the VP of marketing at Virtuous, he is figuring out this new title of being dad and sharing all of his wisdom with us today.
• 2:37
  Speaker 2: So, brian Funk, get into this house, my friend, it is a delight to have you here.
• 2:41
  Speaker 3: John and Becky.
• 2:42
  Speaker 3: Good to be on the pod after all these years.
• 2:44
  Speaker 3: Light to have you here, john and Becky.
• 2:46
  Speaker 3: Good to be on the pod after all these years.
• 2:47
  Speaker 3: It feels surreal.
• 2:48
  Speaker 3: It feels surreal, so so stoked, to play in the movement, building community building sandbox with you, you all here today.
• 2:54
  Speaker 2: Oh, my gosh.
• 2:55
  Speaker 2: Sorry, it took 500 episodes.
• 2:56
  Speaker 2: My friend, you've got so much value to add Way too many, no kidding.
• 2:59
  Speaker 2: Yes, well, brian, I mean, your story is one of those that I think we have unraveled you kind of like an onion over the years of just like these different pieces of your story, and each part of it just captivates us.
• 3:10
  Speaker 2: I wonder if you would take our listeners back, tell a little bit about the experiences that formed you growing up, and we'll get into our conversation today.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: I was a young kid who grew up in a small, small farming town of 2,000 people in the woods in Connecticut.
• 3:29
  Speaker 3: You could probably make a lot of assumptions about me from that sentence alone.
• 3:35
  Speaker 3: I love that.
• 3:36
  Speaker 3: But I had this wonderful, safe, protected childhood where I was able to meander, explore and, like, figure out who I was and what I wanted to be, and I think I was for a long time very, very lost in how to find that.
• 3:53
  Speaker 3: I also, like my parents, just I was just raised in a bubble.
• 3:55
  Speaker 3: Let's just own it right, own it from the get go.
• 3:58
  Speaker 3: I was, I was raised in a bubble and I just I've spent my life trying to pop it Right.
• 4:01
  Speaker 3: I've spent my life trying to pop it right.
• 4:05
  Speaker 3: And when I was 17, I went through one of the most transformational experiences of my life in actually an English class where we read Night by Elie Wiesel, and we lived door to door, about 90 minutes from Elie Wiesel's office, and so we read his book and my friends and I just literally piled in our car, we went and we knocked on his door and, lo and behold, he opened his door and let us in and the moxie.
• 4:35
  Speaker 1: It was he passed away, and what an amazing experience.
• 4:40
  Speaker 3: Amazing experience and he challenged us and it was just about if my story and my lived experience and what I went through has moved you this much, what are you going to do about what's still happening in the world today?
• 4:56
  Speaker 3: And we went home and we just tried to figure out as a group of me and eight of my friends, and it culminated where we basically mobilized students all across our school to utilize their gifts and talents in an eight-hour sort of like interactive experience performance.
• 5:15
  Speaker 3: That was also a fundraiser for the International Refugee Committee.
• 5:19
  Speaker 3: But Elie Wiesel helped connect us to other Holocaust survivors that were living in Connecticut and we hosted this incredible dynamic Holocaust survivor panel between survivors from World War II to.
• 5:33
  Speaker 3: We had a couple of the Lost Boys of Sudan on the panel.
• 5:37
  Speaker 3: It was just this amazing experience and we were a bunch of kids that just had passion, didn't know what the heck we were doing.
• 5:42
  Speaker 3: We raised $20,000 in eight hours and I walked away and I think it was the first time in my life where I had a defined identity of what I felt made me feel most alive.
• 5:58
  Speaker 3: And from there all the way through I just pursued that passion tenaciously and it's when I was first introduced to an organization called Invisible Children.
• 6:08
  Speaker 3: I saw one of their documentaries and I got very engaged with them when I was in college, so much so I actually had the opportunity to make my way to Uganda, and while I was in Uganda, I'm going to just hit some quick highlights here.
• 6:21
  Speaker 3: But while I was in Uganda, a Somalian I was in Kampala at the time and a Somalian terrorist group Some of you might recall, in 2010, during the World Cup, when the World Cup was in South Africa bombed the city of Kampala.
• 6:37
  Speaker 3: Oh my gosh, I do remember that Nearly 90 Ugandans lost their life and a few Americans lost their lives, and one of those Americans was a friend of mine and a staff member at Invisible Children by the name of Nate Henn.
• 6:48
  Speaker 3: And Nate left behind a legacy of a servant legacy, a humble legacy.
• 6:56
  Speaker 3: And I came home from Uganda, was about to graduate college, did not know what to do with my life, but I knew that I had to somehow honor my friend Nate.
• 7:07
  Speaker 3: So I submitted an application to go work for Invisible Children and the rest is history in terms of my career in philanthropy, fundraising and movement building.
• 7:14
  Speaker 3: So ever since that moment, I've been in or in and around the nonprofit sector and what I thought was going to be a six-month stint, and then, who knows, I thought I'd figure be a six month stint and then, you know, who knows, I thought I'd figure my life out um ultimately became the thing that was actually the core pillar of my life.
• 7:33
  Speaker 3: So it's been a humbling, moving, um deeply fulfilling journey.
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: I I love and cherish moments where, you know, the years slip by and I find, like I talk about Nate and some of these experience experiences less and less.
• 7:45
  Speaker 3: But I really treasure the moments where I get to circle back to them and, as a result, you know, in my time at Invisible Children, I got to be a part of building their movement, as well as their cultural tipping point campaign, kony 2012.
• 7:58
  Speaker 3: And you know we can kind of set the stage on what that campaign was about and what we can learn from it.
• 8:04
  Speaker 3: But ever since then I've had amazing opportunities to work with so many different nonprofits and organizations and, as the world around us changes and shifts and we adopt modern approaches and modern technology, I've also had the ability to step in and help empower and equip nonprofits to utilize the tools and the technologies and the innovations that can help them make a bigger impact in the world.
• 8:29
  Speaker 3: So dang y'all, it's been fun and it's how we met.
• 8:33
  Speaker 3: So that's a quick little clip on.
• 8:36
  Speaker 3: You know, from childhood today to today, you know what the journey's encompassed.
• 8:41
  Speaker 1: I mean, this is why it's so fundamental to ask about the lived experience, because understanding that a book like Night would spur you to activation so much.
• 8:54
  Speaker 1: I don't know why, but I'm seeing you ride your bike to Elie Wiesel.
• 8:57
  Speaker 1: I know that's not what you did, but I just see you biking down there wanting to be a part of something bigger.
• 9:03
  Speaker 1: And you mentioned this is an evolution, and the time that we're living in right now is such an evolution an evolution of beliefs and mindsets and tech and political upheaval, and there's so much going on and we're all evolving and learning, and so I want you to do some tone setting.
• 9:23
  Speaker 1: I want you to talk about who was Invisible Children like then, because certainly not the same organization as it is now and talk to us about Kony 2012.
• 9:33
  Speaker 1: What was happening before?
• 9:36
  Speaker 1: And talk about these grassroots strategies that you have clearly been involved in since you were 17 as an activist for good.
• 9:45
  Speaker 1: Get into the details.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: Awesome.
• 9:47
  Speaker 3: Okay, let's let's like some caveats right.
• 9:49
  Speaker 3: So, first and foremost, Invisible Children is a nonprofit that is dedicated to ending a third.
• 9:56
  Speaker 3: At this point, we're approaching 40 year long child soldier conflict in Central Africa.
• 10:02
  Speaker 3: Started in Uganda, rebel group migrated into Central African Republic and Congo, even disputed border regions within Sudan.
• 10:11
  Speaker 3: The instability in those regions is what the rebel group takes advantage of in order to thrive and build and grow.
• 10:18
  Speaker 3: They are led by a man named Joseph Kony, and Invisible Children believed at its highest, deepest belief, its most aspirational belief that, no matter who you are, you could look at this conflict and say that we should live in a world where children should not be abducted in their sleep and conscripted into a rebel army period.
• 10:38
  Speaker 3: That was Invisible Children's highest aspirational belief.
• 10:43
  Speaker 3: And so, after nearly 10 years of awareness movement building, we're going to get into the nitty gritty details of how they did that.
• 10:53
  Speaker 3: We orchestrated a campaign called Kony 2012.
• 10:56
  Speaker 3: And the idea was that how is the world's worst war criminal literally no exaggeration number one most wanted man on the international criminal courts list for crimes against humanity and war crimes?
• 11:11
  Speaker 3: How does no one know this man's name?
• 11:13
  Speaker 3: And so we came forward and we said we don't want to do a fundraising campaign for our programs on the ground.
• 11:19
  Speaker 3: We're not here to actually raise money.
• 11:20
  Speaker 3: If we are going to achieve our mission, every person around the globe has to know this man's name, and so we created a 29-minute film and a whole series of activations for young people to contact their congressional representatives, contact influencers and celebrities, run awareness campaigns, share the film, rock the t-shirt.
• 11:44
  Speaker 3: We made it really, really simple to get involved and we literally wanted to make him famous.
• 11:47
  Speaker 3: This film went viral.
• 11:50
  Speaker 3: Within one day, the film had garnered a million views.
• 11:54
  Speaker 3: Within five days, a hundred million views.
• 11:56
  Speaker 3: The campaign raised nearly $30 million, which is far more than what we had ever raised in any annual year previously.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: This campaign is also so.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: This is where the caveats come in.
• 12:08
  Speaker 3: This campaign is also without its controversies.
• 12:10
  Speaker 3: Some of you knew of the campaign and participated in it, and it's impacted you to this day.
• 12:15
  Speaker 3: Some of you have heard about it or seen it on the internet.
• 12:18
  Speaker 3: You've seen the memes.
• 12:19
  Speaker 3: Some of you are experts in our sector and maybe the mention of this campaign makes you contract, and I think the thing that I want to say at the onset of this conversation is, especially if you feel contracted, I promise you, for every conspiracy theory and I've heard them all I've heard them all, I promise you.
• 12:51
  Speaker 3: We are an organization of 100 people.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: Our CEO is 27 years old, Our founder was 30.
• 12:53
  Speaker 3: The average age of our staff was 23.
• 12:54
  Speaker 3: And we are a bunch of people that were young and idealistic enough to believe that we could change the world.
• 12:57
  Speaker 3: If you have a belief that we didn't have enough emphasis on programs, I promise you 96% of our staff on the ground were Ugandan, Congolese and Central African Republic, led by civil society and local leaders.
• 13:10
  Speaker 3: I promise you I could spend the whole pod dispelling the conspiracy theories.
• 13:17
  Speaker 3: I am one lived experience of millions within this campaign.
• 13:20
  Speaker 3: I was one member of a team of 100 that executed this, and I was one member of a community of 3.5 million people that mobilized to make this campaign happen, and so I'm one perspective in 3.5 million.
• 13:34
  Speaker 3: But the integrity of the work and the integrity of the campaign I will stand by every day of my life, and so I'm excited to dive into what some of those were, but it felt out of integrity, not to mention the range of experiences and feelings that people might have around this campaign.
• 14:29
  Speaker 2: I mean, that's the kind of human you are, brian, and I appreciate that tone setting, and I do think this is a community that's rejecting cynicism and pouring into learning, evolving, growing and calling each other in and having these conversations to talk about stuff in a more productive way.
• 14:46
  Speaker 2: So I do want to get into the head of this team that's building a grassroots strategy that I think a lot of nonprofits could look at and replicate, because this year specifically, all these years later, we're still talking about the trend of activate the one to grow the movement, and I feel like y'all did this at such an early phase.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: Using media to scale impact.
• 15:08
  Speaker 2: All the things we're still lifting to this day Back us up.
• 15:11
  Speaker 2: What are some of those core strategies you learned?
• 15:13
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sounds great.
• 15:14
  Speaker 3: So, yeah, before we dive deep, let's just give the 10,000 foot view right.
• 15:19
  Speaker 3: And so, you know, I want everybody listening to think of this, as these are your four core pillars for building a movement, and we love alliteration here, and so we have to keep it simple and easy to remember.
• 15:34
  Speaker 3: We have four A's right, and so what we're going to cover and what I'm excited to dive in with you, john and Becky, are part one, awareness.
• 15:45
  Speaker 3: What role does awareness play in building a movement?
• 15:47
  Speaker 3: Part two is autonomy.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: That's, in your supporter base, your volunteers, your donors, your board, your staff, your beneficiaries what role does autonomy play?
• 15:59
  Speaker 3: So we have awareness, autonomy.
• 16:01
  Speaker 3: The third pillar is activation.
• 16:04
  Speaker 3: So how do we then activate our base to build and grow a movement?
• 16:09
  Speaker 3: And the fourth component is actualization.
• 16:12
  Speaker 3: So, as you're building and growing a movement, as people are growing within themselves, how do they actualize within your mission?
• 16:22
  Speaker 3: So the four pillars are awareness, autonomy, activation and actualization.
• 16:29
  Speaker 3: So here's where I want to start us reflecting on not just the Kony 2012 movement, but all of the different movements that I've been a part of, from nonprofit mental health movements to gubernatorial campaigns, political advocacy, you name it.
• 16:45
  Speaker 3: I wanted to distill down what are the four core pillars that are required to truly build a movement that sustains itself, and so, about a year ago, I developed a framework, and so I think it'd be helpful to run you through the framework and then we can actually break down what did we do at Invisible Children?
• 17:08
  Speaker 3: The framework goes through a few key components.
• 17:11
  Speaker 3: The first is I'm just going to say it out front the last thing that we care about is dollars, which I know for all of us that are within our budget constraints, our fundraising goals, the economic pressures of our time.
• 17:40
  Speaker 3: You might jump out piece is awareness and within awareness, we, first and foremost, we, want to be relentless and simple in our messaging.
• 17:51
  Speaker 3: We want to showcase that we have a solution and we have to educate on the problem solution and we have to educate on the problem and this kind of.
• 18:01
  Speaker 3: When we talk about building a grassroots movement, before we can hit a tipping point and accelerate a lot of the awareness building has to be.
• 18:08
  Speaker 3: There are tools and technology today that can help us do this at scale, but a lot of it's one-to-one.
• 18:13
  Speaker 3: It is one-to-one relationship, building trust, authenticity and, I think, like effective awareness building goes into the second phase of this model, which is autonomy.
• 18:28
  Speaker 3: So we need to build an awareness engine and as we start to build a base of support, we have to unlock autonomy.
• 18:37
  Speaker 3: I think this is something that isn't discussed a lot, personally, but I think the first thing that Invisible Children did really, really well, is they?
• 18:46
  Speaker 3: We turned every staff member into an expert on the conflict, on the intricacies of being a team in San Diego that was working on an issue in Africa and the white savior complex and white man's burden.
• 19:00
  Speaker 3: And we wanted to turn our entire staff into historical experts on the issue, experts on the political nuances of what we were working through and the political nuances of the solutions we were recommending.
• 19:14
  Speaker 3: And some of these staff were literally interns that would only be with us for three months, but we wanted them to be fully autonomous, to be ambassadors and champions of what we were talking about.
• 19:26
  Speaker 3: Once we would unlock and create systems and processes and education for our staff to have autonomy.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: It was then.
• 19:34
  Speaker 3: How do we actually create autonomy for our supporters to become advocates?
• 19:38
  Speaker 3: How are we doing the same for our supporters?
• 19:42
  Speaker 3: Because the real, true magic, in my opinion, of movement building is building a movement actually has little to do with your cause.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: Building a movement actually has little to do with your cause.
• 20:03
  Speaker 3: Building a movement has everything to do with empowering and enabling a group of individuals to spark their own passion and identity within your cause.
• 20:06
  Speaker 3: They are how they define themselves.
• 20:08
  Speaker 3: What do they want their life to mean and there's no simple way to like.
• 20:14
  Speaker 3: There's not one answer for 10,000 individuals, there's 10,000 answers for 10,000 individuals.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: So a movement allows people to show up in the way that is truest to themselves.
• 20:41
  Speaker 3: The third component of autonomy is we actually equipped our beneficiaries to self-advocate, say that we were a bunch of white kids running around trying to educate people on a really complex, nuanced historical problem dating back decades from political turmoil in Central Africa.
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: The truth is that we actually brought over our beneficiaries, the recipients of our programs, to actually tell their own stories.
• 21:07
  Speaker 3: We sponsored their travel to the US, trained them and empowered them to share their own stories and put them in front of us and said part of building the movement is about giving the people impacted a platform to tell their own story.
• 21:24
  Speaker 3: So we gave autonomy to our beneficiaries.
• 21:27
  Speaker 3: So awareness autonomy.
• 21:30
  Speaker 3: The third part is suggesting how we engage and I kind of categorize this as, first and foremost, your time and your talent and your community and your network is actually more important than the dollar.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: So we empowered people to say we need your voice, people to say we need your voice, we need your time and we need your community.
• 21:57
  Speaker 3: And when you empower someone to see themselves and being able to come forward and say I do not believe in living in a world where the abduction of children exists and I can do something about it, and you have the autonomy to do something about it.
• 22:10
  Speaker 3: Now you're putting forth your time and when?
• 22:13
  Speaker 3: When you're putting forth your time in your volunteer capacity, this is what is going to accelerate the giving capacity.
• 22:20
  Speaker 3: So the fourth pillar within this community building framework is, first and foremost and this is all stuff we all know, right, this, every fundraiser listening to this, every person that works in a nonprofit listening to this knows this.
• 22:33
  Speaker 3: But, like every dollar we put emphasis on, every dollar matters.
• 22:37
  Speaker 3: We had to translate dollars to impact and we had to define the common denominator for all of our supporters.
• 22:44
  Speaker 3: And I think, like something we talk about a lot now in our space is how key personalization is in everything that we do.
• 22:52
  Speaker 3: Right, like we live in a highly personalized world and I actually I want to give Invisible Children credit because I think they were doing things on the ground that were very cutting edge.
• 23:01
  Speaker 3: So I'm just going to pause there and see if you guys have any input.
• 23:06
  Speaker 1: I mean, I got a lot of.
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: I got a lot of things I'd like to say about all of that and it just makes me think of how you're progressing, and I want to talk about modern movement buildings.
• 23:18
  Speaker 1: Let's talk about the hard stuff here too, because we want to know what those common challenges that nonprofits are going to face when they start to implement a grassroots strategy.
• 23:29
  Speaker 1: We want to know how do they overcome some of those challenges.
• 23:33
  Speaker 1: What have you seen from your experience with Kony 2012 and, honestly, in all of your work?
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: Yeah.
• 23:38
  Speaker 3: So I think this is a great space where I can maybe pull back the layers a little bit and share how we did what we did, because I think in that it presents the challenges and there is a level of patience and resilience that an organization needs, and you need the buy-in and support from your board and your executive leadership team to navigate the level of patience and resilience that's required to build a movement.
• 24:05
  Speaker 3: My example here is that okay, great, it's 2012.
• 24:11
  Speaker 3: We launched Kony 2012,.
• 24:12
  Speaker 3: 100 million views in five days.
• 24:14
  Speaker 3: Now a lot of people might look at that in face value and say cool, cool, slick marketing campaign.
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: But what are you like?
• 24:26
  Speaker 3: No one actually knows the layers behind that.
• 24:27
  Speaker 3: Now, if you rewind the clock back to 2004,.
• 24:29
  Speaker 3: Eight years earlier, the founders of Invisible Children encountered a woman in Uganda named Jolie Okot.
• 24:35
  Speaker 3: Jolie Okot, to this day, is the leading leader and voice and expert on the ground in Uganda.
• 24:43
  Speaker 3: She's the person that the organization has leaned on for years and years and years.
• 24:46
  Speaker 3: They had a camera and Jolie said I need to show you something, and they filmed children who were living out in the remote villages where abductions would happen, walking miles at night to sleep in the streets and city centers that were protected by the UN.
• 25:06
  Speaker 3: So they filmed this story, they brought it home, they made a movie out of it and the founders of the organization said we have to tell people about this story and we need to be bold and asking for your time, your talent and your money.
• 25:18
  Speaker 3: And it was very simple and literally and now this is part of what is like maybe doesn't work in today's modern fundraising landscape but literally what they did was they bought, beat up 16 passenger vans 20 of them and they said maybe our friends will believe in this enough to give up three months of their life and volunteer and travel around the country and screen this film to as many places as they can, and Invisible Children did this every spring and fall for eight years.
• 25:58
  Speaker 3: So what happened was one-to-one teams with autonomy, with the education, the expertise, the resources, with the film and with the Ugandan advocate, got in a van with an approval from history curriculums to go in and go to all school assemblies, speak at colleges, speak at places of worship and over the course of eight years, directly reached 3.5 million people On a one-to-one level, on a one-to-one level, on a one-to-one scale Wow, it took eight years.
• 26:36
  Speaker 3: So when I talk about patience and resilience, now, while they were doing that, they were also doing a few things.
• 26:42
  Speaker 3: They were selling merchandise.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: So during Kony 2012, 20% of all revenue was product sales, merchandise sales.
• 26:48
  Speaker 3: 14% of all revenue was recurring giving right.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: So, while we were in schools, we were saying will you give three bucks a week, will you buy a t-shirt?
• 26:57
  Speaker 3: Will you tell your friends, will you share the movie?
• 26:59
  Speaker 3: Right?
• 27:00
  Speaker 3: And so it spreads, it spreads.
• 27:02
  Speaker 3: So, yes, we were fundraising, yes, we were building a coalition and a movement, and it took eight years movement and it took eight years.
• 27:15
  Speaker 3: And so, by the time we had launched Kony 2012,.
• 27:19
  Speaker 3: So, becky, earlier in the conversation, you asked where was I?
• 27:20
  Speaker 3: So I was a team leader, as a part of a team that was leading these screenings across the country.
• 27:25
  Speaker 3: So what we did is, before the film went live on YouTube, for two weeks, we had 20 teams.
• 27:30
  Speaker 3: I was based in the tri-state area, so I was in New York City.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: I was screening to audiences of about 3,000 to 5,000 people every day, every day, nonstop, for two weeks, before the film went viral and the ask was buy the action kit, share the movie, wear the t-shirt, call and tweet your congressional representatives.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: That was it, John.
• 27:50
  Speaker 1: This is warming.
• 27:51
  Speaker 3: Right.
• 27:51
  Speaker 1: This is literally the warming step.
• 27:53
  Speaker 2: It's cultivating and activating those rabid fans.
• 27:55
  Speaker 1: Yeah, we call this staging in the impact arc Keep going.
• 27:59
  Speaker 3: So something that's crazy.
• 28:01
  Speaker 3: Just some data stats.
• 28:03
  Speaker 3: In the two weeks before Kony 2012 went live on YouTube, kony 2012 hashtag was trending in cities and states across the country.
• 28:14
  Speaker 3: So there's actually a Twitter.
• 28:15
  Speaker 3: There's a Twitter heat map that exists of where the hashtag was the most fervent.
• 28:20
  Speaker 3: Guess where.
• 28:22
  Speaker 1: It's where our it's where our teams and Ugandan advocates were on stage screening the film and sharing their story.
• 28:29
  Speaker 3: Wow, so.
• 28:30
  Speaker 3: So you have towns and cities that are lighting up.
• 28:32
  Speaker 3: I was in Delaware a week before the film went viral.
• 28:35
  Speaker 3: We spoke at the same school where President Obama sent his kids to school.
• 28:41
  Speaker 3: President Obama didn't hear about Kony 2012 from CNN.
• 28:44
  Speaker 3: He heard about it from his daughters.
• 28:48
  Speaker 3: So, freaking cool.
• 28:50
  Speaker 3: And so we then hold a screening the night before the film goes viral, with all of our influencers celebrities, corporate partners again, people with relationships that we've built over the years.
• 29:00
  Speaker 3: And we said, as an influencer, the greatest thing that you can do tomorrow, when the video goes live, is you got to talk about it, right?
• 29:08
  Speaker 3: So the film goes live, you've got 20 teams around the country that are speaking one-to-one with tens of thousands of people.
• 29:15
  Speaker 3: You have influencers and celebrities that are elevating the profile, and then, all of a sudden, it's igniting and that's how, in five days, you get a hundred million people to share your campaign.
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, brian, this is why we love conversations like this.
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: This is actually the vision of the podcast, because we always picture this iceberg that we look across and we're like man, how did this campaign do that?
• 29:37
  Speaker 2: The massive underbelly of this iceberg that had been going on for years, of one-on-one conversations, of intentionality, of equipping people and training people, and storytelling and all this stuff.
• 29:50
  Speaker 2: This is why we can't just like make a documentary and expect it to do like what we do.
• 29:56
  Speaker 2: This is why we have to do this harder work that takes time, but it's so much more deep and meaningful.
• 30:01
  Speaker 2: So I mean how I want to start applying this Cause.
• 30:04
  Speaker 2: I mean I'm seeing your steps come through this and the awareness, autonomy, the suggesting people how to plug in and the definition of the common denominator piece.
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: I want to like start to like round this out as we think about how do people apply this to their places.
• 30:19
  Speaker 2: We have so much more at our fingertips now, 10 years later or 15 years later with social media, how that's evolved.
• 30:26
  Speaker 2: Things on TikTok trend within minutes and hours, not even days, at this point.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: So how can you know we, as organizations and missions out here, leverage this moment and use this power of media for our own movements right now?
• 30:42
  Speaker 3: Yeah, I think the the catch 22 here is that I think that the environment is louder now than it was true.
• 30:50
  Speaker 1: It is a very noisy space Then we did this.
• 30:52
  Speaker 3: The space is very, very noisy.
• 30:56
  Speaker 3: Luckily, right Like, there are tools and technologies that can help us to publish and automate at scale, but I do think it comes down to having a.
• 31:12
  Speaker 3: This is going to sound idealistic, but it's actually extremely strategic.
• 31:17
  Speaker 3: Now I see a lot of organizations that, again, like I mentioned this already, they are stuck in the financial and economic pressure, the need to just hit a fundraising number, because it's the fundraising number right Like we're tired we're burnt out.
• 31:35
  Speaker 3: We're grinding right.
• 31:37
  Speaker 3: These are all things that actually suppress our ability to spark a movement on what is your ideal state that you want to see in the world, and actually distilling that down into the economic engine of your nonprofit is critical.
• 31:56
  Speaker 3: So, when you think about your fundraising goals, when you think about even your marketing department's goals, when you think about how many impressions do you want to get, how many net new people do you want to attract into your organization, how are you creating personalized engagement to people that are learning about you?
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: How are you creating an autonomous experience for those that are your most fervent supporters?
• 32:22
  Speaker 3: Right, like all of that actually has to ladder up to what your primary goal is.
• 32:30
  Speaker 3: Right, it's not idealistic to say that we want to eradicate the existence of child soldiers within the Lord's Resistance Army and we want to see Joseph Kony arrested.
• 32:41
  Speaker 3: Right, that might seem really, really idealistic, but at the end of the day, we had very, very specific goals.
• 32:49
  Speaker 3: Right, we ran very targeted campaigns, for example, where, if there was a big decision, this is even outside of the nonprofit.
• 32:57
  Speaker 3: But I'm just giving an example.
• 32:58
  Speaker 3: There was one time where we did a campaign where there was a big decision coming out of the State Department around funding towards relief efforts in Central Africa.
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: Now we knew that we had a movement that could influence this, so we stood up a campaign, called Cary, back when John Cary was in the State Department.
• 33:16
  Speaker 3: It was called Cary, stop Coney.
• 33:18
  Speaker 3: Well, there were 1,200 tweets going out every minute texting John Cary about what decision he needed to make.
• 33:28
  Speaker 3: So, like, we used our movement to apply pressure via a medium that was very public and, you betcha, he went out and made a very public statement about it later in the day.
• 33:40
  Speaker 3: And so, right, so we have fundraising goals, like there are.
• 33:43
  Speaker 3: Like we know what we need to do to maintain and stabilize our programs, like net, new programs that we want to develop.
• 33:50
  Speaker 3: Right, so we have financial goals there, but we also have awareness goals.
• 33:56
  Speaker 3: We have right, and you can benchmark this into saying this is how many people we need to activate in order to get this much traction on a platform, in order to influence a decision maker or policymaker, and that helps us move closer to our mission of eradicating child soldiers in Central Africa and seeing Joseph Kony arrested.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: This is such an incredible story and there are so many nuggets here that are true to this day.
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: And I remember John speaking with Adam Garoni in an earlier podcast episode, who started the Movember movement, and he said everywhere I go, everybody says, just go make a Movember.
• 34:35
  Speaker 1: Go do that again for our organization.
• 34:38
  Speaker 1: And I think if you're listening to this and you're thinking, okay, we've just got to do a Kony 2012.
• 34:43
  Speaker 1: No, what Brian is saying is look at your goals, and I want to make sure you're not just looking at your financial goal, your top KPI.
• 34:53
  Speaker 1: What are you really trying to do to move the needle?
• 34:56
  Speaker 1: Because if there's intention and if it's really simple, it's really clear about what you need to do.
• 35:04
  Speaker 1: The possibilities are limitless.
• 35:07
  Speaker 1: And, brian, I think you would agree with me and say you don't have to be a massive organization to invoke something like this.
• 35:16
  Speaker 3: No, no, no, no.
• 35:17
  Speaker 3: And, to be honest, it goes back to the very basic tactics and frameworks that we all know we need to operate in, and it's all about personal relationships.
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: That's it.
• 35:26
  Speaker 3: This is going to sound crazy, but we had a team of interns 15 people that would come in.
• 35:35
  Speaker 3: They're volunteers that would work with us for three months at a time.
• 35:40
  Speaker 3: We would again apply autonomy and we entrusted them with managing all of the relationships within our recurring donor portfolio and I'm talking like because you think about the average age of our donor base it's not just about engaging with them on our organization.
• 35:57
  Speaker 3: We empowered our volunteers to engage with our most dedicated, loyal supporters within their own lives.
• 36:05
  Speaker 3: We had teams that literally knew when your soccer practice was, what big exam you had, who was bullying you at school.
• 36:13
  Speaker 3: Right, like deeply, deeply personal relationships, the most personal things point back to the name of an individual who was their partner on staff at Invisible Children that supported them through their youth.
• 36:32
  Speaker 3: It was more than just stopping Kony.
• 36:36
  Speaker 3: We believed that if young people could feel trusted, feel friendship, feel love, feel kindness, that if you could see that within yourself, you could do anything.
• 36:52
  Speaker 3: You could make a Kony 2012 go viral.
• 36:54
  Speaker 3: We believed that and it was represented in our processes.
• 36:58
  Speaker 3: It was represented in how we approach donor engagement.
• 37:01
  Speaker 3: It's just, it's absolutely and it's foundational to what we all need to be doing.
• 37:10
  Speaker 3: And it just blows me away.
• 37:13
  Speaker 3: I mean, I'm going to tell you one like I'll tell you one other story.
• 37:15
  Speaker 3: I have stories on stories.
• 37:18
  Speaker 3: I was on a stage, I was speaking in New Brunswick, canada, and it was like a 2000 all-school assembly, high school.
• 37:25
  Speaker 3: And as soon as the presentation ends, I'm on stage with my Ugandan teammate, boney, and this kid rushes the stage.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: Young kid.
• 37:34
  Speaker 3: He's crying, tears running down his face and I quickly pull him backstage because his whole school is watching him.
• 37:41
  Speaker 3: Runs up on stage, pull him backstage, boney, and I sit him down and he just starts talking to us.
• 37:49
  Speaker 3: Come to find out just about nine months prior he had lost his older brother to suicide and he said to us this young boy, michael, he was 15.
• 38:00
  Speaker 3: He said today was the first day that I felt a reason to be here.
• 38:05
  Speaker 3: Young kid having this moment of incredible self-awareness, and he goes.
• 38:12
  Speaker 3: I feel like I can do something and I want to do it for my brother.
• 38:16
  Speaker 3: This kid went on to run a peer-to-peer fundraising campaign and raised $7,000.
• 38:22
  Speaker 3: The awareness meeting someone deeply personally at where they're at in their lives, with what they're experiencing, completely disconnected from our mission, and saying I see you, I hear you, how can I help you.
• 38:35
  Speaker 3: And a big part of who he is is now foundational to our cause.
• 38:40
  Speaker 3: It transformed his life.
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: That's a beautiful story because, on multiple levels like I think of how y'all baked autonomy into these campaigns that it becomes very personal and it can be expressed in a way that's meaningful, and I think that is absolutely critical to any movement building, and we've seen that too.
• 38:59
  Speaker 2: But I don't want to miss that.
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: There's this belief component at the core of.
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: I caught this at the tail end of what you said today, brian is that y'all did believe that this was going to go viral like that and that informed how you showed up and the intentionality and the actions and everything that follows, and I think that that is something that we don't put enough emphasis on you know I had are we actually dialed into that.
• 39:26
  Speaker 3: I had a sticky note on my desk.
• 39:28
  Speaker 3: It stayed on my computer for every day that I was at Invisible Children and it said the money has to match the size of the dream.
• 39:36
  Speaker 3: And we just believe that our dream was worthy of seeing it fulfilled.
• 39:41
  Speaker 3: And again to the part where I say, like, within the donor engagement framework, that's why money comes last.
• 39:48
  Speaker 3: Right, because we just had this belief that the money will follow if, while we're building our movement, if we do the right things in a very strategic way, the money will follow, $3 at a time $3 at a time, $3 at a time.
• 40:08
  Speaker 1: I mean I don't know how you all are feeling sitting there listening to this story.
• 40:12
  Speaker 1: I mean it's just given me such a heart and a lens for all of you do-gooders out there and changemakers.
• 40:19
  Speaker 1: I'm almost 45, and I still believe I'm that idealistic 17-year-old like you, brian, who just wants to go out and do good and change the world, and I think movements like this make it tenable, and I just thank you for bringing this beautiful story, bringing this framework in.
• 40:36
  Speaker 1: I think we want it to be tenable for you.
• 40:38
  Speaker 1: On the other end, who's listening?
• 40:40
  Speaker 1: We want you to be able to do this and so, brian, we know that you are very familiar with the podcast and know how we round out these conversations.
• 40:49
  Speaker 1: We want to ask you for your one good thing today.
• 40:52
  Speaker 1: What's a one good thing you're going to leave with this community?
• 40:56
  Speaker 3: I think the one thing I'm going to share and my hope is that this resonates and it was something that dropped in for me probably five years into my fundraising career and I think it transformed the way that I think about building personal relationships with donors, supporters, volunteers like, as you steward your movement, that as a fundraiser I actually had an honor and a duty and a responsibility and a privilege to help steward not just actualization for our mission, but I was able to help steward actualization for what people wanted to see for themselves in their own lives.
• 41:44
  Speaker 3: I got to help 16-year-old kids find their voice, find their passion.
• 41:49
  Speaker 3: I got to help their parents who were navigating what it meant to see their young child come alive, right.
• 41:57
  Speaker 3: And and I I think that that is the mute, the magic and beauty of what it means to be a fundraiser it's we are stewarding something greater than our mission.
• 42:06
  Speaker 3: We're stewarding impact on an individual level that is actually not tangible, and I think the beauty of what we show up to is that we'll never actually be able to realize the full breadth and scope of our impact, because what you're doing, day in and day out, is a continuing ripple that is changing people's lives beyond your mission beyond your beneficiaries, and that is the great honor and privilege that we get to do in this work that we are all engaged with.
• 42:39
  Speaker 2: Did I not tell you at the top of this interview that Brian's one of those people that makes you feel like you can do it, that builds you up, that builds the people?
• 42:48
  Speaker 1: around you Totally hype friend yeah.
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: Really grateful for the way you show up in this world and I want to connect people to you, brian.
• 42:54
  Speaker 2: I mean, you're just a magnet, so tell how people can find you online.
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: Where are you hanging out these days?
• 42:59
  Speaker 2: How can they cyber stock you or actually reach out?
• 43:01
  Speaker 2: You want to know them one-on-one, I know.
• 43:03
  Speaker 3: Please connect with me, whether that's on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, you know.
• 43:16
  Speaker 3: Would love to just create connection.
• 43:17
  Speaker 3: I'm pretty easy to find.
• 43:18
  Speaker 3: It's Brian, with a Y B R Y A N F U N K and my handles are either at Bri Funk or my full name, Brian Funk.
• 43:21
  Speaker 3: So linkedincom backslash I N, backslash Brian Funk.
• 43:24
  Speaker 3: I work with nonprofits, social impact businesses and high growth companies through my own business that I'm building Modern Profit, and we are a marketing and social impact agency that helps generate results that grow your business, accelerate your impact, foster your culture and deliver the abundant results that you're looking for to increase your profit and purpose in the world.
• 43:49
  Speaker 3: And so if you're looking to build a movement, accelerate your growth, increase your revenue, I'd love to partner with you.
• 43:56
  Speaker 3: I'd love to help, I'd love to be a sounding board.
• 43:58
  Speaker 3: So please consider me a friend and partner as you continue to build and grow and implement these four pillars of movement building at your organization.
• 44:10
  Speaker 1: I'm so glad you were born, I'm so glad you're in this world, I'm so glad to call you friend and ally.
• 44:15
  Speaker 1: I think that this conversation, while it's been practical, it's also been inspiring and heady and grounding that what we're doing every day absolutely matters.
• 44:27
  Speaker 1: Bravo to you, bravo to Invisible Children, bravo to the safety and security that it led to and the hope for so many.
• 44:35
  Speaker 1: We adore you, my friend.
• 44:37
  Speaker 1: Keep doing good in this world.
• 44:39
  Speaker 3: Likewise, thanks for having me folks and keep up the great work, and to everybody out there listening, thank you for what you show up to do day in and day out.
• 44:47
  Speaker 3: The world needs you, your mission needs you and we're in it with you.
• 44:51
  Speaker 2: Agreed.
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: Thanks, friend.