Download Otter for your meeting notes

635. Making a Movement: Voice + Vision - Jon and Becky | Otter.ai

635. Making a Movement: Voice + Vision - Jon and Becky

Sabrina Li27min

Jonathan McCoy

00:00

Hey friends, welcome back to making a movement. If you've been with us, you know by now, we're building the bones of a movement right here with you, step by step.

Speaker 1

00:08

Yeah, and we're doing it together. And so far, we've talked about how to spark that action, which was the M The mobilize. We talked about building structure, which is organize, and then how to strengthen it, which was optimized. Can we just say we had 2o in here? It's like, move

Jonathan McCoy

00:26

I'm like, jingle is forthcoming.

Speaker 1

00:29

It's gonna happen. But none of that moves far if your message is muddy. And so we got to talk about that today with one of our favorite topics.

Jonathan McCoy

00:38

Yeah, you knew you're gonna get that from us as two storytellers. We're talking about probably our favorite thing, which is that combination of voice and vision, because if you can't say it clearly, definitely nobody can repeat it, and they won't be able to carry that message forward. So we really want to unpack today what it takes to craft a message that spreads like by design. But before we hop in, let's define a couple of those words. When we talk about voice today, it is and how you say it, it's your tone. It's that promise, it's the feeling like, almost like a brand wrap around. What's that feeling that you get when you encounter a voice of a movement that you love, or a company that you love or an organization that you love? Those words should feel like you and they're going to help you spread. Yeah, both

Speaker 1

01:23

are so incredibly important. And when you have the voice and you have that tenor surrounding you, then you juxtapose it with the vision, which is the picture that you're painting. It's the future that people believe in and it's and it's a future that they want to be a part of building. But if your vision is muddy. Your community won't know where you're going to take them. So it is absolutely critical that the voice and the style and the way you talk comes alongside that big dream that you're casting that you want someone to be a part of. When those two are in sync,

Jonathan McCoy

01:58

the world is unstoppable. Yeah, so today we're gonna walk you through four real world moments on the podcast where we saw voice and vision come together, where it moved from words on a page to something that people would ripple out and carry forward in their own way. And so we got to start with one of the legends, and I remember the day that this episode got booked, we were just like doing a song and dance cheer

Speaker 1

02:21

the day that St Jude said yes, and that we were able to get Rick Shadyac onto the podcast to talk about this incredible work, talk about a movement. I mean, I just think a timeless example is St Jude Children's Research Hospital.

Jonathan McCoy

02:36

Yeah, and many of y'all listening today probably already know the story, but its founder, Danny Thomas started with a very simple vision, this idea that no child should die in the dawn of life. I mean, how can that not move you, just hearing those words, but their voice is also just so human in how they want to reach that vision, or how they create and carry that through. By saying, families should never receive a bill from St Jude, just keeping it really simple,

Speaker 1

03:05

yeah, I think that promise has carried them clearly for generations. Over decades, it is so clear that every donor, every volunteer, can repeat it exactly. Can I tell you something wild Jon that literally just happened to me yesterday. I was at a funeral yesterday, and they talked about St Jude, and they talked about this vision, because the individual I was there, you know, honoring, was a proponent of St Jude, and that's where they wanted memorials to go. And so I'm literally seeing how this is playing out real time. Because when people believe, when they feel like they're a part of that vision, it cascades, it cascades on and on. So let's take a listen from Rick Shadyac, the immediate past president and CEO of all SAC, which is the fundraising and awareness organization for St Jude. Here he is.

Rick Shadyac

03:58

My father was one of the persons back in the 1950s before there was St Jude, that Danny Thomas approached to help him build St Jude Children's Research Hospital. My dad did not know Danny Thomas. He was a Department of Justice lawyer in Washington, DC, but we shared the same heritage. We're Lebanese as is Danny Thomas. And so Danny Thomas went around the country asking men and women that were Lebanese to help them build St Jude, and they were forming this organization called Al SAC, which stands for American Lebanese Syrian associated charities. And the organization exists solely to support St Jude Children's Research Hospital. And my dad told me, once I became old enough to kind of understand all this, he said, we really just asked one question to Danny, why are we going to do this? And Danny looked him in the eye, and he said, We're doing this to say thank you to God and the United States of America for giving their parents my grandparents the opportunity to come to this country and to make life so we were paying this back to the United States by creating st. Jude Children's Research Hospital. And then he also said that we want to put this in Memphis, Tennessee, a segregated city at the time, because we want to address healthcare inequity. We want to make sure that children of all races have access to specialty quality healthcare, and we're going to take the economics completely out of the equation, because no family was ever going to receive a bill from St Jude for treatment, travel, housing or food. So Danny Thomas, again, in his wisdom, created two separate organizations. Okay, that doesn't exist for the most part in the philanthropic space. So Al sac was put into existence in 1957 created to raise the money and to create the awareness, raise the money, then to build St Jude Children's Research Hospital. Our job today is to make sure that we raise literally billions of dollars with a B to support St Jude, and then St Jude would be focused on taking care of kids, finding cures for these kids, conducting research. So Danny Thomas's idea was that let the business people focus on the business they don't. We don't want the scientists and the doctors worried about money. Let's, let's put a separate organization that's going to make sure that we have the resources to take care of these kids and to do the research that's necessary to find cures. So it was a laser focus for each organization, and it has allowed us to literally thrive. And that's, you know, we're one of the largest charities. We're the largest healthcare charity in terms of cash. We're one of the second or third largest charities. You know, we at LSAC, we have an obligation to raise over $2.5 billion to hospital. Operating and capital budget is more than $2 billion per year. You know, we're blessed to have 12 million donors when people come together around a cause and they know that the dollars that they're donating are helping to operate a hospital to actually conduct research. That's why I call St Jude the People's Hospital, because they're operating it every single day.

Jonathan McCoy

07:09

I mean, lots of things to unpack.

Jonathan McCoy

07:12

Lots of things like Danny Thomas, freaking legend, ahead of his time, and also like, as a recovering gift officer hearing $2 billion dollars to raise annual like I am, perspiring like crazy over here, stewarding 12 million donors. What? Again, I know, but

Jonathan McCoy

07:29

those millions of donors like that rung out to me that I mean, the promise of St Jude lives on because millions of people, literally millions of people, every day, carry it forward. And just like your example, you shared yesterday

Speaker 1

07:42

And that's the point. I think that's what Rick is trying to say. He's saying most donors aren't giving millions. They're given $10 they're giving $20 and the compounding effect of that is amounting to $2 billion This is a movement. It is ordinary people acting to keep a clear promise alive. That's what a movement does. It invites people to do their small part.

Jonathan McCoy

08:07

Yeah, I mean, money moves at the speed of trust. You know, that's a quote that we bring up that Iara Peng, so wonderfully has brought to the podcast. But I think it's also true, because if you go back to St Jude's promise, it's so clear families who will never receive a bill. That promise has built trust, because all of us probably listening, you're connected by somebody that's probably been touched by that mission, and certainly is a donor to that mission, and the proximity there over time, the trust does compound as you deliver on that

Stephen Hackett

08:36

Heck, yeah, it does. But here's where it gets really interesting, because when trust gets traction, amazing things get unlocked. So we want you to meet Stephen Hackett. I don't know if you've listened to this episode, but it is truly one of my favorites. He is a dad, he's a podcaster, and he's a St Jude dad, and he turned his podcast into a podcastathon that has raised, I know I'm like, of course, like, Tell me more. Like, on this that he has raised more than $2.2 million for St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital. And just his insight into this is so brilliant. So here's a clip from him.

Stephen Hackett

09:20

One thing we've really talked about is how to share the comprehensive story about St Jude, for one, I'm just one patient dad out of a 1000s. And so while we talk about our story, very early on, it was important to me for this campaign to be bigger than just my family. That was a good seed for our community. But very quickly I realized I want to talk about the science and research. I want to talk about st Jude's international reach. I want to talk about all these other things that the organization does. A bunch of that stuff I never interacted with, like I've never been in a clinic in another country that is using st. Jude's research and treatment options developed here in my own backyard. And so we realized, okay, we can, we can plant the seed, we can root it in my story, but we want to expand past that, and that's really where having a really good partnership with St Jude comes in, where we've got an entire team of people there that do these sorts of activations and campaigns, and we can work with them to access science and scientists and researchers and doctors and patient families and really tell the whole story. But of course, that is not to take away the personal emotional impact that a nonprofit like St Jude has right? You're talking about kids who are diagnosed with a catastrophic disease at a young age. And while St Jude has done a lot to move the needle in terms of Survivor rate. So when St Jude opened in 1962 it was 20% survival rate, now it's 80. So we can celebrate that and talk about that, but also like, Hey, y'all, there's still that 20% and that 20% is not evenly distributed around the world. If your child is diagnosed with cancer in parts of the world, that survivor rate is way lower. And so it's important to us to sort of take this mission and the really the broadness of it, and figure out a way to tell all those stories, sort of in a comprehensive way. And we're really fortunate that we get to work with professionals at St he does. I'm not a professional fundraiser like I talk about computers on the internet for a living, but being able to partner with really good people who this mission is their their life's work, and to stand on their shoulders is a real honor.

Speaker 1

11:42

I mean, I love that story so much, and let me just tell you how you know when your movement is winning, when your rabid fans can repeat stack stats like back to you, they are literally taking on the back to your tone tenor. They are absorbing the voice. They are absorbing the mission. They see themselves in it, and they are pushing it back out like a mirror to people in front of them. And Steven is clearly that rabid fan. And why? Because St Jude has a clear voice and a vision, and they literally equip him and his team to be advocates for the mission. It's extraordinary.

Jonathan McCoy

12:24

It is. And he continued on, dropping a lot of wisdom. He even talked about storytelling specifically later on. And here's a quote we pulled. He said, If you can tell a good story about the mission and show people you're putting your money where your mouth is when a community buys into that and owns it themselves. That's when you see true success. Okay, gets it. Stephen's like a podcaster, but he's like, coding our we are forgetting values the internet.

Becky Endicott

12:50

Yeah. I'm like, You do way more than that, Stephen. You are moving mountains. So belief. I love it so much. Oh, it's just so good. Okay, so we're moving into example number three, it could be one of our most favorite humans of all time, but we got to talk about P 4Hglobal and sweet. Dr B we love. Dr Bertrhude Albert. She is the co founder of P4H Global, a nonprofit that trains and equips local leaders, especially teachers in Haiti and across developing nations with these tools and skills and these relationships that they need to drive sustainable change in education and community development. And Whoa, did she have a vision?

Jonathan McCoy

13:34

Whoa, Nelly, I mean, yeah, she wanted. She loves Haiti.Obviously, it's her home country, but through her workwith P4H global, she recognized kind of this disconnect of maybe a lot of how the media tells the story of Haiti compared to the true story of Haiti. And so she became passionate about just turning her phone on, opening up tick tock, even though she was not some social media like Maven over there, she just started telling the truth, telling the true story of Haiti in her own voice. So take a listen to what happened.

Dr. Bertrhude Albert

14:07

So January of this year, I decided to start a Tiktok. Interesting. I'm horrible with technology, so I've stayed away even my Instagram. I wasn't too active, just because I struggle with technology, but I knew in my heart that I can't just work in Haiti, because at the end of the day, one day, I'm not going to I'm young, but I'm not eternal on this earth, and I want to leave something behind that can help inspire more change Throughout the world, maybe not even just Haiti, maybe with other countries. And as I was thinking through I'm like stories, that's how you change the world. It's through telling your story. And so I decided in January to start my my tick tock. And I've been blown away, as you mentioned within these I mean, I'm going on my sixth month now. Like 55,000 new followers on on Tiktok and even my Instagram, I haven't even like 800-900 people on my Instagram. I'm at about 12,000 people on new people on Instagram, where I'm doing nothing but just telling the true story of the Haitian people, because the the media doesn't do the best job at telling the full story of the Haitian people. And I think as as you all have said it multiple times, people are attracted to stories like they want to hold on to something they feel is real and authentic. And that has been my tagline. Is a Haitian American dedicated to telling Haiti's true story. And so that's exactly what I do on my Tiktok, just telling the stories, having short clips of different parts of Haiti. I mean, yeah, Haiti was the first free black Republic in the world. Haiti gained independence in 1804, and when Haiti gained independence, Haiti inspired the freedom and liberty of other Latin American countries. That's why you can see Haiti's flag in the Colombian flag. You see Haiti's flag being honored throughout these flags. When Haiti gained independence, Haiti gave independence, not just for Haitians, but for the world, for enslaved Africans across the Caribbean, across the world. And that's why you see that Haiti being the second nation in the Western Hemisphere, the first established nation in the Caribbean. We inspired the abolition of of slavery in the Dominican Republic in several Latin American countries, Haiti stands as a powerful symbol of freedom and liberty, specifically for for us black folks and and when you see that story and you share it, people are like, I've I never knew this. I did that's not what that's not what media or school has taught me, and it's my joy to share that story with the rest of the world.

Becky Endicott

16:58

Okay? Doctor, joy she brought,

Jonathan McCoy

17:00

yeah. I had to pull this up while that clip was playing. Not only is it so resonant that her profile still reads a Haitian American dedicated to telling Haiti's true story, like that hasn't changed so clear, but she now has 114,000 followers, so she's 10x since that interview, and her voice is so human, so direct, it meets the very moment she leans into uncomfortable conversations to provide a voice of reality, and now she's gathered this online community of hundreds of 1000s of people across all of her social channels, and is growing the conversation and the ripple And that's what this conversation today is all about,

Becky Endicott

17:43

yeah, she's got the 114,000 on that platform, but then she's got almost 300,000 on tick tock. So we're talking about almost half a million people who are following Dr B and getting this enlightenment. And it's connected back to this beautiful nonprofit that she has. They can come learn these stories, and then they can help power what's happening right now. And I just think what she's doing is brilliant. Okay, we're in the home stretch. We're coming up on our final example. And of course, we had to drop in Gloria Umanah with hope boost. Yeah.

Jonathan McCoy

18:19

I mean, we love Gloria. She had this idea to turn old phone booths, you know, the old pay phone booths, into beacons of hope, where mental health resources could be delivered right there in community, in a beautiful, kind of accessible format. She didn't want hope booth to just stay an idea, though. She wanted it to show up in real life. Yeah,

Becky Endicott

18:40

and I will tell you it connected with me so deeply I joined the monthly Giving Club. And can I tell you the benefit of being a monthly giving donor to the hope booth? I'm plugging it right now. I get a handwritten thank you card once a month from somebody on their team. I am not kidding. I have so much joy when I go to my mailbox. But here's the thing, if Gloria had just had this dream, kept it on paper, if she hadn't invited people in, think about the joy and the connection and the help that would have just been stagnant. The Vision needed community to make hope booth real. She needed people to help build the first boot booth, to share that idea, to replicate it in other cities. So hereshe is breaking down just a little bit of how this worked.

Gloria Umanah

19:31

What does it look like to use our creativity to impact people where they are, who are never coming to another, gathering, a conference, a church, a workshop, a retreat, any of those things ever again. How do we create something that's accessible and embedded in our culture and our community? And the reason why a telephone booth came to mind for me is because I remember, I know I look young, but hey, I saw them. I remember as a kid, we would drive around the city of Atlanta, and it was so easy to spot. A telephone booth, especially at night, because of the light that shines through it. And I thought to myself, well, that's the perfect depiction of hope. It's light in the midst of darkness. And I thought the beauty of these telephone booths was that they were embedded into the community. It wasn't there one day and gone the next. It was drilled into the ground. It was available 24/7 and all it took was 10 cents to be able to access whomever you needed. And I thought to myself, Well, shouldn't Mental Health Access be the same? Shouldn't it be embedded in our communities, in our culture? Shouldn't it not require much money, if any at all? Shouldn't it be available 24/7, around the clock, not dependent on if a therapist is available or not, or your pastor or your friend, or how do we do that? And so that's when our team sat together and said, well, let's just remodel telephone booth. And I said, Okay, does anyone know any carpenters? And they were like, what? And I was like, I don't know anything about this. I quite literally don't know anything about this. I just have an idea in my head, and that's when I realized the power of community truly and inviting people into the story of what you're building. I think sometimes we could be overly protective over vision and ideas, but I think to myself, if I had never invited people into the story of building and developing hope booth, it actually would still be on a piece of paper. It wouldn't have manifested into reality today right now, because of my own insecurity, or my own fear, or sometimes even pride. And so realizing the beauty of what happens when different people with different strengthskind of come together. That's when we sat and thought through, okay, how do we build this thing?

Jonathan McCoy

21:37

Gosh, this is like back to back chills on these episodes, but I just had this picture of, like an open hand, because we can't hold so fast to our vision that we don't let other people carry it with us, build with us, spread it. And that invitation, like, changes everything.

Speaker 1

21:54

Yeah, and you look at something like hope booth today, and it's in 32 cities, three countries, 18 states, like all of those, have hope booth installs, and I'm gonna here to tell you, as an ambassador, I would love to double that number in the next year or two, because I love Gloria talking about just that light coming down. And to me that spoke to me as a donor, as a human like the metaphor of just needing help at some time and making that accessible to others. So love that so good. I think so many examples wrap this up, like, let's, let's put a bow on this.

Jonathan McCoy

22:31

Yeah. I mean, we're gonna prompt you with a few things here as we start to round out. But I want to ask you, or have a couple gut check moments for you. Number one is, can you enumerate what is your one line promise? What are you putting out there? What are you inviting people into? The second is, can people see the future that you're describing? And I guess follow up question, do they want to be part of that? So how are we really wrapping words around this vision that is really something that people want to be part of, see their place in it. And then the third one is, would your biggest supporter today get your story right in their own words? It doesn't have to be verbatim, but good one what, you know, ask some people, this is why we love surveys and focus groups or just having one on one meetings, asking people about what they see, the perspective and understanding, where's the gap from what you're trying to do and how people are interpreting it. And then the fourth one is, how could you make your message easier to share? We always are verbose around here. Let's be honest. I can tone set for like, 20

Speaker 1

23:32

minutes. I couldn't vote for an hour. Yes, we are. But

Jonathan McCoy

23:35

like, how can you get down to the clearest place that we don't want families to have a medical bill, you know, something so simple that it can become easily spreadable and shared at the kitchen table. I

Speaker 1

23:47

also think that there's four components that I think could take this to the next level. And the first one is that your voice has got to be so human and authentic. Are you guys watching chat GPT? Like, trying to be human. Like, it's a little creepy sometimes. Like, how accurate can get. But you are human. The work is human, the way people feel when they interact with your mission, that is human. And the authentic piece is so important because it means we're telling the truth. And back up again to that trust component, the more we tell the good the truth in good times and in bad it shows that this isn't just something that happens. It's not a clear path every single time. So make that voice human and authentic. The second thing is, you've got to paint a picture of the future. I feel like you talked about this a little bit. Jon, you said, Can people see the future that you're describing? Can they see themselves as someone with a paint brush helping you paint that future? That is the difference. They don't want to just see this thing eradicated. They want to be a part of eradicating it. The third thing is, you got to make sure. That message is so clear and repeatable. And you said easy to share. Jon, I'm like, what is the shortest possible way we can say this, where it gets into somebody's head over and over. Stephen Hackett, talking about the statistics of St Jude, it is in his head he can, you know, right off the tongue, pull those things off because he is a rabid fan and because he has heard those messages so many times. This really takes me back to this trend we have this year, of owning your own narrative. And if your messages are long, it's going to be hard to make them repeatable. If your biggest supporter can't get your story right? Then that is a chance that we need to reorder our narrative. And then the last thing is, let community carry your message. This concept, we've talked about it at impact up as community is the carrier we think we are. We think we own the channels and the distribution we own like a piece of it. We are gatekeepers, but the carriers are the passionate community that can take it and run with it, and they will take it to heights that we could have never conceived on our own.

Jonathan McCoy

26:10

I love that mental picture, and it happens to be the truth too, which is really awesome that also is helpful. You know, we couldn't leave you without a one good thing, and we're going to push you to mobilize alongside us. So your move for today, after this episode is we've challenged you to write down that one line, what's that one kind of like sentence, message, CTA, that you could share with your community. That's step one. But this one good thing has got another part. We want you to test it. We want you to see if it sticks. We want to see how people respond. So call up a friend, call up a donor, shoot it in an email or a text and say, How does this land? How does this feel? And this is a work in progress. You can figure out how to make it, you know, resonate more as you have these conversations, but the key is just putting it out there, not keeping it in your Google Doc or your Microsoft Word document, but like saying it and bringing it out into the world,

Speaker 1

27:05

love that. So next episode, we're going to talk about what happens after your message sticks. We're going to talk about how to empower action. This is our final episode, because all of this momentum needs a next step, and that's where we're going to lead

Jonathan McCoy

27:22

you. Your voice deeply matters, my friend, your vision deeply matters. But both of those things only connect if they can really move people to carry it with you. So we really want to empower you to go test it, get out there and see how it sticks. We're

Speaker 1

27:37

rooting for you, and we'll see you in our final episode empowering action.

00:0000:00