A good program, and nobody walking in the door
In September 2010 I took the president's seat at H.E.E.A.L. Santa Barbara, a new nonprofit that helped people through grief and loss with exercise and the arts instead of the default path, clinical talk therapy. It was a volunteer seat. I was running Tellus Design and Build at the same time, and the board was a small group of people who believed in the model and gave it their time.
The program was good. My first read of the job was that a good program would carry its own reach, and that fundraising and governance were the cost of keeping the lights on. That read was wrong, and it took contact with how families actually arrive to see why.
Nobody in acute grief searches out a program and compares options. A grieving child does not pick an arts class. An adult picks it for them, usually a school counselor or a hospice or care coordinator, in a short conversation at a full desk. That adult is the customer. They are not making a clinical recommendation when they hand over a sheet. They are managing their own exposure. They want to avoid a complaint, offer the family something that costs nothing, and close the conversation without creating work. Our model also asked them to send a family somewhere other than the default, which is a harder referral to make than a familiar one.
So the organization did not need a better program or a louder pitch. It needed three things, in order. An outreach approach that made the referral cheap to give. A board and a funding base that made it safe to give again. And enough money coming in to keep the first thing true.
The easy yes goes first
There were two ways to walk into a school. The credentialed pitch leads with the board, the model and the funders, and asks the counselor to be impressed. The other leads with the three facts a counselor can repeat without looking anything up. It is free, it is local, and there is no waitlist. Nothing in that sentence has to be checked before the sheet changes hands.
I led with cost and access, and I used credibility for the second job, which is keeping a referral from feeling risky once it has already been made easy. A fair skeptic would say a free program gets referred no matter who runs it; I think that is right about the first referral and wrong about the second. The counselor who sent one family and heard nothing, or heard something bad, does not send another. The counselor who sent one family and then saw a recognized grant, a real board and a clean public face is the one who hands out the sheet every time.
I would rather be the easy yes than the impressive one.
How I came at this one
The first question was what a yes costs the person who has to give it, a counselor or a coordinator with a full desk. That question fit because nobody in grief chooses the program; an adult chooses it for them, and that adult is weighing their own exposure, not our mission. The second question was what makes the second referral as easy as the first, and the answer to that one was governance.