Guest: Bruce Ashford, founder and CEO of The Ashford Agency · Host: Jeremy Rivera
Bruce Ashford works with CEOs of nonprofits and small businesses who have a high-value mission and cannot grow at the speed they want. His diagnosis of why nonprofit leaders in particular get stuck is generous, and it is structural rather than personal.
“Most of them in my experience get into nonprofit work because they’re passionate about a mission and they usually don’t have business experience. Sometimes they do. Often they don’t — often they have strong leadership skills, but have no idea how to wrap their head around moving an organization forward.” — Bruce Ashford
Note: this conversation was recorded for Unscripted Small Business. We are carrying the nonprofit half of it here because that is where Bruce spends most of the interview.
Nonprofits Are Organisations Too
The framing that unlocks the rest is that a nonprofit is not a different species of organisation, only a differently funded one. Host Jeremy Rivera put the common misconception to him directly — that non-profit means no money, and that you have to become a martyr to do the work.
Bruce’s answer was that you do not have to be a nonprofit to do good in the world at all, and that the real dividing line between the two models is not virtue but paperwork:
“If you move from the business model to the nonprofit model, of course, on the financial end of things, the biggest difference is that your nonprofit’s being carried forth on the back of donors who buy into the vision. But I’d say the biggest line in the sand between the two is government regulation. The minute you move into nonprofit work, there is a whole praetorian guard of government regulations that you’ve got to learn to follow.” — Bruce Ashford
He also punctures a common assumption in passing: “a lot of people don’t know that there are some nonprofits that can and do make money.”
The Six Components, Applied To A Cause
Bruce’s model is the same six components for both kinds of organisation, with the labels translated:
“I divide nonprofits into six components, similar to a business. The categories are a little different, but they’re parallel. You know, businesses: leadership, marketing, sales, product optimization, management, productivity, cashflow. Well, the nonprofit is a little different. It’s leadership and governance, because nonprofits got a board over them.” — Bruce Ashford
The translations he walks through:
Leadership becomes leadership and governance, because there is a board above the executive. Marketing stays marketing. Sales becomes engagement — and this is where his sharpest observation sits. Product optimisation becomes program optimisation. Management and productivity is “about the same.” And cashflow becomes financial health: “the point of a nonprofit is not to make money for shareholders. There’s no initial public offering with a nonprofit. But they’ve got to bring dollars in from donors.”
The engagement component carries a structural burden the business version does not:
“Instead of sales, it’s engagement. They basically have to sell to two audiences. They have to sell to donors… And then they also kind of have to sell to their program participants, the people they serve. I mean, it’s weird to talk about it. It’s selling, but…” — Bruce Ashford
Two audiences, two entirely different value propositions, one function. A business sells to the person who pays. A nonprofit has to persuade the funder and the beneficiary separately, and the arguments that work on each are not the same argument. His discomfort saying it out loud — “it’s weird to talk about it” — is exactly the discomfort that stops the function being resourced properly.
Why The Magic Trick Does Not Work
His account of where nonprofit leaders’ attention actually goes is the most useful diagnostic in the conversation:
“Numerous of these components are usually not on the front of their brain. Usually on the front of their brain is programs and impact. That’s the first thing they get into it for, the programs and the impact. Then when they get into the thick of leading, the next thing that suddenly goes into their brain is marketing. I need a magic trick with my marketing to help my programs go forward and get my donors drawn in. But the magic trick doesn’t necessarily usually work.” — Bruce Ashford
Programs first, then marketing as the emergency lever. Four of the six components never get deliberate attention until something breaks.
His correction runs the chain in the other direction:
“Then you have to go a little deeper and realize, wait a minute, at the leadership level, I’ve got to set my critical objectives correctly and then take those critical objectives and connect those to how we market, how we fundraise, how we do our services. And then if I do that, all of a sudden I’m going to have the cashflow that I’m looking for. The donors are going to see the value in this thing and they’re going to give. And so then you have what’s called a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious cycle — a cycle upwards instead of a cycle downward.” — Bruce Ashford
The causal claim is that donors give when the connection between objectives and activity is legible to them. Fundraising difficulty is downstream of leadership clarity, not a separate problem to be solved with better appeals.
First Impressions Are Visual, Commitments Are Message-Based
Bruce’s core complaint about marketing applies to appeals as much as to advertising:
“The core expertise within marketing is the one that’s gone by the wayside, and that’s the actual message. Why is that important? First impressions are visual.” — Bruce Ashford
“Commitments to buy are message based. So marketing firms are usually using boilerplate techniques or boilerplate AI language that is C or C plus level at best. And the most important thing for a business or nonprofit to do is to put together a highly effective message. The words that we use to talk about ourselves are the differentiating factor.” — Bruce Ashford
His word is “buy”. We have applied it to giving because he explicitly includes nonprofits in the same sentence, but the substitution is ours.
The nonprofit version of his hero framework follows directly, and it is a harder instruction here than in business:
“With the nonprofit, the nonprofit itself is the hero. But if you want an effective marketing message, you need to write one in which the customer is the hero… The guide in the story is your business. You’re the guide. You appear briefly. You’re in the story, but you’re not the hero of it.” — Bruce Ashford
Nonprofit communications are structurally tempted to make the organisation the hero, because the organisation is what needs funding. Bruce’s structure asks you to make the donor or the participant the main character and cast yourself as the guide who “shows empathy and credibility” and hands over “a simple plan.”
He has a blunt aside on mission statements too. Most are useless for marketing “because nobody remembers them — not even the CEO, not even the board that voted them into existence.” The remedy: write a good one, repeat it in every all-staff meeting, and put it on all your collateral.
Why AI-Written Appeals Fall Flat
“It’s, I guess, soulless. People just can tell when something’s written by a machine. And now that everybody is doing their writing with machines, it just all blurs together.” — Bruce Ashford
For an appeal, this matters more than for an advert. A donation is not a transaction with a product on the other end; it is an act of belief in an organisation’s character. Prose that reads as machine-assembled undercuts the specific thing being asked for.
Bruce is not telling anyone to stop using the tools — he accepts the volume pressure is real and that AI will be part of the writing. His point is that the differentiator moves upstream, to the message itself. A distinctive message produces distinctive output at volume. An absent message produces the average, faster.
For a nonprofit with one communications person and a year-round calendar of appeals, that is a genuinely practical conclusion: the highest-leverage hour is not spent writing the next appeal, it is spent fixing the message every appeal is generated from.
Connect
Bruce Ashford runs The Ashford Agency (theashfordagency.com), working on message clarity and structural clarity. He is candid about scope: “You don’t want to hire me for SEO. You don’t want to hire me to do graphic design.”
The business-side version of this conversation is on our sister show at Unscripted Small Business. Related listening: Andy Choi on profit with purpose, and the full interview archive.