The Two Most Important Questions You Must Be Able to Answer as a Social Enterprise or Nonprofit

“A lot of you cared, just not enough.”

― Jay Asher, Thirteen Reasons Why

No matter how passionate and dedicated you are to a cause, it is an unfortunate truth that not everyone will feel as strongly as you do, if at all. Whether it is helping the blind receive scholarships and additional support and resources in India or microfinancing community-level projects in Uganda, people have their own reasons that compel and inspire them to focus their time and effort on particular causes or projects. The belief that they will make a difference is strong, but the real question is, how do you translate that beyond taking on the burdens of the world on your shoulders into making it a shared joyous duty for all? 

Let’s ask two very important questions and a few talking points around them that you absolutely must know the answer to, whether you are reminding yourself why you wake up each day, pitching to a potential donor or investor, introducing your passion to friends and strangers, speaking before a live studio audience and panel of investors, or reaching out through social media. 

Who cares?

This is the objective question you must first answer before going to the second one. Let’s say your cause is related to protecting your data and personal information. The question doesn’t just posit why people who are affected care, but why the people interested in your data and personal information care. 

To answer that particular example, the people who care are advertisers, scammers, government intelligence agencies, large tech firms (big data), and you.

Why they care is because of what they can do with that information, whether it is to track what you are doing or steal your information and use it to drain your bank accounts. Why you care is because obviously, it’s your information…in addition to information of anyone in your contact list!

With this example, the question of “Who cares?” should be simple enough to answer and makes the second question much easier to expand and elaborate on as necessary. You give facts that are easy to understand how something affects others, and you should always, always be able to make it relevant to whomever you are talking to so that they know that they aren’t separate from the cause you represent. 

Why should I care?

This is both objective and normative and serves to go from facts to the right way of appealing to people’s self-interests. Whether you like it or not, not everyone is interested in the things you are, as many people believe that something doesn’t affect them at all or doesn’t affect them enough to care, and others also believe it’s not worth the mental time or even a single penny of their money to do anything. 

Let’s return to the previous example of protecting your data and privacy: why should I care if someone has my information? Common responses are that “I’m not important enough for anyone to care” or “It doesn’t make a difference since I’m just one person” and so on. These people are misinformed, and by being misinformed or ignorant, they draw incorrect conclusions about why it’s okay to not care about your cause. 

Without evangelizing or getting sanctimonious, the key to making others care about what you care about is to point out where it’s in their self-interest. One great response then for people who don’t care about spies and misinformation or keeping tabs on you and all your contacts is to then ask, “Do you like getting robocalls or seeing lots of spam in your inbox? Well, if not, then guess what? They send all of that to you because your information is compromised and people are selling it to scammers and spammers who hope you’ll eventually be tricked and lose more of your money to them.”

By revealing something that everyone can agree on is significant, you make it easier to get someone to realize why they should care. 

When Harvey Milk ran for office in San Francisco, he won not because of his major causes that history remembers him for with gay rights, but because he got people’s interest by talking about how if he were elected, he would make sure that there would no longer be dog poop everywhere on the streets and nobody would have to worry about stepping in it again. 

By starting small with something everyone can agree on, you open the door for them to eventually listen to bigger issues, such as gay rights in the case of Harvey Milk, and then you win over very dedicated supporters.

Conclusion

If you can answer both questions quickly, simply, and succinctly, you give yourself a chance to make your mission much easier to follow like aiming your arrow at the right target, and you make it easier to help others help you. Help others understand, and others will help you ecstatically.