Thought Leadership Advocacy for Non-Profits | Stu Manewith | 328

Welcome to Leveraging Thought Leadership! Today's guest is Stu Manewith, Director of Advocacy and Thought Leadership at Omatic Software. Omatic Software deals in data integration for non-profits, helping them maintain and grow donors and donations. His thought leadership changes lives!

Before joining the team at Omatic Software, Stu worked as a fundraising director for non-profits for 16 years. His deep experience gives him an exceptional view of the sector, and taught him to understand the needs of both software vendors and fundraisers. By marrying those two interests, Stu was able to create incredible insights. His work became a turning point, helping non-profits achieve even greater mission impact though using cleaner, more integrated data and finding effective pressure points.

Stu talks about the epiphany that made him realize that non-profits could better serve their customers by studying past stories, tracking data points, and comparing the outcomes. Utilizing this process, he's been able to better deploy software into non-profits, helping them create case-studies, assess previous assumptions, and create new, stronger methods of fundraising. In turn, those case studies have shaped informational blogs, webinars, and internal training documents to raise awareness both inside and outside non-profit fields.

Thought leadership practitioners often debate the advantages and challenges of top-down versus bottom-up approaches to organizational education. Stu chimes in with his thoughts on why bottom-up has worked better for him and his clients. He uses that approach to learn about customers and their problems, taking those issues to heart. In this manner, he helps non-profits place the customer's needs first, allowing the organization's success to grow naturally from that good work.

If you deal often with non-profits, or if you seek to understand the importance of data integration to thought leadership, this conversation offers clarity and inspiration. Stu offers a ton of valuable insights, so you might want to listen to this one twice!

Three Key Takeaways:

• If you want people to listen to your thought leadership insights, be sure to present yourself as a trusted subject matter and domain expert.
• Never undervalue the importance of listening! Through understanding a client or customer's needs, you gain an intimate knowledge of their problems, making it easier to create custom solutions.
• Get out those case studies! Study them, challenge the outcomes, and turn that content into blogs, webinars, and other great learning tools.