It’s a situation you’ve been in before: You meet a stranger and they ask what you do for a living. You tell them you work for United Way. They ask what United Way does, and you then have 30 seconds to capture their interest before their eyes glaze over and you move on to a conversation about the weather.

Does your 30-second pitch secure you a new donor?

If you’re like most United Way employees or volunteers, the answer is no. After a polite follow up question or two, the conversation has moved on and yet another potential donor has slipped away.

So, how can you stop potential donors from slipping away? The secret is to create a coherent, compelling, and easy to understand elevator pitch. This is a topic we’ve written blog posts about before, which you can find here, here and here. However, today’s blog post combines many of the lessons we’ve shared in the past into three easy-to-implement secrets for crafting the best-ever elevator pitch for your United Way.

Secret 1: Stop Talking About Partner Agencies

When you are interviewing for a position at a new company and your potential future employer asks you to explain your current job, should you answer by talking about the unique and important work you do or the work that your colleagues do? You’d talk about yourself, of course! If you highlight the strengths of your teammates instead of yourself, how can you expect to get the job?

When you have the chance to give an elevator pitch, the same theory should apply. When someone asks about United Way, keep the focus on what your United Way does. Ideally, you should focus on sharing the in-house programs and initiatives that are unique to your United Way. If you don’t have your own programs or if your United Way is a local funder for community nonprofits, that’s OK, but your discussion of partner agencies should stop there. If you only have 30 seconds, it is critical to keep the focus of your conversation on the unique work of your United Way.

Secret 2: Focus on Community Impact

Going back to your hypothetical job interview, if you said during the interview that you currently worked in education, your interviewer would probably have some follow-up questions. Afterall, what does it mean when someone says that they work in education? Are they a middle school teacher? A principal? Maybe they work in the office of their children’s school or maybe they write textbooks? The challenge with offering vague descriptions of your work is that it raises more questions than answers.

When you are crafting your elevator pitch, you need to get more specific than saying that your United Way works in education, income, and health. To help your audience develop as deep an understanding of United Way as possible in a short amount of time, you need to get specific about the work your United Way does. To do this, pick a few specific issues out of each impact category. For example, instead of talking generally about education, talk about your work to promote kindergarten readiness or high school graduation. The more specific you can be about the issues that your work addresses, the better your audience will understand United Way.

Perhaps your United Way works to address many issues in your community. This means you may not be able to list every issue your United Way is helping to address. This is okay because most donors won’t be able to remember more than two or three issues anyway. To cut down on the length of your elevator pitch, just pick one or two issues to highlight.

Secret 3: Forget About Your Campaign Goal

Think about the last nonprofit to which you made a donation. Got it? Now ask yourself: Why do I give to that organization? Is it because you knew they had a fundraising goal of $2 million and you wanted to help them reach that goal? Probably not. Did you give to that organization because they’re making a meaningful difference and you believe their work is important? Most likely.

When you have the chance to give an elevator pitch, you need to speak to topics that will hold your audience’s attention. This means you need to speak to issues that potential donors care about. Rather than using your elevator pitch to share how much money your United Way needs to raise this year, talk about the impact your United Way desires to make in the community. “This year we’re working to ensure that 2,000 of our community’s most vulnerable students graduate high school” is far more compelling than “This year we hope to raise $1.3 million.”

Recap + Another Approach

Creating compelling elevator speeches is a challenge for most United Ways. While it is difficult to cram everything you want to say into a 30-second speech, it’s much easier to say the things your audience needs to hear if you remember to stop talking about partner agencies, get specific about the issues your United Way impacts, and forget about your campaign goal.

However, if you find that writing an elevator pitch is still too complicated, maybe what your United Way as a whole is doing is too complicated. To learn more, check out this past blog post.