Soapbox Engage Blog

The world of nonprofits is a constantly-changing world of people. It's critical to continuously grow, evolve, learn, and improve yourself and your skills. Whether you're a development professional or hold another nonprofit job, you're responsible for building people up, empowering them to transform the world, and helping them see that change happen.

It's an inspiring—and sometimes overwhelming—task! Sometimes you need some inspiration yourself. Or perhaps you're looking for a new perspective or strategy to address an old problem.

We've assembled ten TED Talks to help you refine your donor relationships, increase motivation, and refine your leadership tactics to yield a greater influence on the world.

Table of Contents: 10 TED Talks to Empower Your Nonprofit Leadership

1. How to Be a Better Fundraiser
2. How Money Can Buy You Happiness
3. The Art of Asking
4. How to Start a Movement
5. Want to Help People? Listen to What They Need
6. Servant Leadership: What Does it Look Like to Lead?
7. Modern Nonprofit Board Governance
8. How Great Leaders Inspire Action
9. The Way We Think About Charity Is (Backward)
10. What Nonprofits Can Learn from Coca-Cola

10 TED Talks to Empower Your Nonprofit Leadership

There are loads of great resources and TED talks out there, but we narrowed it down to ten great resources to help boost your motivation, inspiration, and leadership skills.

1) How to Be a Better Fundraiser

Kara Login Berlin gives a top tier seminar on fundraising. We were stunned and inspired at how she broke down thinking about money, asking about money, and developing relationships. Not only did she make fundraising easy, but she also clarified ways we can improve as humans adn as development professionals.

2) How Money Can Buy You Happiness

What if you could motivate your donors to give more? Scott Holdman wants to tell you the secret to giving is that we naturally find joy when we give, but we’ve been convinced by our culture that our consumption will bring us joy.

Inspiring your donors is as simple as reminding them of who they’re helping and what purpose they’re serving with their money. Holdman eloquently and graciously reminds us all of what we can really do with our cash.

3) The Art of Asking

Amanda Palmer talks about developing a relationship with her donors to fund her music career. She draws the link between empathy and donations. People are eagerly willing to give when a relationship of trust, respect, kindness, and empathy exists between them and the recipients. We found this talk especially inspiring for nonprofits to revisit before a new fundraising campaign to remember their connection with donors is what drives giving.

4) How to Start a Movement

Derek Sivers takes us through a short, spontaneous moment to dissect how one person can unite people to a common cause by remembering the most important part: the power of followers.

Your donors are everything. Sivers reminds us that bringing new people into your movement will help you establish strong relationships and create new donor opportunities down the road.

5) Want to Help People? Listen to What They Need

Ernesto Sirolli teaches us from his failures how to help the people we want to help. His advice to nonprofits is to sit down with their mission recipients and listen to where the aid needs to go instead of making assumptions about where it should go. This video is an incredibly inspiring reminder that our help should always start with humility and learning.

6) Servant Leadership: What Does it Look Like to Lead?

Liz Theophille offers the secret of how to develop trust and inspiration in your team. Through the use of examples from her own career, she describes how leaders succeed and fail with their team. This TED Talk offers excellent insight into why it’s important to cultivate a culture that is safe for feedback, bold in creativity, and full of trust.

7) Modern Nonprofit Board Governance

Chris Grundner walks us through traits that make up a stellar nonprofit board by synthesizing his experience as a leader in both the for-profit and nonprofit industries. He reminds us that that passion is essential, but that great nonprofit leaders are called to higher standards.

8) How Great Leaders Inspire Action

Simon Sinek summarizes the mentality of innovative leaders as this: Everything they do is driven by “why” they do what they do. Their mission is directed around a meaning of life and a mindset of change. Why does your organization do what it does? What’s your purpose? What are you fighting for?

Sinek shows you not just how to find that “why” again, but how to inspire others to buy into your mission.

9) The Way We Think About Charity Is (Backward)

Dan Pallotta asks us to think about our biases towards nonprofits raising money and asks a powerful question: “how do we stop looking at a nonprofit’s spending and start looking at a nonprofit’s impact?” This talk has excellent, data-driven examples of how you can apply for-profit methods in fundraising and marketing to improve your nonprofit practices. It may also have some insights to help you invite your donors to think differently about charity, too!

10) What Nonprofits Can Learn From Coca-Cola

Melinda Gates (yes, that Gates), breaks down in blunt detail how our nonprofits can learn from one of the most successful corporations in the world by studying their impressive business machine. Before you think this is just a corporate business plan, Gates ties nonprofit examples to what Coca-cola is doing now so you can better visualize how to apply the concepts to your mission.

Though this talk was given a decade ago, we found it to still hold valuable introspection on where to improve not only your nonprofit’s impact process but also your fundraising and marketing processes.

Even if you’ve seen this before, this video is still a great way to start thinking about where you can improve your organization’s efficiency and overall impact.

There are many other excellent resources out there, but these TED talks offer some wisdom, strategy, and, when necessary, a booster-shot of vision and inspiration for your fundraising team.

Here are three more resources to help inspire and boost your nonprofit fundraising.

• 8 Proven Ways to Grow Your Nonprofit Email List: Sometimes called a “donor list” or a “subscriber list” is a collection of email addresses from people who have agreed to receive regular updates from you. Email lists are dynamic--meaning they grow and shrink as people join and unsubscribe. But, the more people you have on that email list, the more potential donors you’re interacting with! This blog has eight practical strategies to help you add more names to your email list, no matter how big or small it is right now.
• 9 Must-Have Features for Your Nonprofit’s Online Donation Page: Online giving is only getting more popular, which means your online donation page might be one of the most critical pieces of your fundraising efforts! This blog post helps you do a quick assessment of your donation page to make sure you’ve included all the essential features so you can get the most out of your fundraising this year.
• 9 Steps to Plan and Host A Virtual Fundraiser: While many nonprofits moved their fundraising events to virtual platforms out of necessity during the COVID-19 pandemic, when things begin to return to “normal,” it’s very possible that some of these virtual fundraisers will stay around. This blog includes practically everything you need to know to plan a virtual fundraiser for your organization, whether it’s during the pandemic or long after social-distancing is a thing of the past.