Takes one to know one

The age-old playground barb, “It takes one to know one,” actually has some real applications today.  For example, it does take a good board member to recognize another good one—and to recognize the not so good ones.  And a good executive director or program director is much better at spotting the other good ones—and the not so good ones.  And the list could go on.

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What is it that makes it so easy to spot your own kind?  As a redhead for most of my life, I have always been able to spot the real ones from the dye jobs (admittedly, sometimes, you would have to be blind not to), but even the really, really, really good dye jobs.  First, you notice the obvious things:  the skin tones, the eyebrows, the hair on arms and legs.  Then you get to the nuanced things:  shading variations in the hair, the eyelashes, preponderance and location of freckles.  You know what to look for and how to look.

That’s why I was so pleased a while ago to read about the Bleu Market Group (no, not the Blue Man Group) in Cincinnati (although they work nationally).  They are a marketing group that helps nonprofits with marketing strategy, events, connecting to donors, all the usual suspects that you would expect from a marketing firm.  But to assume they are like every other marketing firm would be a huge mistake.  Just looking at their home page compared to the home pages of other marketing firms that work exclusively with nonprofits—oh, wait, how many of those are there?—and you know there is something different here.  But that difference is one of the nuances, a subtlety that makes all the difference in the world.  Bleu Market Group is itself a nonprofit (like The Nonprofit Center – one of our key distinctions in the nonprofit capacity-building world).

It takes one to know one.  Move beyond the words on the home page and you’ll find other words and sections that resonate and say, “we are a nonprofit just like you.” As a nonprofit, it faces the same struggles mentioned on its website:  “Not enough money, no marketing dollars, poor board leadership, lack of volunteers, no social media experience, subpar websites. Those are just a few of the issues that haunt nonprofits today….”  Okay, Bleu Market Group probably does have a marketing budget greater than the zero that most nonprofits have, and its website is anything but subpar.  I have no idea whether the board is poor or great or in between, but I know it is too small.

But no matter how good your board, there are times when having a board is a pain in and of itself.  They have to either raise and/or earn money like the rest of us; they use language that could be on any of our websites, language like, “[a]s a mission driven organization, we believe the world would be a better place…” and “anybody can be great because anybody can serve”; they hold fundraising events for themselves and others.  And they use words like “haunt”—these are the struggles that haunt our daily lives—and capture the reality of our daily lives.  They are one of us.

This is not a dis on for-profit companies that provide services to nonprofits.  Rather, it is an homage to those who provide us services and understand our realities from living it and who are, therefore, better informed to formulate solutions that can be applied within those realities.  They see both the neon signs and ones that don’t flash so garishly.  Because it takes one to know one.