Does Your Organization Leave Others Thunderstruck?

Starting and running a nonprofit is in many ways responding to a calling that you never wish you had. When you answer that call in response to a feeling or an emotion that you cannot answer in any other way, you know that the work will be simultaneously the most difficult challenge and the most rewarding, because nonprofits are not solving an easy problem. They are solving a problem in society that the private sector and government have abandoned.

“And I thought, what could I do? And I knew There was no help, no help from you… You’ve Been Thunderstruck.” – Angus and Malcolm Young (aka AC/DC)

In their iconic stadium anthem “Thunderstruck”, AC/DC galvanizes people to engage from the opening riff built on a B note to a repetitive phrase that creates a community chorus confident in victory. It comes as no surprise that the song is used as the opening entrance for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders to signal that something big is about to happen in the stadium. The song prepares you that something worth noticing is about to happen without telling you exactly what will happen.

This tension is the exact place where successful nonprofits sit. They are solving something monumental that others could not see how to do in a way that was profitable or easily replicable. These successful nonprofits have at their core like any good song or football team – a framework of players or pillars that can work together to create a championship legacy. AC/DC might call that “Thunderstruck,” at Fullanthropy we call it CLAIM Your Legacy™.

Like a Super Bowl football team, CLAIM Your Legacy™ has 11 distinctive pillars. Each do something important to help the nonprofit achieve their purpose in transforming communities, sustain their funding, and create devoted fans, who joyfully give.

C encompasses communication, connection, and community. Communication describes how you share your organization’s story and purpose. When done meaningfully and with genuine emotion, that story connects with the recipient. Repeated connections build a community where the recipient wants to belong. “Thunderstruck” does this with a percussive beat and a chorus that creates a simple rallying cry.

L reflects both leadership and leverage. Leadership includes your stakeholders that can move the organization forward or backward or sadly maintain the status quo by keeping it stagnant. Gifted leaders and those you train well who understand their true role will leverage existing resources to create more without requiring significantly more organizational effort. In the same way, the percussive beat running through “Thunderstruck” leverages repetition in a way that naturally creates energy, vibrancy, and genuine enthusiasm, which creates a culture of victory.

Administration is the systems that you use to create organizational excellence. It is the precision that the DCC uses to transform the audience into watching the opening sequence again and again after 16 years. Your stakeholders do not see each step; they see the collective excellence that makes nonprofit management seem effortless. Spoiler alert: It is as complicated or even more than teaching 36 dancers with different styles a five-minute dance sequence that ends with them jumping into the air and landing in a split simultaneously.

Impact and innovation represent the I. Impact is the measurement and documentation of transformational work that successful nonprofits do in eradicating suffering or amplifying beauty. Innovation is the unique way in which they do it. Every song that you have likely heard on any satellite radio station uses the same 12 notes of “Thunderstruck,” yet how each songwriter crafts the melody, the chorus, the lyrics, the beat, the order of the notes, etc. is where the innovation lives.

M is both the traditional nonprofit elements of mission and money coupled with an unexpected but equally critical element – mindset. Mission is the why that your organization exists. Great nonprofit leaders understand their work as great musicians do – a calling that they have to answer. Money includes both obtaining it to ensure stability and stewarding it well to ensure sustainability. While it does not motivate the work, it propels it forward. The connective tissue between mission and money is mindset. It is the quiet knowing that what you are doing has profound value and deserves everything. Mindset is hearing a simple guitar riff with a melody and knowing that it is an anthem in the making. The Young brothers likely understood what they were creating long before it became the football anthem for the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders, Florida, LSU, and Alabama.

Each pillar is important in its own right, but when it is playing at an NFL level alongside the 10 others, it produces a Championship Legacy organization, but Angus and Malcolm Young articulate the Championship Legacy that succeeds where the market and government fail so much better near the closing of “Thunderstruck”:

“Yeah, it’s alright We’re doing fine Yeah, it’s alright We’re doing fine, so fine. You’ve been thunderstruck.”