Bruce Ashford: You Do Not Have To Be A Nonprofit

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Bruce Ashford introduces himself with a line he has clearly used before, and it is good enough to survive the repetition: “You know how the people out there who are telling bad stories in the world tend to hog the mic and get all the attention. Well, I help the good guys steal the mic, move to center stage, tell a better story and get the attention.”

He runs The Ashford Agency, working with CEOs of nonprofits and small businesses who have a high-value mission and cannot grow at the speed they want. They come to him, he says, with a problem of message clarity, structural clarity, or both — the first being a marketing message that is “really not landing, it’s not compelling,” the second being how to get all the moving parts of the business “firing together at the same time.”

You Do Not Have To Be A Nonprofit To Do Good

The line came in response to a question from host Jeremy Rivera about a specific misconception — that non-profit means no money, and that working on something meaningful requires martyrdom.

“At the beginning of this interview, I said, you know how there are people out there telling bad stories in the world. They tend to hog the mic. Well, I help the people who are out there telling good stories in the world steal the mic, move to center stage and tell a better story. And I think the important thing out of what you just said there is that you don’t have to be a nonprofit to do good in the world.” — Bruce Ashford

The claim is not that the legal structure is irrelevant. It is that the structure and the impact are separate decisions, routinely collapsed into one. Bruce is well placed to say so because he works both sides — and he is blunt about the practical difference when you cross the line: “the biggest line in the sand between the two is government regulation. The minute you move into nonprofit work, there is a whole praetorian guard of government regulations that you’ve got to learn to follow.”

That reframes the choice usefully. Incorporating as a nonprofit is a decision about funding model and compliance burden, not a permission slip for doing something worthwhile.

First Impressions Are Visual, Commitments Are Message-Based

Bruce’s central complaint about the marketing industry is that it has specialised away from the thing that persuades:

“Marketing firms are focusing on social media channels — very good to do that. Website building, user experience, graphic design, all of these different subspecialties within marketing. But the core expertise within marketing is the one that’s gone by the wayside, and that’s the actual message. Why is that important? First impressions are visual.” — Bruce Ashford

And the second half, which is the one that matters commercially:

“Commitments to buy are message based. So marketing firms are usually using boilerplate techniques or boilerplate AI language that is C or C plus level at best. And the most important thing for a business or nonprofit to do is to put together a highly effective message. The words that we use to talk about ourselves are the differentiating factor.” — Bruce Ashford

He is not arguing that design does not matter — he explicitly grants that first impressions are visual. He is arguing that the two do different jobs at different points, and that budget flows overwhelmingly to the one that opens the door rather than the one that closes it.

“C or C plus level at best” is a precise and slightly brutal grade. Not wrong. Not embarrassing. Adequate — which, when every competitor also has access to adequate, is another word for invisible.

Make The Customer The Hero, Not Yourself

The most immediately usable part of the conversation is his story structure, and the diagnosis that comes with it:

“Whether you’re a business or a nonprofit, the marketing story that you tell, the marketing message that you have, should be one in which the customer is the hero. Far too many businesses, in the marketing message — if you read it carefully — the business or the product is the hero. With the nonprofit, the nonprofit itself is the hero. But if you want an effective marketing message, you need to write one in which the customer is the hero.” — Bruce Ashford

He then walks the structure, and it is worth following because the roles are precise:

“A hero, just meaning a main character, wants something really badly. And at the beginning of the movie or the story, they want something. The guy wants to win the girl or the warrior wants to win the war. If they don’t want something, you don’t have a story. But very quickly, the hero faces a problem of some sort that’s too big for him.” — Bruce Ashford

Your job is the next role, and it is deliberately a small one:

“The guide in the story is your business. You’re the guide. You appear briefly. You’re in the story, but you’re not the hero of it. And you show empathy and credibility. You empathize with the problem, how difficult it is to find a product that meets their need or whatever. You show that you have credibility and you can solve their problem. That’s where testimonials come in, stats. You give them a simple plan. It’s very easy to buy from us.” — Bruce Ashford

“You appear briefly” is the instruction most businesses will find hardest to follow, and it is the test. Count the sentences on your homepage about you versus about the reader’s problem.

AI Script Is Soulless And People Can Tell

Bruce is not anti-AI — he concedes the volume problem is real. But his description of the output is unsparing:

“It’s, I guess, soulless. People just can tell when something’s written by a machine. And now that everybody is doing their writing with machines, it just all blurs together.” — Bruce Ashford

“It all blurs together” is the strategic point rather than the aesthetic one. The failure is not that any individual piece is bad; it is that the category converges. When every competitor sounds the same, sounding fine is a competitive disadvantage.

His position is that AI has to be used — “we’re going to have to use AI to write, because we’ve got to produce so much” — which makes the differentiator the input rather than the tool. A machine given a genuinely distinctive message will produce distinctive volume. A machine given nothing will produce the average, at scale.

Which loops back to his core argument. Message clarity is not a nice-to-have that AI made obsolete; it is the only remaining input that AI cannot supply for you.

Six Components Every Organisation Shares

The structural half of Bruce’s practice rests on a six-component model. For a business, the components he names are leadership, marketing, sales, product optimisation, management and productivity, and cashflow.

His observation about how owners actually engage with that list is the useful part. The components most on the front of their brain are the mission-facing ones. Then, under pressure, attention jumps to marketing — “I need a magic trick with my marketing.” And, as he puts it, “the magic trick doesn’t necessarily usually work.”

“And then you have to go a little deeper and realize, wait a minute, at the leadership level, I’ve got to set my critical objectives correctly and then take those critical objectives and connect those to how we market, how we fundraise, how we do our services. And then if I do that, all of a sudden I’m going to have the cashflow that I’m looking for.” — Bruce Ashford

The sequence is leadership first, then the connection from objectives to activity, then the money as a consequence — producing what he calls “a virtuous cycle instead of a vicious cycle.” Marketing is not the entry point; it is the second link in a chain whose first link is usually missing.

He also has a short, practical note on mission statements. Most are “no good” and cannot be leveraged for marketing “because nobody remembers them — not even the CEO, not even the board that voted them into existence.” The fix is unromantic: write a really good one, repeat it in every all-staff meeting, put it on all your marketing collateral, and it becomes a powerful piece of collateral in its own right.

Connect With Bruce Ashford

Bruce runs The Ashford Agency (theashfordagency.com). He is refreshingly clear on scope: “You don’t want to hire me for SEO. You don’t want to hire me to do graphic design. There’s so many things I cannot do, but those are two things that I can do and do very well” — message clarity and structural clarity.

He also runs a non-employee model, working with trusted vendors, and his advice there is worth repeating: “don’t be afraid to fire a vendor and hire a different one.”

Full episode on Castos. The nonprofit half of this conversation is covered on our sister show at Unscripted Green & Non-Profits.