by Dr. Kevin Dean, President & CEO, Tennessee Nonprofit Network
I already know exactly what my opening speech will be at Tennessee Nonprofit Conference in September.
Why? Because it is the exact same thing I said at last year’s conference. And it is exactly what I say whenever I speak to anyone: that we are better together as nonprofits, we have more power as a coalition of nonprofits, and that building community is a vital part of nonprofit leadership.
I know I have to be a broken record. Sometimes, I feel less like a dynamic sector leader and more like one of those pull-string talking dolls with a grand total of four recorded phrases. Pull the string: “Collaboration!” Pull it again: “Advocacy!”
But why do I do it? Because science tells me I have to if I want to have any actual influence.
If you are a nonprofit leader, you probably feel this fatigue too. You are tired of explaining your mission. You are tired of begging for unrestricted funds. You assume everyone else is just as exhausted from hearing it. But the truth is, if you want your staff, board, funders, and community to actually absorb your message, you cannot say it just once. You have to say it until you are entirely sick of it, and then you have to say it ten more times.
Here is the cognitive science behind why sounding like a skipping record is the most effective leadership strategy you can deploy.
The Psychology of Repetition
Our brains are fundamentally lazy. They are constantly looking for shortcuts to process the massive amount of information bombarding us every day. Repetition takes advantage of these mental shortcuts to bypass skepticism and build trust.
The Illusory Truth Effect
When people hear a statement repeatedly, they are significantly more likely to believe it is true. Familiarity breeds credibility. The brain uses recognition as a proxy for truth; if a message feels familiar, the brain assumes it has already vetted the information in the past, effectively lowering the audience’s critical defenses.
Think about your staff and your organization’s core values. If you mention that your organization “centers community voices” once during an annual staff retreat while everyone is digesting stale bagels, that phrase will evaporate by lunchtime. But if you repeat that phrase in every staff meeting, integrate it into performance reviews, and paint it in giant letters on the breakroom wall, the Illusory Truth Effect takes over. It stops being a neat idea from a retreat and becomes an undeniable fact of your workplace culture.
Cognitive Fluency
Cognitive fluency refers to how easily our brains process information. Repeated messages require less mental effort to understand with each exposure. When a message is easy to process, it inherently feels safer, more accurate, and more authoritative to the listener.
This is incredibly important when dealing with individual donors. Sometimes, in an effort to sound like serious intellectuals, we pack our appeal letters with academic jargon. We write things like, “We are operationalizing a paradigm-shifting, synergistic capacity-building model.” The donor’s brain has to work incredibly hard to process that word salad. But if you repeat a simple, clear message across your newsletter, website, and direct mail—like “your gift puts books in the hands of children”—their brain processes it effortlessly. That ease of processing translates into trust, and trust translates into donations. Keep it simple, and say it often.
The Mere Exposure Effect
People tend to develop a preference for things simply because they are familiar with them. The more an audience is exposed to a specific message, the more favorably they will view it, provided their initial reaction was not actively hostile.
This is your secret weapon for community members and local politicians. At first, your new advocacy campaign might just seem like background noise to them. But the more they see your yard signs, read your op-eds, and hear your name at city council meetings, the more warmly they will feel toward your cause. They might not even know why they like your organization, but the mere exposure has built a baseline of goodwill. You have essentially worn down their indifference through sheer repetition.
A message cannot spread if the initial audience forgets it before they reach the parking lot. Repetition is your primary defense against human forgetfulness.
The Ebbinghaus Forgetting Curve
In the late nineteenth century, psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus demonstrated that humans forget a massive percentage of new information within hours of learning it. Spaced repetition—delivering the message at regular intervals—interrupts this curve. Each time the message is repeated, the rate of forgetting slows down, eventually cementing the concept into long-term memory.
Let us apply this to your board of directors. You present a brilliant, comprehensive strategic plan in January. Everyone claps. By March, a board member raises their hand and asks if you have ever considered opening a thrift store, selling branded tote bags, or launching a massive gala to raise a million dollars—ideas completely absent from the strategic plan. You cannot scream. It is just Ebbinghaus at work. To defeat the curve, you have to attach your strategic goals to every single board agenda, read them aloud at the start of every meeting, and tie every financial report back to them. You have to repeat the plan until they recite it in their sleep.
How Repetition Drives the Spread of a Message
Once a message is finally internalized, repetition plays a crucial role in getting the audience to act on it and share it with others.
The Rule of Seven
In advertising, the Rule of Seven is a classic principle stating that an individual needs to encounter a message at least seven times before they will take action. While the exact number of required touchpoints is heavily debated, the underlying principle is absolute: singular announcements rarely generate movement.
If you send one email asking people to register for an event, you will get a handful of hyper-organized people signing up. The rest of your list saw it, thought “I should definitely do that,” and immediately got distracted by a video of a raccoon eating grapes. You need the second email, the third social media post, the fourth personal text message, and the fifth newsletter reminder. Action requires sustained, sometimes annoying exposure.
Creating the Illusion of Consensus
When a message is repeated frequently across multiple channels, it creates a sense of ubiquity. If someone reads a concept in a newsletter, hears it referenced in a meeting, and sees it on a slide deck, it establishes social proof.
This is exactly why coalition building is so powerful. If one executive director tells a foundation that restricted funding is suffocating their impact, the funder views it as an isolated complaint from a grumpy leader. But if fifty nonprofits repeat that exact same message in grant reports, at town halls, and in direct conversations, it creates an illusion of consensus. It stops being a whine and becomes a sector-wide movement that funders simply cannot ignore.
The Strategic Caveat: Repetition with Variation
There is a risk to all this: repeating the exact same words in the identical format over and over leads to audience fatigue. You do not want to become white noise.
The secret to effective communication is repeating the core premise while constantly varying the delivery. You cannot just yell “we need general operating support” at the same foundation officer every Tuesday. But you can deliver the exact same foundational message by:
- Telling a personal story about how flexible funding allowed you to fix a broken boiler and keep your shelter open during a freeze.
- Presenting hard data about how organizations with operating reserves weather economic downturns better.
- Sharing a testimonial from a program director whose sanity was saved by unrestricted funds.
- Creating a visual graphic showing the true, unglamorous cost of running your programs.
Alter the format but keep the central thesis identical so you build cognitive fluency while keeping the audience actively engaged.
So, when I stand on stage at Tennessee Nonprofit Conference in September and tell you that we are better together, you might roll your eyes. You might think, “Here goes Kevin, pulling the string on his back again.” But that is exactly the point. Science proves that my broken record approach is working. If you want to actually move your mission forward, you should probably start skipping a beat yourself.