449-SYB-Karen-Cochran.mp3: this mp3 audio file was automatically transcribed by Sonix with the best speech-to-text algorithms. This transcript may contain errors.
Carol Cox:
Small shifts can make a huge difference in your presentation impact and the results that you get. Hear what they are. And my conversation with Karen Cochran on this episode of the Speaking Your Brand podcast. More and more women are making an impact by starting businesses, running for office, and speaking up for what matters. With my background as a TV political analyst, entrepreneur, and speaker, I interview and coach purpose driven women to shape their brands, grow their companies, and become recognized as influencers in their field. This is speaking your brand, your place to learn how to persuasively communicate your message to your audience. Hi there and welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast. I’m your host, Carol Cox. I know, especially if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, that you want your presentations to do more than inform. You want your audiences to transform, to be inspired, to take action, and you want to make sure that you’re attracting new speaking opportunities and clients long after you’ve left the stage. But as I’ve talked about quite a bit, many experienced professionals get stuck in what I call the expert trap, where they really want to deliver so much information and content from a good place, instead of focusing on creating connection and really getting into the hearts and minds of their audiences. My guest today, Karen Cochran, has done this really well with the presentations that she’s been delivering. She is the founder of Philanthropy Innovators, and she’s led teams that have raised over $1 billion. I don’t even know how to comprehend a number that big to be personally involved in. Karen worked with us in our one Day Speaking Accelerator workshop in Orlando, Florida earlier this year, as well as in a presentation makeover before she presented at a conference. And we’re going to talk about the results that she got from that conference. So we’re going to talk about that approach that she took, what she learned about storytelling, and how she now uses her voice to inspire generosity and change. Karen, welcome to the Speaking Your Brand podcast.
Karen Cochran:
Thank you. Carol, it’s a pleasure to be here.
Carol Cox:
Well, I mentioned that you’ve led teams that have raised over $1 billion. Again, what an incredible number and incredible success. What drew you to the field of philanthropy in the first place and the work that you now do?
Karen Cochran:
So I was lucky to find my calling as a paid student caller in college. And I really got hooked because I wanted to help people and I wanted to solve problems. And philanthropy does just that. It’s the intersection of donors helping organizations Fund new ideas and have impact.
Carol Cox:
And so you then worked for other organizations until you started your own company?
Karen Cochran:
I did. I spent three decades in higher education, academic medicine, and as a volunteer for non-profits before founding Philanthropy Innovators in 2022. And the whole concept behind that was, I wanted to take everything I had learned and share it as broadly as possible. You know, I was lucky enough to be raised in a family where one of the tenants was. A mistake is only a mistake if you don’t learn from it. And I obviously in a 30 year career, made a number of those. Um, had a lot of mentors who helped me learn a great deal about the business. And as I reflected on what I wanted to do next, I really honed in on the fact that as fundraisers, we’re very, very good at putting a bow around the cultivation, what we call the solicitation, the stewardship cycles, all of those things to have the donor experience, what the impact is going to be. But we don’t do a really good job of sharing what it really took to get the donor to say yes.
Carol Cox:
Mhm. Okay. So let’s then dive into this presentation that you gave at a conference earlier this spring called AFP icon. And I know it was a resounding success because you shared the feedback with me that you got from the people who were in the audience. I always love when conferences send the audience survey feedback that they that they collect. So it’s really, really helpful because you get not only the quantitative data like the 54321 rankings, but also a lot of times people in the audience will leave testimonials and reactions and let me share one of them, because you you sent this to me as well. Here’s what one person said. Thank you for providing the most valuable session at AFP Icon Seattle. You validated what I know, ignited new ideas that I can act on and re-inspired me in the work we do in philanthropy. I work with two billionaires. Thank you for the invitation to keep in touch on success stories. Amazing, right? The most valuable presentation at the conference. I love you said validation, new ideas and inspiration. So why do you think this presentation that you delivered, Karen, was such a success?
Karen Cochran:
So, you know, having worked with you, I can tell you that one of the things I received through not just the day long series that I went through, but also the coaching call that we had beforehand, was help with the structure. This was a story. It was a story about $1 billion donor who was a very unlikely billion dollar donor. And the woman’s name is Ruth Gottesman. She gave $1 billion to Albert Einstein Medical Center in the Bronx, but she never expected she could do a gift of that size. And what happened was through a series of connections, right? Much like storytelling, fundraising is all about connection, right? Her connection was with a gentleman by the name of Doctor Azahar, who runs Albert Einstein. She became close, even closer than she already was as a faculty member to the institution. The piece that she had no knowledge of was when her husband passed away. He had left her a portfolio of Berkshire Berkshire Hathaway stock and he had been at one of the early salon dinners in the 1960s and met Warren Buffett personally. And it’s likely that he invested somewhere around 10 to $20,000, which back then was a lot of money. And he had kept that as at the side, as a secret portfolio. And upon his death a couple of years ago, the valuation was more than $1 billion. Wow. And he left her one note and it said, do what you think is right.
Carol Cox:
Well, no pressure, right?
Karen Cochran:
No pressure. And when she started processing and thinking about what could I really do, she turned to her family. But she also turned to people she trusted. And Doctor Azahar was one of those people. And when she asked the question, you know, what would you do with, you know, a transformational gift. I don’t think she put a dollar figure on it. He said I’d make tuition free and that was it. That was what she wanted her legacy to be. All at once, everything just lined up beautifully. And for me, reading the story in the New York Times, I instantly thought, oh my gosh, what a really great story to tell others about how gifts happen. And so I think that one of the things that’s reflected in that feedback is the fact that I told the story all the way through. And honestly, Carol, that would not have been possible before me coming and being part of the session with you all and then following up via coaching because they were minor tweaks, but they were they made a big difference in the presentation, in the engagement of the audience and how the message was received.
Carol Cox:
All right. Well, I want to dig into a little bit more about storytelling in general in just a moment. But before we do that, I remember when you were at our one day in-person workshop, and then you got up on our practice stage and you delivered a portion of your talk with the story and and your framework. I think you were also practicing your framework at the same time. And you did such a beautiful job, you would have thought you had notes or a teleprompter in front of you, but you did not, because we do not allow that for good reason. But you did such a great job doing that. And then I remember in the coaching session that we did on zoom after the workshop to help you prepare for this conference, you had sent me your slide deck in advance, and your slides are beautiful, like beautifully designed so they look great. And I agree with you. It wasn’t like you didn’t need a wholesale change in your presentation slide deck. It was just these minor things with where to start the story, where to pause it, and then come back to it later. So the audience is kind of waiting to hear and see what happens. So first tell me about your experience being on our practice stage at the workshop. And basically we’re like, okay, here you go. Get up there and tell us something.
Karen Cochran:
Well, I think one of the most important things was from the minute I walked in the room, I realized I was not alone. And I think so often when you are presenting, whether it’s for a even a panel or if you’re facilitating or you’re the keynote, like I was, uh, out at Icon, it’s really important to understand that going through a process can strengthen your ability to deliver the message. And that was so evident not not in a scripted kind of way, but in a welcoming kind of way, because from the very beginning of that day, I was with it happened to be a room of women, but women who were at similar pivot points in terms of their speaking journey and the support I felt and my ability to really learn and grow from them can’t be underestimated. It was really, really transformational for me.
Carol Cox:
Well, I love hearing that, Karen, because so much of the work that we do is one on one, because that’s where we can really, you know, dig deep and ask you questions and kind of pull out those different ideas and stories. But we also see such a benefit of bringing women together literally into the same room, whether it’s in person or even if it’s in zoom, because of that sense of, like you said, I’m not alone. Everyone’s on this journey and on a similar point in the journey, and you do get so much energy and support and a sense of community. And I think momentum coming out of something like that?
Karen Cochran:
Absolutely. The connections I made there are still very, very much alive. Um, I’ve seen a number of women outside because there was a wasn’t exclusively Central Floridians, but I’ve seen a number of people in the community and we’ve connected, you know, and stayed in touch as supportive members and interested in one another’s speaking journey.
Carol Cox:
Oh, I love that. Yeah. It’s interesting. We do get about half and half half from Central Florida. You know, Orlando, Central Florida driving distance and about half who fly in from Washington state, California, Texas, Boston from all over the place. So it is a lot of fun to expand your network in that way. All right. So I mentioned that you had sent me your slide deck. And so we were just making some adjustments to how you were telling the story and how you were bringing in the lessons that you learned from that story that you wanted to share with the audience. Before we dig into those details, I want, as I promised, to talk about storytelling in general because we know how important storytelling is during public speaking to make that connection with the audience. But in philanthropy, you know, like nonprofits know how important storytelling is. There’s a very well known kind of, um, thing saying that, you know, a million people is a statistic, but one person is a story, and that one person is how you get someone to connect to a cause. So I guess, Karen, tell me a little bit about how you learned the importance of storytelling in the work that you do, and how that has translated into the talks.
Karen Cochran:
So I think you’re absolutely right, Carol, in that, you know, philanthropy is about storytelling at its essence. If someone is going to give you if it’s their time, which is highly valuable, or their money, obviously another resource, right? It’s about making that connection. And I learned a long time ago. It’s about going in and listening to the donor. Not going in with just a menu in your head of how they can help you. So one of the things that I do, not just in philanthropy, but in as I prepare to speak anywhere, is to do my research to understand who the audience is, whether that’s a donor audience of one, or whether it’s an audience of several hundred. Right. The message is not going to be received if you don’t understand who you’re trying to communicate to. So I see a lot of parallels between fundraising and speaking. And these days I. I can’t emphasize enough to young fundraisers. Storytelling is a critical, lifelong skill that you need to focus on and continue to develop because that is what helps you connect to the donor and engage them at a level that actually makes them want to learn more.
Carol Cox:
Yes, because then so have you had this experience with donors? Where do they see themselves sometimes in the people that they’re going to be helping, in the sense that maybe that’s where they were at at some point in their life or just or what? How does the storytelling help them to decide that this is this is the work that they want to support?
Karen Cochran:
So sometimes it is, um, you know, I think of a scholarship, right? Uh, in a higher education setting, someone who was a first generation student, um, and how that scholarship not just transformed their life. Life, but will transform the lives that come after it because of the percentage of individuals who will continue to go to higher education. Right? But oftentimes it is about some other experience they’ve had in life, or an experience they wanted to have that they felt they missed out on. So the storytelling for me is about learning what’s most meaningful for them in terms of the organization you serve and connecting them to the part that’s going to resonate most strongly.
Carol Cox:
Um, yeah, the listening is key because it’s what is most meaningful to them. And then reflecting that back to them, that’s so important. So Karen, let’s talk about some of the specifics of the presentation that we worked on together. As you mentioned a little bit ago, you were focusing on this, this story of the woman, Ruth, who ended up donating $1 billion to this, uh, the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. And I remember when we were I was having you practice it that I, I suggested that you foreshadow a little bit and add some suspense to the story to kind of keep the audience wanting to know what happened instead of kind of delivering it like all at one time. And so I’m such a big believer, the more that I do this work, and the more that I work with clients like you, is, is the power of going deep within a story rather than going broad? So a lot of times as presenters, we think that sharing with our audience 10 or 15 different examples like boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. Like here’s all these quick highlights is the way to do it. But I have found and even as myself as a as someone in the audience, I like the depth because I really want to get inside the person’s head, like who is the story is about whether it’s you as the speaker or someone you’re talking about. Because I want to know, maybe this is just me. Like what makes them tick? How did they decide this? What led them to do this? What happened afterwards versus kind of that? That broad brush where I don’t really get those those details that help me to understand myself better. And after all, that’s what audiences want to do, is understand themselves better.
Karen Cochran:
Absolutely. So I would say to your point, the foreshadowing. Foreshadowing was key. I think one of the things you told me that I have come back to a number of times, not just in that presentation, is that there’s a difference between how we speak and how we write.
Carol Cox:
Yes.
Karen Cochran:
And having spent a large part of my career in higher education and academe, I can be a very cerebral writer and part of as I go to this next level, part of what I need to in many ways unlearn, right, is that simplicity is best. Simplicity is going to enable me to make the most connections in the room, and to then build off of that simplicity in a way that makes sense for the audience. So one of the things you told me is don’t tell them in the beginning about where the billion dollars came from, because I think I had that early on in almost the introduction, you were like, no, no, no, you can say, I’ll tell you later, which is exactly what I did. And then about, you know, five minutes towards the end, I shared what I shared with you earlier, which is where the money came from, to enable Ruth to actually make tuition free at Albert Einstein Medical Center.
Carol Cox:
It’s almost like a big reveal. Yeah, yeah.
Karen Cochran:
A little bit of theater.
Carol Cox:
Yes. Right. It makes it fun. And to your point about the difference between writing and speaking, and I know, again, so many of the clients we work with, they have their authors, they’ve written books, they enjoy writing, they like writing. A lot of them come from academia or spent time in academia. And I remember when I was I was working on a PhD in history. And of course, that writing is very, very different than how I had to train myself to write as a marketer. And it took a while for like the old writing muscles to switch over to the marketing style writing muscles. But now my challenge is, as I’m working on my book, I need to kind of unpack some of the marketing muscles because it’s very short, pithy, right? Like and then and instead books tend to be longer, like I need to fill out more content. So it’s kind of you, you find that balance. But to your point about the difference between speaking and writing, and you probably have found this, Karen too, is that when we write, we tend to use larger vocabulary words with more syllables, a lot more commas, a lot longer sentences. But when we talk, we generally do not do that because it is it feels so much more fluid. And we’re waiting also for the audience to react.
Karen Cochran:
Exactly.
Carol Cox:
All right. So I’m.
Karen Cochran:
Better myself.
Carol Cox:
Okay, well, I think you did. All right. So I’m so glad that this presentation was so successful for you. I also, and I see in my notes from our that coaching session that we also talked about adding humor, because I very intentionally always make sure to add humor to my talks because yes, usually something off the cuff will happen and I’ll maybe make a, you know, a joke. That’s kind of makes sense in the moment. But I also like to plan the humor because it’s good to have some some moments where the audience can kind of chuckle to themselves or smile to themselves. So do you remember what you did in your presentation for humor?
Karen Cochran:
I don’t remember what I wrote into my script. I do remember what happened, which was, after all of this preparation, the actual slide deck that had my, you know, your Presentation mode notes in it didn’t come up.
Carol Cox:
Which I think is a good thing. I.
Karen Cochran:
Well, in many ways it might have been the best thing because I in the moment had to rely on all of the preparation I’d done. But I did make a joke about it.
Carol Cox:
Oh, well, there.
Karen Cochran:
You go, audience. Yeah. Right up, right away. The audience cracked up, so.
Carol Cox:
That is good. Whenever technology doesn’t work, the best thing to do is, number one, you just have to go with the flow. And then number two, just laugh about it because the audience will totally understand.
Karen Cochran:
Absolutely.
Carol Cox:
What that’s like. All right, Karen, so you have obviously done a lot of work in philanthropy. You’ve had a long career in it. So what advice do you have for whether it’s speakers or leaders, whether they work in philanthropy or any type of industry, if they want to have the the kind of, you know, success and presence and An impact that you’re having with the talks and the workshops that you’re doing.
Karen Cochran:
So I would say one of the things I’ve learned the most, um, through my engagement with you, but also over the last three years, is give it the time it deserves. It’s so easy when you’re in a leadership role or you’re in, um, you know, your young fundraiser and you’re going from project to project to donor to donor to not give it the time it deserves. You are the expert and you deserve to show up as the expert, which is usually not the issue. It goes back to the communication, right? Thinking through how can I be most effective in communicating this message? How can I express it in a simplistic way that the majority of the people will understand? How can I listen to my audience and connect? So I would say when you have those opportunities, because they will be given to you if you are a leader in the field, make sure that you give it the time it deserves so that you get the maximum learning out of it, but also you get the maximum ROI out of your investment.
Carol Cox:
Thank you for that advice, Karen. That’s really helpful. What is next for you? What are you working on?
Karen Cochran:
I’m working on a number of fun things. I’m continuing to grow the business beyond Central Florida in my three verticals, which are philanthropic strategy, executive coaching, and interim leadership. And I’ve recently made a connection with center for Creative Leadership, where in 2026, I hope to be in, uh, whether it’s on the stage, facilitating a panel or co-presenting with a woman by the name of Jean Leslie, uh, about her research on Poly crisis, which expands.
Carol Cox:
Not.
Karen Cochran:
Just. Yeah, well, it’s about how we are now at a time where there are a number of crises that happen simultaneously. We can no longer just address one crisis at a time. So her work has been ongoing for the last several years on this subject, and we connected over the summer and really had a wonderful dialogue about not just how it impacts people in the philanthropic sector, but how it impacts people more broadly. So I’m really looking forward to finding that stage and sharing that passion with her.
Carol Cox:
Oh that’s lovely. We’ll definitely keep me updated on that. I love to see these collaborations. And where’s the best place for listeners to connect with you.
Karen Cochran:
On my website? That’s w-w-w. And there will be a link to directly access me there and you can sign up for my for my monthly newsletter as well if you’d like.
Carol Cox:
Okay, great. I’ll make sure to include a link to that in the show notes, as well as a link to connect with you on LinkedIn, because I know that’s where both of us tend to hang out and and spend our time as far as social media. Well, Karen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast and for sharing your experience working with us, but also your experience presenting and your experience with storytelling in philanthropy. I know that listeners have gained a lot from hearing you.
Karen Cochran:
Carol. It’s genuine pleasure, and I always am more than happy to talk with anyone about your support and the experience I had as, um, a coachee and a participant.
Carol Cox:
Oh well, thank you so much. For those of you listening, if you would like to join us at our next one day in-person Speaking Accelerator workshop in Orlando, Florida. We host them in during the early part of the year and in the fall. So our next one as of right now is coming up on February 19th, 2026. And you can get all of the details and register now at speaking your Brand.com again, that’s speaking your brand.com. And if it’s better for you to work virtually with us, we also offer presentation makeover packages. So we’ll take your existing slide deck outline presentation that you have and we’ll give it a complete makeover, similar to what Karen and I talked about. Or we can start from scratch in a one on one VIP day. Whatever is the best fit for you. And the best thing to do is to schedule a consultation call with us so that we can talk about what you need and the best options for you. You can do that at speaking your Brand.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.
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