Jeff Schreifels
Welcome everyone. Thanks for joining me. We have a great guest today. Tom Ahern is one of fundraising's most well-known individuals who is an expert in donor communications. He's written six well-regarded books about how to fundraise effectively. And he's one of the country's most sought after creators of fundraising messages. So let's get ready for some real talk.
How are you?

Tom Ahern
I am fully caffeinated.

Jeff Schreifels
Excellent, so am I.

Tom Ahern
Alright, let's explore stuff.

Jeff Schreifels
So let's talk. I want to know your fundraising story. I know you weren't a fundraiser from the beginning. You were in other stuff. How did you get... So tell us about that and how you fell into fundraising.

Tom Ahern
Right. I was invited in by my wife and partner, Simone Joyaux. So at the time, that would be in the late 90s. I was co-partnering in a very small ad agency, but we were doing very good work. We were getting international awards for the stuff we were doing. So we felt that we had something special, and we were working on making it better and better. But our clients were a mix of everything from adult education at a college, university, to roof membranes for factories. Whatever needed to be sold, we were in charge of getting the materials together, the communications materials, in order to promote these products. Simone basically asked, can you write a direct mail letter? Now I'd become a trained direct mail copywriter by that time. It took about 10 years and I said, well, it can't be that different. I'll, yes, I'll give it a shot. I'll even do the first one for free because I don't know if it's going to work or not. In the marketing world, you get paid for what you produce. So my understanding of fundraising was very basic. It was, we're here to make money. And I came in from that side. Then I started looking at the materials that Simone was sharing with me. And she often told the story. And I'd come thumping down stairs from my office to her office and shouting, what are you people doing? Because all the fundraising materials I was looking at, reviewing, analyzing, did not have the same level of psychological impact that I had learned in marketing, in pure marketing. So that's how I got into fundraising.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Tom Ahern
Basically as an amateur coming in from a different background and seeing it with fresh eyes.

Jeff Schreifels
So what's happened since that time with you and your affair with fundraising?

Tom Ahern
Well, it worked out. I mean, I go back to the early 2000s getting really into the non-profit world. And not only did Simone say, well, could you do this for one of my clients, but the local AFP chapter had an annual conference. And one of their speakers pumped out and they called me in a panic really saying, we understand you know something about marketing. Can you talk to our fundraisers about it? Okay. And you know, I did, and that was my first presentation ever. If you jump forward about a decade, I'm now getting on an airplane every two weeks, flying somewhere to present at a conference or AFP chapter or for, you know, sometimes training staff.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Let me ask you about this as you're flying around. Why do you think you're so popular? Not everyone gets to do that. So you started writing about donor, started writing, getting successful at it. What was it?

Tom Ahern
I had a moment, you know, like everyone. I had lots of stage fright. I didn't know if the material was any good. I was assembling it myself. There weren’t a lot of people to lean on. I mean, you had basically a divide in the non-profit world between the agencies who knew what they were doing and were testing what they were doing and really had a good grip on results. And then you had the other 99% who couldn't afford an agency who were trying to do this by guesswork. And the guesswork wasn't necessarily producing the best results. So the basic move was to take simple marketing principles and move them into non-profit.

And then I met people like Adrian Sargeant and Jen Shang both, you know, Adrian as a marketing professor and Jen as a psychologist, specializing in fundraising behaviors. They taught me a lot. And I was also, I had the advantage actually of going to these conferences and meeting every bloody expert on the earth who knew something about fundraising. And so in my downtime at a conference, I would go and listen to other speakers. I made it my hobby, for instance, to listen to people talk about planned giving. And eventually that became one of my subspecialties.

Jeff Schreifels
I remember I was in the direct response world, agency world for many years at Domain in Seattle. And how much fun it was to have clients who were willing to test and try new things. I remember, and that's where we started testing the donor-focused newsletter idea.

Tom Ahern
Yes! Yes!

Jeff Schreifels
And putting an actual ask in the newsletter and actually having a reply device that we put in. And then we saw these newsletters that were barely breaking even to making tons of revenue for these organizations. It was so fun thinking of different things like that. I remember we had a client, it was called America's Second Harvest, which is now Feeding America.

Tom Ahern
Absolutely.

Jeff Schreifels
We got them as a client in 2001. And at the time, they only had nationally about 50,000 donors. And they were making maybe $9 million total in revenue from all of those donors. And they probably had...

Tom Ahern
I've got to say, you're talking agency talk, they only had 80,000.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, right. But, you know, for Feeding America now, that was like, they were like in their infancy. But what the beauty of it was is they had a leader that said, I want to double growth in two years. And here's $8 million. Here's $8 million to make this happen.

Tom Ahern
Wow. Mm-hmm. He invested in growth.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, at the time the executive director is like, and he got the board on, board was like, okay, we're gonna do this. We, Tom, must have, we must have A-B split tests, I don't know, or put panel tests on 160 different types of testing. What's the message that people are going to resonate with around feeding people that are, that need food. And it was so much fun. We learned so much from all of that testing. And I'm happy to report they did double growth within two years. And today, you know, they have half a billion donors, they have 500,000 donors, you know, their billion dollar organization, you know...

Tom Ahern
Yes, that I do. Of million.

Jeff Schreifels
And it all started that time. And it was just so much fun to work on something like that and to gain all this information about how do donors respond to different messages.

Tom Ahern
Domain, I want to give a big shout out to Domain and what it produced in terms of a platform on which to build better donor communications. And my original exposure to Domain happened in Miami. I was down there conducting focus groups for AFP International.

Jeff Schreifels
Okay.

Tom Ahern
I think it was still NSFRE at that point.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Tom Ahern
You know, I had time between my focus groups just to go in and hang out and listen to people. So I saw a program note that said that Domain was going to explain how donor newsletters could sometimes raise more money than actual mailed solicitations. I thought there is no way in the world that that could...

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Tom Ahern
Possibly be true. So I went and I heard and I'm sorry I don't remember which of you heroes was speaking that day. But I listened and I took copious notes as one always does and came back to my little practice based in Rhode Island and I had a client who said, well, we'll try it. And we took your formula. I mean verbatim and did a newsletter for a Boys and Girls Club and money just started to roll in. So, you guys were the impetus for what became a very big sideline for me, which is explaining how to do donor newsletters.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, yeah, you had an inc... Yeah, I remember seeing, getting your stuff and how you took that and just ran with it and how people now look at newsletters, fundraising newsletters, donor newsletters in a completely different way. Well, yeah, and...

Tom Ahern
Well, some. It's still a complicated thing to do well, but there's a book and it is in its third edition. And it is a tribute to Domain. I hadn't met Jeff Brooks, who was part of Domain at that time.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Ahern
And then the first time I met him at a conference where we were both speaking, he said, “You wrote the book I wanted to write.” You know, that was good to hear for one thing that I hadn't screwed up too badly. But I was also exploring a lot with looking at all sorts of donor communications and thinking, well, if we did this instead, maybe it would produce more response. Again, a purely marketing-driven point of view.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ahern
All about the money. That eventually got me into trouble, that attitude. But originally, there was so much work to be done. And I was getting invited to places like Australia to speak. I was there from the United States. So I was the designated outsider. And it was a conference for private schools, what we call private schools, they call public schools and universities. And the host, headmaster, got up in front of the entire crowd and announced, “Well, today we're finally going to learn the cheesy methods used in the United States to raise money for higher education,” or words to that effect. He was probably far more eloquent.

But, you know, I'm sitting at a table thinking, yay, go America, because, you know, our universities have billions of dollars stuffed away in endowment. And that would be nice for you too in Australia. So, you know, there was a big world to just do primitive early stage, “Don't do this, do this instead” advice. And, you know, there's always a few people at least in the audience who clung to that, went back to their office and tried stuff. Because that's the basis of getting a different result is don’t do the same thing, do something different.

And here's what you might try. We gave plenty of examples as time went on. At first, it was hard to find good, for instance, donor newsletters. Just what you were producing for your clients like Feed America — that was the 1% of the aid. That was agency work. It was intelligent. It was well-researched. It was always being tested.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Ahern
The clients I was working with at that time were really mom-and-pop charities, except for I was speaking in front of everyone. So I over time began to pick up some very interesting clients.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure you have. Tell me over those years, tell me why you love fundraising.

Tom Ahern
Well, one of the things I love about it is that you're going out to the world — let's say the “world” being in air quotes, of course — and you're going out to a target audience and you're asking them to solve a problem or help you solve a problem. And then you stand back and see what happens next. Now a lot of things can get in the way. For instance, we've mailed on the wrong date and there was just this big, low, quiet, no response to that. That was a mistake. Sometimes the mistakes went in the other direction. We once mailed the same thing three times to the same target audience without changing a word and we just kept making money. So...

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Tom Ahern
You know, it was very experimental for me. I walked into a client called Sharp Healthcare and they're in San Diego and it's a big hospital system there. And I don't know how they found me, but they did. And the pitch from them to me was: do whatever you want — which of course for a copywriter is like, okay, all right.

So they had been using a mail house to write their direct mail appeals, which isn't uncommon. And I put aside the mail house stuff because it was sort of what you would get these days from AI. It was generic. It was predictable. It was unexciting, no emotions, very institutional voice. And I started writing. I had been trained among, by among other people, Jerry Huntsinger, one of the greats of American direct mail fundraising.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Mhm.

Tom Ahern
He had this whole mail series of trainings that he did and I bought it — and now you get it for free incidentally on sophie.org. But I bought it. You know, that's one. He was one of my early mentors. Mal Warwick was another one. And what I had in my head from them, I started writing my letters. And they were completely different than the ones turned out by the mail house. And I have one thought in my head, which was: look, people are coming to the hospital. We call them generically “grateful patients.” If they give money, they don't sue you. And that is basic reciprocity. Because by then, I had read a book about neuroscience.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Tom Ahern
You could barely see behind me. There are over 500 how-to books in my office. So anytime I had an issue or I needed to figure out how to do something, I would read a book or two or three and then try to apply it. In the transfer through your brain and through your pen onto paper, it was totally different. My work was totally different than what was coming out of people like Mal Warwick, but it was and it wasn’t. It still had a psychological basis — reciprocity in this case.

And we had created an acquisition letter for people who had been patients, were discharged, and then about two months later, they'd get this letter saying, “You came to us with your health problem, and thank you for that trust.” And the reason we said “thank you for that trust” is that institutions don't talk that way. They don't make a big deal of — they like to talk about themselves, of course. And the medicine is amazing medicine. So there was no problem depending on the fact that they are producing excellence there. They had just gotten an award from the White House — I forget who was president at that point — for national recognition for their excellence program.

So the letters now are coming to people saying: “You were a patient. Now we need your help because this is a community hospital and it's a nonprofit.” And in some ways we didn’t have to say much more than that because as soon as you said nonprofit, people got, “Well, then you need perhaps my support.” And we ran that letter — it became the control. We ran that letter all the time, year after year after year, for at least five or six years, until somebody got nervous about the HIPAA rules. And we kind of tweaked it a little bit, but by that time, tens of thousands of new donors had jumped on board with Sharp. And I don’t know, last time I looked — this was a couple of years ago — they were bringing in $60 million a year or something like that just through philanthropy, not related to capital campaigns.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Right, that's amazing.

Tom Ahern
Yeah, it got written up oddly in the New York Times by a columnist who covered nonprofits at that time. And that's where my reputation exploded — because of the New York Times thing.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Okay.

Tom Ahern
And because I came out of public relations as well as marketing, and I knew if I just told everybody that the New York Times thought I was great, then, you know, it was like that was a shortcut for them. They didn't have to think twice about it.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, that's amazing — how tens of thousands of new donors to this organization appeared, happened because you wrote an effective communication piece. You know, yeah, two-page letter. And here they are today at 60. It’s like going back to the Feeding America thing, you know, back then when they had 50,000, now they have half a...

Tom Ahern
Two-page letter. That's all.

Jeff Schreifels
Half a billion donors, 500,000 donors.

Tom Ahern
Half a million.

Jeff Schreifels
Half a million, yes, sorry. Not a billion. It’s just amazing to see, you know, being part of the initial start of that and now where it's gone. So that's got to be, feel very satisfying.

Tom Ahern
Well, yeah — although confusing in a way. I mean, I thought I had a good principle behind it, the reciprocity thing. You know, the hospital does something for you, you maybe want to do something back in exchange. Very basic psychology. And yet when I read the letter, it's a very odd, kind of awkward-sounding letter.

There are definitely humans in it. “I” is writing to you. But even so, it was built more for speed than for literary excellence. And the speed being: you start with an initial paragraph that is eight words long, and then you jump to the next paragraph, which is still one line long, then you jump to the next paragraph and you're already asking for a gift in paragraph three. That was completely different than what they had been doing in the past. And as it turned out, it became sort of a structure that then started to distribute itself.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So for a lot of young fundraisers that are either just starting out, what advice do you have for those young fundraisers in how to learn that craft as a good communicator to donors?

Tom Ahern
Well, people will say, “You're a writer. That must be hard. I couldn't do that.” And my answer to that is, well, yeah, you probably could actually — if you had enough training. Because if you have training, you're never in the dark about what to say first, what to say second, et cetera, et cetera.

There is a formula behind appeals — in direct mail or emails or on the web or in your social posts. There’s a formula for engaging the reader. Now part of that formula is the simplest thing I knew, which was that if you use the word “you,” people would pay more attention. And that was strictly from a marketing background.

Tom Ahern
The “you” was the glue that held their brain’s attention. And when I’m looking at the early stuff in nonprofit plans, it rarely used — sometimes never used — the word “you.” So it was like, who are you talking to? And the basic concept behind that, I think more or less as a rationale, is that if we tell people how good we are at what we do, and they understand that, then they will jump logically to, “Well then yes, I should make a gift to this organization.” And that was completely bananas. It was just not — sounds good, but…

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. People want to solve problems. They don't care how great you are.

Tom Ahern
Well, there are — you know, I had so much good advice early years. Jerry Panas, among others, major influence on me. And I read everything I could from Jerry and, you know, other people saying — and I forget who this was, I think it was — oh, I won’t try to remember.

But so: people give to people, and they give to people who are in trouble. Or dogs and cats are in trouble. I treated that as a pure gesture. I didn’t go into, “Well, I wonder what the subtext of that is.” I just wanted them to respond. So the more we worked on tuning these things up over the years — tuning up direct mail, tuning up annual reports, tuning up cases for support, and any other communications interface — the more psychology was getting dumped into it.

So in some ways, two streams that are flowing into me: I have a background in marketing where you have to sell, and then I have an interest — and it's a fascination — with the psychology behind why people will actually respond. I learned a lot of that from Adrian and Jen.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. How do you... yeah, yeah.

Tom Ahern
So, I was going to just say one more thing about that. You can learn it that way — that’s how I learned — by reading. You can also have a great mentor who teaches you. And I have had a thousand mentors — you know, all those people I listened to at other conferences, all those books I read — all of that got poured in, and the product on a yellow pad is them speaking through me. I’m a ventriloquist.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. No, I get that. Yeah. I mean, if I look back at my own career, I’ve had so many mentors and learned so many things from others. I mean, it’s all — everything I know is something, a piece of somebody else that, you know, taught me something, you know? Right?

Tom Ahern
Hmm. Yes, exactly. I can almost go through the stuff and say, “OK, this is what Jeff Brooks taught me. This is what Domain taught me. This is what…” — yeah, on and on and on.

Jeff Schreifels
Exactly, exactly. How important do you feel it is for a fundraiser to actually care and love the mission that they’re writing about? Is that an important aspect, do you believe? And why do you think? Why?

Tom Ahern
Well, yeah. You can fake it until you make it, sort of, with emotional writing — which is what you need to do for fundraisers, for donors. But eventually it gets to the point where, you know, “I don’t necessarily have much connection to this cause, whereas this cause over here is extraordinary.”

And one of the things I learned as I got bigger and bigger clients was that these — maybe call them legacy charities — the ones that had been around a while and had grown successfully — they were doing extraordinary work. And it might be — in some cases — might be over-academic because they had a lot of reporting to do. And so they did have people coming in and analyzing the results of their programs. And so much of that was really to satisfy grantmakers with so much data that they would choke on it.

I fell in love with the charities that I was working with, and eventually I had only charities that I wanted to work with. So I could pick my clients. They would come to me. And what an opportunity that was because — like you had with Feeding America — they gave you enough money to do the thing, do the job right.

So in — just as COVID gets started, for instance — we built a new donor newsletter for USA for UNHCR. So USA for UNHCR raises money in America, and there are chapters like it in other countries like Canada, for refugee aid overseas. And the UN, UNHCR, you know, administers all that.

As we started to hear the stories that were coming back from the front lines through the executive director, then we realized, “My Lord, this is an adventure as much as anything else.”

For that particular newsletter, we had two insiders and three outside consultants working on the newsletter, knowing that what it was going to replace had been underperforming. And, you know, if you did an analysis of why, there were 10 glaring mistakes being made.

So we just ignored the previous newsletter, rebuilt it from scratch from the bottom up, changed the letter from the executive director column into something useful, started writing hard-hitting headlines, making lots of offers — all the things you do. And it took four issues to get it — kind of all the wrinkles — ironed out.

But after four issues, they were making like a half million dollars in revenue, clearing that on the newsletter. So, you know, we…

We are — we being myself and the people I co-associate with in the case writers group — we’re all small. We’re the one person here, one person there, one person there. But you put all those backgrounds and minds and practice and experience together on a project, and you have the inside being trained at the same time. That was very important for USA for UNHCR. But the goal was always to shift production and writing and production onto the staff — bring it all in-house.

I asked — I had a pinky swear with the executive director at the charity at that point — I said, “Give me four issues. Give us four issues. And don’t change what we write. And let’s see how this goes.” And she said, “OK.” And we got to lead the project for four issues and then hand it off to them.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Fantastic. Awesome. That would have been fun.

Tom Ahern
Well, it is fun. Plus, you make a lot of mistakes. I mean, I don’t know if they are mistakes exactly. What you do is you go, “Darn, we missed that opportunity to do such and such.”

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, exactly. That’s the beauty of direct response is that you can quickly figure out what you did and change it and see a different response to things. That’s the beauty. And even if you do make a mistake — you misspell something — there’s something weird about direct response fundraising that kind of…

Tom Ahern
Yeah, absolutely.

Jeff Schreifels
…the more mistakes you make, actually get a better response from it. I remember one time, Tom, we did a newsletter — one of those newsletters you were talking about — for a client, and the printer messed up the cut of it. It was like a four-page thing. And so when you opened it, it just was this giant piece of paper. And it wasn’t like cut.

And the client called back, you know, immediately when they found out about it. The client was like, “This is the worst thing ever. We want our money back. We want the printer to pay,” you know, all that. We said, “Hold on for a second. Let’s wait until we see results from this. And if the results are just tanked because this thing is all this big piece of paper, we’ll seek compensation from the printer and everything.”

And, you know, sure enough, this was their number one best newsletter they ever had in the history of this organization. And, you know, some of those things happen. You make mistakes. Yeah.

Tom Ahern
Of course. Well, you hope they happen. I mean, our industry is full of war stories about people who did something so crazy that you couldn’t believe it, and yet it produced incredible results. You don’t shoot for that.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Tom Ahern
No, you never shoot for it. Although we've — we thought about testing like, what — how many misspelled words could you have to actually boost response in a direct mail piece?

Tom Ahern
Well, something I learned — and I learned this from you guys, from Domain, Jeff Brooks, and all the other stuff that through osmosis went into my brain — that mistakes are... everything teaches you something.

Typos — yes, you’re going to get a complaint. And that was another thing that I learned from Domain: that if you don’t get complaints, you’re probably not pushing quite hard enough.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yes. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ahern
There should be somebody, first of all, who notices those grammatical errors or those spelling errors. There should be some reason — “I can’t believe you people said this. I’d never give to you again.” But that is a form of response feedback.

And all that indicates to me is that somebody paid attention to it, rather than nobody paid attention to it.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Tom Ahern
So I — you know, and Jeff kind of cured me of that. I asked him once, “OK, if you’re doing a million-piece mailing, how many complaints would you get, do you think?” And he just guesstimated, “We might get 500 complaints.” And I thought, “Holy moly. If any of my charities got 500 complaints, they not only would fire me, they’d probably come out and…”

Jeff Schreifels
Take your house!

Tom Ahern
Take my house!

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, I remember that. The more complaints we would get, the better the response was, actually. The more revenue.

Tom Ahern
So there’s so much that is counterintuitive. This is why you can’t learn, for instance, how to do direct mail appeals by looking at other direct mail appeals if you don’t know what you’re looking at and why they are saying what they’re saying.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah, yep, good stuff.

So, a little bit out of the fundraising path, I wanted to just talk to you — because obviously, probably most people don’t know you were married to someone pretty famous in the fundraising circles.

Tom Ahern
Right. Simone Joyaux — ACFRE, CFRE.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, I mean, very well known, very well respected. And she — yeah, she was definitely a troublemaker. And she passed away. And you were married for a long time.

And I wanted you to talk about that because it’s important — just not only to talk about it and how you’ve been working through that — but you’ve also wrote a book about it.

Tom Ahern
I did. It was an 18-month experience for Simone and I at the end. We had had 37 years of marriage. We owned a second house in France that we went to a couple of times a year and then otherwise rented the place to mostly Americans and Canadians who wanted to experience France. This was in a little town there.

We had a wonderful life, and she taught me all the things that I didn’t actually have a natural talent for — like ethics. She made sure that I had ethics. In fact, it was like living with, you know, a paragon. She always knew what the right thing to do — or if she didn’t, she’d think it through.

Then one morning, she came back to bed — she always got up very early. She was looking at email, and an email had come in from Adrian Sargeant from England. And she came back into the bedroom and said, “I can’t read it.”

And I had done a lot of work with hospitals and was kind of used to reading through lists of things like symptoms and stuff like that. I knew that this might be a symptom of some kind of stroke because she — I mean, we were both avid readers. We read all the time.

And so we picked up a book by the side table that she had been reading — she was a fan of romance novels — and she couldn’t read that either. And so at that point, it’s: throw your clothes on, and do we call the ambulance or do we drive to the nearest hospital?

Tom Ahern
It was our decision to go to the nearest hospital, and I drove Simone there. We got there — fortunately, we were the first customers of the day at the emergency room. So we went right in and they started to do testing on her.

And it quickly became clear that she had had some kind of stroke — what they called a brain bleed. And she was conscious all during this. And she was interacting with people. And she was apologizing, apologizing, apologizing. And that was Simone. Her native tongue was apology.

They said, “We don’t have a neurologist on staff,” because this was a good but regional hospital. They didn’t staff up to that level. So we had to have an ambulance anyway. The ambulance went lights and siren to the nearest hospital with a neurologist. It was a good one. And they tested — MRIs or whatever, you know — they have to peer inside your brain.

Then the diagnosis came back that she had… cerebral… arterial angiopathy? That’s not actually correct, but the blood vessels in her brain on the outside were… they were compromised, and they were going to continue to bleed.

So the book is about really that period of time — those 16 to 18 months — and then looking back into our life together before then. The novel — well, it isn’t a novel, it’s a memoir.

During that time, Simone became incredibly fearful of what was going to happen next. And we had talked many, many times about, “Well, you know, what’s going to happen if one of us dies before the other one?” We knew exactly what was supposed to happen.

Her family had a tradition of giving their cadavers to a medical school. And then the remains — whatever were remaining, I don’t know what’s left after medical school — were cremated, and there was a stone plaque in a Michigan cemetery. She intended to go that way. Her whole family intended to go that way. Just family tradition.

And as it happened, medical schools during COVID were not taking new corpses. That was just part of their sanitary routine.

Tom Ahern
In the end...

As it happened, one night — and this is all in the book — she got up at like 2 a.m. Said, “This is the worst pain I've ever felt in my life.” And she'd always had headaches. And then she collapsed on the floor of the bedroom. We were able to get her standing and downstairs, down a set of stairs, which was, in retrospect, remarkable because she was already dying in her brain. And into the kitchen on the first floor.

Called 911. They were there as quickly as they could be, took her and, you know, I followed along, but there was nothing I could do. And so I went back home to get a few hours sleep.

And the phone rang at 6:30 a.m. And it was a doctor from the hospital saying, “What are your wishes?”

Now, this was the second death that I had been close to. My father had — he was in my very poor care in his later years. And that was the same language they used: “What are your wishes?” when he was dying.

And I didn’t get it at first. “What are my wishes?” Well, you know, what you wish for anybody who’s ill. No, they didn’t mean that. They meant she was dying.

And so...

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah.

Tom Ahern
We had often talked about, “Do you want to be on life support?” Absolutely not. “If I don’t have a brain, please pull the plug.” And we both felt that way.

And so my answer was, “Take her off life support.” And that’s what they did. And in two or three days, she was gone.

I didn’t know what it meant to have half of you torn out of your brain and heart that way. You know, I’ve had tragedy in my life, as we all do. But we had been a very sharing couple. We split all the household responsibilities kind of down the middle. And she did her things, and I did my things.

For instance, great example: When we were in France, I don’t speak French. Simone was brought up by a French father and she learned French in French elementary schools as an American. And she was very, very embarrassed when she was speaking to a native French person at how bad her French was. But they would always say, “No, you’re speaking so beautifully. We’ve never heard an American speak like that before.”

And so she did all the speaking in France. I could go to France and my entire life was seeing things and having financial transactions, like at the farmer’s market. Otherwise, I was just there saying “hi.”

She taught me how to be polite.

Tom Ahern
And which is very important in France. It’s a rather — not a rigid culture — but it has a lot of rules. And one of them is, you greet people in a small town, for instance, if you’re walking around, you always greet anyone you encounter. And it goes by age. If you’re the older, they greet you. If you’re the younger, you greet them.

Jeff Schreifels
Mm-hmm. Okay. Awesome. I like that. I like it. Yeah, I always saw you two as a team. That’s what— yeah.

Tom Ahern
We are, yes.

Jeff Schreifels
And now you’ve been doing it alone now for a while.

Tom Ahern
Yeah, it’s— I feel, on my better days, that I am representing what we used to call privately, Joyaux Ahern University. It was just the two of us, but you know, we were on this mission to train everybody in everything that we thought we knew.

And, I have a little sign up by my desk that says, “What if everything you think you know is actually wrong?” So there was a degree— an attempted degree— of humility in there as well.

Jeff Schreifels
I mean, that is a quote from someone who’s a real learner, somebody that loves to continue to learn to me. So like, this could all be wrong, but I’ll learn something else that might be right.

Tom Ahern
Well, again, you know, so much was counterintuitive in learning a trade like copywriting for nonprofits that it was a very scary trade to be in if you weren’t learning all the time.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s true. And that’s good. That’s a good advice, I think, for all the people listening is that this work, you never stop learning. There’s always something new to learn about this work.

Tom Ahern
Well, I mean, take AI as a very good example. It will eventually revolutionize copywriting by being a useful tool in the hands of people who are well-trained. In the hands of people who are not well-trained, it is what it is.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. So what are some of these trainings you’re doing now? How can people learn from you today?

Tom Ahern
Well, I do four major webinars a year, and we haven’t found a way to characterize them yet. We sort of treat them as “back to basics and beyond.” It’s not— for one thing, my basics are different than an average person’s basics because of the training, because of the marketing background, because of the public relations background.

When you come into the non-profit world and everything is not at the agency level, but at the next 99% level, people just have no idea how to do communications. They may have a great idea how to do their programming. And it can be extraordinarily impressive. Some of my favorite charities are started small, they’re now medium sized.

But the quality of their work, the testimonials from the people who have benefited from their programs is just breathtaking. And I’m thinking of, for instance, Vita Hoven, which is based as a charity in San Diego, but runs about six orphanages in Tijuana, Mexico, just over the border. And they’ve been around a long time. They’ve been around, I guess, since the 90s.

And we now have, therefore, a time span long enough so you can do a longitudinal study of the kids who came into this orphanage. Now, Tijuana is not just any old town, you know, on the planet. It’s one of the most dangerous cities on the planet in terms of murder rate. And if you’re an orphan on the streets there, you can imagine how difficult it is to survive, much less thrive.

Those kids come into Vita Hoven. They get fed, they get clothed, they get educated. And almost all of them, 18 years later, or whatever time span was, go to college. It’s just like, no, again, that’s impossible. Nobody can do that. Well, they do it. They do it at six different orphanages.

And is it easy work? No, it is really hard work. These kids have a ton of psychological baggage to deal with as well.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I know that every week I get an email from you and there’s always some really good nuggets in there. How do people sign up for that email? How do they get that?

Tom Ahern
Probably... You’re getting it every week, you must be getting it from somebody else. I— It feels like it’s every week!

Jeff Schreifels
I know, maybe it feels like it’s every week. I mean, in a good way. I like getting your emails. There’s always something good in there.

Tom Ahern
Well, I’m trying to be useful to people. So one of the things that has opened my eyes is, as time went by, and Simone and I had a household income which was very ample for people with no kids, we started giving away money more and more as years went by.

Our will— most of the estate, such as it is— goes to one charity or another. Our schools, of course, as a tribute to what they did for us in our lives. But mostly to the local community foundation, which is a large, very old— it’s like second or third in the country— community foundation with a substantial endowment.

But we have seen their work up close for decades, and the leadership has always been ambitious to really do more good in the community. And they take risks all the time. So, you know, it was like, well, we don’t know what the future is going to be. So let’s give them our money and let them put it to work.

Jeff Schreifels
Yeah, awesome. Well, Tom, thanks for being with me today. It’s been fun. I appreciate it. And for all those listening in, thanks for being with us. Look at the show notes. You’ll have lots of ways to connect with Tom. And we’ll see you next time.

Tom Ahern
My pleasure, Jeff.