Publications

In my pursuit of speaking, writing, marketing, and podcasting I've written a few cool things. In fact, a few people have even written things about me. Check out some of my publications below.

presentIMPACT: The Speaker's Guide

In presentIMPACT: The Speaker's Guide we make presentation a science. Over the next 100 pages, we will take you step by step through the process of overcoming public speaking anxiety, building confidence, and delivering clear, effective, and professional presentations. The lessons you will learn in this Guide are infinitely transferrable across all standards of communication. By applying them not only on the stage, but in all aspects of your communication, you have the opportunity to become a better speaker, leader, conversationalist, and presenter.

Feature on Notable.ca

Today’s Notable Young Entrepreneur is Mo Waja, a professional speaker and instructor, award-winning university debater, writer, marketer, the founder of presentIMPACT, and the author of presentIMPACT: The Speaker’s Guide.

Finding Your Marketing Voice

Good storytelling is the lifeblood of strong marketing. But, in the nonprofit space, the imperative to tell good stories comes with two challenges. The first, of course, is finding the right stories to tell. The second is determining the right voice through which to tell those stories. To answer these questions, we must start by recognizing that ‘storytelling’ in the context of the nonprofit means expanding our definition of the organizational story beyond the population we serve…

Marketing vs. Mission: AFP Congress Preview

For many nonprofits, ‘marketing’ has been­ — and remains — a support tool for fundraising; its purpose, mainly to serve as a medium to get the fundraising message out there to as many prospective donors as possible, via social media or otherwise. But this limited use fails to capitalize on the opportunity of marketing. For nonprofits making more robust use of marketing and communications, the act of ‘marketing’ becomes everything from a branding exercise to…

Marketing is Ambassadorship (especially for nonprofits)

The marketing we do, in any organization, shapes public discourse around the subject being marketed. When that subject is a product, the marketing can be fairly straightforward. The story marketing tells the world informs the prospective consumer’s understanding of the value of that product, its benefits, and the positive impact that it will have on their life. When the subject being marketed is a cause that directly affects a person or other living creature, the story we tell…

Storytelling on a Budget

For many of the smaller nonprofits out there (and even some of the larger ones), committing to marketing through storytelling can seem like a daunting prospect, particularly if it is not something your organization does consistently. One frequent argument against making the leap into very intentional storytelling as a branding and marketing method is cost. In a world dominated by the almost cinematic experiences of giants like SickKids and Charity Water, our framework…

How to Make ‘Thought Leadership’ Part of Your Marketing Mix

With AFP Congress arriving in a short 2 months, burgeoning and tenured thought leaders alike are preparing themselves and their talks to bring new, ambitious, and exciting ideas to the world of fundraising. But ‘thought leadership’ as a marketing activity isn’t something done just once a year or even once a month. It is not exclusive to large scale speaking events or even to a single guest blog post…

Marketing Your Negative Space

Telling your story is harder for some nonprofit organizations than others, particularly when you, the nonprofit, are working with a vulnerable population. Why? Because, depending upon the specific characteristics of the population in question, there are often strict ethical, and sometimes legal, guidelines we must adhere to that dictate how a story can (and should) be told...

Why Every Professional Should Study Public Speaking

Every time we communicate with another person we leave an impression. From the words we speak (or type), to the inflection of our voice, to our body language, every aspect of our communication has an impact on how the person on the other end of the conversation perceives us. In the professional world, that impression in turn affects if and how a person begins working with us or continue to work with us...

Developing Your Nonprofit Narrative

Storytelling to drive “giving” or donations can feel a little repetitive. A common example is the classic profile piece featuring someone whom the nonprofit has impacted. This is the written, video, or audio piece that introduces an individual, describes a barrier, and then states how the organization helped that person to overcome the barrier. It’s straightforward, it’s easy, and it’s a tempting format to gravitate towards...

Asking is Offering: A better way to reach out on Social

But social doesn’t quite work the same way. A like, share, or retweet can certainly be interpreted as an expression of interest in that particular piece of content, but it’s not necessarily reflective of that person's interest in your overall brand. It’s certainly not necessarily an invitation to begin sending that person asks…

Stop Marketing Problems, Start Marketing Outcomes

To be fair, this problem/solution statement formula works… so long as the audience you’re speaking to immediately connects with your problem statement. Across the board, for a person to take action on a given piece of communication (written or verbal) they need to connect with some part of the message in that communication…

3 Reasons to See the World Through Insta-Filtered Lenses

The moment I started getting serious about Instagram was when I became serious about starting my own business teaching professional speaking. As I began to research how to go about marketing myself, I realized what many of those around me had already discovered: that Instagram has become and is continuing to grow as one of the strongest marketing tools for personal branding out there...

Figuring out Your Podcast's Value-Add in 4 Steps

Ever since the seeds of Toronto Story Archive were planted at PodCamp Toronto what feels like so many moons ago, there has been a question at the forefront of my mind: that is, what is the value-add of Toronto Story Archive? Considering this I went back to my professional roots, thinking about the value-add of a speech or presentation. Primarily in public speaking you give a talk to...

Starting a Podcast: 3 Lessons from the First 10 Episodes

So at this point, if you’re in the business world, the concept of starting a podcast has probably entered your orbit in some form or another. The benefits speak for themselves, content produced in an easily digestible format perfectly suited to the multitasking listener. One of the reasons why many prospective podcasters fail to launch, however, comes down to a perceived operational entry barrier that, having now gone through it, I’d like to take a moment to debunk...

Three (More) Words That Are Damaging Your Talk

For the most part, the time of the hard sell has passed. The ever expanding population of organizations leveraging customer data to access customers in new, varied, and ever more subtle ways means that your average customer is so inundated with advertising and sells that they have established moats, walls, and a portcullis between your marketing and their wallet...

Leading Your Slides

For almost all content-driven speakers, PowerPoint (or some similar program) is a necessary piece of the presentation puzzle; its primary purpose, to provide a visual aid to the verbal information that you are presenting to your audience. However, for the speaker, PowerPoint also tends to serve a second purpose – to provide them with visual cues to help aid the movement of their presentation...

3 Ways to Build a Better PowerPoint

PowerPoint is immortal. As close as we try to get to a more natural, conversational presentation (and as far as we try to run from the learned-by-rote, slide-heavy lectures of the past) PowerPoint and other, similar systems play a critical role in delivering complex presentations efficiently and effectively to an audience whose knowledge and experience will always vary across a spectrum. Unfortunately, most PowerPoint slides are poorly built, with one of two adverse results...

Unplugging Presentation

Modern technology has fundamentally changed the game of public speaking. On the stage, speakers today need to be constantly mindful of the fact that to be quoted often means a fifteen-second clip on Instagram or Twitter, or their entire presentation distributed through video sharing on YouTube. Interactive media such as webinars, vlogs, and podcasts have become an expected part of building your brand as a business, an expert, and/or a thought leader...

Silence is IMPACT: Conquering the Filler

Fillers are a challenge that every presenter faces throughout their career. Even our most seasoned presenters, veterans of the TED stage, podium, or university lecture hall, are not immune. These are the words that fill the space between thoughts; they are the sounds that our body generates whenever we stumble or find ourselves searching for our next word. Now, in theory this should mean that we have some measure of control over our use of fillers; that we can recognize fillers before we speak and actively prevent ourselves from using them...