Tag Archives: NTEN

Nonprofit Radio for January 8, 2024: Our Esteemed Contributors’ 2024 Outlooks

 

Amy Sample Ward & Gene Takagi: Our Esteemed Contributors’ 2024 Outlooks

Amy Sample Ward and Gene Takagi kick off the New Year with what they’ll be keeping eyes on this year. They delve into artificial intelligence (AI); the presidential election; donor advised funds; workers’ rights; and more. Amy is our technology contributor and CEO of NTEN. Gene is our legal contributor and managing attorney at NEO, the Nonprofit & Exempt Organizations law group.

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We’re the #1 Podcast for Nonprofits, With 13,000+ Weekly Listeners

Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.

Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.

Nonprofit Radio for December 4, 2023: Misinformation & Disinformation

 

Amy Sample WardMisinformation & Disinformation

Amy Sample Ward returns with their insights into what to do about these maladies plaguing our world. They reveal smart internal tactics to reduce the odds of your nonprofit’s info being misused by bad actors; what to do if it is; how to avoid your org itself being a source of misinformation; and a lot more. They’re the CEO of NTEN and our technology and social media contributor.

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Board relations. Fundraising. Volunteer management. Prospect research. Legal compliance. Accounting. Finance. Investments. Donor relations. Public relations. Marketing. Technology. Social media.

Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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Hello and welcome to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. I am your aptly named host and the pod father of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d bear the pain of nocal Beura if you dampened my spirits with the idea that you missed this week’s show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with the highlights. Hey, Tony, this week it’s misinformation and disinformation. Amy Sample Ward returns with their insights into what to do about these maladies plaguing our world. They reveal smart internal tactics to reduce the odds of your nonprofits info being misused by bad actors. What to do if it is how to avoid your org itself being a source of misinformation and a lot more. They are CEO of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor on Tony’s take two December, good wishes were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org here is misinformation and disinformation. It’s always a pleasure to welcome Amy Sample Ward back to nonprofit radio. You know who they are for Pete’s sake. Nonetheless, they deserve the proper introduction. Of course CEO of N 10 and our technology and social media contributor, they were awarded that 2023 Bosch Foundation fellowship from just this past summer. And their most recent co-authored book is the Tech that comes next with AUA Bruce about equity and inclusiveness in tech development. They’re still at Amy Sample word.org and at Amy RS Word. Welcome back, Amy. What a pleasure. Thanks for having me. I’m excited and I appreciate an intro that doesn’t list the number of years or episodes I’ve enjoyed on nonprofit radio. That always makes me take, take a bit of a pause. Well, we regale you on the anniversary show, right? Each July we’re coming up. This next July will be the 7/100. Wow. But only then will we remind you that which show you began in? Yes, I can accept these terms. Close listeners will remember but uh but the others who may not remember, you’ll have to wait till the 7/100 show to learn what Amy’s first show was. So we’re talking about uh misinformation, disinformation. Why don’t we just start with the basic explanation of what the differences are between Miss Miss and Dis Yeah, I appreciate starting at the beginning because I do see especially in this, you know, world of tweet or Instagram sized language where people kind of write Miss slash disinformation, but they’re not interchangeable. They mean very different things and the implications for your organization or even the potential that your staff do wanna these things is very, very different, right? Um A good way to remember. It is misinformation is a mistake. So, misinformation is you or a staff person or a community member even saying the wrong thing, you know, they said 73% instead of 37% or something where it doesn’t have an intentional agenda, right? It’s not, it’s not created or distributed as a way of trying to um do something whether nefarious or just, you know, against what you’re trying to do. Um And misinformation, unfortunately, like we can still talk about, this is something we, we need to think about as organizations, especially when we think about um trying to have staff out in the community um being present, sharing their thought leadership, all of these places. We humans, we do make mistakes, we do say 73 instead of 37 right? But that means we just maybe just said that to, you know, and we’re here um at a big donor recognition event and we say the wrong percentage and all those people then they want to be informed, they wanna look like they know things. So then they repeat the same wrong stat, right? So it is something we want to think about. Um and there’s some tactics for making sure staff have all those resources um to fact check themselves and to share things. But I think the more concerning one of these two is disinformation. Um And that’s not to say that your staff don’t and intentionally or unintentionally create um or, or participate in disinformation, but especially want to talk about what it looks like for your organization’s images, content, data website, et cetera to be used as part of someone else’s disinformation campaign. Um And that means again, people who are creating or sharing or distributing information with the intention that it is, you know, going to change people’s mind and that they know that what they’re doing is not factually correct. Yeah, the intentionality is the distinction. I like misinformation. Very good, helpful and disinformation, of course. Intentionally interesting. Yeah. Uh Right. Uh Yeah, let’s definitely talk about what happens if you’re essentially a victim included in disinformation, disinformation, post article campaign. Right. I OK. Excellent. All right. Um So some basic things, you know, uh we could be like on an individual basis as well as an organizational basis. Some simple things to help you avoid on either level, misinformation and disinformation. I think, you know, basic news literacy, you know, let’s, let’s flush out, flush this out a little bit for folks and maybe it may be covering things that are obvious. But II, I think there’s value in the, in the basics, you know, just, yeah, and, and some of it really is kind of a, a journalism like go back to the basics um place that we don’t all have that kind of training or background. So it’s not um I’m not saying this to say, oh, everybody you know, knows this and isn’t doing it. No, a lot of people have never had the privilege to get this information or to be trained to do to operate in this way. But I think as organizations, we already see that there’s silos, there’s certain staff who know certain things and other staff who don’t. So that’s going to still be the case when it comes to organizational data, data or information reports that you’re putting out etcetera. Um But creating kind of a information center for all staff. And again, not thinking well, only these three people on the communications team who are the ones who do our presentations need to know it, put it in a place where all staff can see. Here’s the deck that explains our organization and our, you know, latest numbers of impact or how many people we’ve reached this year, right? Um That’s a number that many people on staff maybe have an occasion to say and you want them saying the correct number, right? Um Having uh uh we used to create a cheat sheet, for example, where in 10 puts out lots of different reports and they have so many different data points in them. But what are the ones that we know the community is most interested in, regardless of which report it was in? Let’s make one cheat sheet for staff that says, ok, this is the trend on this topic and here’s the number of organizations, you know, that responded in this way on this other topic in one place. Um That way anybody who’s presenting or answering a question from a community member is all pulling data from one place. If the a new year goes by a new version of that data, it’s updated in that document, people are still going back to the same place. They’re not like, oh, let me find this year’s version of this, right? They’re always going to the same place. Um And what that looks like externally, which is where the kind of misinformation to the dis gets connected is making sure just as a a good journalist would, would cite their sources, organizations need to be comfortable citing their sources too. But I think um part of this has come from feeling like we need to be the authority on everything we say. Uh And, and what that means is that organizations don’t, you don’t have the latest information on every topic under the sun. That’s fine. What you’re, what you’re an expert on is your mission. So cite the source for the data on your page where you’re making the case for what you do. Is it from the census? Is it from a partner organization? Is it from a state department? You know that, that you work with actually putting in where that 37% came from is going to mean that if someone out there has an agenda and they’re saying, oh, yeah, I’ve heard that 37% of people XYZ, they’re not able to reference your website as part of their disinformation campaign because your website really does list, here’s the link to the census where this came from, right. They’re not able to modify what you’re saying. You’ve made clear where you got your information. Otherwise that website, you know that article where you don’t link to any sources, you don’t list how that data was collected is really ripe for interpretation. And that’s really what disinformation campaigns look for. Something that’s coming from a legitimate website. You are a legitimate organization, you have a legitimate website and if it’s not clear they can use that however they want, right? They can reposition it. Yeah. Yeah, cite your sources and, and you might be the source. Of course, it may be maybe your own data, maybe your own research might be your own annual report. But citation, citation. Yeah. Very smart. Right. So you can’t be, you can’t be linked back to as the source because you’re giving the source of the correct information. Excellent. Yes. Is there, is there more? Well, I think that, yeah, there is definitely more. I just wanted to stop but yeah, no, there is more. And I think um you know, just as we are suggesting you cite your sources for that 37% maybe written on your website. A place where organizations often don’t think about adding their logo or their website or anything else is other pieces of content they’re sharing. Um But creating almost like a watermark, you know, your logo in the corner or um maybe if you made a little infographic to share online and it says in the corner, this is from, you know, n tens, 2020 report on X, right? Because creating content that’s meant to be shared off of your website is even even more likely to be uh picked up, right? And used conveniently in disinformation when it doesn’t, when it’s, when it has no anchor, right? When it doesn’t have the watermark, it just looks like a fancy stat that somebody else posted. So making sure you think about anything that, that you’re sharing externally where it isn’t on your website and you’re controlling it. Can you add this watermark? Can you make sure that a source or a reference is written inside the graphic? Not just in, you know, maybe the caption that you put with it right? Inside that graphic? All right. Awesome. What else? What else should we be doing? Well, I think the other piece of this is so that’s proactive, right? Let’s make sure staff have the resources to say the right things and also the content we’re putting out on our website and our email out into social, it is cited has the right information that’s all proactive from our side. But what do we do for everything we can’t control? Right. So the other side of this is monitoring and often an organization only finds out that they, their content, their data, their imagery is part of some disinformation campaign because they got tagged or recognized by a community member who, who saw that content somewhere else, right? And they were like, wait a second, you know, I recognize that photo or, or whatever. Um So we’ve said this probably on the first episode I was on, which was too many years ago, you know, when we were talking about any other type of social or, or online listening, but it’s still the case setting up alerts to track your organization’s names and mentions online folks think, oh, this is great because, you know, we’ll know when we’re in the news, you’ll also know if somebody is, you know, trying to, to misuse your content. Um So, so not overlooking that, especially within certain systems. So, you know, maybe you work with a certain community that uses Instagram a lot, for example, or tiktok and you don’t really use your full written out, you know, maybe of a five word name, you know, making sure you’re setting up notifications or following hashtags on those tools that use the kind of name or abbreviation or acronym or even, you know, maybe tag that would be most likely used if you were getting pulled into something. Um because it’s really gonna be through that type of listening that you find your content being used. And then of course, what do you do if you see that? Uh I think some folks feel like like any other type of potential trust breakdown, you know, OK, we should come out really strong. We’re gonna make some big statement like we do not support or like, don’t worry, your data has not been stolen, that doesn’t necessarily convey that you understood what was happening there, right? Um So I think instead if you see your contents getting picked up and misused, maybe, you know, and this isn’t like at the level of of an international scene, this could be locally, maybe some of your um event photos and and talking points are being misused by a local representative, right? Um This doesn’t need to be huge scale, it should still be meaningful, right? And not to be on the scale of the uh the Israel Hamas War, but it’s just, but it’s important to you, but it’s important to you. It’s still your name, it’s still your reputation and it’s a perversion of your content. Exactly. It’s time for a break. Are you looking to maximize your fundraising efforts and impact this giving season donor boxes. Online donation platform is designed to help you reach your fundraising goals from customizable donation forms to far-reaching, easy share, crowdfunding and peer to peer options. Plus seamless in-person giving with donor box live kiosk. Donor box makes giving simple and fast for your donors and moves the needle on your mission. Visit donor box.org and let donor box help you help others. Now, back to misinformation and disinformation. The one tactic that folks have used when that is the case when OK, your stuff is getting, you know, twisted a little bit. One option. There’s a couple here, one is to flood the system. So instead of trying to add more attention to that person and try to say no, that isn’t what we said or that isn’t what that graphic is for, right? Ignore them and flood the system. So make sure that you have a correct fully sources cited blog post on your website. So that if people Google what that person just said, they’re finding your correct blog post, that you have a recent social post that points to that, that clarifies this information again, you need to tag them, you don’t need to say anything about them, but make sure that if people are reading what’s out there and are like, what is this? And they do a search for you, they are seeing what you want them to see and not that right. So there’s one flood the system, make sure it’s all all correct. And so far as you can do it. And then the second is really not gonna be seen by a lot of people and that’s contacting the, the folks who are posting this often in disinformation, the folks doing the posting are not the ones who created the content for them to post. Um And so they are also in a little bit of a more precarious position than whoever gave them the content, especially on a local level where it’s harder to hide like, you know, each other locally. So contacting them and saying, hey, this is not good, right? Whatever the case may be and engaging with them. Um Especially saying, could we have a public engagement around this, this conversation? Um Folks, organizations have turned that around and been able to great, we had a town hall because our, you know, recent report was of interest but wasn’t understood. And now you’re getting positive attention because you were able to engage that person and turn it around. Um Of course, if they say no, you’re wrong, we’re right. Our content is good. Well, you know, where you stand and you can move to a uh uh maybe option two B which is then to, you know, go into the process of reporting those accounts, reporting that content. Um The challenge there just so folks are already thinking about it is when we’re reporting content on, on the, on the greater internet across social media, et cetera. Folks are gonna see if that content has already been used by other users, if it’s been shared or posted. And so if what they’re posting and you’re now reporting is very similar even to your own con content or to content that others have posted, it likely will not get taken down because, you know, the the content review process will say, oh no, this is like what widely used widely known, right? Versus thinking that it’s this one accounts content. Um and it’s kind of a catch 22 when it comes to managing and reporting disinformation. So the, so the more widely it’s been used, the less likely it is that you’ll, that, that the originator that you’re talking to would, would remove it. Well, they wouldn’t be the ones removing it. You’re, if you’re reporting it, you’re asking, you know, meta to take it down or something. Um And in that point they are, you’re essentially reporting that user. Um And that user and their content is all part of whatever meta would be looking at to say, oh, is this a nefarious thing? Is this bad? You know, and a lot of folks don’t have success getting it taken down because there’s the, the content is similar to content that’s already up. Maybe they weren’t the ones that created it anyway. So that I just want folks to know. It’s not just a one click. Oh, great. It’s removed. That’s why it’s not step one because it is very difficult for a lot of folks to get disinformation accounts stopped. OK. OK. I know you did a little reading and thinking about disinformation too. What are your thoughts? I did. Well, II, I was, I was on a different level. Um, I was thinking about folks trying to validate something that they might, that they need. Let’s talk about that. Um All right. Well, you’re, you’re being very gracious look. So, but, but I don’t want to deviate from our best practices that you’re enumerating. Like you got, you’re, you’re down to level two B already. So. All right. Well, all right. I know you wanna, you, you probably feel like you’ve been talking a while but everything you’re saying is valuable and you got more insight into it than I do. That’s why you’re our technology contributor. So don’t, you don’t, you don’t need to be humble, but all right. So we, we, I wanna know if there’s a step three after two B but we’ll come back to it. Um Yeah. No, just sources like, you know, if, if something seems a little unusual to you or, I mean, you, you can’t, we, we cannot fact check everything we read. There’s just, there’s just too much but so if something seems, uh as David Letterman used to say a little hinky uh because I was just in Indiana with my wife. So hinky, pinky is on my mind because that’s where Letterman was from. Uh You know, there’s a place like uh Politifact, Politifact, they have their Truth 0 m. It’s green, red or yellow and it usually they’re green or red. There’s, there’s not a lot of yellow. So politifact, I mean that, you know, you want to go to a bona fide source. Politifact Snopes has been around for a long time and they are legitimate fact checkers. Um If you’re, if this may come up, if you’re, if you’re creating content, that’s not, uh that, that’s not based solely on your own data, but you’re relying on other people’s data. There’s, there’s something called the crap test. It’s craap. Um and it is, it’s, it’s quite bona fide now. I I was not aware of it but uh it got links from it. It’s linked to by Texas A and M University. Uh even Central Michigan University, New Jersey Institute of Technology, Oregon State University for you, Amy uh Southern Utah University, University of Chicago. So there are respected universities and uh some of them seem to be library systems of those universities though that recommend the crap test for their students. So you can just Google crap craap. It’s an acronym for currency. You know, how, what’s the timeliness of the information relevance authority? What’s the source, the accuracy of the, of that source overall and the purpose for which the the data, uh the data was posted or the purpose for which the source exists, you know, is there some nefarious agenda? So currency relevance authority accuracy purpose uh the crap test to, to take a look at and there are a lot of factors within each one of those but determining whether data that you’re relying on is valid, right? I really like that. A couple um reactions coming up for me, especially thinking about nonprofit staff who are trying to do this or, or muddle through this one is when you’re creating content or, you know, trying to put up a blog post or a page, whatever letter you’re writing. Um And you’re looking for sources, if you aren’t comfortable writing right there in the letter or right there on your website, you know, where that fact came from, then it’s not a fact you can use. Um, I know we’ve definitely talked with organizations where, you know, they’re like, oh, it’s the perfect stat and like the perfect, just what we want. But it’s kind of like a sketchy organization or like, it’s not an organization that’s mission aligned and, you know, so let’s just use the stat and like, we don’t need to, if you’re not, you know, if you can’t cite the source, then it’s not a stat, you can use it in that’s intellectual dishonesty, right? It’s just, it’s like a gut check, right? Um So there’s that the other kind of reaction that’s coming up for me is I know, you know, nothing is simple. It is complex to say, OK, well, this needs to come from quote unquote, authoritative source, but there is no authoritative source in this kind of white dominant. Are they a university or are they a paper or whatever? Maybe on the topic you work on. That’s OK. You know. Um but for example, in Oregon, we found I was um on the board of an organization that did gender equity uh work, especially policy work to support gender equity organizations. And found that in there was not a, a report or a survey or a government census on certain data related to all kinds of factors, gender, domestic violence, et cetera on, on, on certain topics for over 20 years. So, yeah, maybe there was a stat you could find from 1989 we’re not using that stat, you know. Um And so instead of saying, OK, well, there’s like nothing good. So we don’t, don’t have anything to sort uh to, to site or what we have is so old, we’ll just reference it. No, that’s how they framed a lot of their content. These stats are so old, we can’t even use them, right? And that became a talking point that made them an authority, right? So we are going to do research because it isn’t out there. Um And it created an opportunity for their website to become the author authoritative source. Other organization could link to, hey, here is their report. Maybe it’s not the same as a census, but at least it’s something the state didn’t even care to report on this, right? So, um an opportunity to think about not just OK, there’s a real lack of data and your organization is at a disadvantage. Maybe naming that really clearly on a web page will mean that when folks go to fact check, oh, this local representative said that it’s 37%. They find your website where you say don’t trust anyone who tells you. There’s a number, there hasn’t been a survey in 40 years, right? Like, wow, now you’re educating people, you know, that that’s a very savvy turnaround. Yeah. And having, you know, quick facts on our, on your, on your missions topic, you know, on, on Portland Land, Conservancy, whatever it is that you do, having that quick reference page means you will come up when people do an internet search and maybe you’ll get to frame how they think about any stat or talking point they come across from somebody else. It’s time for Tony’s take two. Thank you, Kate December. I know it’s a critical month right at the end of Thanksgiving and giving Tuesday comes that important month where I know you can be looking for 2530. I’ve seen like 40% of your annual fundraising from this single month sometimes. So if that’s your situation, you have my good wishes. I’m thinking about you. I’m rooting for you. I hope you’re giving Tuesday. If you were in giving Tuesday, not that you needed to be necessarily, you could sit it out. But if you were in, I hope you did well, if you didn’t do well or as well as you would have liked brush that off. Don’t let your giving Tuesday impact what you’re thinking about. You know, don’t, don’t second guess yourself for your, your December strategy. Giving Tuesday stands alone. I hope you were very successful. If not, don’t let it impact the coming month. You’ve got my good wishes. I’m like I said, I’m rooting for you. If you do everything you can, then you have nothing to be ashamed of. That is Tony Stick Two Kate. Good wishes to everyone from Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Well, we’ve got buu but loads more time. So let’s go back to misinformation and disinformation with Amy Sample Ward. I, I’m, I’m gonna take us back to your best practices. Conversation. What, what else you, you put a lot of thought into this, what else should, should we be doing if we discover that our content is misused? Yeah. One thing that’s specific to, you know, social media profiles or accounts that you’d have that aren’t on your website that I’ve seen some organizations do. And I really like, um is they have put in their bio and of course, that’s limited, you know, some accounts, you have five characters in an emoji or something, but like where you can have this information, um I organizations have referenced really concise, you know, we don’t post stats or we only post infographics from our own research or something that kind of gets out ahead of if their, if their organization’s account is then getting tagged in some tiktok, you know, videos, comment thread where people think they’re referencing their stats. Anybody that then clicks through to that organization’s bio will see. Oh, they, they couldn’t have posted that because they only post X, you know, uh whatever it might be. So that’s another place to think about how you frame what your content might be is, you know, here your profile on whatever tiktok, I, I guess the Portland Land Conservancy maybe would have a tiktok. I don’t know. Um but you know, putting in your bio, like we are sharing tips and strategies if you want research data, contact this email or you know what, however you might frame that but making it so that even in the course of the kind of fast action of social media where people are tagging or commenting or whatever your organization gets thrown in the mix, anybody that sees that and clicks through will know whether to think you were really part of that content or not even just by what they land on your account with, you know. Yeah, your account B OK. Um And is that something it sounds like that belongs on your website as well? Maybe maybe on the footer of every page where you have your whatever your tax ID number and your address, maybe a disclaimer because because this the the trouble is so ubiquitous II, I think it deserves, you know, it sounds like it deserves to be on every page. Well, and it’s interesting that you say the ubiquitous comment because, you know, I think it’s pretty similar to conversations we have with organizations, especially smaller or medium sized organizations who, uh, about security where they’re like, no one cares about us. No random hacker, you know, thinks we’re important, like we’re not on anybody’s radar, nobody’s coming for us. And so they don’t plan and they don’t think about any of that until all of a sudden, do we have cyber insurance? Like, what do we do when there’s been a breach? Like, they, they think that it doesn’t apply to them because they think, like, they’re not an important fancy spinning this organization, but that’s not why a security breach would happen. Right. Um, just from a kind of accidental breach of staff doing something or from, uh, ransomware. It’s because you care about your content. Not because the person hacking you does, you know, they just know that you’d pay to get it back. Similar, similar mindset with disinformation is, yeah. Who no one, no one knows about us. No one would try to do whatever, you know. Oh, that disinformation is just for the war or just for some government, whatever. Yeah, it’s for everything. There’s a reason that people have, you know, malicious intent to shift, you know, pers perception locally or, or nationally on all kinds of issues and whether you work in homelessness or food security or animal rights. Like every topic has its issues and it’s folks who wanna take down, you know, organizations or wanna shift whether money goes to that sector or not. So, I’m not trying to be like a fear monger, but it is, it is worth spending some time making sure that you do have these practices in place and that you do know what you would do if something happened. You know, I think it’s naive, Unfortunately, it’s regrettably, uh, in, in the culture over the past probably 10 years or so. It’s become naive to think that your organization is too small or your work is too benign. Your work could be incendiary to anybody. Right. And look at the, the pizza, the pizza shop in Washington DC. It’s a, it’s a pizzeria. Well, you know, who’s gonna attack a pizzeria. But, yeah, yeah, including the guy who went there or went to, I don’t know if he got to the store but the guy who went to DC armed and he was, I think he was stopped before he got to the, whatever the pizza gate place was called, I forget. But, uh, yeah, so there, there is nothing so benign. I mean, you know, uh, animal welfare, like a no kill shelter. There may, there could just be people who think that not, that only not, they may not be so incendiary as to think that animals ought to be killed. But why is that? Why are they getting money. But my, but my um you know, my I just got laid off but the, but the No Kill Shelter just expanded building just they just had a campaign and raised a half a million dollars and expanded their building. But I just got laid off, right. Any, any cause is fodder for, for any kind of, you know, irrational criticism. But that criticism could run pretty deep and, and be dangerous. And I know that you have had some smart and insightful recent conversations about A I with A Fua and Beth and George and all these different people. And I want to make one bridge over to those conversations as we’re talking about disinformation. But some of it is also created by A I A I is great generative A I specifically is great at coming up with content. That’s why it was created to make it, it also is making up fake sources. It is is making up fake information. And so the more that people start getting used to A I tools being out in the in the wild here and are using them themselves, the more people are going to be hopefully looking for sources and they might see something and click on it and see that it’s fake because you know, this generative IA I tool made it all up and then they come to your website and they click on a source and they see it’s real. So they are going to trust that more, you know. Um And it just really, I think underscores the need to make sure the content on our websites um or out in our emails, et cetera is really what we mean it to be. It is fact checked. It’s correct. It cites its sources because we’re now putting that website up in a, in a sea of content where a lot of it is gonna be created by a robot and not and not correct. You know, you’re talking about the uh show from June 5th 2023. Uh It’s called Artificial Intelligence for nonprofits. Uh We had uh Beth Cantor Afua Bruce, your co-author George Weiner and Alison. Fine. That’s the, that’s the show. Yeah, that was a full explanation. Uh conversation about the risks, the opportunities, uh bad practices, uh potentially good practices. Um My, my bias comes out when I say, yeah, I say bad practices, potentially good. I qualified the good but the bad I left, I left. That’s just bad and maybe good. Uh My, my bias comes out. Uh My bias comes out in that conversation too. So June 5th, uh the show is called Artificial Intelligence for nonprofits. I am very concerned. I’m very concerned. Um Anyway, we don’t need to rehash that conversation. Um We were just uh so, all right. All right. This is uh this is valuable, this is valuable stuff. Nobody is um nobody is immune. No cause as good as you think your cause is imagine somebody who thinks it’s as evil as you think it is good because, because that person could very well exist probably does. It’s just a matter of how incendiary that person is, right? And I think that there’s two pieces related to this, that of course, a lot of what we’ve just talked about are actions, nonprofit staff can be taking to post content in a certain way or, you know, create resources internally, et cetera. But I also think there’s two opportunities here to build better, closer relationships with other organizations. So that um even if you’re not all working on the same issue, maybe you all work in the same community or maybe you all have a similar funder or, you know, whatever the relationship might be. But using this as saying, hey, I know that we all want there to be accurate information out there. We did a survey and we have this, you know, here’s the data I I I’m happy to share it with you so that you can trust it. Can we all agree to say it’s 37% so that we are, you know, getting out the word in a more consistent way to proactively fight any disinformation that comes out later, right? People will see three different organizations are all citing the same source, all agreeing that this is the content, right? Similarly using uh potential, the using the potential for disinformation as an entry point for conversations with a funder to say, we know this is a topic that not everybody supports, you support us. We’re so, we’re so glad that you do and how could you support us making sure that there is accurate reporting or more, more research than the limited amount we’ve been able to do, you know, so that more information is out there for the public and, and again, we’re proactively cutting off the influence of disinformation on this topic. Um So I think that’s an important entry point for those conversations. Even if nothing comes of it, the funder doesn’t give you more funds. I wish they would truly, um, maybe they don’t, but it’s part of, it’s something that you’ve planted with them that, hey, this is a role you need to be playing if we need accurate information out here, if we want these missions to be successful. Right. So, um 22 places where this conversation we’ve just had about disinformation maybe helps you start new or different conversations with partners or funders. Yeah. Yeah. And that comes, that brings to mind the, uh the information gaps that you were talking about earlier, you know, the turn, turn that around into something positive and try to get funding for the research that hasn’t been done since 1989. Right. Exactly. Exactly. What about the tech companies? Let’s shift a little bit. Uh, I’m interested in your opinion of their responsibility. They are, uh, they are absolved from the responsibility that media companies that news organizations have under. Um, uh, the Communications Act that was, uh, I think it’s article 230 or something, something like that. But, uh, of, of the, of a, of a communications, a federal, a federal statute, they’re exempt from, from that because they, they claim that they are, they’re merely like a bulletin board. They’re not, they’re not a content creator, they’re a content disseminator poster distributor. So they’re not responsible that this is where this is where I think their argument breaks down. Therefore, they’re not responsible for what gets posted on their billboard. Well, when I was in seventh grade, there was a billboard monitor we took down if it was from last week’s, it was advertising last week’s seventh grade dance, we took it down because you don’t need that anymore. It’s, it’s, uh, that’s, that’s old versus disinformation. But, uh, obviously, um, I believe they ought to be, well, he’ll do a much higher standard. I, I, I’m not, I’m not opposed to the journalistic standard or something. Very, very close to that. Right. Yeah, I mean, I think this is, uh, but I’m also interested in your opinion. Yeah, this is, this is unfortunately not a, a new point of frustration, of course. Right. Um, folks feeling like whether it’s Facebook or Twitter or whoever else, you know? Sure you, the company didn’t create that content but you are allowing it to be disseminated and it is wrong. Um You know, we get disinformation is is kind of a Venn diagram in this context with hate speech, there’s there’s this kind of out of proportion understanding or reference to freedom of expression that is that is being used often to cloud whether or not there’s accountability to be taken. Um And I think of course, I think that the platforms need to have a level of responsibility to either prevent or then address harm when it happens because they have allowed this content to, to exist and be disseminated. I think similarly, organizations should really think about, are you prepared to be responsible for harm that comes from content that you may post? And that’s not to say that, you know, every time you’ve been posting on Facebook, it was malicious and you were doing something. But um you know, are, are you maybe going to start using certain tools that are generative A I or something else? And are you ready for what content maybe comes out of there or do you wanna say, hey, we are only our humans are writing our content about our advocacy because we know it is very important that it is 100% accurate, you know, and, and uh we need our experts to do that or um you know, we are only going to post parts of our research when it can be posted in full and these parts of our research are able to be posted as an individual infographic. There are definitely reports that easily are misinformation can be disinformation if they’re posted without the full context of that report, right? And so maybe you wanna say we can’t just have this random thing going on Facebook because it will easily turn into something that we we aren’t necessarily ready to be responsible for. So let’s post ourselves. It’s not to say someone else couldn’t take a screenshot and post it. But you as the organization didn’t start that, right? You are saying we are posting this in full context as a full report document. Um So just some places to think about guidelines or at least guard rails for staff and how they post and, and where, where they post that content. Yeah. All right. Guard Rails for making sure that you’re not, you’re not becoming the bad actor. Right. Right. And right. And you may not even, you’re not doing it intentionally but, you know, context is, is, is, is critical. Yeah. So, yeah, so, yeah, you got to scrutinize uh uh policies, right? What, what’s the role of a generative A I in your organization? If it has a role? Uh what are the, what are the allowable purposes uses where not, you know, you don’t and you just don’t want to be embarrassed as well. Uh Putting aside disinformation, you know, you don’t want to be that was that college? Um There were, there was a, there was a college where the, the, um, one of the officers posted something that was supposed to be thoughtful about a shooting at a local, in a local community. It was a university officer and, and it was just, it was posted by Generative A I, and it, it, it was, it was off color and it was, it was worse than just neutral and not, it was worse than not saying, not persuasive. It was poor and, and it, you know, and it created a whole, uh, you know, it, it created a big problem for the, a big pr problem for the university. Um, you know, so you don’t, you don’t want, you don’t want, you know, it’s your reputation, you just, you need to be judicious about. Right. Who, who posts in your name? Yeah. Exactly. Exactly. And again, it’s not because that means you can lock it down and control random other internet users. You can’t. But anyone that goes then to fact check what that random internet user posted about you will see thoughtful, carefully posted content and no, oh, that you didn’t create that. Right. Because that is clearly out of step with everything else they can see from you or is factually not matching what you have on your quick fax page or, or, you know, whatever else. I know this has been like an hour of tips and people are like, oh, my God, stop to giving me more tips. You know, I, I can only do so many things, but even if people do two of the things we just talked about, that’s a, that’s a good direction for getting into a better position. Yeah. Well, I think people are, uh, often overwhelmed when, when you’re a guest because you have, because you have too much value. You bring too much value. Stop, turn it off. No, no, no, it’s a buffet. You take what works for you and, and if, if, if you don’t agree that this could be a potential problem for you, then, uh at least you’re making that decision informed. Right? And I hope that it doesn’t, I hope that it isn’t an issue. Yeah. Yeah, of course. We wish no ill will on anyone, right? Uh Naturally or anything that we haven’t talked about that any approaches, we haven’t explored angles. We haven’t, you know, the only thing that I will say is that I think this is perfect time to be talking about this. Um, you know, it’s November 30th when we’re recording this. Not that it’s live in this moment, but, uh, a year from now, not even a year from now, six months from now, uh, in the US as politics kicks up its its cycle again, every topic is potentially a topic that a person in a debate references, right? Or a candidate on TV, references or that somebody wants to put into a commercial. And that means, you know, over the next six months you really wanna make sure your content is in order that you only have, you know, stats you stand behind on your website in case you know somebody’s in a debate, they reference the food insecurity rate in your area and you’re like, I know that’s wrong. Can you prove it wrong? Is it on your website? The correct number? Right. So um I just wanna make sure that not again, there’s no fear in this, no anxiety, but just the timeliness is a year from now when it’s election time, we wanna be ready before that. So let’s make sure that you have the content on your website that you want folks to be able to reference and source and well, before the campaign start kicking everything up again, context, you’re right. 2024 is an election year. Be conscious. All right there, Amy Sample Ward, the CEO at N 10 and our technology and social media contributor, Amy. Thanks so much. What a pleasure. Thank you. Yeah, this was a good one. They’re all good. Next week, Gene Takagi returns with a discussion of Sam Altman chat G BT and why they’re relevant to nonprofits. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at Tony martignetti.com were sponsored by donor box, outdated donation forms blocking your supporters, generosity. This giving season donor box, the fast flexible and friendly fundraising platform for nonprofits donor box.org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate Martignetti. The show’s social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein. Thank you for that affirmation. Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio, big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for July 24, 2023: 650th Show!

 

Claire Meyerhoff, Kate Martignetti, Scott Stein, Gene Takagi, Amy Sample Ward & Jena Lynch: 650th Show!

It’s Nonprofit Radio’s 650th show and 13th Anniversary. To celebrate, co-host Claire Meyerhoff shares her “13 Pro Tips & Top Tactics for Nonprofit Podcasts.” We have our associate producer, Kate Martignetti, live music from Scott Stein, and our contributors Gene Takagi (law), and Amy Sample Ward (technology), are also on board. Jena Lynch from our sponsor Donorbox joins us. It’s fun and music and celebration! And gratitude.

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Every nonprofit struggles with these issues. Big nonprofits hire experts. The other 95% listen to Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio. Trusted experts and leading thinkers join me each week to tackle the tough issues. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at Tony Martignetti Nonprofit Radio.
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[00:00:38.61] spk_0:
And welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. It’s mid July. We’ve got the live music and that can only mean one thing. It’s our 650th show and 13th anniversary celebration, jubilee anniversary celebration. Welcome. Welcome to the 650th show. Here’s our associate producer, Kate with a little known fact about your favorite abdominal podcast that needs to be more widely known.

[00:00:53.20] spk_1:
Tony-martignetti non profit radio is in the top 1.5% of the 3.14 million podcasts worldwide. We’ll talk more about that shortly.

[00:01:03.41] spk_0:
Yes, we will. And Kate, what’s happening today for the 650th?

[00:01:35.35] spk_1:
Your co host today is Claire Meyerhoff and Claire has brought her 13 pro tips and top tactics for nonprofit podcasts. We’ve got much more live music from Scott Stein. Our contributors, Gene Takagi and Amy Sample Ward are here and Jenna Lynch from our sponsor Donor box will drop in. It’s fun and music and celebration and gratitude. We’re sponsored by Donor Box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org.

[00:01:49.20] spk_0:
Thank you. Thank you very much, Kate Claire Meyerhoff. It’s so good to see you. Welcome. Welcome,

[00:01:53.23] spk_2:
tony-martignetti. Thank you so much for having me on your 650th show. That’s an amazing accomplishment. It’s

[00:02:23.66] spk_0:
always a pleasure. Every July I look forward to this and every year joining and everybody else joining the very first show was July 16th in 2010 and you were on the second show, July 23rd. Absolutely. Yes. How are you doing? What’s, what’s going on in the

[00:02:50.13] spk_2:
world? I’m, I’m doing very well. I would say that the um my professional highlight of the year after of course, being on tony-martignetti non profit radio was that I attended um my most favorite plan giving conference in the universe, which is the Carolinas Planned Giving conference at Canoga, the North Carolina and South Carolina Council’s put on this great um meeting in the mountains of North Carolina. And this year I was invited to do a keynote with my podcast partner, Cathy Sheffield. And we instead of doing like a keynote thing, we came up with a panel. So we did, we were, we called it the 2023 Canoga keynote panel, the Secure Act 2.0 and how it impacts fundraising. So we had a nice little panel of experts and I asked them questions and we think it was pretty popular

[00:03:15.00] spk_0:
in North Carolina. I didn’t know

[00:03:16.92] spk_2:
no I’m not, I’m not in North Carolina. Traveled there.

[00:03:27.73] spk_0:
I know, I know. I know. I know you traveled to North Carolina. You delivered. I didn’t know I would have come. You were in the mountains. I’m at the beach. It’s a little, it’s a little far,

[00:03:30.63] spk_2:
about 350 miles apart. But next time I will

[00:03:34.64] spk_0:
350 miles between friends. Come on. Alright. Alright. The mountains, the mountains of North Carolina are beautiful.

[00:03:41.41] spk_2:
They certainly are. They certainly are.

[00:03:44.52] spk_0:
And, uh, you have, uh, you brought some, some wisdom with you for your 13 pro tips and top tactics. I did non profit podcast.

[00:04:09.35] spk_2:
Yes, I did because I get asked this question a lot about podcasting because my background is in radio and then I currently, you know, host and produce my own podcast and, you know, really been around the block with all this and there’s a lot of, um, I’ve, I have a lot of wisdom I think to impart to anyone, a nonprofit, considering launching a podcast. It’s a very big undertaking and, or if you have an existing podcast, some things that might help you. So I hope that everybody learns from my 13 pro tips and top tactics for nonprofit podcasts.

[00:04:29.20] spk_0:
I’m sure I’m sure they will. I’m sure we will. Uh, we’re gonna get to them. Let’s bring in Scotty, Scott Stein, Brooklyn, New York. How are you?

[00:04:38.30] spk_3:
I’m great. How are you, tony?

[00:04:40.36] spk_0:
My pleasure. I’m well, Thank you. Thanks for joining on the 6/50. Thank you very

[00:04:44.15] spk_3:
much. Thank you. Glad to be here. This is always a highlight for me. And every time I tell people about this podcast, I said, boy, you know, he’s got 550 episodes. Oh, my goodness. Well, no, this time it’s 600 nickel. I’ve almost, I’ve lost track of the hundreds at this point.

[00:05:22.04] spk_0:
You’re so thoughtful. Thank you. Yeah. No, it’s a, it’s a long run. It just, you know, I, I, somebody was, I was on someone else’s podcast and they were, they were saying, well, you know, such a long run. I say, I told them that I latch onto things that I learned and then I just keep doing them. So I don’t have to learn something new. I just, I just keep doing the same thing 650 times. It’s very freeing. I don’t have to learn something else.

[00:05:30.29] spk_3:
Right. But you learn as you go and you, and you find new wrinkles and, and even though your, you, you say that it feels the same, but like you, you obviously bring a different energy to every episode and you find ways to keep it interesting and keep your listeners engaged, keep them coming back. It’s really, really pretty remarkable.

[00:06:09.85] spk_0:
Well, that’s because we have great guests and, uh, and two of the great guests that are recurring guests, they’re not recurring guests. That’s the wrong. That’s the wrong appellation. They are contributors and of course, I’m talking about Gene Takagi and Amy Sample Ward. Welcome, Jean. How are you?

[00:06:12.22] spk_4:
I’m doing great, honored to be here on your anniversary, tony. Um It’s been a wonderful resource for the nonprofit sector and I agree. Absolutely great guest, myself, not included but everybody else, great guest and a very witty but deeply thoughtful host. So, thank you.

[00:06:52.17] spk_0:
Thank you. All right, that’s we, I try to keep it entertaining. You know, we’re where we want to work in the intersection of value for non, for small and midsize nonprofits and entertainment. And I think there is a space in there where we can, it can be light and still valuable. Absolutely. Amy Sample Ward. Welcome.

[00:06:57.53] spk_5:
Hi. I’m excited that I could call in across time zones were really touching things

[00:07:02.23] spk_0:
today. Welcome from Warsaw Poland. Tell us why you’re there.

[00:07:06.69] spk_5:
I’m doing some training for the organization here around, you know, the usual how to use technology in this world for non profit work.

[00:07:20.05] spk_0:
You’re a Bosch. Uh You’re part of the Bosch Fellowship, is that right?

[00:07:28.74] spk_5:
Yeah, the Robert Bosch Academy. That’s not in Warsaw though, that is in Berlin, but just happened to be already being so close. It was easy to make the train ride over to Warsaw and do some training here.

[00:07:39.52] spk_0:
Where else have you been in Europe? Anywhere else besides home based Berlin?

[00:08:03.70] spk_5:
Well, many years ago before I started joining your podcast, um I lived in England and so we, uh, we went back to London and got to show our daughter around the city, um, for a week, a couple weeks ago. Yeah. But otherwise the summer in Berlin has been more than adequate to keep us

[00:08:08.45] spk_0:
busy. Your family is with you, Max and R and R with you. That’s wonderful for the, for the summer. And this is three, you’re doing this for three months. right? The whole summer.

[00:08:15.36] spk_5:
Yeah, I will have been here for three months. They didn’t come at the start, but

[00:08:19.27] spk_0:
okay. Okay, you’re there for June, July and August. Yeah, essentially. Alright. Alright, Jean, what’s going on with you? What’s, what’s happening in, in the Neo Law Group?

[00:08:43.88] spk_4:
Lots of stuff going on, of course, in our country right now. So we had the big affirmative action case come down the website web design case. So there’s lots of stuff coming from the Supreme Court and nonprofits trying to navigate it. So we’ve been staying busy, but I’ve got a road trip plan um to Vancouver with like three national parks or state parks along the way. So we’re really looking forward to that in about three weeks time.

[00:09:07.39] spk_0:
Wonderful time away. Excellent. Excellent. Let’s bring in Kate martignetti. She’s the newest member of the nonprofit radio family, our associate producer Kate martignetti. Kate. Welcome. How are you?

[00:09:18.79] spk_1:
I’m doing well. Thank you for having me.

[00:09:21.34] spk_0:
Absolutely. Glad to have you. And I realized that before we got started, I neglected to introduce you to any sample ward when they joined. So I was gonna

[00:09:31.46] spk_5:
say I see a interesting last name pair on this call.

[00:09:37.84] spk_0:
Yeah. It’s quite a coincidence. It’s quite a coincidence, isn’t it? The way I found the, I found tony-martignetti non profit radio. So I just, you know, became the aptly named host and then there’s this Kate martignetti who happened to wander along. So, so I brought her in. So Kate meet Amy, Amy, meet Kate.

[00:09:58.00] spk_5:
Now,

[00:10:01.52] spk_2:
of course,

[00:10:40.85] spk_0:
it is my kid is my niece. She’s just, just recently graduated from and to the Academy of Musical and know the American Musical and Dramatic Academy in New York City. She just so she’s professionally trained and I was happy to bring her on. We, we, we did something together on a Lark because I was at their home. They live in South Southern New Jersey. And, uh I thought, well, I have a professionally trained person and I have to do a show while I’m at your house. So let’s bring her in. And, uh, I love the way I love the way she sounded. And, uh, so now she’s in

[00:11:04.97] spk_5:
permanently. I wouldn’t believe that you were not related because every once in a while I’ll meet someone and you know, will be at some event and we’re sat at the same table and we both have the last name sample and we are not related. So it can happen. You can have a not super common name and not be related, but glad to know that you really are. I’m excited that you’re doing a fun cross generational project together. Like non profit radio. That’s true.

[00:11:13.99] spk_0:
I never even, I never even thought of. That’s true. Even we brought in another generation. Absolutely. Right. You can

[00:11:21.29] spk_5:
learn from you. Tell me it’s a legacy and learn from,

[00:11:30.65] spk_0:
we brought in a Gen Z which we did not have. All right. All right. Okay. Just, you know, we’re all talking around you and about you. Uh What’s going on? What are you doing this summer since you graduated from AMD?

[00:11:40.69] spk_1:
Um Well, obviously working with you every Thursday, you know, to record and put out something for your show

[00:11:48.88] spk_0:
highlight of your week. Of course, naturally, my

[00:12:32.94] spk_1:
favorite part of the week um getting to call my uncle. Um I was hoping to start working at a local theater. Um But I mean, I think you’ve heard about like the Sag Aftra strike. Um So, although I could definitely still work at local theaters, it seems that most actors aren’t. I mean, even me, I don’t know if I want to go, even though it’s my passion to be on stage, I want to support my um my union even though I’m not a part of SAG and also support the writers who are putting out beautiful pieces for us to work on. So I’m kinda, you know, I’m okay doing voiceover work for now and then hopefully when things cool over when Sag and the writers get what they deserve and then I’ll hopefully get back on stage.

[00:13:02.92] spk_0:
I admire your commitment to the, to the labor movement. Absolutely. Even though you’re not a member, it’s important. It’s important. All right, I’m glad you’re with us. I love working with you. Every Yes, every Thursday night we, we produced the show for the following Monday. Um Claire, why don’t you, uh why don’t you kick us off with a couple of your uh pro top tips tactics. Everybody’s, everybody’s chomping to, to hear these. I can, I can see this. A couple of people are holding up signs, you know, where’s Clay

[00:13:19.14] spk_2:
tips? I know Al Roker was just, you know, on my shoulder,

[00:13:24.56] spk_0:
nobody’s got signs but nobody put in the chat, but we’re all interested still. So let’s kick off what’s, what’s some, a number one pro

[00:14:34.44] spk_2:
tip? We have 13, 13 tips coming up. And the first, the first pro tips and top tactics. 12 and three are all about giving important consideration to the why the what and the who of your nonprofits podcast. So the first one is why have a podcast. Should you have a podcast? Because the, your board chair is like, we need to have a podcast or your executive director is like, put me on a podcast. No, that’s not the reason to have a podcast the reason to have non profit podcast is to highlight all the wonderful people and work of your mission. So that’s really important. That’s why I have a podcast. And there’s some other reasons too. If you have a podcast, you’re gathering content in a new way. So let’s say you interview someone for your podcast and then a couple of months later you’re doing your newsletter. Well, gee you’ve got all this content on, on tape. I still like to use the word tape that you can go back to and it’s a great way to, to capture content. Tony. Do you have anything to add to my first tip about why I have a podcast? Yeah,

[00:17:04.75] spk_0:
you certainly you’re right. You know, you want to center your mission. What, what, what work do you do? Who do you do it for um you know, mission uh mission centered, right? You’re not, you don’t want to go off like I did once and have a podcast on fermentation because in, in my, in my early days, I thought, well, we’ll just have, we’ll do some occasional off topic shows. And so I brought somebody on. He’s still, he’s still well known, I think in the fermentation community, his, his name is Sandor Katz, but he used to go by Sandor Kraut because sauerkraut is a popular fermented food. So I interviewed Sandor Kraut and uh it was okay about, about halfway through. I was realizing this is really this really does not belong on non profit radio. And uh Claire agreed more effusively than I just stated it. But so she was pretty adamant that and I had another one lined up to um I was going to do uh I had another one, Santa Claus, I was going to interview a professional Santa Claus. So I don’t know, you know, I was just thinking, alright, I thought, well, nonprofit professionals are varied in their interests. But what I didn’t realize in the moment when I made the decision to bring Sander on was that they can pursue those other interests through other podcasts that I was, I was lacking that in my thinking. So I brought Sander on. It’s uh it was an early show, I don’t know, many, many years ago in the first year or two, I think something like that. Um Anyway, that’s all to say, center your mission. Our mission here is small and midsize nonprofits. There will be no more fermentation shows. I’m not going to bring the professional Santa Claus on. He was disappointed too. I, I and I felt bad, I’m letting Santa Claus down, you know, you feel bad about that. I mean, the man makes his living uplifting Children and here I am telling him, you know, I I wanted you on the show, but now you can’t come. So I felt bad about dissing Santa, but it had to be done for the, for the good of the mission. That’s the whole point. Uh Claire Center, your mission in your, in your

[00:18:47.72] spk_2:
podcast. Well, and that’s tip number two. Is that what is your podcast about? Really? What is the, what is the, what of your podcast? And it’s not about your executive director’s ego. It’s not about fermentation unless you’re the National Fermentation Association. Um Your, your podcast again is about your mission. And so that’s, that’s what it is about. And then number three, in the first or first little group, who is your ideal listener. And this one I think is really, really important because pretty much every nonprofit organization I’ve worked with or help them with the podcast, I say, well, who is your ideal listener? And they go, oh the general public, we want everybody to listen and that’s, that is really, you’re really off base with that because unless you’re maybe like, you know, an animal rescue um podcast and you give like tips for heatwave with dogs and stuff. Like people will find that podcast and listen to it. If you’re the Humane Society or something, that’s a helpful podcast to a lot of people. But in general, um the who is going to listen to your podcasts are going to be your most engaged people. So they might be board members, they might be longtime volunteers and they’re your longtime donors and supporters that really care about your mission. And I think the litmus test a little bit is for choosing your audience. If after listening to this podcast, would that person, would that donor feel more inclined to include your non profit in their will or other estate plans? Does the content of your podcast make them feel like they’re, you know, they’re getting good inside information that, that your nonprofits, good stewards of donation that the people who work there are really, you know, doing, doing good work. And so I think that’s the who your ideal listener is. It’s that really close, close group of people. It’s not some big, vast general audience that’s going to find you on, on Spotify. If you’re, you know, a local podcast, say in Detroit about homelessness. So interesting

[00:19:18.77] spk_0:
how you bring in, you bring in a Planned Giving litmus test. Would you said after listening, would people include you in their will? Oh, that’s a pretty high, that’s a pretty high bar.

[00:20:30.59] spk_2:
Well, it’s, it’s, you know, you’re, you’re speaking directly to a long time, you know, loyal donor who’s been giving to you maybe for 20 years, maybe $10 a year. And that’s your, your typical, you know, really good plan giving prospect. And so I do like to use that as a litmus test. And then another thing is you can, you know, put a little, like I call them commercials, but you can put a little recorded PS A or something or you can read it like Kate does read it, read it live and you could have a PS A about plan giving at your organization, right? So you can talk about that about your legacy society and how people can, you know, get more information, you know, put in your URL for your Plan giving dot org hashtag or slash legacy or whatever. So I think that that is a good um litmus test about what your content should be. Now, it shouldn’t be like deep in the woods like, oh, let’s talk about rates for charitable gift annuities. It wouldn’t be that right. But it would be other things that when someone is listening to your podcast, they’re like, wow, you know, this is really there. I really agree with this. This is really great. I’m happy, I’m proud to be a supporter of this, of this organization. Okay.

[00:20:31.67] spk_0:
Okay. And you’re, of course, the PSAs could be any related to anything planned giving or become a monthly sustainer. But of course, you don’t want to get, you don’t want to get carried away either with promoting giving or volunteering

[00:20:56.17] spk_2:
111 little spot, you know, one little spot. It’s kind of like, I used to be a traffic reporter, right? And at the end of the traffic, you know, my traffic report I’d say, and you know, traffic is brought to you by Ledo Pizza. Ledo Pizza is square because Ledo Pizza never cuts corners. That’s a 12th little spot, right? So

[00:21:08.13] spk_0:
D

[00:21:34.79] spk_2:
C, this is, this is a mixed 107.3 the ABC, um, CHR station in, in DC where I did the traffic for a while. Yeah. So those little there, you know, those little 12th spots and really they’re really valuable. That’s a great, you know, you could just put that at the end of your, at your nonprofit podcast interested in leaving a legacy to help animals visit blah, blah, blah slash

[00:21:36.75] spk_0:
legacy. I’m more interested in Ledo pizza, never cutting corners. So the

[00:21:40.89] spk_2:
Pizza Square because pizza never cuts corners.

[00:21:43.69] spk_0:
Pizza Square. So they did Sicilian Pizza. Of course, of course, you wouldn’t cut the corners. The corner is the best part you want.

[00:21:52.28] spk_2:
And someone wrote that and it was, you know, read on all the radio stations. And

[00:22:14.24] spk_0:
I think that’s a brilliant line. Never cut corners, never cut corners, right? I saw what I saw something on a, uh, this was, uh, an electric company, there was a truck, it was something like Gans are electric. Let us check your shorts. And I thought that was great tag line. That’s

[00:22:34.18] spk_2:
a really, that’s a really great tag line. Years ago, I helped judge a nonprofit tagline contest, a national one. And, and you know, the classic best example of, of a, a tagline would be, um, oh, my train of thought just went. But anyhow, I think of it

[00:22:37.16] spk_0:
later.

[00:22:39.48] spk_2:
I know maybe there’s a little pizza foundation and I could help them start a planned giving program.

[00:22:50.25] spk_0:
Alright. I would like to work with you on that. I would like to work with you on that. Alright. You wanna you wanna give us one more tip in this, in this little block of tips?

[00:24:06.19] spk_2:
Sure. Those were my first three tips. The why what and who are your podcast? And then my next group is production, making it happen. How do you make it happen? And we’ll talk about more later But the first one would be this tip number four, who is going to do the heavy lifting a podcast is a lot of work and who in your organization is going to take on this long term commitment. It’s just not just one little thing that you do one weekend and you forget it and it needs to be someone who is super excited about doing this podcast, someone who learns quickly, someone who’s tech Savvy, perhaps like Kate martignetti, someone who’s test tech savvy, they could, they could run your podcast and that’s really important like who’s gonna do the work because in a lot of cases, a nonprofit podcast has one person doing all the work there, the host there, the producer, they book the guests, they record it and they edit it, they make it an MP three, they put it up on Buzz Sprout or their other host and they do it also. If you have this one person that’s super excited about doing the podcast with some skills that’s really, um that it’s really, really, really important

[00:24:08.71] spk_0:
and I agree with you that they should be excited about it. Not, well, all right. You know, okay, if you’re gonna add it to my, to do list,

[00:24:18.60] spk_2:
which is usually how it

[00:24:50.75] spk_0:
Right. Right. You gotta be because, because it is a lot of work and you want somebody who’s motivated, you know, he’s got some, got some passion about it, you know, really is interested in taking on that, that heavy lifting that you described because, because it takes time, it does take time. All right, Claire, cool. Thank you. We were going to revisit the through the, through the show. And, uh I just, uh at this point, I want to bring in uh our resident musician from Brooklyn New York, Scott Stein, Scott’s gonna, Scott’s gonna do a song for us a new day. Tell us about the song

[00:24:57.57] spk_3:
Scott. I think the song is, it’s mostly about fermentation.

[00:25:04.09] spk_0:
So its mission centric, who sent us the mission of the show?

[00:25:08.24] spk_3:
I wasn’t sure if too much time had elapsed, maybe your listeners may have forgotten about that section. Um

[00:25:13.33] spk_0:
No, that was, that was, that was a bona fide callback. Cool.

[00:25:48.55] spk_3:
Cool. It’s not about that. I think the song is rather new. So I think it is about kind of just finding your way through the, you know, the challenges in life and trying to, to stay centered, which is, I think something that’s easier said, than done for most of us myself included. By the way, there might be, some, might get some sound effects. It’s just sort of thunder storming here in Brooklyn. So, uh, so if you hear that, hopefully it’ll be just like right in rhythm. Okay.

[00:25:57.12] spk_0:
That’s how we know we’re live thunder in the background. We don’t, we don’t, we don’t take that out. All right, Scott Stein, a new day

[00:29:10.31] spk_6:
at the moment with soldiers and guards. Even there never had a plan and, and a half empty bed thinking maybe that’s where I should have stayed time. Yeah. Yeah. What speed? Mhm Yeah. Now I’m stuck. Mm As far as the eye can see from the valley to the top of

[00:29:15.32] spk_3:
the ridge.

[00:30:10.30] spk_6:
Hurry up, steady but slow. The arms of the got some miles to go. Yeah. Yes, it is. Now

[00:30:25.64] spk_0:
Scott Stein, who beautiful Scott. That’s lovely. That’s a beautiful new song. A new day.

[00:30:32.10] spk_3:
Thank you. Glad you enjoyed it. Absolutely. Doing some shows coming up. So it’s an impetus to get some new songs written and finished and out into the world. So, so there you go.

[00:30:57.33] spk_0:
Thank you for doing it. And we’ve got, we’ve got more. Scott’s gonna do a couple of other songs for us shortly. I want to bring in Jenna Lynch from our sponsor donor box, Jenna. First of all, am I saying your name correctly is Jenna or Gina?

[00:31:03.77] spk_7:
It’s Jenna. Good job

[00:31:05.52] spk_0:
welcome Jenna’s non profit. Advocate at our sponsor, Donor box, Jenna. Thank you for joining and thank you for donor boxes. Sponsorship of nonprofit radio.

[00:31:18.46] spk_7:
Well, thank you for having me. And congratulations. 650 shows. 13 years. That is uh incredible. That is just amazing. I’ve been a fan for a long time, so I’m really grateful to be a part of this and I didn’t know I was entering into a concert here. That was really cool.

[00:31:48.01] spk_0:
I see. You’ve got your branded T shirt on. Very, are your branded T shirt? You’re branded button down shirt? Yes, I’ve got the donut box shirt. Okay, wearing the swag. So, so Jenna tell us a little about donor box. I mean, this is, is used by 50,000 organizations worldwide. Uh 40,000 in the United States. What, what’s going on? What’s the formula at Donor Box that you’ve got 50,000 organizations worldwide using this?

[00:32:54.92] spk_7:
Yeah. Well, thank you for that question. So, at Donor Box, we are all about empowering nonprofits to make a difference. So we are a fundraising platform built with fundraisers for fundraisers. So our team, we’ve had our boots on the ground and we really inform what the product looks like because we understand the seasons of nonprofit and nonprofit pain points. So, so I think that’s one thing that really helps our nonprofit users really thrive. Um And something that I think also makes us stand out is that at the heart of our fundraising platform is something called the Ultra Swift donation form. So this is really a game changer um designed to reduce that donor drop off when they’re making a donation and it provides a really quick donation experience. That is we’ve timed this over four times faster than traditional donation forms because we all know that we want to go through the hassle of making that transaction, right? We

[00:33:06.95] spk_0:
say that on the show every week. Uh next donations four times faster. So good, cool. I was gonna ask you why our donations going four times faster. Alright, so, right. So it cuts down on drop off,

[00:33:35.53] spk_7:
it cuts down on drop off, which really makes a big difference because in today’s digital age, we are all about convenience. We’ve all we’re all donating on our phones were all using these digital wallets, right? So we don’t want to go through the hassle of plugging through the these long ugly tedious forms. So with our ultra swift pay folks can make a donation and uh you know, really quick time and that means that your nonprofit is getting that donation uh super fast as well. So um I think that’s a pretty big deal for folks

[00:33:53.22] spk_0:
and you have something new to the live kiosk, right? Donor Box Live Oscar. What is that about?

[00:34:57.03] spk_7:
Sure. Well, so that’s the perfect segway I think beyond our donation pages and forms, we offer a comprehensive suite of fundraising solutions. So it’s not just the forms and the pages. So from selling event tickets to engaging supporters through peer to peer campaigns, crowdfunding pages, text to give. Um we really offer a versatile uh set of fundraising solutions to cater to all needs. And one of those things is the donor box like chaos. This is something that we recently released and we’re seeing really great results from a nonprofit community. So it’s for those in person fundraising moments. So it’s um it really simplifies the process of collecting on site donations and on the spot donations using a tablet or card reader. So this kind of replaces that clunky box that you have at the front of your museum or at your brick and mortar, mortar, non profit people can and swipe tap or dip their card and give in a way that’s convenient for them and you can still engage those folks later. So instead of people just dropping five bucks into a box and you have no idea who did it. People will give through the live kiosk, they get a thank you and a receipt automatically and you can put those people into your fundraising cycle so that you can continue to nurture those relationships.

[00:35:21.20] spk_0:
So that’s for like Galas golf outings, auctions, things like this, anything, anything live and in person.

[00:35:29.26] spk_7:
Yes, exactly. It really is a great apply to

[00:35:34.51] spk_0:
all before you go leave us with one more thing you’d like, you’d like our listeners to know about uh donor box and let me thank you again for the donor box sponsorship. What what, what would you like would you like to leave us with?

[00:36:31.12] spk_7:
Sure. I think one final note, I think what truly sets donor box part is our team’s commitment to supporting the growth of our nonprofit users. So yes, we have all this awesome tech, but we truly believe in the human touch, right? Which is why we are a team of people that have had experience in the nonprofit sector are ourselves. So we provide a range of resources to help our nonprofit users. So our customer success team is totally amazing and dedicated to helping nonprofits succeed. And they provide this personalized support 24 hours a day, Monday through Friday and even offer weekend help as well. And beyond this, we offer fundraising coaching through a premium package, monthly, free webinars. And we have something called the Donor Box Academy to provide these really valuable guidance and knowledge and courses and resources all in one kind of tidy package. So we’re really here to walk alongside you throughout your fundraising journey. So again, balancing the tech with the human touch and making sure that you’re accomplishing your goals.

[00:37:01.22] spk_0:
Thank you, Jenna. Thank you. Thank you again for the donor box sponsorship, Jenna Lynch non profit. Thank you so much for having me at donor box. My pleasure. Thank you

[00:37:11.41] spk_5:
and Jenna. Thanks for being at the MTC this year

[00:37:14.51] spk_7:
of

[00:37:15.14] spk_5:
course

[00:38:43.55] spk_0:
so long, Jenna. All right. Uh Claire, you know, it’s something interesting. We’re clear we’re gonna talk about some, some, some more of the 13 pro tips and top tactics. But it’s just something interesting, you know, I, I asked Jenna was like, pronouncing her name right to me, Jen. A, you know, it’s just, it’s, it’s Jenna. That’s, that’s the only, that’s the only, to me that’s the only conceivable pronunciation. But when you bring in a second set of eyes or more like Kate as, as our associate producer, she asked me before we went live, is it Jenna or Gina? I thought, oh should, it could be Gina? It could be Gina. So you see the value of, of uh well, my, my brilliant niece, first of all, but a very close second to that the value of somebody else, you know, just another perspective. I mean, of course, it could be Gina but to me, there was no other way. Um So there is another way and having a different perspective on anything. Uh I’m getting a little prophetic now, a little little misty, you know, anything besides how to pronounce somebody’s name uh is valuable, a new perspective, fresh perspective. So give us some fresh perspective on, on nonprofit nonprofit podcasts. Let’s talk about a couple more. Shall be clear,

[00:39:55.18] spk_2:
let’s do a few more tips for, for good non profit podcasts. And so my tip number five is only let a few select hands touch this podcast. So this is not a project for a committee. You will never have a podcast. See the light of day when you have a committee to the podcast committee, the podcast committee is not a good thing. Really, one person can do the whole thing and then you might have two people involved. Let’s say you have someone that’s a host besides yourself or, or vice versa. So how have just a very, very few people involved in your podcast? Because one person really can do it all and one person can decide the format, they can book the guests, they can serve as host, they can record, they can edit, upload that final MP three and make sure that it, it gets fed to podcast providers like Spotify and, and I heart and all those, you know, there’s a whole sequence to this and then also like, where is this going to live on your website? So there’s a lot of back end stuff to, to doing your. So my, my tip number five is only let a few people touch the podcast. Number six is one person can do it all because I like to just really emphasize, emphasize that. And so we’re just, you know, moving, moving along. So

[00:40:37.33] spk_0:
I can, I can, I just can I meld those 25 and six. The only thing that I do have help with is on that back end. So, you know, your tip is just a few people and I do have help on the technical side, our web guy, Mark Silverman, uh, social media, Susan Chavez. So, you know, I produce an audio file every week and I put it someplace for, for Mark and then he puts it where the, the podcast platform crawlers will find it, Apple, Spotify, Google, etcetera. So, so, uh, so putting those two to get to tips together, I do have some help on the, on the back end. But I absolutely agree with you that one person can do. We could do all of it, but certainly one person could do the front side, all the guests and the ideas and the hosting and one person, you know, back back side.

[00:41:36.00] spk_5:
Do you remember real non profit life? If one person does it and that person leaves you no longer have a podcast because no one else in the organization knows where you upload the file to or how you recorded it or who the guest list was. So back declares very original point. A podcast is a long term commitment and that means, well, it does not, I absolutely agree. Technology of any time by committee usually never ever turned on. Um, but there needs to be some ability for folks to go on vacation and take some time off for folks to share knowledge may have backups. Um, because otherwise, you know, it’s similar reasons why you don’t have only one person in the organization that knows about the program and runs the program entirely by themselves. Otherwise your program or your service would end as soon as they left the organization.

[00:42:20.43] spk_2:
That’s an excellent point. And so it would be very, it would behoove you to create, you know, documents concerning the podcast, like if you have a format sheet or anything and, you know, share that with other people at the organization so that they are at least familiar with it. And, you know, another point would be too, if you just do a once a month, that’s really enough people, like, you know, tony has this massive commitment, right where he does it once a week. But it’s, it’s a, that’s a load of work. So for your nonprofit, once a month is fine, it really is. And you can just, you know, do it once a month that gives you plenty of time to get it, to get it all together. The

[00:44:00.85] spk_0:
only thing I would add to that is, uh before we bring in Scott because we got some music coming up from Scott very shortly. Uh The consistency is important. If you’re gonna do once a month, stick with once a month, don’t say, well, we’re gonna take the summer off. You know what? Because then the summer bleeds into the fall and your podcast collapses. People, people unsubscribe you. Consistency is key. If it’s gonna be whatever, it’s gonna be twice a month, once a month. If you’re gonna go for weekly. You know, that is a big lift. That’s an enormous lift for somebody who’s got a full time job to, um, just be consistent. Stick with it to Amy’s point. If you go on vacation, either pre record a show. So to cover yourself while you’re away or have somebody fill in for, you can certainly have a guest host. Uh, David Letterman had guest hosts and, uh, other people whose nighttime shows I don’t watch anymore. I still have guest hosts. I was gonna go to Johnny Carson with uh Joan Rivers, but that’s probably wasted on 98% of the audience. So. Exactly. Amy says, shaking your head. No. What’s that? Kate is like my, my, my, my 61 year old uncle. Right. Exactly. But you can have it, you can have a guest host, believe it, my, my examples, my, my dated examples aside, you can have a guest host. Keep with the consistency, right to, right to Claire’s Point and to, and to Amy’s point, we’re gonna, we’re gonna bring, well,

[00:44:21.48] spk_2:
I want to emphasize that when I talk about like having one person do it, that’s really mostly for the beginning to get this thing launched, right? Because it’s really hard to get things to get this podcast launched. But why once you have that podcast going, then after a couple of episodes, you could bring in a guest host and now that person is learning more and more. But I think the one person or a few hands is definitely right when you’re starting your podcast so you can, you know, get it done

[00:45:02.93] spk_0:
and absolutely. Absolutely. No committee, no committee. Okay. Let’s bring in Scott. I, uh, I requested Scott play a song that I love, love on his album. He introduced it for us last year on the 6/100 show Uphill. The album is Uphill and my favorite song on that album is a good life and I love that Scott. I’m, I guess I’m, I guess I’m supposed to let the musician talk about the show but I mean their song. But, but, but you know, you’re suffering a lackluster host, you all, all, all five of, you know, this. So, uh but, but, but I’m a fan so I’m sharing effusively, I love that. The album is Uphill, but the final song on the album is,

[00:45:55.17] spk_3:
thank you. I’m, I’m so glad you, first of all, thank you for requesting the song and taking such a careful listen. Yeah, the album is uh it’s definitely a moodier piece. Um I was my family that went through, give you the short version, but we were going through a lot. There was, we lost some dear family members and it was just a lot of turmoil and this record was kind of my way of, of um working through it. Uh But I needed to end on an uplifting note or some kind of some kind of joy even if its hard won and, and that’s where this song really came from. And so I’m happy to do it for you. Thank

[00:46:13.48] spk_0:
you, Scott. A good

[00:48:23.79] spk_6:
life. She’s been shot. Copy. So we’re reliable. Mhm. Mhm. Does he get the car? Very

[00:50:52.50] spk_0:
beautiful. A good life. Scott Stein. Don’t just stick to what, you know, let it fly and watch it go. Love that. I always love that when I’m listening on my own, that one just always catches me. Don’t just stick to what, you know, let it fly and watch it go. Thank you, Scott. Thank you, Claire. Let’s, uh, talk about some more pro tips and, uh, and, and finish out your 13.

[00:54:25.74] spk_2:
Yeah. Well, I’d like to for, for budding broadcasters, people who want to do their own nonprofit podcast and you’re thinking, well, what, what would be some of the topics, what would we talk about on this nonprofit podcast? So I suggest looking to your existing communications, what type of content gets the best feedback on your social media and your newsletter, your E news, right? Like you do a little feature on a, on a donor or something and, and you get a bunch of emails from people going, oh, I love that little article about the lady that did XYZ. So your, your existing content really should inspire you to what is going to be on the podcast? What do your, your longtime uh, donors like to hear about. And then uh my next tip is something that Tony gave me. I love this, your topics and your guests also should pull back the curtain that each episode should illustrate it for those who love it and want to know more. Let those people know that there’s, you know, something behind behind here, there’s like magic happening that’s making this nonprofit so great. So try to pull back the curtain a little bit. And then, um, my next tip is something tony I know. Agrees with two. You should adopt a guest first policy. So a lot of people say like, oh, I’d love, we should really do a story about the people cleaning up the rivers in our community. Well, do you know anybody know? And then you have to like hunt around for this magical person who’s going to come on and talk about this content on the flip side. If you do guest first, let’s say you’re talking to someone at your organization, they tell you something really, really interesting. You’re like, wow, that was so interesting. That person is really lively. They want to do the podcast. That’s the person who should be on your podcast. And then that’s guest first. So it’s you think about the guest first and the, the topic is secondary. And I think a great way to illustrate this is with Prince Harry and Meghan who got this massive, um, uh, they got a ton of money to do a podcast for Spotify. But now we’re reading a, you know, Spotify is not doing that anymore. And so they killed it. So now I read little things in the news about, you know, people who know stuff about what was going on, you know, behind the scenes. And so they would get on a call with Prince Harry who I think is a lovely guy and, and they’d say, well, what kind of, you know, podcast you want to do? And he go, well, you know, I would love to talk to Vladimir Putin about his childhood trauma or I would love to talk to Donald Trump about his childhood trauma. And then the producers working with Harry would say, well, do you know Putin? Do you know Trump? Well, no. So how, how is that gonna happen? Meanwhile, your Prince Harry, right? Like a lot of people would want to come on your podcast that, you know, like super cool people, right? Like he’s involved in a lot of different nonprofit causes. There must, you know, there’s all kinds of great people he could have on his podcast, but he’s pitching these ideas that are just not gonna happen and that happens to with non profit podcast. They said, oh, we really need to do it about this. And it’s like, well, who are we gonna have on? Oh, I don’t know. And then you look around for this magic person and then maybe you find the person and they go, no, I don’t want to be on a podcast. You want people who want to be on your podcast that are excited about being on your podcast. So if you go and look at like your previous newsletters and things and you say, oh my God, we interviewed this woman about this show. She was, she loved doing the article, she loved the article. We’ll put her on your podcast. She’s already warmed up. So, you know, I love to repurpose content and ideas um with nonprofits, I

[00:54:37.70] spk_0:
love that little shameless self promotion that the, that tony-martignetti non profit radio outlived the Harry and Meghan. Yes. Okay.

[00:54:48.60] spk_2:
Getting more money.

[00:55:06.97] spk_0:
There’s another one, you know, the Bruce Springsteen Barack Obama podcast, that one collapsed. Michelle Obama had a podcast that one collapsed. So, uh you know, non profit radio has persevered through the uh through the turmoil of podcasting. At least I believe those were both Spotify podcasts. But, uh I feel bad for Bruce and Barack that they couldn’t keep their podcast

[00:56:03.74] spk_2:
going. I feel they couldn’t do as well as tony-martignetti. And when I talk to nonprofits about podcast, I always talk about tony-martignetti. There’s never an initial conversation that I have with someone that doesn’t mention you because I’ll say, look, so here’s this person. 13 years ago. I, he wanted to do this podcast. He put all these things in order. He’s still doing it. He does one a week every week of the year, except for two, that’s 50 a year. I mean, that’s, that takes a ton of work. So I always, I always talk about that. So rounding out my, my top tips, um, I think this is a good tip, the politics, right, of the, of the nonprofit podcast. So, so if you’re, you’re, you’re the person working on it. Like, don’t oversell it. Right. Don’t say over going to have, you know, one, a, one a week and we’re going to have all these people on, don’t oversell what you’re doing. Just keep it, keep it low and say, you know, we’re working on a pilot episode. That’s a great way to manage the nonprofit politics is to say, you know, that we’re doing a pilot episode, we’re going to see how it sounds. Well, let different people listen to it. And, um, I think that’s, that’s a great thing to do. Managing expectations, managing expectations.

[00:56:28.94] spk_0:
That’s probably a very good idea. We’re working on a pilot. Let’s see how, let’s,

[00:57:00.51] spk_2:
yeah, working on a pilot, manage those expectations because that’s, you know, it’s like a campaign or something. So I’ll do my very last tip right now. Let’s call it number 13, we’ll wrap it up and here’s the pro my, my number 13 pro tip. Look at existing podcast for inspiration and validation. So, look around at other nonprofits, see what they’re doing, how they do it and, and do that, find, find those. And I found a few really, really good non profit podcast I want to mention and well, put these out there somewhere. So, Feeding Tampa Bay, which is a, you know, a food insecurity non profit, they have a great um podcast. Vermont Arts Council has a great podcast and something called Farm Commons has a great podcast. So there’s a lot of really good non profit podcast out there and you can see how they do it. You can see what their back end looks like. What does it look like on their website? Right? So that’s, you know, uh what is it, the sincerest form of flattery,

[00:57:30.03] spk_0:
copying, copying, imitation, imitation. Thank you. Alright. Cool Claire. Thank you. Thanks for, thank you for finding three excellent examples to

[00:57:44.22] spk_2:
thank you. Yes. Well, I think, I think that’s helpful for, for our other are 90 other 95% of the nonprofit spectrum. The people without the big budgets,

[00:57:49.17] spk_0:
cheap red wine is our theme music. It’s been our theme music for many years. I don’t know, I don’t know how many 8, 10 years, a long time, a long

[00:58:01.09] spk_3:
time.

[00:58:08.88] spk_0:
So I always ask Scott to perform cheap red wine. Um And so Scott, you wanna, you wanna intro the song at all?

[00:58:51.41] spk_3:
Sure. I wrote this one when I was much, much younger and maybe a little more cynical. I appreciate you letting me do this song last because it sits the highest in my range. Is the hardest one to sing. So, allowing me to just get a little warmed up. But, yeah, this is from a record I did back in 22,009 called Jukebox was actually the first record I did after moving to New York and moved in 07. And so I was just, you know, wide eyed and bushy tailed. Although I didn’t think I was, I certainly was back then, uh, as Fresh off the boat from Ohio as it were. So, anyway, so, but I was, I was thrilled when I got the call that Tony that you wanted to use the song and we’re gonna license it. And, uh, and I’m just so tickled that, that, that you’re still using it and, uh, it’s going strong. So here’s the, here’s the full song,

[00:59:12.17] spk_0:
Deep Red Wine. It’s my pleasure, Scott Cheap Red wine,

[01:02:25.27] spk_6:
baby. Just keep on talking sooner or later. I’ll figure out seeking romantic advice from a building because I’m on it. Look. Mm. You’re losing a diamond. Mhm. And nobody else in used to find me charming, but I can’t figure out don’t matter now

[01:03:31.55] spk_0:
at the top of his range, top of his range, Scott Stein. Thank you. Thank you very much, Scott. Thanks so much for being with us for the 6/50. Thank you.

[01:03:41.65] spk_5:
May be one of Claire’s Pit. Should be to have a live musician with your product.

[01:03:58.26] spk_2:
Well, if you have a very robust podcast, yes, you could have live, you can have live, you have live music. I get my music off of something called story blocks. That’s a website that has all this great non live music

[01:04:02.25] spk_0:
that you can sample. Ward Amy Jean. Thanks for being with me.

[01:04:07.69] spk_5:
Thanks for having us along the ride.

[01:04:10.06] spk_0:
Absolutely. My pleasure. Continued. Good luck to you, Amy. And you’re in your fellowship. Thanks

[01:04:18.98] spk_5:
to schedule some time later and debrief at all.

[01:04:23.44] spk_0:
Okay, you can debrief on non profit radio if you like that. That’s what

[01:04:26.75] spk_5:
I mean. We’ll hash it all up together. Okay. Okay.

[01:04:29.89] spk_0:
Alright, Jean. Thank you so

[01:04:32.82] spk_4:
much. Thanks Tony and just to add into the tips. Um Don’t infringe on creators rights. Don’t take Scott songs and, and put them on there without his permission and license and writers Guild go because you got to protect those, your, your creators, right? So, thank you for leaving that up

[01:04:51.49] spk_2:
to

[01:04:53.98] spk_0:
and yeah, I licensed cheap red wine from Scott all those years ago.

[01:04:58.89] spk_3:
Yes, appreciated proud member of local leader to FM. So,

[01:05:03.86] spk_6:
all

[01:05:06.91] spk_0:
right, Claire Meyerhoff. Thank you very much. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for bringing your tips. Always a pleasure to have you join us on the, the show. Anniversaries. Thanks,

[01:05:16.00] spk_2:
Claire, tony. It’s great. It’s a, it’s a highlight of my year. I’ll see you at the 7/100 show.

[01:05:23.33] spk_0:
You will. Thank you. Thanks everybody, Kate. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. Take us out.

[01:05:31.52] spk_1:
Happy to tony. If you missed any part of this week’s show,

[01:05:37.27] spk_0:
I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re

[01:05:55.59] spk_1:
sponsored by Donor Box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate martignetti. The show, social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guide and this glorious live music is by Scott Stein.

[01:06:23.29] spk_0:
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty. You’re with me next week for non profit radio, non, profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for July 17, 2023: Communications & Development Teams Working Better Together

 

Misty McLaughlin & Alice HendricksCommunications & Development Teams Working Better Together

Misty McLaughlin and Alice Hendricks close our 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference coverage, as they reveal how these two teams can avoid the common conflicts and tensions, to come together collaboratively. They’re the principals and founders of Cause Craft Consulting.

 

 

 

 

 

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[00:00:34.85] spk_0:
And welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio, big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with us. I’d suffer the embarrassment of mono aphasia if you uttered the word fail because you missed this week’s show. Here’s Kate, our new associate producer just promoted from announcer with highlights of this week’s show, Kate. Congratulations on your promotion.

[00:01:13.64] spk_1:
Thank you, Tony. I’m happy to be here and now communications and development teams working better together. Misty mclaughlin and Alice Hendricks close our 2023 nonprofit technology conference coverage as they reveal how these two teams can avoid the common conflicts and tensions to come together collaboratively. They’re the principals and founders of cause craft consulting on Tony’s take two.

[00:01:15.88] spk_0:
I finally have someone to blame.

[00:01:20.84] spk_1:
We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org.

[00:01:34.89] spk_2:
Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 23 NTC 2023 nonprofit technology conference in Denver, Colorado, where we

[00:01:49.07] spk_0:
are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology

[00:01:50.04] spk_2:
strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me now at the, at the conference are Misty mclaughlin and Alice Hendricks. They are both principles and co founders of cause craft consulting, Misty. Welcome back.

[00:02:08.19] spk_3:
Welcome to non profit

[00:02:09.04] spk_4:
radio.

[00:02:10.13] spk_2:
Pleasure to have you both co founders, the

[00:02:11.96] spk_3:
principles. Thank

[00:02:18.51] spk_2:
you. Your session is communications and development team working better together. Alright, Alice, since you’re the first time non profit radio, why don’t you give us an overview of what’s, what’s out there between these two teams and why this is important,

[00:02:47.95] spk_4:
you know, tony, it’s a really important topic because over the 20 years that I’ve been in the sector working on both development and communications teams projects from a technology perspective, we’ve noticed that there’s often inherent conflict between those two teams primarily because their mission are very different. Development departments need to raise the money, communications departments need to get the word out and so nobody is doing anything wrong. They’re all living their jobs in the right way, doing the right thing. However, because of the inherent conflict, friction occurs between people and teams often don’t get along. They fight over resources, they don’t have good processes and that can lead to a feeling of discord between staff and organizations.

[00:03:17.40] spk_2:
Interesting. Okay, I, I was very interested to read this uh because I’ve not, I’ve not seen this but I’ve been a consultant for so many years. Um you know, I could see why I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t know about it. I do plan giving consulting. So that’s a narrow niche within one of the two silos we’re talking about, well, hopefully not silos within one of the two teams that we’re talking about, you know, in development. Um So, yeah, I’m not aware of that, Misty, how does this conflict sometimes play

[00:04:06.19] spk_3:
out? Well, Tony, that’s a great question. So, um we have been seeing it for years but then we saw an article a few years ago in the Chronicle of Philanthropy kind of talking about what the implications of this phenomenon are because it is kind of, I think it’s reasonably well acknowledged that this happens sometimes to the point that those two teams don’t work together at all. And so you have kind of two separate pieces and they just decided we’re not going to work together. And then there are times that it’s actually a

[00:04:12.09] spk_2:
disaster. We can’t raise money if we can’t get the message

[00:04:25.54] spk_3:
out. Exactly. And we can’t, and we can’t get the message out if we don’t have that kind of core audience on board. Right? I mean, fundraising represents a significant audience of importance for the organization. So the Chronicle of Philanthropy did a piece about this and then we just continued to see it, continue to see it, see it play out in all these ways. And we decided to do some research about this. So our session is actually kind of presenting some of the results of that research. We heard from 85 organizations about what this looks like in their organizations and how it plays out from, I would say dynamics that are mildly ineffective and involve some minor friction to complete breakdowns.

[00:04:50.06] spk_2:
We’re not talking to each other. We’re not, we’re not going to send your messages or we’re not going to support your message. Support your messaging.

[00:05:14.57] spk_3:
Exactly. Or we’re going to circumvent the approval process and we’re just gonna send something out before you can stop us. And if it contradicts the mission or it contradicts, for example, like a shared messaging hierarchy. Oh, well, as long as I got my message to my audience and it happens on both sides, it’s no one’s at fault. I mean, people really in general, people aren’t devious, they want to work together. They sometimes just can’t figure out exactly how to make that happen. Um And then, you know, often what is just a kind of personal conflict blows up to be something happening more at a team level or more at the departmental level, leaders have a huge role to play in this. And if two leaders between those two departments don’t get along, it’s difficult for staff to kind of figure out how to navigate the

[00:05:39.74] spk_2:
President’s or something. Exactly. Um Is there uh do either of you have, well, you work, you work in the same company, you know, all the same, you have the same clients? I mean, is there a, I don’t mean to focus on the inflammatory. But is there, is there like a story of conflict, maybe, maybe like a good story of conflict and then later on, we could tell the epilogue where it came out, came out. Well, after cause craft consulting intervened. Is there a story like that?

[00:07:14.95] spk_4:
Yeah, I mean, I think there’s lots of stories like that. What we see often dynamics that happen because of this is delayed getting emails out the door or vetting process is just it’s going to take me four days to get back to you to approve the content or choose the photo or complaints about just the lack of collaborative working together. We also often see the leaders might not get along of these two departments, but staff themselves develop and forged relationships of trust amongst each other, which is great. You really want to have good, strong personal 1 to 1 relationships. In fact, in our research results, one of the ways that we saw people who responded, that mitigate the fact that the teams themselves weren’t getting along is that just they made friends with someone on the other team so that they needed a file update or some piece of collateral, they would ask their friend, which is wonderful because you have a trusted friend. But for us as process design consultants, we see that as a dysfunction, we see that as a lack of people really understanding what their role is, who’s supposed to be doing what, what lane they should stay in, what you can expect from someone and another team. So the really the solution to all of this is good, strong leadership, building trust and good process. So everyone is clear about what you’re supposed to do, what happens next and that helps mitigate the conflict. But yeah, I mean, it can be very hard to work in an organization where you don’t get along with others.

[00:08:56.77] spk_3:
One organization that we came across the international relief organization, so obviously a big part of their, their work is fundraising and engagement went in times of crisis, right. So rapid response, emergency response is huge for them. And it’s kind of the core source of their fundraising. Um the development department in the communications department sort of went through this period of years where they just couldn’t figure out how they were going to message in these moments and it would sort of be a simmering tension. Um And when it was a non conflict, exactly, it’s a core function of the organization. And so it would be a kind of a problem, but they would sort of come to some sort of agreement, but then a crisis would happen and they couldn’t get a message out the door in order to be able to fundraise around that message. And so they would miss the moment again and again and again, in these moments that they should have been coming together and pulling together as a team. So in that case, they brought us in to say, how can we get these two teams to work together? We want a message and comply completely different ways, particularly in these moments of crisis, we want to use the channels. So the digital channels, in particular, with this kind of hot spot of, well, who’s going to say one, an email and who gets to press the send button, who gets to have the final word on how we’re going to talk about this. Um And we went through a whole initiative to try and solve this and get them talking to each other. And it was a lot about getting them to use the same language and recognize each other’s expertise that they just come from different worlds. Somebody who responded to our survey said, communications is all about saying what the message that the organization needs to get out and development is all about trying to say what the donors want to hear. And those are just two completely different worldviews. And so when you can put those together and say, where’s the common ground in this? How can we represent our organizational priorities? And at the same time time, really translate that to words and language that really resonates with donors and causes them to act.

[00:09:47.72] spk_2:
Okay. So let’s start to get to some specifics that we can, we can recommend if you are uh suffering the symptoms that the two of you were talking about 55 minutes ago um disharmony and yeah, antagonism, frustration. All right. Um because we’re, we’re, we’re, yeah, we’re striving for harmony. We’re gonna leave disharmony behind and striving for harmony. Alright. Um you talk about a clear message prioritization, so deciding in advance, I guess this instead of me trying to guess Alice or Misty, you’re better. Alice is waving to Misty. So different

[00:10:11.08] spk_4:
in terms of doing a content strategy where it’s clear about what we’re trying to do and having things planned in advance. So we know what, how we will behave in any given situation. It’s governance, it’s a process governor project of understanding when this crisis is going to occur. If you’re an international relief organization and there’s a tsunami, what do you do having those plans already laid out? So it’s clear about what you’re supposed to do, what the other people on what other team is supposed to do. And that’s a process design. In our research we asked, is there any governance over the messaging? And most of the respondents said no, there might be some process or a shared calendar, but we really don’t have a way of knowing how to behave when something happens.

[00:10:40.61] spk_2:
Okay. What does this governance look like?

[00:11:39.72] spk_3:
That’s a great question. So governance can happen at a lot of a lot of different points in working together a lot of different points in that sort of relationship life cycle. So for example, when you have a project, making sure that if those teams are gonna be working together on, for example, a campaign or a long term body of work, or maybe there’s a new programmatic area that’s rolling out. You always start with a tool like a project charter or terms of reference as an international organizations, they call a charter terms of reference. Um But the idea is that you’re so together and you’re saying, okay, how are we going to talk about this? What is our organizational positioning, not just messaging but positioning? What is our relationship to this thing that’s happening part of the social problem? What’s our unique value proposition? And how are we comfortable talking about this as an organization? How are we not? That’s the content strategy piece that Alice was speaking to? What do we think the best channels to do that? And how when something happens around this, when there’s a big news event, when there’s something to respond to, how are are we going to work together? And that’s, you know, forever, how are we going to work together? But in this specific case, on this topic, how are we going to work

[00:11:46.52] spk_2:
together these workflows, workflow process? Exactly. All shared and agreed in

[00:12:32.68] spk_3:
advance. Exactly. And that everybody on the team knows, right. It’s not just an agreement that two leaders make everybody, individual contributors need to understand what they’re supposed to do. How do they feed into the system overall? So that they’re working hand in hand together. And a lot of the time, there are certain teams, for example, digital teams, they are forced to operate between communications and fundraising wherever they sit there, controlling channels that all these different parts of the organization need to use a lot of the time. That’s a starting place for forming some shared working agreements or some principles that are used in moments like this. There are a lot of other tools to. So for example, she calendars so that there is one shared view of every external communication that’s happening, whether it’s a fundraising ask or it’s a media piece coming out or it’s some sort of campaign, broad marketing campaign that there is one shared view and everyone gets a view of the whole of what the audience is seeing instead of a kind of micro departmental specific view,

[00:13:00.50] spk_2:
other other other processes that you can share that. Yeah.

[00:13:24.31] spk_3:
Yeah. So we have a whole list in our presentation of hard tools and I would say something like the calendar and the workflows, those are hard tools. Um There are also soft tools and I will just say for fairness purposes, these soft tools like work in any two departments that are having a breakdown. We were here two years ago where we were online two years ago at NTC talking about fundraising and it teams and frictions between those teams. There are lots of places, obviously, it’s not just limited to development and communications. But some examples of some of the soft tools would be um you know, doing shared planning activities. So doing your annual annual plans together, not doing separate departmental plans but saying, what do we want to accomplish this year? What does that look like?

[00:13:48.11] spk_2:
It’s an outside consultant? So what do I know from collaborative calendars? I thought, I thought this especially communications and fundraising. I would have thought that this was all happening.

[00:15:03.09] spk_4:
Think about even pre internet fundraising departments were doing plan giving major gifts and direct mail and they were doing their own thing and direct mail is kind of its own bespoke thing. It’s still kind of done the same way. It was about 25 30 years ago, right? When you enter, when all of a sudden digital happened, everyone, the the email list is really a file of all the supporters. Communications often feels like there’s an audience about just awareness and brand engagement and marketing and all I want to do is engage those supporters in that way. Development looks at that list and says these are prospects or they’re already donors that I need to feed and nurture. And so part of it was the shared technology often created the conflict around who’s list is who’s who gets to message to who about what message, right? So what is the content of the message that’s a fundraising message versus a educational message or what the organization is? Doing the part of that has been, I think that most of the conflicts are around ownership of the odd, they believe they have different audiences. But supporters of an organization don’t have a hat on and say, I’m a donor or another hat on and say, oh, I’m interested in this content. That’s not how it really works. But that shift is slowly happening and we’re seeing more collaboration around that because of the proliferation of channels that everyone is engaging on social email.

[00:15:52.01] spk_2:
What’s your advice around who should be in these conversations were doing the annual calendar? Is it I imagine it’s not only the two heads of the of each team, but how deep do we go to every, all the members of each, both teams? I mean, our listeners are small and midsize nonprofits. So we’re not talking about 25 person fundraising or communicate, but still there could be six or eight people on each or even combined. What’s your advice around? Who

[00:16:40.93] spk_4:
does this planning? Transparency is super important especially to employees now, you know, where we live in an age where feeling aligned with the mission and your work and coming to work and really having a good experience at work is very helpful. So our advice is usually be as inclusive as possible with everyone who can participate in a planning exercise. Bring them in because you know, we live in an age where people are quitting and quiet, quitting and if you live, if you are working in an environment where there’s tension with other teams, that’s a good sign. That’s a problem. I mean, it might be a retention issue there for organizations. So when you do strategic planning together or redesigning a process or anything that will enable a change to happen, it’s, it’s best to be as inclusive as possible.

[00:16:45.92] spk_2:
Or, or if everyone is not included in the actual meeting, then bringing it back to your team incrementally. It’s not like it’s all going to be decided in a 90 minute meeting, bring it back feedback, representing that feedback to the, to the working group or the

[00:17:01.53] spk_4:
collaboration.

[00:17:10.59] spk_2:
Okay. Okay. Um Anything else we should be talking about work processes planning besides, well, you were starting to talk about soft, you didn’t, you didn’t, you didn’t really flesh out. We got digressed, digressed you into more discussion of the hard tools, lackluster, you’re suffering a lackluster host.

[00:18:53.56] spk_3:
There’s a lot, there’s a lot and this is I think where I was going with that was to say these are tools that work in other breakdowns, they work in any breakdown in the human system. But for example, saying we’re taking the whole team away twice a year for one day or two days. And that means development and communications. That might also be a marketing group that might also be a digital team or it might be sub working groups, but we’re going to do these two day intensive retreats where we really try and understand each other’s expertise and map solutions together and those could be processed solutions or that could be campaign planning. It could be anything, it could be exploring new audience opportunities um There and there’s all of the piece we’ve just heard so many clients say this year, you know, this wasn’t working well before the pandemic, but now we’re just broke down by the side of the road. Our ropes have frayed between these two teams and even within our own teams, we’ve on boarded new staff, they’ve never met each other. And so what is it that we’re going to do? So understanding, for example, when you need to pick up the phone, when email is not enough, our slack is not enough, texting is not enough. We need to actually pick up the phone and work together in a human way towards a solution. Um That, that those kinds of pieces as obvious as it sounds, they’re not pieces that people have necessarily incorporated into their ways of working, particularly younger staff. So understanding that there’s a whole range of those kind of tools that you can use um and sort of working norms that you can establish with those teams if you were a leader or even just a manager of a small team. I think one of the most interesting things we found in this survey is that this tends to be less of a problem at small organizations, particularly when you have like a one person development and communications team, you have to work together. You don’t have a choice. This is a problem that happens often with growth and scaling that relationships that once worked. It’s just harder to figure out how to do that. The more humans you have in the

[00:19:17.28] spk_2:
mix retreats. Plus there’s social time built in. What about? It cannot be a soft tulle, just social time that we’re not doing any planning. But we’re doing, I don’t know, you know, one of the mystery, one of the mystery places, solve the murder mystery places or, you know, whatever or just drinks a game room. Yeah. Yeah. Right. Just get to know each other outside our, our marketing and communicate.

[00:20:04.70] spk_3:
This can be very social. But the idea of like after we do something, we have to do some retrospection together, I think that often gets lost in these teams because people are moving so fast, you move from one campaign to the next campaign to the next ask. And now so many teams have the data to sit down together after doing something, even something that maybe didn’t go very well and saying, well, what worked here? Is there something we can learn together and kind of using the data is a way to have an independent objective view. You can all analyze together and say, what does this mean for the future? How do we do it? And you can do those in a fun social way. It doesn’t have to be a boring, sort of like. Now we’re going to do a postmortem and we’re all going to look at it. You can, you can sort of make this a part of the way that you work together.

[00:21:13.56] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Donor box. It’s the fundraising engine of choice for 50,000 organizations from 96 countries. They’ve got something new. Now, you can accept cashless donations anytime and anywhere with donor box live kiosk, turn your ipad or Android tablet into a kiosk to boost in person giving. And with their new additions to donor box events, you can sell tickets in 43 currencies and ask buyers to cover fees. Put these two together and you’re in person events will take off donor box helping you help others. Donor box dot org. It’s time for Tony’s take two.

[00:21:16.08] spk_0:
Thank you, Kate. How, how are you?

[00:21:18.85] spk_1:
I’m doing well. How are

[00:22:58.51] spk_0:
you? Uh, I’m great. I’m great. I’m glad you’re with us. And, uh, and congratulations again on your promotion. That’s so, that’s Kate. She’s not an intern. She’s our associate producer, but I have someone I can blame. Now, I’ve been saying for years, where’s the intern? Yeah, I wish I had an intern every time I make a mistake who would say who writes this crappy copy? I wish I had an intern to blame. Well, I don’t have an intern but I have an associate producer now, I have an associate producer that I can blame. It’s beautiful. So, any flubs? Well, I’ll just leave them at flubs. I won’t go more, uh, I won’t be more extreme with another F word with any, with any, with any flubs. I’ve got an associate producer that is now going to be responsible. I’m thinking this, this is today’s news. I’m just thinking, I’m glad that Kate is not a member of Sag after yet. Otherwise I would have lost her. She’d be, be on the line so we wouldn’t have her but not a member yet. It’s relieving. It’s sort of, there’s a burden lifted from my shoulders that I no longer have to bear the responsibility of my own mistakes. That’s the beauty of it. I don’t have to be responsible for my own flubs any, any longer. Very relieving. That is Tony’s take two.

[00:23:20.68] spk_1:
Not what I was expecting and I’m not sure what I’ve gotten myself into here but whatever we’ve got just about a butt load more time now. Back to communications and development. Teens working better together. Hmm.

[00:23:23.89] spk_2:
Where else should we go with the topic? We still have some time together. You know, we haven’t

[00:25:24.42] spk_4:
talked about yet when you, if there’s something broken that needs, that needs healing, you know, you think about these conflicts in any, whether it’s between communications and development, between it and development, any kind of processes that are broken and cause frustration and friction within teams. It’s useful to have another event happening and that needs change and then you can overlay process improvement during another change. So a good example that we often find is that if someone is migrating from one software tool to another, it’s a great opportunity because people are going to use a different technology when they come to work every day. The common thing between development departments and communications departments is that they all use digital tools. They use CRM S, they use email marketing tools, they are always tied to technology. And so if the technology is changing, it’s a great opportunity to think about what role do we need doing? What activity in this tool? And then you can take that one step further and say, how should all these roles work together? What’s the workflow? What’s the process here? Who’s supposed to be doing what and what you find in a lot of organizations is there’s a often individuals that they’re just willing to learn everything. So they’ll take on any project and they can use the tools really easily and they end up doing more than their job description, then you have others who just really don’t, don’t have their role clear about what they’re supposed to be doing. So you have an opportunity in something as, as something like a CRM migration. You can also take a look at the staffing and the staffing structure and the processes and improve some of these frictions almost under the guise of as we go through this technology migration. Let’s take a look at how we’re actually doing our work and that’s useful because sometimes new technology has different features. So you need a skill set of a subject matter, expert in a purse skill. How did that person fit in? Which means how to other people’s jobs change. So if you look at the human component around technology

[00:25:40.50] spk_2:
and sometimes technology is not the sole solution, the people in the processes could very well be contributing to the to the problem that we’re looking for the tech to solve.

[00:26:22.77] spk_4:
Usually the text, I would say almost all the time when we hear about a technology problem, the technology is working as intended. It’s a people and process and workflow problem. Sometimes tools are older and they need to be renovated or an organization has developed a new strategy, an organization that mostly does touch engagement or gets corporate gift or grants wants to start a mass marketing program. They need technology that can better accommodate those different strategies. Those are all opportunities to stop and look at process. How are we looking, how are we working together? What organizational structure do we have? Is everybody is or do we have all the right roles in our team? And it’s a great opportunity, we find that a lot of the time we do a lot of change management and process design around the human component of the technology and it really has nothing to do with the tech itself.

[00:26:34.31] spk_2:
Is there another example, Alice that you can share around an event that merits this this kind of attention and planning and introspect. Really, it’s introspection, I think its organizational introspection, something else non tech

[00:27:33.47] spk_4:
oftentimes a new leader will come in so a new leader can come in and have a new idea or a new program. Like the example of now we’re going to start doing a new strategy. So any type of external force of change, if there’s a moment of critical change, that requires the opportunity to take a step back and look at how things are working. You’re absolutely right. It takes a very self actualized executive director to say here, I’m getting complaints from my development director and complaints from my communications director. I need to bring in an outside consultant and figure out a better process so people can work together. That doesn’t often happen. Usually there’s some other pressing external event like a new person comes in, who’s a leader, a new development director and director and executive director who says, wait a minute, this doesn’t seem right. Why are people complaining and not getting along? Let’s take a look at that or it’s a technology thing. It’s like our tools aren’t working together.

[00:27:58.51] spk_2:
Okay. That was a good example. Thank you. Alright, cool. I’ll put you on the spot. Thank you. All right now. You’re cause craft consulting, you’re not flustered. I, I put you on the spot and you rose to the moment. Of course. What is no surprise, surprise? Yeah, that’s right. All right. Um We still have some time if there’s other stuff you want to, we talked through your three learning objectives, stated, learning objectives for the, for the session. But what else, what else you’re gonna share with folks that we haven’t talked about? Maybe we

[00:28:11.46] spk_3:
could talk a little bit about our survey results. Um I think we learned some

[00:28:14.54] spk_2:
more motivation type. Okay.

[00:28:57.93] spk_3:
Well, one of the things we asked about values beyond motivation, beyond motivation. Uh the subject of structure because we were, we were curious about and we have observed a lot. It’s not a perfect structure that perfect organizational way of structuring this work of these teams that works well every time. But what we really noticed is there are big differences in the way that these breakdowns happen that are a result of structure. So when you have a development in the communications team and one department, it’s not that that’s a perfect structure. It’s just harder to have a lot of conflict where people don’t work together, right? But as an organization grows, you tend to have two separate functions, people specialize and they pull apart. That’s one moment where a lot of conflicts can happen. Um where digital lives in an organization that’s a big differentiator in terms of. So if digital lives in communications. Sometimes there’s a real breakdown between development and calms. Digital are the ambassadors that go back and forth and the emissaries between those teams and are the ones that are trying to connect the ropes. Even when those

[00:29:17.95] spk_2:
earlier you said something similar. Yeah,

[00:29:27.92] spk_4:
they have to be the mitigators, you know, they have to, they’re getting the pressure from both sides and they actually have to serve both departments. So oftentimes the attitude and approach the digital team can be one of either exacerbating conflict or bringing people together.

[00:29:32.93] spk_2:
What about the existence or not? Of the same leader over two different teams. So, but they’re not the same team, they’re two separate teams but same director or vice president. Does that, does that make a difference in terms of likelihood or not of conflict? That’s a good

[00:29:57.92] spk_3:
question. I would say it depends sometimes that leader themselves really has a career that aligns with one function or another. We’ve seen, I have an exam recently, the department that its development in communications, but the leader is really a long term career fundraiser and communications. A little left out. It’s like kind of a child that has the parent that’s really aligned with the other child. So if you have a strong leader who equally invested in both sides and really thinks from the perspective of both sides that actually can work very well as a structure, we’ve seen a lot of that

[00:30:28.41] spk_2:
interesting because they come from a background of one of the other. So they’re going to be much more fluent with one function.

[00:30:51.56] spk_3:
Exactly. As something else we saw that I thought was really fascinating. Is we asked how many of these organizations have a dedicated marketing or engagement team that’s not exactly calm and it’s not exactly development. It’s a marketing function and a huge portion. I think almost 70% said that they have marketing teams when we would have these conversations 10 years ago. Marketing, it’s still a very dirty word in organizations. If you said marketing people would say, well, I’m a nonprofit. We don’t do marketing that’s changed hugely railed

[00:31:14.88] spk_2:
against that, but I always bristled against that, but it has changed, it has changed marketing and promotion. Now we talk about promotion. Promotion used to be sales promotion, like selling lay’s potato chips at a point of sale, you know, in a supermarket that was sales promotion. Uh You know, we’ve, we’ve there are things we can learn from the for profit sector, right? Everything corporate is not dirty. Exactly and marketing and promotion, I think are

[00:31:41.11] spk_3:
examples and marketing. A lot of those teams see themselves as engagement functions as thinking across all the ways that an organization might engage and thinking about the full funnel, the kind of full end to end relationship even for non donors, like volunteers, activists. Um lots of other folks, service recipients even, how do they play into the way the organization needs to be engaging them. Well, the

[00:32:46.09] spk_4:
for profit world has kind of nailed this with the idea of customer experience management. Now you have big companies that have CX. So when you think about the donor experience or the supporter experience, thinking about it, from that perspective, it’s about the curation of an entire holistic experience. The for profit world has nailed that when you, it’s, it’s important to actually for all of the teams to consider their audience as one audience. And how do we, what do we want that experience of our audience to be? And that like I said before, you don’t put your hat on as a donor and a hat on to someone else. So thinking from all of the new knowledge we have from customer experience management, applying that to how we’re going to engage our supporters. We have seen organizations combine their development and communications teams like you said before into a public engagement, um External affairs, other names of teams that have a single leader, the benefit of that is also there’s a single source of making a decision or setting priorities, which is really helpful to have right now, the teams have competing priorities and there’s no arbitrator besides maybe the executive director or the executive committee to say yes, we’re going to focus on this and we’re not going to focus on that. We talked

[00:33:07.22] spk_2:
about message prioritization, okay. Right. Single single decision maker. Alright. Anything you want to leave us with, I let Alice open. So Mr, you want to leave us with something harmonious and uplifting, empowering

[00:33:17.27] spk_4:
the harmonious and uplifting, encouraging,

[00:33:19.09] spk_2:
encouraging, and empowering.

[00:33:57.97] spk_3:
Well, one of the things that gave me great relief in analyzing the survey results was to realize that I think most people know that these two teams actually have more in common than many of the other teams in the organ. There are some natural points of harmony built in. They both really care about results and outcomes. They are very focused on reaching audiences. They think from outside in and not just an inside out perspective. And by that, I mean, they think about these audiences and what do these audience needs. They’re curious about how to reach them, they want to message right and represent the organization, well, they want to get it right. And they see themselves as bro the work of the organization to the world at large, making it relevant and meaningful. So there’s a ton of common ground. I think that just gets obscured a lot of the time by these persistent thorny dynamics. And when you can help people to see the common ground, people are relieved and excited to work together almost universally. We’ve seen that over and over again. The will is there people just sort of need to be given permission and shown the way

[00:34:26.58] spk_2:
Mr mclaughlin Alice Hendricks, both principles and co founders of cars, craft consulting. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Thank you Alice and thank you for being with nonprofit radio coverage of 23 nt. See where we are not sponsored by lay’s potato chips. Even though I gave them a shout out, we are sponsored, in fact by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with us

[00:35:02.90] spk_1:
next week giving circles with the woman who popularized them. Sarah Llewellyn. If you missed any part of this week’s show,

[00:35:06.21] spk_0:
I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com.

[00:35:25.10] spk_1:
We’re sponsored by Donor Box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your associate producer, Kate martignetti. This show, social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein.

[00:35:51.75] spk_0:
Thank you for that affirmation, Scotty be with us next week for nonprofit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for July 10, 2023: 10 Easy Ways To Boost Your Fundraising On A Budget & Personalized Fundraising At Scale

 

Rosalind Zavras & Julia Toepfer: 10 Easy Ways To Boost Your Fundraising On A Budget

Relationships; storytelling; thanks; impact; consistency; and more. Rosalind Zavras and Julia Toepfer share tactics you can use right away to increase your fundraising impact without busting your fundraising budget. Rosalind is CEO of Aropa Consulting and Julia is from the National Immigrant Justice Center. (This was recorded at the 2023 Nonprofit Technology Conference, hosted by NTEN.)

 

 

 

 

Joe Frye & Peter Yagecic: Personalized Fundraising At Scale

Here’s the 11th easy way to boost your fundraising! First, adopt a better definition of personalization, beyond first-name emails. Then, understand the many types of personalization available. The advice comes from Joe Frye and Peter Yagecic, both with Town Hall Agency. (This is also from 23NTC.)

 

 

 

 

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[00:00:25.58] spk_0:
And welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio. Big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the effects of Jerome Erasmus if you dragged me down with the idea that you missed this week’s show.

[00:01:55.47] spk_1:
10 easy ways to boost your fundraising on a budget, relationships, storytelling. Thanks impact consistency and more. Rosalind Taveras and Julia. Temper share tactics you can use right away to increase your fundraising impact without busting your fundraising budget. Rosalyn is CEO of a rope a consulting and Julia is from the National Immigrant Justice Center. This was recorded at the 2023 nonprofit technology conference hosted by N 10 and personalized fundraising at scale. Here’s the 11th. Easy way to improve your fundraising. First adopt a better definition of personalization beyond first name emails, then understand the many types of personalization available. The advice comes from Joe Frye and Peter Logistic, both with Town Hall Agency. This is also from the 23 and TC on Tony’s take two, got feedback. We’re sponsored by Donor box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Here is 10 easy ways to boost your fundraising on a budget.

[00:02:24.58] spk_0:
Welcome back to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 23 NTC 2023 nonprofit technology conference. We are sponsored here at the conference by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. With me now are Rosalind Taveras who is CEO of a rope, a consulting and Julia Tepfer, who is senior marketing and digital engagement strategist at the National Immigration National Immigrant Justice Center, Rosalind Julia. Welcome to non profit

[00:02:37.12] spk_2:
radio.

[00:02:39.25] spk_3:
Alright,

[00:02:54.52] spk_0:
pleasure, pleasure. Your session. Uh is 10 easy ways to boost your fundraising on a budget and it’s already, it’s already in your past. You can relax, relax. All right. Um Leslie Rosalind, why don’t you get us started with just, you know, some like 30,000 ft overview of why this is an important topic.

[00:03:04.46] spk_2:
Well, I will and one thing that we really emphasized is there technically are no easy ways to boost your fundraising. But our strategies were how to make your fundraising easier and your processes, especially for small teams. How can you leverage different tools so that you can fundraise effectively? Even if you are resource

[00:03:53.83] spk_0:
strapped, there is no easy way. There is no panacea. Okay. Okay. Um Julia, you wanna, you have, I’m just looking at the the learning objectives or learning outcomes. I think they call the list of fundraising tactics. Start right away. You wanna, we have 10. We don’t necessarily, it’s not ping pong. We’re not gonna go Julia Rosalind. Julia Rosalind. But Julia, do you want to kick us out with some, some of the

[00:04:18.70] spk_3:
strategies? Yeah. Um I mean, one of the things that we talk a lot about um in the session is relationship building and how important it is to establish a strong relationship with your donors. Um and um some of that comes from talking directly to them, um comes from thanking them often um knowing what their needs are and why they are connected to your organization, why they’re passionate about what you do. Um And so a lot of the tips and tools that we talked about really stem mostly from, from some of the that initial relationship

[00:04:45.47] spk_0:
instead of transactional treating KTM communicating when we want something. Alright, so I’m gonna make, I’m gonna make you drill down. I want to, I want to hear the 10. So start us off with number one.

[00:04:51.33] spk_3:
Um Do you remember what exactly number

[00:04:54.35] spk_0:
one, I’m not going to know

[00:05:33.15] spk_3:
the number 11 that we talked about in the session was thinking your donors and doing it in, in creative and different ways. So um making ensure that you particularly thank them after the um the transaction receipt, you know, an auto response email is not a thank you. Um So making sure that you really build that relationship through thanking them. Um And using some really creative methods um to continue that conversation with them and thank them for their, for their donation. Ross had a had a great um tip of um writing letters to them and um doing it through a method called Punk Post which send

[00:05:42.91] spk_0:
letters and you have some of these creative, I don’t want you to just say we talked about creative ways. I want to hear what the creative ways are

[00:05:59.04] spk_2:
really interesting service that has cards and then they employ artists to give creative designs and handwritten notes within the cards. So especially if you’re not an artist and you or maybe you don’t love your penmanship, you can use punk Post to send these really beautiful cards and they’ll do the stamp, they’ll do everything for you. So you just pick the card type in your message and they’ll send it and you can do big groups of these for donors as well. So you

[00:06:24.92] spk_0:
post dot com. Is that easy? Okay? Okay. Alright. If you don’t like your own hand, but people do like handwritten notes, they love them, but if they can’t read them, then they’re not very valuable. So if your handwriting is that bad, but people do love, respond to handwritten notes. They really do another creative way. Rosalind creative way of saying thank

[00:06:51.13] spk_2:
you. And this also goes back to our second strategy which is segmenting your donors. So understanding who your donors are and why they got connected to you and then creating a thanking strategy from there. So you wouldn’t thank someone the same way for coming to your house for dinner as well as giving you a birthday present, right? Those are two different interactions. So your donors should also have two different types of thank you, depending on how they come in to your organization or maybe what they’re interested in. Okay.

[00:07:34.95] spk_0:
Okay. So thank you, segmenting. Um segmenting, I guess, you know, also by what their interests are, what they’ve given to. Okay. And technology helps with these things, right? Tags, attributes we can segment in your CRM, you can segment in your email, uh app. Okay. Okay. You wanted to keep going wrestling some more, some more of the 10. We’re gonna hit all 10. So we’re not letting, uh letting you hold out on non profit radio listeners. Okay. What else? What else do we have?

[00:07:53.88] spk_2:
Another great tip is to talk to your donors and this is one of my favorites. So that’s why I’m jumping to this one. A lot of us are nervous to speak to our donors. Don’t really. No. Should we call them? Yes. Call them, text them, email them, get to know your donors because they are excited about the cause that you’re working on and they want to get to know you and they’re excited if you want to get to know them as well as we were saying earlier. Fundraising is relational. So build a relationship, the same way that you would build a relationship with a friend or colleague.

[00:08:13.12] spk_0:
What are some things you could talk to folks about if you’re picking up the phone, talking, how

[00:08:18.14] spk_2:
they got involved, how they found out about your organization, things that they’re interested in, you could tell them about the programs that you’re working on and things that are coming up. And also it’s a great way to gauge what they’re interested in and maybe they’ll say in that conversation, oh, I didn’t realize you do this. I’d love to hear more about it. And then now you know which emails to send them because they’re most interested in this one particular program. Okay. Okay.

[00:08:52.30] spk_0:
Um And even, I think even if you’re calling and even just leaving a thoughtful message, even if they don’t call back, you still made a valuable, valuable contact. I think

[00:08:56.89] spk_2:
we also talked about you could potentially use volunteers to help out with this as well. Like you don’t have to be the only one calling all of these individuals, but just make sure that whoever is calling knows the verb that you want to use, knows how to talk about your programs, the way that you want them to,

[00:09:14.31] spk_0:
that can be a good exercise to for boards. I mean, it’s an easy, I’ve made lots of thank you. I do plan giving, fundraising. Nobody’s ever turned, turned down or been upset at a thank you call sometimes you have to reassure them. Actually, a lot of times I’m only calling to say thank you,

[00:09:32.67] spk_3:
thank

[00:10:02.91] spk_0:
you. Yeah. You know, because I work with plan giving donors to, to the non profits, but sometimes they make an outright gift to and since I might be the relationship manager, I’m calling to say thank you, I think, you know, but I just gave, you know, and I might say tony-martignetti from so and so charity I just gave, you know, or something like I’m calling to say thank you for that. Yeah. And then, then they let their guard down like instantly, but sometimes you do have to reassure folks, but for both, that’s a really easy call to make a thank you

[00:10:06.73] spk_2:
call. It makes everybody feel good, especially if you have a board that doesn’t exactly know how to fundraise or maybe they’ll say we’re uncertain. Start with

[00:10:27.57] spk_0:
the first one. They’ll see how easy they are and who wouldn’t love to hear from a board member of an agency that you just gave to volunteered for. All right. Um Julia, let’s go to you. What else?

[00:11:11.45] spk_3:
Yeah. So one I really like a lot is telling personal stories. So sharing um the victories of your clients, your staff, um really creating a personal connection between your donors and the cause that you um that your organization represents or the service, the services that you provide. Um We talked about um making sure that, you know, if you’re sharing a human’s story um to make sure that they have control over the way that story is told, um to make sure they have that they have consented to the way that you’re sharing that story. But it’s a really great way to really connect donors to the actual impact that, that they are having and tell

[00:11:24.40] spk_0:
the stories in what ways.

[00:12:21.13] spk_3:
Yeah. So um we shared a few examples actually um on, you know, you could do it through written stories, right on, on emails or in letters um but also on social media and through images and videos. Um Roz has um some great examples of um organizations that might not provide direct services to people. Um um but can still share pictures on social media platforms that still really tell a story of the work that their, that their organization does. Um In this particular case, it was um food in the back of a, of a minivan um from an organization that uh does food reclamation and delivers food to organizations that then distributed and it was still really sharing the story of the work um but didn’t necessarily involve people. So we really stress that like there are lots of different ways that you can share and tell stories. They don’t have to involve um people or animals. Um that it’s possible for all organizations to, to do that effectively. Rosalind

[00:12:42.23] spk_0:
sounds like it looks like you may want to amplify that some definitely.

[00:13:18.30] spk_2:
Well, and this woman also after the session came and asked a similar question, you know, she has an advocacy organization. So a lot of what she was working on is how can I tell a story when our stories numbers and, and one of the things that I spoke with her about was I’ve seen organizations in similar spaces tell the story about why the advocacy is so important. So you can connect your organization to. Okay, we’re working on this issue and pedestrian safety. So maybe we tell stories around why pedestrian safety is so important and how people have felt, walking on roads without sidewalks and you know, doing short videos and things like that. The other point that I like to emphasize is only use platforms that you’re comfortable with and that your donors use. You don’t have to be on a specific social media platform to share these stories if that’s not where your donor base lives and if they’re all, if emails really effective, then you can do a video and send it in an email,

[00:14:08.61] spk_0:
okay, meet them where they are not where you would like them to be. Uh okay. Alright. Um Anything more on anything more on that one on one personal stories? I mean, the point is everything, everything, all the work we do affects, impacts people somehow climate change, you could say, well, how do I reduce that to a story? Uh But that’s a, that’s a great example of a of an advocacy organization that personalizing, able to personalize anything more on that one before we know,

[00:14:13.74] spk_2:
I think we can. Yeah. Well, another good one is

[00:14:18.13] spk_0:
okay, Rosalind both. I like them both. Okay. Okay, I’ve been using now, I’m using both. Alright, thank you.

[00:15:02.29] spk_2:
Thank you. Another great one is to convey impact and so and convey impact in everything that you’re doing. Not just your emails but your social media campaigns. When a donor does give, how can you connect their gift to the impact of their dollar? Right? And that’s more than just saying. Thank you for your gift. You donated $5 to the education program. It’s rather this $5 allowed kids to come in and you know, gain access to new books uh so that they can now read after school, right? Um And a huge part of that is donors are excited about the cause. It’s not about your organization, it’s about your community and the work that you’re doing so center them in what you’re talking about so that they know that they’re part of the solution. Their donation affected change in an area they’re excited about that could

[00:15:17.25] spk_0:
even go back to personalizing the story. Enabled a student like tony to buy a book, attended school, whatever. Yeah,

[00:15:26.43] spk_2:
exactly. A lot of our tips work together.

[00:15:29.36] spk_0:
Okay. Very good. Yes, they don’t stand alone.

[00:16:16.64] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Donor box. It’s the fundraising engine of choice. For 50,000 organizations from 96 countries. They’ve got something new. Now, you can accept cashless donations anytime and anywhere with donor box live kiosk, turn your ipad or Android tablet into a kiosk to boost in person giving. And with their new additions to donor box events, you can sell tickets in 43 currencies and ask your buyers to cover fees, put these two together and you’re in person events will take off donor box helping you help others. Donor box dot org. Now back to 10 easy ways to boost your fundraising on a budget.

[00:16:23.23] spk_0:
Ross. Let’s stick with you. Give us another one.

[00:16:40.13] spk_2:
Another good one is to test your online donation experience. And so a lot of us, especially in the fundraising space, we know what an online form looks like. We’ve filled them all out, we know them really well and we don’t really have an outsider’s perspective into what it looks like to donate. So a really good and I think this one is actually pretty easy and simple. Ask somebody who isn’t in fundraising to try and make a donation and give you feedback and even give them a little rubric to say, you know, here’s some questions that we would like you to answer as you’re trying to give this donation and let us know how it looks and feels and if there are ways that we can improve the experience.

[00:17:06.84] spk_0:
Okay, easy. Yeah, and do it from the outside easy. Okay, Julia, you got something, it’s getting harder now because we’re down like number seven or so. So there are fewer and fewer left for you to choose

[00:17:31.96] spk_3:
from. Yeah. So testing your assumptions is an important one. Not assuming that, you know, what works well with, with people and with your supporters and donors, um making sure that you really use um hard data to look at what it is that, that works for you.

[00:17:39.97] spk_0:
Assumptions like what, what assumptions are people, organizations commonly making?

[00:18:08.56] spk_3:
Yeah. So I think um like the way that they interact, the way that they interact with um with your donation page, I think was something that we touched on. Um and A B testing different messages, um different ways that people respond to um to your messaging. Um but also not testing, trying to test too many things at, at one time but um doing some A B testing with, with messaging and subject lines and, and things like that.

[00:18:31.67] spk_2:
Yeah. So really to piggyback off that if you’re going to test um do A B testing on emails, change one thing per email, right? Change the subject line. Maybe you have a subject line with emoji and one without emojis and see which one gets opened more and same with your social media, right? Post on a Monday and then maybe next week post on a Tuesday and see if you’re getting different engagement. It doesn’t have to be fancy you don’t need to use all these analytics tools, just create a plan and say, okay, we’re going to test this thing now and we’re gonna test something else later.

[00:18:55.05] spk_0:
And uh is there a minimum size that you should have before your testing or minimum, let’s say number of emails for, for validity.

[00:19:05.02] spk_2:
Um There are plenty of content specialist that will probably tell you yes and give you a number. I think you could test with five people personally. You can always um understand your donors more and understand how they communicate. So I’m a big proponent of no matter your donor base, how big it is, how small it is. You can, you can test and get valuable information.

[00:19:28.15] spk_0:
Um Go ahead Julia, you were, you were taking off some, it’s getting harder now. Yeah,

[00:19:48.39] spk_3:
I think so. I think we can remember um timely calls to action is a really important one that is actually really pretty rich because there are a lot of different ways that you can use that effectively. But um a lot of it relates to urgency and making sure that you’re conveying urgency um with donations, whether that is um around a campaign deadline or an event um or a holiday or something really tying it back to urgency and making sure that people know that it’s very important that they give right now. And creating that sense really helps to, to um encourage people to donate.

[00:20:18.94] spk_2:
It really also helps with donor acquisition when you have a current event that is directly affecting your cause to then try and create uh campaign and language around that as well. Uh The classy why America gives report is really interesting. And according to their survey, um and their, their data collection, 60% of donors were likely to give when asked in, in relation to a current event.

[00:20:42.82] spk_0:
So using a news hook or something right? Related to your work? Okay. Okay. Did you all have stories or cases that you shared like examples of these in real life?

[00:22:12.31] spk_3:
Yeah, I mean, we, we showed some examples in particular of the way that we um show the or quantify and show the um the impact of that donations will have like on a donation page really equating the um the way that people’s donations, what they’ll actually fund and the impact that they’ll really have. So um we showed some examples of how um Rose mentioned this too but how um you know, for our organization, $35 provides translation services for a refugee or $100 provides a legal consultation for a family. So we showed some examples of how you can come to those numbers and conclusions and figure out how to um determine the value that donors will see of, of what their donation actually does. And, and that really is about starting with numbers and making sure that you can see what it is that um, what value as relates to your mission and services, what, what dollar value might equate to something.

[00:22:20.65] spk_0:
Exactly. Exactly.

[00:22:27.49] spk_2:
And also within your organization you’ve been able to do timely calls to act because you work in immigration and unfortunately immigration has been in the news quite a bit. Right. Do you see also that cycle of when a news cycle happens, you’re getting more engagement. Yeah.

[00:23:17.18] spk_3:
Yeah, for sure. And I think, um, the, you know, when not only using the sense of urgency, but when you ask people is also really important, yes, using things that are happening in our communities and in the news is something that we do quite a lot. Um because our organization does respond directly to some of those on some of those issues. So yeah, that’s something that’s really important. Um We also pretty effectively um can use light boxes and notification bars to really amplify messaging that we’re sending out. Um and making sure that people really see that it, you know, when there’s a particular campaign, not all the time, but in a rapid response situation, that can be a really effective strategy for not only donor acquisition but also donor retention.

[00:23:34.03] spk_0:
Okay, who’s up to naming the last one or two? I have not been counting, but we’re who’s up to naming another one or two that are remaining

[00:25:24.06] spk_2:
a consistent communication is definitely remaining. Um And again, when I was reading different surveys of donors, you can range anywhere from 53% to 75% of donors will not give again if they receive inconsistent and unclear communication. So it is this is incredibly important uh to get right. And it doesn’t have to be complicated. One of our best strategies is, you know, create a calendar for communicating with donors and it doesn’t have to be on, you know, fancy social media planning calendar. It can just be in your Google calendar, your outlook calendar and share it with everybody on your team that communicates with donors. Because this is also really important if someone in the program team communicates with all of your volunteers who are also probably a good number of number of donors and sends them a bunch of emails in a row and then you tack on and the last email is about a giving campaign, they’re going to have email fatigue, right? And so let’s make sure everyone in the organization who does talk to donors are on the same page about what our calendar is and that everybody is using key language that you want. Another really good strategy is to look at all of your platforms online and make sure that the language and the logos are all the same. You know, I can’t tell you how many organizations that I start working with. This is one of the first things I do and then maybe I’ll go to a Facebook page and it has the old logo and it has language that doesn’t correspond to their website at all. And the nonprofit says, oh, well, that was just someone in development and we lost the password and we’re not, you know, we’re not on Facebook. So we’re not going to change it. And I say you need to change it because it is a public part of your persona and because these social media platforms are all seo linked, they’re going donors are going to find it and you want to make sure you control the narrative.

[00:25:42.12] spk_0:
Okay. Excellent. Is there more any other strategies? Yeah.

[00:25:44.21] spk_2:
Well, we had a bonus tip if we’re

[00:25:46.24] spk_0:
at. So it was you got 11 for 10? Oh, cool. Alright. Give us a bonus.

[00:26:46.27] spk_2:
Yeah, so it wasn’t counted in the original 10 because it’s not as quote unquote easy to do, but it can be very effective and it’s creating a peer to peer fundraising campaign. Uh And one of the reasons it’s not necessarily easy is because it requires a tool, right? It’s not necessarily a lot of our tips and strategies you can implement without needing some sort of fancy technology. You can use the systems you already have. But peer to peer really relies on having a peer to peer fundraising tool that people can easily access, set up their own campaigns and get ready to go. It’s also the really important to arm the um to give the donors that are participating in this campaign a ton of marketing material and a ton of training on what it looks like to fundraise for your organization. Just as I was talking about consistently communicating, you want to make sure that your wonderful, well, meaning donors are using the same language that you would use when they’re going out to um talk about their organization with their friends and

[00:26:49.21] spk_0:
family, give them resources. We’re talking about brand, you know, consistency you were saying, so give them the logo and the colors,

[00:26:56.41] spk_3:
tool kits, messaging, messaging,

[00:27:00.01] spk_0:
consistent messaging.

[00:27:19.37] spk_3:
Yeah. And we’ve even done um you know, starting off really with a small core group of folks. Um we started it with our board. Um but even doing a webinar with them to make sure that they understand the process of setting up the peer to peer page and, and how they see in the system who donated to them and how they think them and how they keep track of all of that. Um So really one of the things that makes it a little bit more of a complicated tip um is that it does require quite a lot of effort, at least to get off the ground.

[00:27:39.29] spk_0:
Um As I said, you need a platform. Is there a platform that the two of you like to use? Is that one of them preferred over the others? You can shout it out. What’s the diff?

[00:28:18.25] spk_3:
Well, I think one of the things that we talked about that’s really great is um if you are just getting started to, to piggyback off of foundations or other um organizations in your community that are doing giving days, um they often will provide the infrastructure for you to use and you can test out the tool and you know, a peer to peer tool in the process that way. So you don’t necessarily have to have your own in order to participate in those ways um through a community giving day or something. So that’s, that’s a really great one.

[00:28:26.64] spk_2:
And I like to stay as platform agnostic as possible because it depends on your team and your donors as to which one makes the most sense. Do you have very tech savvy donors who are really excited to go in and make changes or do you have donors that want something that’s plug and play because they don’t really understand how to use these tools and they’re just excited to go out and fundraise for you. So, you know, there are amazing platforms out there, but I really always start with who is your team and who are your donors?

[00:28:58.84] spk_0:
Okay. I did

[00:29:28.60] spk_3:
remember, I did remember one about, about matching matching grants and um matching gifts. Um And so we talked about how, um you know, a lot of it’s not great to leave money on the table. Um We talked about employer, particularly employer matching gifts. But then also, um if you, you are, again, this is a little bit more complicated. But if you are equipped for uh kind of recruiting matching grants from donors or companies or foundations, that, that, that’s another thing that can, that can work really, really well. Um particularly in um a campaign situation where you can say, you know, all donations up to $20,000 will be matched dollar for dollar until midnight. Thanks to XYZ donor.

[00:29:58.95] spk_2:
And when we say leave money on the table according to um, double the donation, they researched this and 4 to $7 billion a year goes unclaimed in matching gifts. And that, that is money that is just left on the table by all of

[00:30:20.81] spk_0:
the company. Let your employer know that you donated their simple form. Exactly. And they’ll send the same or whatever they are match, match.

[00:30:23.06] spk_2:
And even I’ve seen reports that up to 40% of fortune 500 companies now have a volunteer match program as well. Which means if you have a volunteer base, maybe they haven’t donated. But they work for one of those bigger companies. You should also talk to those volunteers and see if they can talk to their company and if they’ll match some of the time that they’ve donated.

[00:30:43.51] spk_0:
Oh, so it’s the company providing another volunteer to piggyback on the employee that’s already volunteering for the organization. No,

[00:30:52.59] spk_2:
it’s the company writing a check equivalent to that person’s time.

[00:30:55.69] spk_0:
Oh, it’s giving cash equivalent to the

[00:30:58.24] spk_3:
volunteer time.

[00:31:10.84] spk_2:
Oh, and this has been a very effective strategy for one of my clients because they have a mentor program and all of their mentors are volunteers from large tech companies. And so they get often written checks from those employers saying, oh, I’m so happy my employee participated in your program. Here’s a check for their time.

[00:31:20.12] spk_0:
Damn. So 20 hours in a month or something, or 20 hours in a year, it was more like like somebody donated 20 hours in a year and the employer will pay the nonprofit, the value of that 20 hours. Okay. Excellent. I’ve never heard that. What is that called?

[00:31:36.85] spk_2:
Volunteer?

[00:31:42.17] spk_0:
Aptly named? Alright. Um okay. So anything else anything we probably, well, I don’t want to let you off the hook. We may have named all 11 but did we I think

[00:31:51.06] spk_2:
so confident. Well, like I said, they’re all super intertwined. So um we covered them all. I don’t know if we named

[00:32:05.19] spk_0:
one way or another. Okay. Alright. Alright, fair enough. All right. Um You, you’re one of your outcomes, tried and true fundraising tips from other nonprofit professionals do that that does come from the audience or, or, or I mean, you two are already a nonprofit. So is that redundant? I don’t know are the tips coming from you to or from the audience?

[00:32:24.46] spk_2:
And we had really good audience participation and they gave some of the tips that they use. So let’s bring them in.

[00:32:29.97] spk_0:
So share some,

[00:32:32.17] spk_2:
please. One organization mentioned that they have a threshold over $350. That’s when they start calling people. And that for them has also been incredibly effective. They just pick up the phone and they give donors a call um if they’ve reached that amount and that also helps them manage it a little bit because then they’re not necessarily calling everybody, but they know that that’s their threshold. My recommendation though is even under that 3 50. Take a sampling maybe and occasionally call them as well

[00:32:59.36] spk_0:
or like whatever you whatever you think you have the bandwidth for. If $50 is a big donation for you, then maybe that’s your threshold if you can manage it. Okay. Alright. You got another one came from the audience,

[00:33:48.57] spk_3:
another one that somebody shared was that they crowdsource stories from their participants and um collect them and share them out in monthly emails and they share a few stories in each email um in that the person’s words who submitted the story and it might include a photo, but it’s all coming pretty much directly from the participants themselves. And they mentioned that they put um a fundraising, a donate button, not even a hard ask, but just to donate button in the bottom of those males. And it generates quite a lot of donations just from this one email that shares these impact stories from, from folks who have participated in the services. Um and even with the soft ask, they get a great return on those.

[00:34:15.28] spk_2:
That also reminds me another tip. Um, and an audience member echoed this was around lapsed owners. So going back to segmenting your donors, if you can segment who has lapsed, then reaching out directly to them and talking to them and saying hi, we’ve missed you or, um, you know, here’s information about our programming. Again, targeting lapsed owner specifically has had great returns both for my clients as well as the woman that came and spoke

[00:34:30.72] spk_0:
and targeting them more digitally

[00:34:42.00] spk_2:
email, just having direct language to them that says like, thank you for your support. We miss you. Can you come back or here’s what we’ve been up to, especially if you have lab donors that have been away for five years, 10 years. You can use that as a great opportunity to say, this is everything that’s changed in the organization in that time and sometimes they just forgot, but they haven’t donated. And so reaching out to them and communicating with them in that way will help jog their memory and say, oh yeah, I love what you’re doing. Yes, I’ll donate again.

[00:35:08.71] spk_0:
And I didn’t realize that I had stopped and you found success even going back that far, going back 10 years, very successful. Interesting because that’s typically, I think folks will like do one or two, maybe three years lapse. You found success going back as far as 10 Okay.

[00:35:36.05] spk_2:
Okay. And again, it’s about targeting the communication, right? So you would target a 10 year lapse donor differently than a one year lapse donor. The one year lapse donor might have just credit, credit card expired or something changed. And that’s why they haven’t given, whereas the 10 year lapse donor is there, probably aware they’re not giving to your organization anymore. So use this as an opportunity to talk to them again about what may be their life has changed? What are their priorities again? Get to know them and say, hey, you know, we love your support. Is there something that we can do to get that back?

[00:36:02.00] spk_0:
Awesome. Any other area? The pros from tips from either one of you to professionals or that came from the audience trying to immerse listeners in the in the session experience.

[00:36:10.04] spk_3:
Okay. Those are the ones

[00:36:12.30] spk_0:
we’re not gonna okay. Put you on the spot. Um Rosalind, why don’t you leave us with inspirational thoughts around easier ways to boost your fundraising, the value of all these things we just talked about.

[00:36:36.33] spk_2:
Well and again, donors are excited about the work that you’re doing. So when we talk about tips to boost your fundraising, it’s about honestly just connecting with them and having them connect with your organization in fun, interesting and personalized ways.

[00:37:12.31] spk_0:
Rosen is a CEO A Ropa consulting and Julia Tepfer, Senior Marketing and digital Engagement strategist at National Immigrant Justice Center, Rosalind Roz Julia Thank you very much. Thanks for sharing. Thanks for sharing. Thank you for being with nonprofit radio coverage of 23 nt see where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with us.

[00:37:20.87] spk_1:
It’s time for Tony’s take two.

[00:38:25.11] spk_0:
Thank you, Kate. Have you got feedback? You know, I’m always interested in your opinion of nonprofit radio. It might be an individual show or a guest or topics that resonate with you or some topic that you think was off topic, didn’t, didn’t really belong on the show. You know, it might be this week’s show, it might be next week’s next month, next year. Anytime I’m I’m interested in your opinion, I’m interested in your feedback. I welcome it. Positive, negative, good, bad. I can take it. It’ll be okay. I’ll be fine. I am genuinely interested in what you think about what you’re listening to week after week. And the best way to get feedback to me is either the contact page at tony-martignetti dot com or just email me tony at tony-martignetti dot com. Eight

[00:38:26.57] spk_1:
that is Tony’s take two. We’ve got Boo koo, but loads more time here is personalized fundraising at scale.

[00:39:06.50] spk_0:
Welcome to tony-martignetti, non profit radio coverage of 23 NTC. Our continuing coverage of the 2023 nonprofit technology conference at the Colorado Convention Center in Denver where we are sponsored by Heller consulting technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits with me. Now is Joe Frye Account, group director for nonprofit and Cause at Town Hall Agency and Peter, Vice President of Innovation at Town Hall Agency, Joe Peter. Welcome to nonprofit radio. Thanks

[00:39:14.64] spk_4:
for having us. Thanks

[00:39:15.42] spk_0:
tony and my welcome also to the, to the teams at Town Hall Agency. What Peter, what is Town Hall Agency about

[00:39:33.06] spk_5:
Town Hall agency is an agency that is focused on the non profit and higher education sectors and it’s a full service digital agency. We have been uh kind of evolved and grown out of our parent company, which is, which is Situation Group and Town Hall. We, we have really brought a lot of folks on board to grow that brand for us. Uh And Joe can speak a little bit more to that, but it is, it is an outgrowth of the work that we’ve been doing for a lot of our uh clients that care about creating passionate communities and really making sure that we’re making impact in the work that we’re doing.

[00:39:59.55] spk_0:
Your session. Topic together is personalized, fundraising at scale a how to discussion. So we’re gonna talk about the how to of personalized fundraising at scale. Joe, what what could nonprofits doing a little better? It sounds like with

[00:40:29.38] spk_4:
personalization. Yeah, it’s, it’s a great question. I mean, you know, I think when we look at the data already, about 60% of non profits are doing some sort of personalization, right? It’s the at scale that we’re really talking about. Um And it really, to me and to Peter, we were talking about this, it doesn’t necessarily start with the tech stack. It’s more of a mindset. Um And how do we break down the silos within nonprofits? Um So that we’re not personalizing one channel at a time, but we’re personalizing the whole ecosystem.

[00:40:46.94] spk_0:
And so you’re encouraging us to go beyond the hello, first name, email, personal and, and assuming that we were personalizing, we use people’s first names and

[00:41:12.30] spk_5:
emails. It’s not a bad place to start, but it’s really growing from that and kind of thinking about the subtle ways that you can do personalization across multiple different channels. So not just saying okay, one and done, we do it here, we’ve ticked that box. But how can we always be thinking about increasing that level of personal is a because we see that constituents respond to that. They actually, they have a tendency to give more when personalization is done, right?

[00:41:20.13] spk_0:
So Peter, how, how far can we go? And what’s, what’s a better definition of personalization?

[00:42:03.02] spk_5:
Well, I, I think there’s a lot, there’s a lot that’s coming out right now in, in thinking how this is going to impact every single part of our lives. I think we’re being personalized to, in ways that we do don’t even realize every single day. And, and one of the things that we talked about in our panel was how can we make sure that we’re always doing a feedback loop of the data that we have, we have first party data about the people were communicating to. And then that the second piece is really making sure that all of that data is consistent, cleaned up, de duplicated, not the most fun part of the job, but that really allows you to then take action what you know, and then always be listening when you’re continuing that conversation with your constituents, they’re giving you feedback on how they open their emails when they do that and the kinds of things, the things that they’re reading on your website. So always make sure there’s a feedback loop to not just rest on your laurels about what you think, you know, but how are you continuing to learn about those people as you evolve in that relationship with them?

[00:42:28.54] spk_0:
You mentioned that we’re always being personalized to, I mean, I’m thinking of any of the, any of the online retailers, you know, customers who looked at what you looked at, looked at these other things, people who bought what you bought these other things, people who bought what you bought, bought these other things with those. I mean, these things paired together, right? We know this is your preferred address, you know. So in those types of ways, is that what you mean? Yeah,

[00:42:48.46] spk_5:
the example that we used

[00:42:49.50] spk_0:
in this is one example, retail and online

[00:42:57.29] spk_5:
retail. Yeah, the example we used in our presentation was about kind of online streaming platforms. They’re all vying for our $8 a month right now. And the ones that are making sure that they know what we like and giving us those recommendations from their content library. Those are the ones that are going to have that competitive edge. So I think we see it a lot in the for profit world that, that personalization is kind of survival of the fittest. But then, you know, the challenge is how do we adapt that for nonprofits when we’re not putting those up against each other in a competitive way? But we’re hoping that we can just make sure that we have the best relationship with our constituents.

[00:43:26.43] spk_0:
I just got an email yesterday that HBO Max is becoming Max. That that’s an interesting branding. I would have thought HBO Max would be better uh keeping their name, front center, but

[00:43:39.27] spk_5:
there’s a lot of money to make that

[00:43:54.59] spk_0:
decision. Okay. Um So look for that big change. Uh So, so do we need some infrastructure, we need to be able to capture and preserve and then coalesce the data that you’re, you’re talking about? Either one of you need infrastructure back in before we can personalize that scale. I

[00:44:26.70] spk_4:
mean, I think one of the things that Peter and I spent a lot of time thinking about is what you do actually need, right? You need data, you need a tech stack, you need a website, you need an email platform, you need something like that. But really it’s organization, right? It’s, it’s a little bit of time. And in our panel, I talked about an example of the client a couple years ago where we spent two hours a month, tagging their data for four months and we had enough data to then personalize everything to them two hours in a month. Yeah, it wasn’t much time at all. Right. And we didn’t ask them for new technology we used what they were using. Uh And so I think there are ways to do it. It’s why we like to say that yes, it can be a tech stack, but really it’s a mindset.

[00:44:45.53] spk_5:
And I think unless you’ve built your own technology from the ground up, chances are there are features within the tech that you use today, you don’t know how to use or that you’re just not using to the extent because those platforms are always improving

[00:44:57.88] spk_0:
tags, attributes, segments, segments. What else are these things commonly called across different platforms? Anything else that

[00:45:31.73] spk_5:
mark that there’s a lot that falls on like marketing automation. Um You know, I think there are more and more platforms that can identify the best time to send, not just for your entire audience but based on you, you know, when do you tend to engage with those emails and then when I hit send for that, you know, maybe it’ll hold that email until it knows when tony is going to open it and it will deliver to you at the right time. So it’s just scale being able to exist. It does exist,

[00:45:34.73] spk_0:
just describe something that you’re dreaming of

[00:45:37.16] spk_5:
that exists. Otherwise I’m going to go off and trademarks but know that exist today. Absolutely.

[00:45:41.67] spk_4:
Existing tools kind of upstream and downstream, right? Like not just the really expensive tools but also the more achievable approachable tools. Okay.

[00:46:13.92] spk_0:
So folks may already have this these resources, you just have to exploit them. That’s right, because I’m thinking of, I use male chimp for my company, emails and uh blasts for the podcast. There are, there’s, there’s like send time optimization. Um I don’t know if it’s including optimizing for me, but it’s including optimizing for the folks I’m sending to and I’m not even thinking about segments, I could set the audience and then segment and then send time optimization for the different segments. I’m just doing it in one

[00:46:37.85] spk_4:
group. Alright. And right, that’s, that’s part of when we define personalization. That’s part of what we’re talking about, right? Like a lot of people think personalization, 1 to 1, ultimately, we’ll get there. But like let’s start in a smaller phase of personalization, one to a persona, one to a group of people. Let’s build our confidence there. And I think a lot of it is kind of, it sounds so big and intimidating and you know, we have all this data and we’re gonna get lost in that data. But when we break it down and we really try to crawl, walk, run a personalized approach. We can do it in ways that everybody gets on board. We can start to break down some of those silos and barriers inside of organizations, bring everybody to the table know clearly.

[00:47:00.10] spk_0:
And then it just become awareness because we’re reassuring folks that a lot what they need is already in place. It’s just exploiting it.

[00:47:22.34] spk_5:
And I think the subtlety of how you approach it and how you start that, that crawl phase. I think we’ve all gotten that email that was personalized to us, but maybe it had the wrong name or it had the first name tag instead of our actual name. And you may I equate that to, uh, if a romantic partner calls you by the wrong name, you might forgive that, but you’re never going to forget that moment. So, so how can we be thinking about personal, personalizing things in a subtle way where it’s just enhancing what we know about you? But we’re kind of mitigating that risk of maybe, you know, as all technology does from time to time, you know, makes a mistake. But, but that’s really where that second stage we were talking about before of making sure that your data is constantly sanitized up to date, clean and consistent. Are there

[00:47:47.25] spk_0:
other examples that we can, we can give folks a different types of personalization. Yeah.

[00:48:56.61] spk_4:
So I like, I think there are a couple of things we can do personalization wise. One is we can personalize to the content. So um right, hubspot came out a couple years ago now with the stat that they have dynamic CTS built into their platform. Uh And so essentially the CT A changes based on your data uh and they came out and said it converts 202% better than a static one. That’s a huge number. But what are we actually personalizing that too? Is it the story that it appears underneath? Right? So our ask is based on uh whatever the blog post topic is and like what was able to help that person and that impact story or we personally personalizing it to the fact that tony donated $100 last month. Now we want them to donate 100 and 20 because we want them to donate 20% more. So, what are we really personalizing too is a good, a good place to start. Um You know, one of the things that I’ve spent a lot of time with is working with organizations have gift catalogs and how to activate a gift catalog across a blog to then have a CT A that isn’t even dynamic. It’s static, but it’s written in the same way that the ask and the gift catalog is so that way everything ties together. So regardless of which channel somebody’s engaging with you with or what the ask is. Everybody’s on the same page about what that actual ask is going to be. And it feels more personal to the donor and the potential donor.

[00:49:09.98] spk_0:
Peter. Other examples. Yeah.

[00:49:32.43] spk_5:
Well, I think one of the things that Joe and I were having some conversations around, uh and I know he’s done some, some campaigns with this personalized video is something that’s becoming more and more attainable without, you know, breaking the bank. Really, there are a lot of services that you can work with to have different videos stitched together. They could include things like your donation history or, or just an appeal to you or, or really just includes segments, you know, as part of that B roll that of things that we know that are important to you. So when you’re thinking about a video campaign or an end of your appeal, you can actually start to use more and more to uh tools that, that every piece of that campaign have some level of personalization going

[00:49:50.42] spk_0:
on. Are there any video platforms that you can, you can shout out recommend as a potential resource

[00:49:56.18] spk_4:
we like item, you spell it. Idomoo

[00:50:01.90] spk_0:
idomoo

[00:50:05.18] spk_4:
dot com dot com. They do a great job really connecting in um to a database or uploaded Excel docs. Um

[00:50:14.18] spk_0:
So the video, so Peter, you’re saying like the B roll can change based on the data that’s in your CRM.

[00:50:30.45] spk_4:
Yeah, B roll the music, the ask everything, right? So everything is a data point. Um And it doesn’t really change your production process that much. They, their system has an after effects plug in that. A lot of producers and editors are already using after effects to produce videos. Um And so you define what the personalization is, what the element is and then you create all the different assets to that. Um But to your

[00:50:45.40] spk_0:
point, both of you, you could start with, maybe, maybe start with first name and maybe giving history or something like that or start simple. Don’t, don’t, you know, you’re not, you don’t have to be Martin Scorsese to produce your first one. But explore

[00:51:32.04] spk_4:
and I think like also, right, if you, if you even wanted to explore it at a higher level, um when somebody makes a donation, right, you, you know what they clicked on before they donate it typically, right? You’re gonna know if they came from an email article from a blog post from something. And so if you take that and you say, you know what, I’m gonna follow up with a personal thank you from somebody that benefited from a donation like this or from our president and CEO or from somebody on our team. Uh And I’m only gonna show them stories and content around the topic that they actually donated to. Um It’s a nice way to personalize in a very subtle way. So it’s not actually saying, thanks Tony for your donation of X, but it’s saying thank you for your support with a personal uh personalized aspect and then also showing them other stories, other impact that you have in that that segment

[00:51:48.01] spk_0:
related to what they gave to. Yeah, he’s a great example. Any other what other examples that we

[00:52:37.21] spk_5:
got on the media buying side? There’s a lot of conversations we’re having around dynamic creative. So this idea of dynamic creative that you when you’re building out your, let’s say it’s your display ad, you have a few different versions that you upload into a system. And then that system can based on targeting as media has always done. But it can also, you know, know where you are geographically and it can say, uh you know, here’s, here’s an opportunity for you in your area and it will show you something different because you’ve set up the rules to do that. It takes, it does take a change of workflow, the tools are getting cheaper, but it does require your team to maybe work in a way that they haven’t done in the past. And the non waterfall way of saying, okay, we’re going to put this ask out to the designer to get back the assets and then we’re not going to talk them again. Well, we may need to go back to that designer and say, you know what we need another variation that can achieve this thing that we’re trying to target. So can we get a few more from you? And it’s just really about making sure that, that the team is, is having that communication. It’s, and there’s a muscle within the organization to be able to adapt to that.

[00:52:58.92] spk_0:
And you were talking about media buying. What are some examples of your, your think? Um

[00:53:00.28] spk_5:
Well, just like the ads that we see,

[00:53:01.81] spk_0:
search, search, search,

[00:53:04.06] spk_5:
search ads

[00:53:28.70] spk_4:
and search ads. It’s, it’s built into Google Google ads from from the start, right? They have the dynamic ads and they optimize for you using AI but you can also optimize by location and, and some platforms allow you to kind of put together other assets. Um I mean, I also think about, you know, as just another example, thinking about communication channel preference and frequency. Um for some reason, I don’t know why my mom will not text me but she Facebook messages me. I can’t get her to text me, but her preferred channel is Facebook messenger. Um And so, you know, with donors, they all have a preferred channel um and a communication frequency that they want to hear from you. And it’s okay to ask for that. Uh

[00:53:47.61] spk_0:
Simple surveys. Yeah. How do you, how do you like us to be in touch with you?

[00:53:52.43] spk_5:
Yeah. And you mentioned Male Chimp a little while ago, tony is something that you use. The survey tools are built into that platform as well. So you can, you can deploy an email that links, you write to a survey on the same platform and then that survey will automatically update those tags on that constituent that you already have. So it’s, it’s, it’s both you can, the tools have never been better to integrate those different tools. But some of those tools are actually adding within themselves to give you even more.

[00:54:19.99] spk_0:
Any other examples you want to share? Did you do your session already or it’s coming up? Any other examples that came from maybe questions or that you shared? No, holding, holding out on non profit radio.

[00:55:10.27] spk_4:
No, we um you know, we talked a little bit about a little bit about chat, lots, a little bit about automation or across social platforms, right? Um I’ve used in the past multiple platforms, but I really like many chat as an example where you can actually set up triggers. So somebody that likes a post or somebody that comments on one of your post gets a message sent to them through whatsapp or any of the Facebook ecosystem messenger wise. Um And it’s just a nice way to kind of build that communication back and forth in that network uh in a not really creepy way, right? Like everybody wants to be engaged with or if they don’t, they tell you, they don’t want to. But it’s often a nice way to kind of automate some of that when we’re thinking about how we can do it. It’s,

[00:55:18.26] spk_0:
it’s interesting. Alright. So somebody liked or commented on a post. Yeah, I don’t know. Just a like and then they get something

[00:55:21.21] spk_4:
they could, I mean, you can set up whatever rules you want. Right. Maybe it’s three likes, four likes.

[00:55:26.33] spk_0:
Yeah, maybe a couple, a couple, a

[00:55:42.20] spk_4:
couple of engagements. And I think that’s where like, you know, I think a common theme, especially at this conference but that we often see is always be testing and it’s what really is that, you know, is it after five likes, somebody is likely to want to engage with you more and they’re looking for feedback from you. Um or is it after 10, like what really does that donor journey look like? And I know everybody is a little bit different. But, and

[00:56:25.31] spk_5:
I think Joe, you, you alluded to this in our panel, but when you’re engaging, when constituents are supporting a nonprofit, they see that relationship is very personal. If they’re going to give you their money, it’s usually because it’s something that they believe in, they support your cause. So, so we find a lot of times people are looking, you said it might seem a little creepy, but we, we find that people that are willing to give often want to engage in a dialogue. So it’s just about making sure that we’re engaging with them in the right way. They don’t just hear from us, you know, once a year when we need money, we’re making sure to, to put information in front of them that we, that we know is with them for them based on what they’ve said to us

[00:56:28.08] spk_0:
before. It was just that one example of the single, single lake, single thumbs up. And then I get a message on what’s

[00:56:47.03] spk_5:
happened. Well, yeah, and you know, we touched very briefly, uh you know, on A I what AI is going to be doing to the world of personalization. Uh I was at a talk recently from Amy Webb from the Future Today Institute and she said we used to search the internet and we’re getting to a point where the internet is now searching us. So just everybody buckle buckle your seatbelts in terms of what’s going to be happening in our worlds around uh the kinds of messaging that we’re hearing from all the new AI that’s coming online.

[00:57:03.11] spk_0:
What does she mean by that? The internet searching us? Well,

[00:57:16.74] spk_5:
that all the signals that we’re putting out into the world about our preferences, what we like that, that, you know, in the best case scenario, you have a dedicated team that’s looking at those making sense of them and, and figuring out a strategy that works to communicate. But when you just, you know, we’re getting to a point where a lot of tools are being unleashed that haven’t been tested before. So, you know, what was the micro response time from how someone moved their mouse from the bottom of the screen to the top. Does that have an indication of maybe a health issue that they’re dealing with? And you just, it doesn’t take long to go into some, some really black holes around this conversation.

[00:57:41.43] spk_0:
Trillions and trillions and quadrillions. We’re all,

[00:57:44.88] spk_5:
we’re all putting out data. Yeah.

[00:58:12.73] spk_4:
And I think that’s the thing, right? Like data, the amount of data can be scary, right? Like I have to analyze all this data um from a personal standpoint where Peter and I I kind of start is you don’t have to analyze everything. Let’s make a hypothesis, right? Like do people care more about where you do your work? Do they care more about the aspect of what you’re doing? Like what do they really care most about? And let’s try to just collect data around that and organize that data first and see if that’s actually what they care about and then move on from there. Yeah.

[00:58:14.74] spk_5:
And don’t be afraid to act. I think it’s possible in an overwhelming sea of information to become paralyzed. But, but you know that at the end of the day, the goal is to try something and see what impact that has. See if it moves the needle and make sure you’re paying attention to those performance indicators to make sure what you want to do is actually happening.

[00:58:32.04] spk_0:
So staying short of the micro seconds that it takes to move the mouse, how can we collect on our own? Some of this, some of this, some of the data that we can be then used for uh personalization at scale.

[01:01:07.08] spk_4:
Yeah. Um Well, to go back a little bit about the data piece, right? Like let’s let’s take a step back and think about why personalization really matters and like why it started in in the more commercial world first. Uh there’s a data point out there that says every second it takes me to, to think about where I’m at on a website and to act, take the next step, there’s a 10% drop off for every second. So 10% plus 10% plus 10% right? And so it’s easy to see how somebody can go from clicking on an ad, a search at Google Grants, add something like that to a website that takes a couple of seconds to load to where you went from, somebody who was going to give to you. So now there’s a 50% chance, right? Because you’re 567 seconds in by that time. Um And so personalization really started as a way to remove friction, uh which is what people often are looking for. And we know that people are really interacting with organizations across channels across platforms. Maybe it starts with uh friends um post on IG or linkedin sharing a success story and you click on that and you’re interested and you sign up for a newsletter and then you get a newsletter and you kind of read another blog post and you kind of build your relationship over multiple channels. Um But when we think about the data that you can collect, right? It’s what if you’re, you’re collecting like the last step. Um Google Analytics has a previous step metric. So everybody that goes to your donation page that converts, what was the previous step that they were on? What was the content? Um Let’s analyze that content. Let’s see what, what looks good about it? Is it 1000 word blog post? Is it a video that was embedded? Is it the ask itself was $50? And we know you actually only gave 25. Why did you only give 25? We can start to look at some of that data. Um And with an email, right, we can see what you’re clicking on open rates, uh platforms like mail chimp and hubspot and in constant contact, they all do that on an individual email record. Uh So you can actually start to see and when we do these uh and we start tagging me. So let’s start with email, right? And let’s figure out if we’re tagging around topics. What tags are people clicking on? Like are people only clicking on an article about X or are they only clicking on articles about why? And let’s start to segment those and build out more detailed personas just from an email engagement because they’ve given you their information, they’ve said they want to hear from you. They’re going to engage with you likely. Um, and it’s just an easy way for us to start there and then expand it out to multiple

[01:01:11.11] spk_0:
channels. Everything you just named is eminently doable if you’re using the most basic email, email service. Yeah, Peter

[01:02:33.78] spk_5:
to go back to, I think the idea of being a good steward of that data um treating it responsibly. Not only because legally you have to and more and more laws are coming out to say, you know, this is, this is how governments are protecting all of our data every single day. But also listening, listening to your constituents letting them know, we alluded to this earlier, letting them know why we want that information and how we intend to use it. We really just want to deepen our relationship with you. We want to make sure we’re landing your in your in box at the right time when we have something to say and when we think this is going to be important to our relationship and we’re listening to you, if you want to come to us and say, you know what? I need a break, I need to, you know, I want to change our relationship and being responsive to that. It’s not so that’s not just the technology and you know, all of the check boxes we’re all familiar with when you hit the unsubscribe button on an email and it takes you to that form and it’s like, why are you leaving? That’s kind of very cold. You have to do that. But also because privacy laws require outreach and you have to be listening to that you have to have in most states, a phone number and an email address where people can reach out to you and say, tell me what you know about me and in our organization, we listen and, and we look at every single one of those and we treat them with respect and we treat them as we would want to be treated if we were reaching out to somebody else who had our data.

[01:02:40.14] spk_4:
And again, that’s, that’s process, right? That’s not, that’s not necessarily technology, it’s, it’s a process internally and that’s part of the reason we say personalization is a mindset.

[01:03:04.77] spk_0:
Yeah. Um Peter, can we go further? So Joe identified um you know, like I was saying, data, that’s eminently collectible. You, you can start tomorrow, just turn on some analytics or, or just go back and look at data that’s already been collected. What will be the next step in terms of data that we could collect or methods that we could use to collect data for more personalization?

[01:03:50.19] spk_5:
Well, I think the way we think about it is may be reversed a little bit. We want to start with what, what is the outcome that we’re looking for? And how do we get there? Because I think it can be really tempting to just say, let’s plug another data source into the machine and see what happens. And I think that’s what you’re seeing a lot with a lot of the large language models that are pervading and coming out in the AI world right now. It’s, let’s just hook up everything that everybody said on reddit and see what happens. And I think as an organization, we don’t want to be, we don’t want to collect something that we don’t need to have to make the relationship better. It’s very tempting um to say like, oh, look, we can get 50 more data points. But if you don’t have a plan for that, then, then you’re just kind of bloating your systems and you’re, you’re risking having more than you need. Um So I think it’s, it’s, how do we, what is the end goal that we want? How do we want that constituent to feel at the end of this relationship? And then what do we need to get there? And, and let’s not over indulge.

[01:04:20.35] spk_0:
Yeah. Very good point. All right. Um What else? Um What else from your session that we haven’t talked about yet? We still have some time if, if there’s more we can talk about.

[01:04:27.75] spk_5:
Well, I think we, we were really encouraged by the, some of the conversations we had after the session. Questions.

[01:04:33.89] spk_0:
Yeah. What, what questions came or what Yeah, I think, well, he can come

[01:04:40.51] spk_5:
anytime you want the vice president. I’m just here to make Joe look good. That’s my job today. I don’t know.

[01:05:09.64] spk_0:
I see Deray vice president and group director, so Peter is the vice president. All right. Um, no, I’m not trying to create a tension within, within town. Yes. Right. Right. Um, what else came from? Yeah. Get Joe Rogan’s numbers. Right. I start going to fisticuffs. Um What else came from this audience feedback, whether questions or comments after privately, what stuck with

[01:06:25.03] spk_5:
you? I think one of the things that stuck with me was going back to what Joe was saying. It’s, it’s not just about the technology and making sure the gears are spinning, but oftentimes in organizations, it’s about the human work of getting teams that are all focusing on their own individual piece of it who are very proud of the work that they do to come together and have a conversation and understand what the bigger goal is. So there were, we all have egos. We, we all want to be told we’re doing a good job and if my part of the machine is working, I’m going to call it a day. Don’t bring me into a meeting to tell me how I have to change something because now some and so what I’m doing is working, but to really achieve something like personalization at scale, it does require getting people into a room together and almost having kind of like a professional therapy session and saying this is where we’re trying to go with our, imagine if we had a system that looked like this. Now, we’re not saying anybody in the room is preventing us from doing that, but we know that we’re only going to get there together by cooperating and finding a new way to break down those silos that exist today and, and how we do that needs to be respectful of everybody who wants to show up and it’s gonna be key to making that happen. Okay. Very good,

[01:06:26.01] spk_0:
very good perspective. Anything else that for anything struck you from the questions, anything else, audience related questions, comments

[01:07:58.00] spk_4:
that yeah, I mean, I think um I think there were really two things, one kind of piggybacking a little bit on that. We spent some time talking about making sure that when you’re collecting KPI S to see if personalization is a success, right? When you’re starting small, like what are you actually looking at? Um if you personalize the subject line of an email, the primary KPI shouldn’t be a donation, it should be an email open, right? And so when we start to have these leading indicators um that are kind of micro metrics that we’re looking at, we can start to get more people on board because we’re then sharing the same language with them, right? Uh We spend a lot of time talking about uh just how different people perceive different words, uh awareness, for instance, right? Like when we run an awareness campaign as an agency, we’re thinking it’s brand lift, right? The action is, does somebody remember your organization name and what you do? Um But oftentimes when organizations come to us and they say we want an awareness campaign, they actually mean they want somebody who doesn’t know them to take an action. Uh and it’s a, it’s a small difference but it does change one, the metrics that we’re tracking and to the type of, of media by that we do. Um And kind of how we message that. Uh And so I think it’s important, like all teams have slightly different language are slightly different connotation of a certain word. And so getting everybody, like Peter said in a therapy session at the beginning to kind of define everything that we’re gonna talk about. Everything that we’re gonna do is a really important key step. Um And it starts with a pis

[01:08:21.76] spk_5:
and, and just because you think something may seem obvious, don’t assume that everybody in that larger group when they get together is necessarily going to click on everything. And an example I often use is in the world of technology, a developer means one thing, someone who codes software in the world of nonprofits development is raising money. So just that assumption, if you’re going off on a tangent about something, and there are people in the room who maybe haven’t worked together before. Don’t assume that everybody is using the exact same dictionary

[01:08:27.75] spk_0:
work in development, right?

[01:08:29.90] spk_5:
Good website. No, no, no, not that kind.

[01:08:45.51] spk_0:
All right. Leave it there. Does that sound good? Alright, they are Joe Frye account, group account, group director for nonprofit and Cause Town Hall Agency and Peter president of Innovation at Town Hall Agency. Just to foment a little more dissension back at the

[01:08:50.47] spk_5:
agency. Thank you very much for

[01:08:53.45] spk_0:
sharing. Thanks. Thanks Peter. Thank you very much. And thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of the 2023 nonprofit technology conference where we are sponsored by Heller consulting, technology strategy and implementation for nonprofits. Thanks for being with me.

[01:09:21.77] spk_1:
Next week, we wrap up our 23 NTC coverage with communications and development teams working better together. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I

[01:09:24.73] spk_0:
beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com.

[01:09:43.62] spk_1:
We’re sponsored by Donor Box with intuitive fundraising software from donor box. Your donors give four times faster, helping you help others donor box dot org. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff. I’m your announcer, Kate martignetti. The show social media is by Susan Chavez, Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by Scott Stein.