Tag Archives: content strategy

Nonprofit Radio for November 28, 2022: Thought Leadership & Content Strategy

 

Peter Panepento & Antionette KerrThought Leadership
Peter Panapento and Antionette Kerr co-authored the book, “Modern Media Relations for Nonprofits.” They share their insights on how to build relationships with journalists so you get heard as the thought leader you are. Plus, other media strategies, like crisis communications. This was part of our coverage of the 2020 Nonprofit Technology Conference.

 

 

 

 

Valerie Johnson & Katie GreenContent Strategy
Now that you’re an established thought leader, you need to produce multichannel content that’s relevant. Also engaging, actionable, user friendly and SEO friendly. Also from 20NTC, Valerie Johnson from Pathways to Housing PA and Katie Green with The Trevor Project show you how.

 

 

 

 

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[00:02:38.49] spk_0:
Hello 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. I hope you enjoyed your thanksgiving. I hope you enjoyed the company of family friends, time for yourself as well. Lots of lots of good thanksgiving holiday wishes, I hope you enjoyed very much and I’m glad you’re with me. I’d be forced to endure the pain of epidermal Asus below psA if you gave me the blistering news that you missed this week’s show. Thought leadership, Peter Pan a pinto and Antoinette car co authored the book modern media relations for nonprofits. They share their insights on how to build relationships with journalists so you get heard as the thought leader you are plus other media strategies like crisis communications. This was part of our coverage of the 2020 non profit technology conference and content strategy. Now that you’re an established thought leader, you need to produce multi channel content that’s relevant, also engaging actionable user friendly and S. E. O friendly. Also from 20 N. T. C. Valerie johnson from pathways to housing P A. And Katie Green with the Trevor project. Show you how Antonis take two. I’m still wishing you well. We are sponsored by Turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C. O here is thought leadership with me now are Peter pan a pinto and Antoinette car. Peter is philanthropic practice leader at turn two communications, Antoinette is part of the leadership team of women advance and ceo of bold and bright media. They are the co authors of the book Modern media relations for nonprofits. Peter Antoinette welcome. Yes. I’m glad we could work this out among the three of us. Thank you. And uh, it’s good to know that you reach well and safe in your respective locations. Okay.

[00:02:39.44] spk_1:
Thank you. Yes.

[00:02:51.33] spk_0:
Okay. I, yes, I see. No one within six ft of you. That’s good. Even though you are home, we’re talking about thought leadership and media. Let’s, uh, let’s start with you Internet. We can, we can use our leverage thought leadership and use the media to, uh, to influence those who are engaged with us, our constituents and even influence policy.

[00:04:02.66] spk_2:
So the media needs experts and non profits are on the ground there doing the work and they are the perfect folks to be experts in this conversation um, in particular and emergency Peter non talks about earlier about crisis communications and in a lot of situations the media scrambling looking for experts. If you have established yourself as a thought leader, which is what you should aspire to do. I know that turn to does the work in helping people to kind of establish themselves with the thought leader in this conversation. But right now we need people with good information and who can provide great stories for example and nonprofits can do that and they can do that work. And that’s why the thought leadership conversations important. Most nonprofits don’t see themselves needing to do that. It’s not the first thing we think about, we think about fundraising, right? Um, but not necessarily media friend raising. And so now is the time that you want to have those relationships and be considered as a thought leader.

[00:04:18.59] spk_0:
Because when there’s news that relates to your mission, um, your call is more likely to be taken, your email is more likely be answered. If there’s that pre existing relationship you mentioned. But if if everybody in the sector is calling all the, all the media blindly, then it’s just sort of a crapshoot whether they answer you or not or

[00:05:38.32] spk_2:
if you think about the media needing like, you know, going to a crisis example, like the media needing a source or an expert And they don’t want to quote the same person that’s, you know, something that I’ve learned from my media background and training. I’ve been working as a journalist since 1995. And you know, one thing that my editors say, you know, don’t quote the same person, don’t quote the same organization. So in a crisis people will call big box non profit sometimes. Um, and they’ll just see them as being the experts for a conversation. And that’s why establishing yourself as a thought leader is so important. So someone can say, you know, I’m a unique voice about this. We have an example in our book modern media relations where um, someone who an organization that worked with Children and families involved in domestic violence became very important in the conversation when a professional athlete in in Georgia was convicted of family violence and all of a sudden that person was called upon to be on radio shows and talk shows and they became a thought leader. But they done the work to position themselves as an expert. And so I know Peter you, I know you have some examples as well, but we just kind of dived in there and and didn’t talk about the whole broad concept about leadership.

[00:06:04.05] spk_0:
Well, all right, well, um peter, I was gonna ask you, how do we start to build these relationships? Um you wanna do you want to back up what thought leadership is?

[00:08:02.93] spk_1:
Sure, I’ll start with thought leadership defined and that and that’s really um the process of establishing one’s expertise in a in a specific area and and and doing it in a way where they are recognized beyond their own organization, in their own kind of immediate networks, as a, as an expert as a thought leader. Somebody who is driving the conversation and really really helping people better understand a key issue or a topic. So for a nonprofit or a foundation, a thought leader might be your ceo um who or executive director, somebody who um is at the front lines uh and and kind of is in a in a position where they um not only have expertise but they have some authority and being able to talk with some gravitas about a topic, um but um in order to kind of establish your credentials there um and get recognized, you have to do some legwork beyond just having that expertise. You have to be um you have to be comfortable talking about that topic. You have to um you have to spend some time kind of building the relationships and the and the and the the larger credibility that you are, somebody who has something interesting to say and the expertise to back it up. Um and the more you do that, and you can do that not just through the media, but through your own channels and through speaking at conferences and and all kinds of other things. Um the more you do that, the more you kind of become uh somebody who is recognized and is called upon to weigh in on important topics or or when news events call for it or in a situation like what, where we are now with with the covid 19 response, Somebody who can kind of come in and bring a voice of reason and perspective to what’s going on around us.

[00:08:31.98] spk_0:
So you have to lay the groundwork there, there has to be some fundamentals and you have to have your gravitas and you you need to appear bona fide and be bona fide not just appear, you have to be bona fide on the topic that you’re that you’re an expert in the mission of, of your, your nonprofit. How do you then start to when you have that groundwork? How do you then start to build relationships when there isn’t really a need for you to be talking about the subject?

[00:09:39.59] spk_1:
Sure, there are a lot of ways to do that one is that you, um, you start to build some personal relationships with media who are covering these topics. And you can do that either through, you know, somebody on your communications team that helps you, or you can kind of do it yourself, but you can, you can start to show up in, in their coverage of stories by, um, by um, positioning yourself and, and building relationships with individual reporters. Maybe even when they don’t need you by having an informational coffee or call so that they can get to know you and know what you stand for. Um, you can do it by your through your own writing and, and public speaking and making those things available and accessible to the media. Um, and you can, you can do it through your own channels to a lot of nonprofits have blogs, they have, uh, they have their own podcasts. They have different ways where they’re positioning their internal experts externally so that they’re kind of talking about and establishing their credentials around around a subject. And

[00:09:41.01] spk_0:
that’s your, that’s your owned media, right. That’s your own media versus earned media?

[00:10:12.00] spk_1:
Yes. Yes. And, and the value of that, is that the more you’re, you’re kind of demonstrating through your own media channels, your expertise, you’re not only building um some greater relationships and and credibility with your donors and the folks who are already kind of in your network, but you start to show up when people are doing searches or when people are on social media and seeing stories and articles that are passed around, if they may see something you’ve written or talked about, shared in another network, and it it sparks a light for them that you’re somebody worth going back to when they need, um when they need some, you know, somebody like you to weigh in on something.

[00:10:52.96] spk_0:
Okay, peter, I know you and Antoinette are both former journalists. Uh, so I’m gonna jump over to Antoinette for what Antoinette, what what what do these outreach, I guess, calls and emails to journalists to try to build the relationship. Uh what what do they what do they look like? What would you suggest people are saying to, to try to get the attention um to build the relationship, not, not when I’m looking to be quoted because there’s a breaking news, but to build the relationship.

[00:12:33.00] spk_2:
So, full disclosure. I’m a current journalist. Um so, yes, so I I still work for publications right now. Um and so people contact me on twitter and social media, which is a new thing. We talk about press releases. I’m a big fan of press releases, um yes, just full disclosure about that. But I still like for people to pitch me on social media, direct messages through twitter. If I’m using my company profile, it’s safe for nonprofits to contact me and say, hey, I have a story. I noticed that you’re interested in this concept, it’s always great when people know what I’m interested in. Like when they’re like, I noticed that you publish a lot of stories like right now I’m working on a story, a series of stories about missing and murdered indigenous women. And so when people see, oh, I notice you’re publishing stories about this and they pitch me on a direct message or um through facebook messenger even and say, hey, would you consider this the story and here’s the angle. Um or have you thought about, you know, I’ve had other people reach out and say I noticed you’re publishing these types of stories about, you know, missing and murdered indigenous women. Have you considered other stories about violence against women and it’s always a really great connection for me. So I think just kind of knowing what the journalist is interested in is really important, kind of, understanding their angle. Sorry, y’all, um understanding their angle and just flowing from there and saying, you know, here’s how we fit into this conversation is always a wonderful

[00:12:46.00] spk_0:
um so outreach by any of the social channels is fine too, you talk about twitter and direct message facebook, those are all

[00:12:56.47] spk_2:
yes and people tagging me like I feel like if a journalist is using their profile in a way that is professional then you’re safe to contact them and them in that way.

[00:13:11.60] spk_0:
Okay. Yeah, yeah peter anything you want to add to? Yeah, I think

[00:14:13.09] spk_1:
that I think is dead on about making sure though that when you do that, you are, you are, you’re you’re not coming with something that’s off the reporters beat or off of um what’s what, what you know, is um what they cover uh or the type of story they cover within that beat. Um you could spend a lot of effort reaching out to every journalist you see on twitter about your specific cause, but if they don’t cover your cause um you know, it doesn’t relate to what they what they do, then they’re probably either going to ignore you or or start to block you because you’re, you’re, you’re kind of almost spamming them. So um it’s it’s important to be targeted with who you reach out to as well and and make sure that you understand that journalists and their work before you before you do your outreach and come at them with a pitch that they don’t necessarily want. So yes, I think it’s really important to to do a bit of that homework up front um and respect that journalist time and if you do that and if you come at them with something that is actually on, on their beat and is of interest to them. Um, then I think you have a much greater chance of getting their attention and getting them to want to follow up with you and and help further, um, the relationship beyond that initial pitch

[00:14:32.47] spk_0:
and

[00:15:31.85] spk_2:
Tony, can I share a pet peeve like to Pet peeves actually is, um, if I write about a non profit and they don’t share the story on their own social, it’s just, it’s heartbreaking for me. Um, a lot of times I have to fight for these stories to appear and I have to fight with an editor to say, this is why this is newsworthy. This needs to be here. And then the nonprofit really doesn’t share the story. And I think, well, you know, I don’t write for my own, you know, just for it not to be shared. Um, and then the other thing is I love when nonprofits support stories that aren’t related to their particular story. So I’ll start noticing like one thing, um, Kentucky non profit Network, for example, before they ever shared or were involved in anything that I was involved in, they started sharing things or liking things that I would publish as a reporter and I didn’t know anything about them, but I thought that was interesting. So that when they pitch something, then you’re more likely to notice it as a, as a reporter, you’re more likely to notice because you feel like they’re really genuinely interested in the conversation, even if it doesn’t apply to them, you’re still interested

[00:15:51.29] spk_0:
Internet. Where are you writing now?

[00:15:58.07] spk_2:
I am writing, working on a piece for Guardian. I am for the Guardian. I am writing for Women Advance, which we have our own network. And then I write for Halifax Media group publications. So I’m on the regional circuit, doing all the fun things.

[00:16:13.38] spk_0:
Halifax is nova Scotia.

[00:16:22.99] spk_2:
No, Halifax is a media group in the United States. They own a series of their own regional newspapers across the country. So

[00:16:28.59] spk_0:
let’s talk a little about crisis management. You wanna, can you get us started with how you might approach crisis communications Antoinette.

[00:16:38.11] spk_2:
I thought that was Peter’s question. I’m just kidding.

[00:16:40.29] spk_0:
No,

[00:16:41.31] spk_2:
I’m just kidding. Um, crisis communications, I think actually Peter is a really great person to talk about this. My crisis communications conversation really has shifted with what we’re going through. So I don’t want to make it so unique to our current situation. Um, so I’ll let Peter start and then Peter, I can back you up on it if that’s

[00:18:50.46] spk_1:
okay. Yeah. So, um, with crisis communications, it’s really important to not wait until the actual you’re actually in a crisis to put your plan together. It’s really important to, to have a protocol that you’ve set up when you’re not in the middle of a crisis of possible to really kind of put together uh some protocols for not only what you’re going to say, but who’s going to say it and how you’re going to communicate during that situation. So um what does that protocol look like one? Is that you um upfront, you designate who your spokesperson or spokespeople are going to be ahead of time um and you spend some time ahead of that coaching them up in terms of what some of the key messages for your organization are, regardless of what the crisis might be. Some things that you would broadly want to try to reinforce and kind of a mood and a tone that you’re gonna want to take with what you’re talking about. Um do that 1st 2nd, is that you would really want to have a system in place for how you activate that for how you activate your crisis plan and your crisis communications. So that essentially means that you want to um you want to make sure that you know, kind of who who needs to sign off on what you’re going to talk about, who you’re gonna be involving in your decisions on whether you need to put out a statement um who how you’re going to communicate in what different channels, the more you can make those decisions ahead of time and have your structure in place, the better equipped you are to actually respond during a crisis situation and be able to get a quick and accurate and positive message out um in in in a situation and often crises are not their crisis because they’re not expected, but you can be planning ahead so that you you are able to react quickly and authoritatively during that situation. Um

[00:19:07.87] spk_0:
you’re you’re compounding the crisis if you’re not prepared.

[00:19:12.53] spk_1:
Absolutely,

[00:19:13.33] spk_0:
You’re scrambling to figure out who’s in charge, who has to approve messages, where should messages go? All, all which are peripheral to the to the substance of the problem.

[00:20:12.02] spk_1:
Absolutely. And in today’s world, where crisis can really mushroom not only in the media, but on social media, the longer you’re allowing time to pass before you’re getting out there with with your statement and your response to it, the worst the worst the situation gets for you. So you really need to position yourselves uh to be able to respond quickly to respond clearly and to respond accurately. Um and and it’s important to note that, you know, that planning ahead of time is really critical, but what you say in the situation is also critical to um you do want to make sure that you communicate truthfully. That doesn’t necessarily mean that um uh you uh u um reveal

[00:20:14.17] spk_0:
everything,

[00:20:14.72] spk_1:
reveal everything

[00:20:15.67] spk_0:
exactly

[00:20:18.45] spk_1:
do uh that you do reveal is accurate. It’s not gonna come back to bite you later. It’s not going to mislead people

[00:20:31.86] spk_0:
talking about complicating the complicating the crisis if you’re lying or misleading, it comes back. I mean, people investigate things get found out.

[00:20:36.17] spk_1:
Absolutely. And I, and I, and I was

[00:20:38.82] spk_0:
technically expanded your problem.

[00:21:42.71] spk_1:
Absolutely. And and you’d be surprised how, how many times when I was a journalist that people, if they had just come clean and and kind of got the truth out there right away, they may have taken a short term hit, but their lives would have got on fine after that. But the more you try to obfuscate or or lie about the situation, or or try to to spin it in a way where you’re, you’re kind of hiding the truth that the worse your situation is going to get. So be be in a position to be as transparent and clear and accurate as possible. Um, with that first statement, uh, knowing that in some cases you might have to say, you know, we don’t know. Um, but we’ll follow up when we do know, because sometimes a crisis situation is one in which speaking of, of when we’re in now, we don’t know all of the, all of the different twists and turns the covid 19 situation is going to take. Um, so, but but rather than trying to speculate, um or or or in some cases, as we’ve seen, some, some public figures do try to spin this one way or another, rather than just saying, here’s the situation here are concerns, Here’s what we know, here’s what we don’t know. Um, it compounds the situation and in some cases it can be dangerous to

[00:22:01.82] spk_0:
people internet, You wanna, you wanna back up a little bit? I

[00:22:38.74] spk_2:
Did. So the, I think the statement, um, I love how people are putting forward these COVID-19 statements and I think we need to have more statements like that. I mean these statements are demanding and people feel like that. But I’m like we could do more of that. We could have statements as nonprofits on issues on public issues, public concerns, things that are um, emerging and urgent for people. I think about in the eastern part of north Carolina because tony I know you’re in, in my home state. I am

[00:22:40.58] spk_0:
in eastern north Carolina.

[00:23:26.54] spk_2:
Happy to have you here. And when we have um, hurricanes, when we have issues like that, if non profits would put out statements like they have with Covid 19 if they felt like they needed to say here’s where we are, here’s what we do here. Here’s, here’s what we have to offer before during after and just update them. You know, I feel like this crisis has brought forward a level of communication and and help people to see the necessary level of communication that we need to have. But we don’t have that all the time is non profits and people are looking for that. So I feel like in the eastern part of north Carolina where we had, um, you know, 100 year, hurricanes within three months of each other that we didn’t think would happen. You know what if people, what if people make covid statements like that? I mean, what if people and so I’m just gonna start calling the covid statements peter that I don’t have a better term for. But what if we felt like we needed to make these types of statements when there’s an emergency,

[00:23:51.92] spk_0:
um, Antoinette, I’m gonna ask you to wrap up with something that you said, which is contrary to a lot of what I hear. Uh, you said that you’re a big fan of press releases.

[00:24:02.00] spk_2:
Could

[00:24:03.26] spk_0:
you take us out with your rationale for why? You’re a big fan of them. I’ve heard that they’re pretty much obsolete

[00:24:10.20] spk_2:
from a journalist. I

[00:24:12.51] spk_0:
don’t know from a commentator. I

[00:24:14.37] spk_2:
don’t want to write that.

[00:24:17.47] spk_0:
I

[00:24:27.93] spk_2:
believe that. I believe that. Um, so yes, because I’ve been reading press releases for a long time and I feel like the who, what, when, where and how gets me past that part of it, then I can ask you all the interesting questions. So if you can give me that in a way that I can cut and paste and I will not butcher someone’s name, like tony

[00:24:43.54] spk_0:
It

[00:24:55.22] spk_2:
might be, it might be a challenge. So I can, we can get all of that out of the way. But a good press release gets me excited as a journalist. It brings me into the conversation and if you aren’t excited about your press release. I can probably tell on the other end. So I had a good press release. All

[00:25:15.51] spk_0:
right, thank you. We’re gonna leave it there. That’s contrary advice. Which which I love hearing. All right. That’s uh that’s Antoinette car part of the leadership team of women advance and ceo of bold and bright media and also Peter Pan a pinto, philanthropic practice leader at turn two communications and they are co authors of the book modern media relations for nonprofits, Antoinette Peter, thank you very much for sharing. Thanks so much. Thanks for

[00:25:28.62] spk_1:
having us. tony

[00:27:19.59] spk_0:
pleasure. Stay safe. And thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 N. T. C. It’s time for a break. Turn to communications. Well, as you heard lots of ideas about the relationships, the relationships that will help you be the thought leader that you want to be. That you ought to be relationships leading to thought leadership. Turn to communications. They’ll help you do it. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C. O. It’s time for Tony’s take two. I am still thinking about you and wishing you well. I hope you had recovery time over Thanksgiving. If you’re in giving Tuesday, I hope you’ll be happy with your results or you are happy depending when you listened. If you are, if you did congratulations, celebrate what you achieved. Take that victory lap you deserve it. If you’re not so happy, keep your head up, you know that you did the best that you could, don’t let it drag you down. You have other successes that are gonna be coming and you’ll be celebrating those. So don’t let a disappointment drag you down going forward. You have all my good wishes for your year end fundraising this week and continuing That is Tony’s take two here is content strategy, which by the way, we have boo koo, but loads of time left for Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 N T C. That’s the 2020 nonprofit technology conference. My guests now are Katie Green and Valerie johnson, Katie is Digital Giving Manager for the Trevor Project. And Valerie johnson is director of institutional advancement at pathways to housing P A Katie and Valerie welcome.

[00:27:44.11] spk_3:
It’s

[00:28:07.84] spk_0:
a pleasure. Good to good to talk to both of you and glad to know that you’re each safe and and well in in Brooklyn and uh, suburban philadelphia. Glad you’re with us. Your NtC workshop was content strategy for donor engagement From tactics to testing, let’s start with you, Katie, what what do you feel was the need for the session. What are nonprofits not getting doing so well, they could be doing a lot better.

[00:28:57.87] spk_3:
Yeah. So we have this session this morning at the same time as we originally had planned, which is great. We were able to give it virtually. And I think what a lot of donor content strategy is missing is simply structure. I think a lot of people don’t know where to start and they’re intimidated by it and we Valerie and I provide it’s some real life examples on how you can achieve a donor content strategy that does get you closer to your revenue goals. However, the tone of the presentation changed a little bit given how the world has come to be our new reality. So we did talk a little bit about the crisis and what it means for fundraising and what it means for content strategy under a tight timeline, knowing that things are changing at a really rapid pace. So really just structure and storytelling are the things that we talked about in this morning’s presentation, which will be available for viewing later, we’re gonna have a recording available for those who weren’t able to make it. But yeah, that’s what we focus on.

[00:29:27.47] spk_0:
Let’s start with part of the a good strategy is using personas, user personas. Can you kick us off with that Valerie? How do you, how do you start to identify what persona looks like and what’s their value?

[00:29:54.36] spk_4:
Absolutely. So, a persona is really like a profile or a character sketch of someone that you need to connect with um and understanding their motivations and goals. So it’s a way of segmenting your audience. And rather than sending all of your messaging out into the ether, trying to tailor that messaging to a specific demographic or a specific group of people. So for pathways to housing P. A. We’re actually still developing what our personas look like. We have an idea of what it looks like, but we want to dig some more into the research and analytic side of things to see who exactly is supporting us right now and what um ties they have in common to help us build those profiles. I think Katie might be a little bit further ahead of us in developing this persona. So I’m gonna toss it over to her.

[00:31:18.60] spk_3:
Yeah. So uh user personas are something I’ve been doing throughout my career. I worked in an agency before I came to the Trevor project. So I was able to get a lot of industry knowledge on how we create user personas and user journeys. But what we did, when we started looking at our end of year campaign for last year at the Trevor project, we made sure we carved out some time to conduct a little bit of an audit of what our donors were looking like, Where were they coming from? What could we track? What could we track? We found out we had a lot more questions than we did answers. So in order to get user personas, something that’s really important is tracking and understanding where people are coming from and where their first and last last clicks are. So because of our ability to use google analytics and source code tracking protocol. We did get a lot of tracking during end of year that will improve what our users like going into future campaigns. But now we’re gonna be able to better tell what is actually inspiring people to give. What is the moment where they’re actually clicking that donate button. What is the first thing they’re seeing that starting their relationship with the trouble project? So that’s what we’ve been doing.

[00:31:45.74] spk_0:
What are the pieces of a persona? How granular do you get? What is it where they live to what they read or what what you give us some like depth of this thing.

[00:33:34.60] spk_3:
Absolutely. So the main important piece of a persona is to know what their needs are. So you can have a persona that’s as general as this is a donor. They need to know how to give that’s a persona. But what you’d like to do is get a little bit deeper in being able to tell what the values of that persona are. What’s what’s the name? What’s the age? What’s the key characteristics? What are the opportunities really? You know, I like to create fake names and really go into it. You stock imagery so that you can try to connect with who this person might be? You’re really giving a face to a name and a value to a person and you want to look at what donors are looking like. So for example, for the Trevor project, we have a lot of one time, first time donors and we have a lot of people who come in, they give their first gift and I’m trying to find where they’re dropping off. Right. What is causing that? So I maybe create a persona that is a one time user that’s not really convinced they want to give again a one time donor. Um, they may be young. They may be, um, like within our demographic, which is under 25 of the youth that we serve with our crisis services and suicide prevention services. Um, so you can get as granular as making and they, and an age and the demographic and the location and what devices they’re using. I think that’s a big one. Is this person usually on their mobile? Are they usually on desktop? What channels do they typically like to look at twitter? You can get as granular email. Are they just looking at your website? So you know, it should get as detailed as you can, but I would encourage people to get really creative with it. If the more details you’re able to get is just a, just a more clear picture of a donor that you’re looking to target. Just make sure it’s someone you actually want to target and not someone you’re gonna be, uh, that wouldn’t actually be coming to you? Like maybe Bill Gates isn’t going to be coming to, uh, a nonprofit website to donate. Um, but you can look at what those specific donors might look like that are more realistic for your campaign.

[00:33:56.12] spk_0:
Okay. Right. You’re, you’re basically on what’s realistic, not what your aspiration is.

[00:34:22.36] spk_3:
Yeah. To a degree, I mean, I think you can be aspirational aspirational in some facets of what you’re doing. I think it has to be somewhat grounded in in, you know, a realistic approach. We do get asked. I get aspirational myself when I’m creating donor personas. When you know, I am looking for major gifts, I am looking for people who are willing to process of 15,000 dollar credit card charge. And there are people out there that that do that. So when I do my donor personas, they may not be the number one target of my campaign, but I do want to consider what those people are interested in as well so that I can personalize content for them to the best of my ability.

[00:34:53.03] spk_4:
Yeah. The other thing to keep in mind is diversifying your donor base. So in looking at who’s giving two pathways to housing right now, they’re mostly middle aged, college educated white women who prefer facebook and giving on a desktop, um, which is fine. And that’s definitely one category of people that you would want to be supporting you. But philadelphia is an incredibly diverse city. So if those are the only people that were getting to with our messaging, then we really need to think about diversifying our strategies to build new donor profiles for people who don’t all look the

[00:35:36.72] spk_0:
same? Okay. And then once you have a bunch of personas and profile? I mean, it sounds like you could have 10 or 12 really different ones, different, um yeah, different characteristics of people, different types of people that come to you. And, and like you said, Katie, even people who leave, you know, you want to capture them back. So, so once you have these Valerie, then you’re trying to communicate to them. But how do you how do you turn your communications into targets to to these personas?

[00:35:46.68] spk_4:
So you really want to think about building content specifically for that persona? So you might be doing a campaign um that you want to hit a couple of different

[00:35:56.37] spk_3:
personas

[00:36:07.97] spk_4:
with, but you’re gonna tailor that campaign specifically to each persona and deliver the message to a specific segment of that campaign. So if you’re gonna do a mail campaign, um, you want to think about how you’re putting together that letter and what you’re writing into the letter and how you’re addressing the donors for each of the different segments for each of the different personas that you’ve put together to really help craft a message and to inspire them specifically to donate.

[00:36:32.48] spk_0:
Okay, right, like Katie, like you were saying, you know, yeah, you know what’s important to them. Um, but that stuff is, this is very uh amorphous to try to, you know, it’s not just what do they give and how much do they give? And what time of year do they give, You know, what’s important to them? What do they value? This? Is this is difficult stuff to suss out.

[00:37:10.42] spk_4:
Yeah. One thing our co presenter said this morning, Marcus was that donors are smart and they’re savvy and with the advent of the internet and all of the various channels that you can communicate with people now, they know what they want and they know what they want to hear from you. And if they’re not hearing from you what they want, they’re gonna go find someone else who’s going to provide that information and communicate to them the way they want to be communicated with. So fundraising and marketing for nonprofits right now looks very different than it did maybe 10, 15, 20 years ago, um, and, and donors know what they want now.

[00:37:24.54] spk_0:
Okay, so it’s worth, you’re trying to suss out all this amorphous information as as best you can. Okay. Um, Katie, is there anything more you want to say about personas before we move on to being multi channel?

[00:37:36.13] spk_3:
Let’s go on to multi channel.

[00:37:40.11] spk_0:
Alright, Alright. Anything I don’t want to leave anything important.

[00:37:44.66] spk_3:
Okay. I think we’ve covered the main point.

[00:37:47.19] spk_0:
Okay. What’s, what’s, what’s important about? Well, I think we all know why to be multi channel, but how to coordinate those messages? What what’s your, what’s your thinking there?

[00:39:21.81] spk_3:
Yeah, I can jump in here. So I think what people often don’t do is they don’t coordinate messages cross channel at the right time. That’s what I’ve been seeing a lot with just by industry research. I mean, I’m always looking at what everybody is doing in the space because I want to be part of the best. Uh but they say being what I’ve heard at multiple conferences is that there’s a rule of seven. Right. So as a non donor, let’s say, I’m scrolling through facebook, I need to see an ask seven times before I’m actually likely to give. So if you’re seeing that ask seven times on facebook, that means it’s seven posts. That’s kind of a lot. And that’s gonna have to be spaced out through a certain amount of days, weeks, months even. So if you’re just increasing all the channels that you’re presenting that message on. So let’s say I’m seeing it on facebook, I’m seeing it in my email. I’m seeing it on my instagram. I’m getting a paid ad for it because I liked it on facebook. That’s gonna shorten the window of which I see seven points of that call to action. So I’m gonna be more likely to give if I’m seeing it in a wider spectrum on the digital space than I am in just one channel. So making sure that you’re saying similar things, but that are custom to what the channel is providing, Like social media has like paid ads have a certain amount of characters you can use. So, um, making sure it’s optimized for what channel you’re using, but still with the common thread is really important for increasing your conversion rate.

[00:40:05.59] spk_0:
Okay, now it’s a little clear to me why I see so many ads for the uh, pickpocket proof slacks. I see them across all kinds of different channels. I’m not, I’m hardly on facebook anymore. But um, I, I see them when I go to websites and I’m reading articles and because one time, I don’t know, I, I swear it was like three years ago I was browsing through these like CIA approved slacks with 14 pockets and it’s all supposed to be pickpocket proof for something and you know, they $200 slacks or whatever, they’re, you know, but

[00:40:08.62] spk_3:
I’ve

[00:40:09.74] spk_0:
seen ever since. Yeah. And I don’t know. I’m not even sure that if I bought them, the ads would stop, maybe

[00:40:16.43] spk_4:
it’s

[00:40:17.57] spk_0:
sophisticated enough. No, it’s not right. That would be right. Because now your brother needs to pay or whatever. All right,

[00:40:23.00] spk_3:
Valerie,

[00:40:24.15] spk_0:
anything you wanna, you wanna explain about multi channel and how, how important it is to reinforce and be consistent.

[00:41:16.62] spk_4:
I think the biggest thing for me is if you’re starting from scratch and you’re really trying to develop content and put it in the right places. Um, you really want to be thinking about who your audience is on those channels. So for, linkedin, the messaging that you’re putting out is gonna look a lot different than what you’re putting out on facebook. Most people use facebook recreationally and they use linkedin for professional relationships. So the type of information that someone is seeking on linkedin or more likely to respond to on linkedin is a lot different than what they’re more likely to look for or respond to on facebook. Um so for us, we make sure all of our job listings go up on linkedin and all of our industry specific information that goes up on linkedin, um just to kind of show our expertise in the area. But when we’re posting to facebook, we’re talking more directly to people that we know are supporters of us and want to do tangible things to support us. So the messaging is different, even though the information is really the same.

[00:41:31.44] spk_0:
Okay, okay, again, you’re consistent but consistent, but but different. Maybe different format even. Um Okay.

[00:41:39.99] spk_4:
Yeah.

[00:41:52.00] spk_0:
Um I mean, there’s there’s other format, you know, content papers, white papers. Um Again, depending for the right, you know, for the right channel research, um, do either of you use um, media, uh, working in working through thought leadership in developing thought leadership in media media relationships either of

[00:42:30.91] spk_4:
you. Yeah, so there’s a local media outlet here in philadelphia called generosity and they are focused on nonprofits and social enterprises and people who are making positive impact in philadelphia. So they’re super open to having folks guest post um, or write op EDS for them. So we’ve utilized that outlet a couple of times. Um, actually just last week, um, our ceo over wrote an article about the opportunity for kindness in the era of coronavirus. So it’s something that she actually wrote to communicate to our staff members and let them know what our stance on, you know, moving forward was going to be. And we thought it was something that would be beneficial, not just to our staff but to be at large. So we passed it along to them. They posted it as an op ed and that gave us um, a little bit more bang for our buck for things that we had already

[00:42:58.94] spk_0:
written. Um, Katie, are you doing much with earned media?

[00:43:03.08] spk_3:
I am not the Trevor project is, but Katie Green is not doing that. Okay, handled that.

[00:43:10.85] spk_0:
Okay. Um, let’s talk about some, some analytics. I mean, how do we know whether we’re being successful? Uh, and where we need to, where we need to tweak or pivot Katie, can you, can you get us started?

[00:44:29.28] spk_3:
Absolutely. So analytics is very hard for a lot of nonprofits because it’s such a scientific based skill set. And you know, that’s something that when I first came onto the Trevor project, is that the first thing I implemented was our source coding protocol. It’s so important to know where people are coming from that you can actually optimize, but we a B tested and continue to A B test absolutely everything. We do it through our website, we do it through email, we do it through our paid social and to see how things work. I think really we just test absolutely everything things you think you know you don’t and that’s what I keep learning through testing is what you think works today, won’t work tomorrow and we retest everything. A time of day test for example isn’t gonna for ascend for email, isn’t gonna be the same after daylight savings. It’s not gonna be the same as the seasons change and particularly not the same now that everybody is stuck at home. So you know they’re testing and optimizing really what you know is working. It just requires retesting re optimizing and testing literally.

[00:44:35.20] spk_0:
Could you, could you give some more examples besides time of day, what are examples of things you test?

[00:45:24.47] spk_3:
Oh absolutely. So on our website we tested, we have a little um call out box with questions on our donate form. We tested the placement of that. Is it better to have it right up next to the form underneath directly on top. So the first thing people see um we test there, we test what photos we use a lot does a photo of somebody looking sad versus somebody looking more celebratory and happy. Um we test a lot of pride imagery because we serve LGBTQ youth. We wanna see if Pride imagery actually helps get our word out there. Um We test our colors a lot because our our brand color is orange which is can be very cautionary but we see you thing oh it’s your brand color. Of course everybody’s gonna always respond to it. But that’s not really the case. Like sometimes things like our blues and purples and greens when it comes to see ta buttons. Um Gosh, I mean I can tell you every test we’ve ever run. Thunder tests um using graphics versus photos on the website. Uh you know the size, the width, the height of our light boxes, the width of our donation forms the amount of buttons we have. It just the list goes on and

[00:45:51.24] spk_0:
on.

[00:45:53.35] spk_3:
I

[00:46:13.51] spk_0:
heard one that just made me think of just one small example of what riffing off what you just said was testing the text inside a button instead of just donate or like uh review or something. You know, be more be more explicit about what the what the action is you’re asking for instead of just a single word. A little little more descriptive. Yeah

[00:46:32.93] spk_3:
testing C. T. A. Is is something that we do a lot just to give people some ideas. I think one that can be really helpful when it comes to fundraising is seeing how your donors react to the word give and the word support and the word donate. So so it’s all the same thing. We’re asking you to support our mission to give to us and to donate. But those three words have very different feelings when you’re reading them on your screen. So that’s one of the biggest tests we ran. Um, but yeah, I wouldn’t recommend always testing the C. T. A. When you have a new one especially,

[00:47:09.95] spk_0:
was it, was it act blue that or or change dot org? I think maybe it’s change dot org started calling it chip in. Could you chip in? Okay. Okay. Um, um, so Valerie, can you talk us through some metrics? You’re the director of institutional advancement? What what numbers do you look for to decide how you’re doing?

[00:48:23.15] spk_4:
Uh, we look at a lot of things. So we’re looking at the click through rates on our emails and on our post actually reading to the bottom and clicking the links that we’re providing. Um, we’re looking at how many people are interacting with things that were posting on social media and whether they are enjoying it or not based on how many people are interacting with it. Um, we do a lot of surveys to do, so, talking to our donors directly and asking them what kinds of things they want to see what kinds of things they don’t want to see. Um, I know Katie is doing a lot more with metrics than we are. So, um, this is my friendly reminder to smaller nonprofits where there’s just one person trying to do all of this. you don’t have to recreate the wheel. Um, so you can look at an organization like the Trevor project that does have the staff who can look at all of these things and do all of these testing and all of the metrics and see what’s working best and they say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So you can look at what they’re doing and then borrow it. Um, so for an organization like me that has a smaller staff, um, we’re doing a little bit on our own, but we’re also looking a lot at what other nonprofits are doing and assuming that they’re taking the time to test things and we’re kind of, you know, copying what they’re doing because it’s obviously successful for them.

[00:48:36.00] spk_0:
How do you learn from them? Do you just create a build a relationship and then ask what, what kind of metrics do you look at

[00:48:54.20] spk_4:
sometimes? And sometimes it’s as simple as going to the Trevor project, websites donate page and seeing where they place things and what they name their buttons and what giving levels they’re putting up there. Um, because you know, you’re never gonna be exactly the same as another organization. So you definitely want to take a look at who you’re using as an example and use someone who’s doing similar work or in a similar location to you. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can learn through testing and after that you’re just gonna have to dive in and do something. So if you don’t have time for the testing, you can do a quick search of what everybody in your industry is doing and kind of take it from there instead,

[00:49:20.34] spk_0:
Katie, uh, since everybody’s stealing from the Trevor project, what, uh, what I assume you knew Valerie was doing this.

[00:49:28.27] spk_3:
I didn’t, but it’s, it’s such a compliment.

[00:49:31.09] spk_0:
It’s

[00:49:32.63] spk_4:
because you do a great job. That’s why we’re looking at

[00:49:35.06] spk_3:
you. Oh gosh,

[00:49:36.48] spk_0:
what do you want to add about metrics?

[00:49:59.95] spk_3:
Um, I think I just wanna reiterate Valerie’s point that there are so many nonprofits where one person is doing this. Um I’m the only person on the digital giving team. I’m the first person they’ve ever hired to do Digital giving. Um I’m still a team member of one, but you know, I do have the support of a very large marketing team that helps me with creating all of the tests that we do and anyone can tweet me email me whatever if like any nonprofit ever wants to connect. I’m always an open resource. But uh, metrics are increasingly uh important, just critical to donors, content strategy. So

[00:50:21.55] spk_0:
since you’re offering yourself as a resource, do you want to share your email and or your twitter, you don’t have to give your email if you don’t want to.

[00:50:28.72] spk_3:
Yeah, maybe twitter is probably the best way to reach me because I’m trying, I’m trying to learn how to tweet more as a digital person. I feel like I need to, that it’s at Katie Sue Green like one word, so it’s K A T I E S U E G R E N K T. Still green green, just like the color. Okay,

[00:50:51.53] spk_0:
Okay, thank you. Um it’s a Valerie, you wanna uh wanna wrap us up some some parting thoughts about uh content strategy.

[00:51:18.42] spk_4:
Sure. Um since I am kind of representing the smaller organization here, I just want to remind everybody that you’re doing everything that you can and it’s everything that you’re doing is important. So don’t try to do everything at once, really pick one thing to focus on and get to a point where you’re doing that well and comfortably before you try to add more um listening to a podcast like this or going to a presentation, like the one that we did this morning is overwhelming in the number of things that you could be doing and it makes you feel like you’re not doing enough, but you are. And just tackling those small hills one at a time is much much easier than trying to climb the mountain.

[00:52:42.29] spk_0:
That’s very gracious, very gracious advice. Thank you. Thanks very much. Um that was Valerie johnson, that is Valerie johnson director of institutional advancement at pathways to housing P A. And with her is Katie Green Digital Giving Manager for Trevor Project. Thank you very much for sharing each of you. Thanks so much And thank you for being with Tony-Martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 NTCC in two weeks. Trafton Heckman with his book, Take Heart Take Action next week, I’m working on it. If you missed any part of this week’s show, I Beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com were sponsored by Turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff shows, 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 B with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95% go out and be great.

Nonprofit Radio for January 3, 2022: Social Media Outlook For 2022

My Guest:

Charrosé King-Mathews: Social Media Outlook For 2022

Charrosé King-Mathews reveals what to look for in the New Year around platform evolution and content trends in the social networks. She’s an instructor in communications at Howard University.

 

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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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[00:00:03.04] spk_3:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio

[00:00:13.14] spk_1:
big nonprofit

[00:00:14.26] spk_3:
ideas for the

[00:01:42.34] spk_1:
Other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast Happy new Year. I’m glad you’re with me. I’d be stricken with Lauren Jill papilloma ketosis if I had to say that you missed this week’s show Social Media Outlook for 2022 Sharos King Mathews reveals what to look for in the new year around platform evolution and content trends in the social networks. She’s an instructor in communications at Howard University. tony steak too. Lots of Good 2022 Wishes. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C. O. Here is social media outlook for 2022. It’s my pleasure to welcome for her first time Sharos King Matthews, she is a strategic communications instructor at Howard University where she’s also pursuing her PhD in communication culture and media studies. She researches and writes about rest and creativity as methods of resistance and healing. Share Jose just left the faculty of N 10 after five years. She’s at Sharos CK Sure Jose. Welcome to nonprofit radio

[00:01:48.94] spk_0:
Hi, it’s great to be here.

[00:02:02.94] spk_1:
Pleasure. I’m glad you are. I’m glad you are. But tell me tell us a little more about your your research and your writing on rest and creativity as methods of resistance and healing. What what what what does that work look like? What is that?

[00:02:05.89] spk_0:
So I am you know, starting out so I’m going to be discovering what that work looks like. But I’ve I’ve always been um very interesting.

[00:02:16.94] spk_1:
I’m sorry, what do you think it’s gonna look like? What do you hope

[00:02:35.04] spk_0:
it’s gonna look well where where I’m starting from is like um I’ve always been interested in in creativity and art and being able to express oneself through artistic mediums and helping other people to do that as well. Um and I think creativity is like a a huge social driver for for change. If we look at like music and art and fashion in the way that people are drawn into movements by the ways that we can use creativity in order to, you know, engage people and get them to think about different things. Um but also on the other side of that that you know, rest is so important to creativity. And looking at the ways that, you know, systems of oppression have stifled communities, abilities to produce creative work by with you know, low wages that require them to work, you know, constantly just to be able to afford a living and you know, um well in my case as a black woman having ancestors who are brought here specifically to work and how that has, you know, our relationships with work and and you know, as opposed to living in more creative and and pleasurable life and how we can, you know, move towards everyone being able to have those more um creative opportunities and how that can change our world for the better for everyone.

[00:04:14.14] spk_1:
Cool, All right. They’re they’re interesting tensions because you’re writing about rest and creativity. To me those are in opposite. I mean, you’re you’re you’re not you’re not at your most creative when you’re resting, creativity is, you know, is activity, stimulation and then and then rest. But then as methods of healing and resistance to me, those are in opposite to, you know, you I don’t they’re they’re, you know, they’re both they’re both critical, but I don’t see them as consistent. Like you when you’re healing yourself, you’re not in a resistance, you’re not in a resistance state state. Resistance to me is, you know, agitation

[00:04:23.78] spk_0:
and

[00:04:30.44] spk_1:
and and advocacy, you know, But that’s not that’s that’s in opposite to healing, right?

[00:04:31.15] spk_0:
Yeah. So it’s like I’m thinking like the balance of the two and how you you you know, need one to have the other and and that kind of thing and seeing how they are synchronous and you know, um I just I want people to everyone to have, you know, be able to live healthier, more fulfilling lives and, you know, all of that stuff

[00:05:12.24] spk_1:
healthy but also productive and resistant when needed. Absolutely, yeah. It’s interesting. Yeah. Like there’s it’s two different spectrums to me rest and creativity, healing and resistance interesting. Alright. This Yeah, I’ll be, look, I’ll look forward to your dissertation in how many years? How many years does this program take you, do you think?

[00:05:17.44] spk_0:
So. Typically about four. I will be finishing up my classes this year and then I’ll be focusing just on my um dissertation proposal and then my dissertation.

[00:05:44.34] spk_1:
Yeah. And research. All right, very good. Welcome. Alright. It’s glad to have you. So you’ve got some savvy ideas coming, coming out, coming off the n 10 faculty as well. So howard faculty and 10 faculty. Uh I’m not sure which is more prestigious. Well, you know, Well one is, one is prestigious in lots of respects and the other has its niche in nonprofit tech. So they’re both,

[00:05:50.89] spk_0:
they’re both prestigious. They’re both quite prestigious in

[00:06:08.04] spk_1:
their own. Yes, that’s right. That’s right. Um Not zero sum by any means. They can both be highly prestigious. So you’ve got some ideas around social media trends. What you see coming for 2022. What do you see happening with our social media platforms?

[00:06:11.84] spk_0:
Some things that I’m seeing are more audio only features um like on twitter on facebook, which would be great for people who listen to podcasts. Maybe that’s that fits in well. Um and even like um

[00:06:35.54] spk_1:
facebook is facebook is coming to audio only a little slow. I mean I’ve been I’ve been podcasting since 2000 10 where they’ve been, where they’ve been, where has facebook been

[00:06:40.13] spk_0:
has been around for a very long time has been around. Yeah.

[00:06:43.52] spk_1:
But where, where they they they’re coming late to the format.

[00:07:09.34] spk_0:
Yeah. And I think so. I think that happens like with technology sometimes we, we like jump ahead and it’s like sometimes we might lose things that were good before and we have to kind of rediscover them and they, they show up in a different way in in some ways, like we see here on, on like twitter and, and facebook also, Tiktok will be um, is working on streaming. Well, it’s released in, in some countries internationally, but it’s another example of, of a platform focusing more on audio only content. Um,

[00:07:24.84] spk_1:
wait, so, so Tiktok moving away from video,

[00:07:26.74] spk_0:
Not away by audio only also

[00:07:51.74] spk_1:
in addition. Okay, okay, Alright. So, alright, so let’s talk about this. This audio only trend. Then you’re saying facebook twitter, Tiktok uh, promoting audio only formats. What do you see? Non profits are able to do? I mean, how do you see leveraging that?

[00:07:53.64] spk_0:
Well,

[00:07:54.79] spk_1:
Like are they all short form like this, Tiktok, you know, like Tiktok audio format limited to 15 seconds.

[00:09:58.14] spk_0:
So on. I know, so each of them is, is a little different. Um, I know on, on twitter for example, you can have like, um, instead of like a live video that’s going on, you can have an audio room where people are chatting, anyone can listen in, but you know, only certain people can chat. So you might, that might be good for like, um, if you’re having a panel discussion or something like that and, and maybe video is not as important to it. Um and you can, you can do it that way, especially if you are uh you know, working, working virtually in people in different locations. Um video is not as important. That can be helpful and um also like when now they have a lot of different ways that they will appear on these different platforms. Um but I think as always, and I want to say this for for like all the transfer that we’ll talk about, you know, you want to think about how it works for your organization in particular because there’s they’re popping up with different features all the time. So you have to think about how, how do we best communicate with our audience. Um so I think, you know, in short form places you might, you might share like specific snippets of your podcast. If you have, if your, if your organization has a podcast, maybe you would share specific snippets or maybe particular quotes or updates that you could share like with the photo and then um like a message that goes along with that photo, which is also, I think the benefit of that is it’s a bit of a lower um you don’t need as much equipment or export technical, know how like you would need to do in order to create a video, you know, with the video, you need to to, you might need to do some editing or you might need to create some graphics, but if you have photos, you can use those in lots of different places and incorporate audio with them, you know, um, on certain posts to enhance the, the content.

[00:10:18.54] spk_1:
Okay, okay, very interesting. Audio, audio only. Do you, Do you envision that, that, that Tiktok audio only feature will still be limited to the, to the 15 seconds.

[00:11:16.34] spk_0:
Um I’m not, I didn’t, I don’t remember reading how long it would be um but okay, so, so Tiktok is also moving into like, because they use a lot of music and stuff on their platform. They’re also looking into Tiktok streaming, like having a streaming service that is a competitor to Spotify. Um and then you also have Spotify incorporating more social media into. There’s so you see a lot of, a lot of um, hybrid things happening um between between some of these like audio and social media in particular right now and I would say we did see this a lot with with video. I mean we had vine was huge and, and you know youtube, of course we still have Youtube. Um but a lot of these things are the things that we, we already used to communicate and they pop up in different ways depending on, you know, what features are available on how the different audiences communicate with one another. Um, on those different platforms.

[00:11:40.04] spk_1:
That’s interesting, you bring up vine, how come vine went away but tick tock. It is, it is, it’s flourishing.

[00:12:39.04] spk_0:
How come, what is that? Yeah, I know, I’m fine, it was right, so vine went away and instagram at that time started having short videos too. So it was like instagram kind of picked up that short video format and then vine, you know, wasn’t needed as much because you have, you have your photos and your video on instagram then, so then we lose vine, but we have olive vines, features on a different platform. Um and I think that’s something that we really want to think critically about when we’re looking at these trends and the different platforms that come up because there are a lot of politics behind it, you know, it’s something it’s, you know, which ones have the most money, like instagram is owned by facebook, so they have a lot more money and resources and facebook is everywhere all over the globe um you know, in, in nearly every country, whereas you know something um for as a, as a um you know, contrast, we have Tiktok which what has been threatened to be, you know, shut down in the US unless they, unless they, you know, sold part of their company to an american owner. So we have things like that that are going on in the background that, you know, we have to make um certain apps, you know, have more ability to reach more people. So it’s also, it’s about how we use them and whether they are service serving people’s needs and you know, that it’s fun to use and all of that, but also we need to think about, it’s not always just, um, the audience that determine which one is a successful platform.

[00:14:29.84] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications, Your Communications Plan for 2022. Does it include social posts, blog posts, newsletters, your annual report, website updates, board reports, fundraising appeals. Acknowledgment messages, staff, communications, process documentation, training, documents onboarding or maybe those last couple don’t fit into your communications plan. They still have to be written. Do you need help with your writing in 2022 Turn to communications, your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o Now back to social media outlook for 2022, does that mean that we should not be pioneers or even maybe early adopters when a, when a platform emerges, you know, that, that we not invest time in it when it may not, It may not survive? I mean like should we wait 18 months before we jump into a new platform?

[00:15:02.24] spk_0:
I that’s a really good question because I mean that’s what we’re talking about here, trends. We wanna know trend because we want to know how do we react to these new things. Um, and two that I, I would say like for if you’re a smaller nonprofit and I’ve worked at many, you know, you don’t have a lot of resources you want to, I would like to think of think of the social media, um, managing that as a, um, capsule wardrobe. So I don’t know if anyone familiar with the capsule wardrobe defined that we have, we have

[00:15:09.48] spk_1:
on non profit capsule wardrobe will definitely land you in jargon jail.

[00:17:48.74] spk_0:
So, right. So, and so a capsule wardrobe if you think of, so you can think, I think a great example is Fran fine on the nanny. She has a very, you know, dramatic wardrobe. However, if you pay attention, she’s pretty much always wearing a black turtleneck, black tights and black shoes and then she’ll put like a fun jacket or a fun skirt on top of those things. And, and so that’s um, you know, a way to extend a wardrobe on fewer, there are fewer pieces and just choosing like a statement piece. So the way I look at that is like, um, in with your social media, you want to have good bones, good structure. You wanna have, you wanna have some image templates that you can use. And then when there’s a, you know, I just talked about images before and putting audio with them. So if you already have great images that you’ve worked on and put a lot of care into curating, you can then add these other things on top of them as these trends change. Um, I would also say as far as new platforms coming up, I think it’s always worth your time to at least create an account so that if that platform becomes more popular in the future, you’ve already claimed your organization’s name on there. Um, so that it’s easy to find you and you, and it’ll be, you know, more cohesive part of your brand. So I think that’s always worth it because that doesn’t take a lot of time. Exactly. Right. Right. Right. Exactly. And that’s fine too. That’s fine too. Because you’re, you’re putting your time where, you know that your audience is and, and you know, what’s going to pay off because, you know, without a lot of time and resources, we have to be very smart about, um, where we’re putting our focus and social media because it’s so vast when you send stuff out, it can just go out into the ether and no one, you know, it might not get traction. So you need to be very smart about how you’re using your time. So I would say like, yeah, you’re right. So you have your, your core images and the kinds of messages that you know, that you can use. Um, also this might be referred to as evergreen content content that you can use all the time. Um, you know, no matter the time of year, but it’s always relevant to, to your organization. Um, I think that’s a very important thing to have in, in kind of your capsule wardrobe, um, of, of social media fashion, you know, your,

[00:18:30.84] spk_1:
your, your capsule wardrobe, your capsule wardrobe. Yes, I scolded your core capsule. Okay. Sorry. Yeah. Um, well, I’m a guy, I want to be, you know, I want to be up. I want to be, I want to be timely. My, my time has long passed. Um, so, alright, Yes, absolutely, of course, evergreen content repurposing, you know, you want to be smart. You know, if something goes on your blog, maybe you can maybe you can pull a 12th, clip, an audio and quoted somewhere, you know, on twitter

[00:18:31.17] spk_0:
or facebook or, or,

[00:18:50.34] spk_1:
or, or Tiktok when, when the audio only features are, are, are available. Um, and then, you know, and then it could be part of, maybe it could be part of an email. Uh, maybe maybe it lives somewhere else on your website. You know, maybe it could be a social media post in print instead of audio. Um, right, so you want to be smart about

[00:19:01.84] spk_0:
right? And one um, uh, an acronym that I use for that, that I’ve heard is cope create once, publish everywhere. Okay, so like your blog post, you created it once. But then you’re using all those pieces of the blog posts in different places on your social media or your website and your blog and your emails and all of that.

[00:19:58.74] spk_1:
I love it create once, publish everywhere. So we got our capsule wardrobe. We have our, we have our cope. Okay, what? Um, all right, So this is interesting. This audio form. I mean obviously as a podcaster and I’ve been a longtime listener of radio and I think radio is just such a intimate format. It feels close. I mean, I got my inspiration for this show from radio shows. Um really interesting, you know, in one respect, it’s a, it’s a step back from, from the video because now you’re only getting really getting half the, not half the content really, but half the half the stimulation. I mean there’s the but but I don’t consider a step backwards, but but

[00:20:01.72] spk_0:
somebody, somebody could

[00:20:02.69] spk_1:
say, well, no picture anymore, what you know, but the video is the trending, but now, now now audio is trending.

[00:20:09.94] spk_0:
That’s why

[00:20:11.54] spk_1:
that’s why we need you on to make sense of this for

[00:20:14.27] spk_0:
us. For

[00:20:15.89] spk_1:
me, I’m not gonna maybe other people maybe more sad, but make sense of it for me please.

[00:21:19.44] spk_0:
So as you were talking, I was thinking, you know how you said like, radio can feel much more intimate than watching the video. And I it kind of reminds me of like reading a book versus watching a movie, the way you described it kind of like, and sometimes, you know, using our own imagination. And and with with the content that were there were there were reading or listening, using our own imagination. I think also helps us build a bond in some way. Whereas when you have a video, it’s like you don’t have to use your imagination, you can see what this person looks like and where they’re sitting and how they’re speaking and all of that kind of thing which I think takes away some of I think that’s part of like our creativity that makes us, you know, interested in having, you know, not knowing everything right away, you know? And and I um especially think like with audio, you know, you’re you’re very you’re not thinking about how you look, you’re just you’re just you’re just really um participating with the content,

[00:22:13.44] spk_1:
interesting. That reminds me of of a host I used to listen to on National Public Radio terry Gross. She she never wanted to be in the same studio as her guests, they always remote and and there was no camera feed. It would she she didn’t want the visual stimulation, she wanted to focus on the conversation and that’s it. She didn’t want the person in the room, she didn’t want to see them wherever they were, whatever studio they were in, she didn’t want to see them from there. It was just the conversation. Mhm interesting. Alright, of course I’m blowing, I’m blowing it here because I I can see you right now and we may put this on Youtube. Uh

[00:22:15.11] spk_0:
well you’re stuck with the lack of choice that people have the choice so to watch or or just listen,

[00:22:21.02] spk_1:
that’s true, you can turn your screen, you can turn off your screen absolutely, you could, you could go for the go for the creativity and, uh, and just listen,

[00:22:29.84] spk_0:
I guess it’s

[00:22:42.94] spk_1:
not so good to just watch though. That’s not gonna be good. Like don’t turn the sound down and try to read the lips that you’re, you’re missing, you’re missing too much content there, that I wouldn’t suggest doing it that way. All right. Um you think Tiktok is growing too, you have a, you have a prediction about Tiktok and instagram.

[00:24:08.44] spk_0:
Um, yeah, so I was reading this and I think, um, hoot suite that Tiktok is growing will surpass instagram um, in the number of active users. Um, and you know, that’s, I mean, we do see a lot of, a lot of the, you know, younger audiences on their like gen Z and stuff like that. Um, and, and I, and I was also reading about, um, okay, well, let me say so, I always want to be like, it’s great when companies can grow and it shows how popular they are. But I do also want to go back to, you know, what we just said about why certain platforms grow faster than others or might succeed where others don’t even though they have the same the same features, But, um, and so, and I start with Tiktok, um, and instagram and, you know, which one is popular is important for our organism, which one’s most popular is important. But we also want to look at where are our audience is in particular. So if you know that your audience is, you know, um this demographic, which is, you know, it’s um boomers who live in Arizona or, or whatever demographic it is, and it doesn’t, it’s not, you don’t see your audience on Tiktok, then it it doesn’t make um too much sense to go on there. But as we said, go and claim your account, make your space. So if you if it ever as the demographics change because that’s important to remember to demographics change over time. Um if we just look at facebook, for example, facebook was only open to university students. Um, so that was a very small demographic, but then it grew and grew. So, so we can see like these are where, where the numbers are for a moment. But that changes. And we can use that information to try to help make our decisions. But we should always remember that none of these are hard and fast rules. And we have to think about ourselves as the expert of our audiences and think about how social media is a tool to help us reach those people that that we know best

[00:25:17.84] spk_1:
and you’re good point, you know, knowing where they are and and knowing that that may shift as well, grandparents were not on facebook 15 years ago, but now it’s common. Well even before the pandemic for grandparents to stay in touch with grandkids through facebook. So,

[00:25:23.17] spk_0:
right. And, and a lot of my students do not use facebook anymore.

[00:25:28.01] spk_1:
Right, well their their grandparents around

[00:25:29.76] spk_0:
it, they don’t want exactly that’s going to look at pictures of your family and stuff, but not talk to your friends.

[00:25:36.74] spk_1:
Facebook is a perfect study in shifting demographics.

[00:25:39.69] spk_0:
That’s an excellent. Yeah, very interesting.

[00:26:26.34] spk_1:
The pioneers were driven off by the by, I think by their grandparents, they were alright, so if Tiktok Tiktok surpasses instagram, alright, so that it’s just, it’s just something I like to be aware of that Tiktok is growing in in audience size that way. And so it might be, might be a place for you to look. Um but maybe not, and we’re gonna get to the maybe not, you know, every right, every platform is not for everybody. Um but again, I love your advice about, you know, claim your claim your spot, get an account in your name, so nobody, nobody beats you to it and then you have to be creative or You know, be Tony-Martignetti two or something, you know,

[00:26:29.19] spk_0:
because

[00:26:38.74] spk_1:
they were the real tony-martignetti you know, All right, so let’s talk about creating, creating content this emerging short form audio

[00:30:11.64] spk_0:
with creating content and especially with short form, I think that’s definitely, you know, a challenge for a lot of social media accounts for a lot of our organizations, especially those that do very complex, you know, work and we want to communicate about it, but you know, this very brief, um, these very brief formats make it very difficult and I always try to emphasize with my colleagues and and reminding myself that social media is a place to direct people to more information. So like, yes, those clips are very short. But you want to make sure you’re using that to direct people where they can get more information. Words, you know, whether it’s, you know, signing up volunteers or donations or or what do you want them to do after? Well, and always have some kind of idea of what you of um, what each of your posts are doing for you. So you don’t wanna, you know, just put any kind of content out there. You have 15 seconds or, or however short the clip is and you want to make sure that you’re, you’re, you know, getting the most out of your time. So, um, when you are like, again, we will go back to the capsule wardrobe, making sure you have those solid foundations, creating some, some graphics that you can reuse. Um, but also, you know, look at what your, your peers um, uh, similar organizations are doing also what your audience is sharing, even if it’s not, you know, specific to your organization, you can see what your audience is interested in and how they are spending their time. Um, I often, you know, in my, in the course that I was doing with the intent, I would often talk about thinking about walking through the day in your audience in any of your audience members shoes and thinking about how are they spending their morning? You know, is that a good time to reach them and, you know, what kind, what are they doing in the morning and how might, you know, your work relate to that in some way. Like if somebody, you know, spends their morning, you know, watering their garden and you are, um, you know, an environmental organization and how you can um kind of show that you have common interests there and relating to what they’re interested in. So looking at looking at what what they are already interested in, but also looking at what some of your competitors and, and similar organizations to yours are doing, and, you know, identifying not just looking at what they’re doing and copying them, but looking at what they’re doing, identifying what works and what doesn’t, and also how you can put a spin on things for, for your brand, um, you know, there’s, there’s a quote, like good artists copy great artists steal that. So, so we want to, so it’s, it’s, it’s, you know, perfectly legitimate to look at what other companies are doing and and try them um, in your own way. Another thing is there’s nothing new under the sun, So all of these ideas are we’re regenerating and, and recreating and which is creativity, you know, thinking of these things from all these different places and they come together to make new things. Um, so when you’re thinking about about your content and how to make it, you know, engaging. You want to go back to the things, think less about the technology and think more about, you know, the very essence of good storytelling and, and you know what makes a good photo making sure that they’re good quality and all of those things can will take you a lot farther than thinking about um friends and and styles because they change so quickly.

[00:31:48.34] spk_1:
It’s time for Tony’s take two. Yes. You have my good wishes for 2022 for the new year. I’m I’m always optimistic at the beginning of the new year. Even when all evidence maybe to the contrary. I still, I don’t know. Uh Pollyanna naivete, blissful ignorance. I I don’t know. But every year I’m optimistic. So I’m optimistic about the new year. And you have my good wishes For your 2022 for you, your family, your work, your nonprofit, all those, all those things that are important. I hope 2022 is very good to you for all of those things in all those different ways. That’s it. My good wishes for the new year. That is Tony’s take two. We’ve got boo koo. But loads more time for social media outlook for 2022. Alright, that was a lot of excellent. So let’s start with calls to action. You want, you want, you want every piece of content to have some call to action, learn, learn more volunteer, donate, sign the petition.

[00:31:53.34] spk_0:
Even if it’s not a direct call to action, like, you know, sign up. Even if it’s, but even if you know the purpose like, okay, we are interacting with this audience member in order to, you know, build a better um relationship with our audience. Always make sure that that you know why you’re posting and you’re not just spending time sending things out because that’s that’s where you start to, you know, sink all your time into something that might not be paying off

[00:32:51.44] spk_1:
and in in short form audio. I mean if you want folks to go somewhere, maybe two learn more or you know, if there is an explicit call to action, learn more at a landing page, maybe you’re testing the, the, the outcomes so you have a landing page or whatever it is. Short form audio that you have to devote part of your 15 seconds to reading a web address.

[00:33:47.34] spk_0:
So with the, the short form audio, it’s always going to be um in a place they’re gonna have to be looking at something to click on it or have some kind of text with it in order to like it’ll come up in their feet or something like that. So whatever description um or you know, sometimes you, I mean in most places you can comment even beneath yourself. So wherever you see any opportunity to put in that information um is important um to do that. But as far as you know with audio as well, I think it’s also sometimes I see um and that’s actually not, this is audio and text but sometimes I’ll see like very long you RL’s um and I think it’s important to remember to use a U. R. L shorter I think um definitely. And when you’re doing audio, whether you know short for more or a little longer and you want to include a U. R. L. Make sure that you use like um Bentley dot com or something where you can customize it to be something easy to remember and you don’t have to say http excuse, you know, all of

[00:35:08.84] spk_1:
that. Uh I like to go even further. I have, I bought the the vanity domain, you know, tony dot M. A. So I could do tony through M. A. I think is Morocco. I’m pretty sure I bought that. I think I’m every two years I paid the country of Morocco I think I’m pretty sure that’s M. A. Um it’s not Mauritania, I think it’s more, I’m pretty sure it’s Morocco. So yeah, so tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant I can say, you know, non profit radio uh email sign up, you know whatever whatever. Alright so that may be worth investing in a little vanity vanity shorter too but but bitterly of course we like. Yeah, I like free resources. Absolutely. Um and then you mentioned peers, you know, evaluating what your peers are doing, what others see what other nonprofits are doing. So you mean literally looking at there at their feeds and and, and different platforms and see what they’re talking about and how they, how

[00:35:35.64] spk_0:
they talk, yep. And so you should definitely be following your pure organizations. Um, there are also a great resource for creating content. Not just, you know, if you, um, work together sometimes on on a shared project, um, you can help boost each other’s visibility on social media. But you do want to be following following your peer organizations also, you know, as a social media manager. Um, you tend to befriend the other social media managers because you know, you said, you know what other each other are going through. And so that’s actually a great community and um, following each other because then you can reach out to each other. Help. Help because you’re you’re in it for the, for the same cause. So it’s like you’re boosting the same content and and you know, helping achieve your mission overall that both of you want to achieve.

[00:36:27.33] spk_1:
That could even lead to some deeper collaboration. Maybe, you know, I’ve, I’ve had guests talk about the possibility of uh, like doing giving Tuesday, you know, combined campaigns. Mm hmm I don’t remember other examples, but but you know, just shared promotion. Pre shared projects, your promotion

[00:36:38.43] spk_0:
and one of the ones that I’ve had the most success with as far as partnership and shared promotion is um well I don’t see them as much anymore, but for a time there were twitter chats were pretty popular. Um I don’t see them as much as I used to, but whenever I’ve done them, I we would always get like tons more engagement um with our content. That was one of our I will put that on twitter chats and and tweeting at conventions. That is when we would get the most followers, the most retweets the most engagements generally. Um and now I’m thinking, you know, with the twitter um audio rooms and stuff like that. That could be instead of having a twitter chat where you’re typing it out, maybe you have people come in and listen to your panel discussion of experts talking about whatever the theme is and um introducing people to, to your brand that way.

[00:37:32.13] spk_1:
Cool. Excellent ideas. All right. You recommended paying attention to what your audience shares. Mm hmm. So you know what you want to you want to do more of what’s popular and less of what people think? Sucks. Right.

[00:38:48.32] spk_0:
So, um yeah, so, well, before I was a lecturer at Howard, I worked in the office of the Vice President for student Affairs and I was managing the social media there. Um and the school environment especially important to watch what your audience is saying because we didn’t need to watch for any problems that are coming up and stuff like that. Um but that’s the kind of thing I think you you want to look for generally and not just you know, problems um not doesn’t have to be something dire, but you know, what is, what is your audience concerned about that your organization can help answer and um you know, what are the problems that they encounter or the ways that see that they that they feel the issue that you cover, how that impacts their lives. So sometimes it might be looking at, you know exactly what they’re posting, exactly what they’re saying and sometimes it means more about like you know looking at overall and kind of observing, you know what you um you might even notice like challenges and things that come up that that your audience does not. Um but you can perhaps you know show how your work can help with these things that they may not even notice our issues um relating to your organization.

[00:39:06.62] spk_1:
What about the use of analytics to uh to evaluate what what your what your folks are sharing is that can that be valuable there?

[00:41:00.61] spk_0:
Absolutely. You should definitely be um keeping track of your analytics if you so if you don’t have a dedicated person who can look at the analytics every month, you at least want to be downloading them. So you have them um whenever I have started a new position as a social media manager. one of the first things that I do is to go to, um, all of those social media accounts and download as much of their um, analytical history as I possibly can. So if you’re already keeping and, and the thing is some platforms that you can’t go back any farther than a couple of years or a couple of months. So it’s very important to get that right away. Um, even if you can’t look at it consistently, because one day if you, if you do have someone who’s able to dedicate time to that, they have tons of content to go on where they can look at, you know, oh, we had a huge jump in in subscribers um, at this time and then they can go and look at, well, you know, what was going on at that time, What did we post? What was drawing in so much engagement? And so that’s why you really, um that’s why your your analytics are so important and it’s thus about like looking through them every day. Or I’m sorry, every month or so, um, because you know, if you don’t have a dedicated person for that, that takes a lot of time. But being familiar with, you know, around how many followers you have or being able to see the trend of, you know, what is normal engagement for us. So that then you can see when you do have a huge spike, you’ll be easily able to identify like oh here’s where that came from and here’s how we can duplicate that success also because that’s another thing you want to think about. How can we do this again? Um how can we use it for a different campaign or or in what other ways can we can we benefit from you know this content that we that did so well

[00:41:05.01] spk_1:
which are the platforms that you think have the better analytics.

[00:42:49.90] spk_0:
I definitely have opinions about that. Twitter, Twitter has great analytics um you will find so in um in a lot of communications scholarship like peer review journals and stuff when they’re when they’re talking about social media they will often use twitter twitter analytics because they’re the easiest to access. So twitter makes it very easy to to download all of your analytics from your account and put it in an Excel spreadsheet and then from there you can do whatever you want to do with it. Um there are on the on the other end I would say like for example instagram you cannot you have to go to like each individual post and see how many how many had right? So you have to type them in and yeah so and and that that allows um face meta now meta to have you know um more control over that content. Um The facebook analytics I are pretty good but again they are there, you kind of have to keep them within facebook Um So it’s harder to you know take them out and analyze them in different ways. So any platform that’s going to allow you to download them in an Excel spreadsheet is ideal. Um But you know sometimes I have had to go through and I’m writing typing them in individually from instagram. So and and that could that could also you know be a factor in deciding which platforms that you spend most of your time on because you know if you if you are focusing on if you make if you want to focus a lot on your analytics you wanna and and you want to have a platform where you can easily download them and it doesn’t take a lot of extra work. Um So you know these are all things to think about when you’re when you’re deciding you know what works best for for how you present on social media.

[00:43:15.50] spk_1:
What’s another one that’s good besides twitter Analytics one judging the analytics.

[00:43:20.00] spk_0:
I mean I do I like facebook uh the analytics that they that the way that they’re analytics

[00:43:27.47] spk_1:
are in the

[00:44:20.59] spk_0:
classroom right? You can’t export them. So um I’m thinking I mean for the most they tried there so you can I would also recommend. So I don’t know of twitter is the best ones, I don’t know of any other other ones don’t really compare to that but yeah but twitter is also starting to lock down um some of that like it’s not quite as much um data as you could get it before so um but there’s also you know platforms where like Hoot suite for example where you can have multiple social media platforms and see your analytics aggregated there. I do caution though that when you use um you use one of those platforms um the numbers might be a little bit different like there might be like some lag time between you know twitter and twitter on Hoot suite you know so um and also like the labels and the way that data is is labeled so you know on one platform a certain action might be called interactions whereas on another platform they’re called engagements and how they measure each of those things and what they’re called could could be different. So it’s just you know making sure we’re watching for those.

[00:44:52.69] spk_1:
Why would like a twitter start restricting the the robustness of the of the analytics the way you just said they’re they’re they’re tightening that up. Why would they why would they offer less?

[00:45:01.29] spk_0:
You want to charge for it? You want to start

[00:45:03.45] spk_1:
charging a fee to get it or

[00:45:29.19] spk_0:
you know what that’s and you know we we don’t know until they until it’s public. So that is 11 thing that could, I’m I haven’t um I’m not sure why it’s more difficult to get information but you know it’s beneficial to companies you know that information is money to them. So it is beneficial to them when they, you know, have proprietary um keeping content that that is valuable to them. I would um but twitter,

[00:45:43.49] spk_1:
they could have it too and share it with us too. I mean they’re they’re only sharing it with users. Users can only get there there little bit. The company is welcome to aggregate the hundreds of millions of users. They can do whatever you want with your proprietary data. But let me have my little share what are you taking in the era of transparency? What are you taking my little share away for?

[00:45:57.29] spk_0:
You would think, But I don’t know. All

[00:46:36.38] spk_1:
Right. You don’t have all the answers. Nobody does know these black boxes that we’ve all signed onto 2020 years. Sometimes they’re more annoyance than than than than additive but sometimes not not, I’m not, not saying I’m I’m opposed to social media obviously, but they can be very annoying, very annoying. We don’t even, we could spend a whole hour talking about facebook or a day about the annoyances behind facebook and in the shift from organic to paid, it’s just to me it’s just corporate green. All right.

[00:46:39.48] spk_0:
But I think a lot of that is, you know power from the users and putting it back in the hands of the company because users do have so much power and we have a lot of their ideas come from the users that are using the platforms. So I think it’s, you know, wanting to control how, how people use that platform and the information that you can get from it.

[00:46:59.28] spk_1:
Yeah, I mean,

[00:47:03.77] spk_0:
it’s

[00:47:28.88] spk_1:
exploitation. I mean, I’ll use, I’ll use facebook the most egregious example as, as the example, but you think goaded us all in, you know, they have 2.5 billion users now, a third of the planet is they, they brought us in and then they, and then they shepherd uh, you know, much less organic reach now. You want the same organic, you want the same reach, add pay for it, pay for it, pay us pay Goldman Sachs and uh, and you can have that, we have your reach back that we gave you originally and you know, it’s, it’s egregious. It’s uh, just exploitation.

[00:47:43.38] spk_0:
And I, I feel like social media has so much power for bringing people together and, and so that’s why I caution about like with trends and stuff we do need to be critical about, you know, is this trend, was this trend created because it’s something users wanted or because the company needs to innovate and grow. You know, so that’s another reason why you can wait and give yourself some time to see which trends are taking on and what makes sense for you because you don’t want to just be throwing your your time into this machine that is just there to make money for them. You want to make sure that you’re getting the best value out of that,

[00:48:37.77] spk_1:
what a beautiful segue to, to a closing section, let’s talk about, you know, every every platform is not for every non profit you know, you’ve you’ve made the point already, you know, you can uh squat on your account, you create your account and just and just squat it, hold it, but but every, you know, even the bigger platforms, we don’t have to be everywhere.

[00:48:42.07] spk_0:
Exactly, so,

[00:48:43.29] spk_1:
you know,

[00:50:17.66] spk_0:
you definitely right, so there are like you and this is something I say in my class to like in learning about social media and there’s constantly new stuff, you do not have to know everything about it, you do not have to be on every platform, your audience is not on every platform, no single person can manage all of the social media accounts that their social media platforms that there are. So I think the most important thing, you know, is to get back to that good structure and knowing who your audience is and um how to communicate with them and then, you know, using the different quirks of those social media accounts and different features to, to tweak that, but um as far as, you know, you might also want to think of as we’re talking about, you know, these big companies and what data they’re keeping and control and stuff like that, that might also be an a factor in deciding which platforms you’re on like um, back to N 10. Um, and 10 is no longer on Facebook because you know, the, some of the business practices that Facebook has used do um, do not, you know, does not work well with end transmission and the ways that they operate and you know, those are things you have to weigh that. Um, you know, if a lot of your, your audiences on facebook and that’s the only way to reach them, then maybe, you know, you do stay, but you know, you have this understanding of like um, that there are issues and were working around them and trying to make the best of these environments, but you know, they are businesses and so we need to be smart about where we’re spending our time.

[00:51:22.46] spk_1:
Excellent advice, very savvy. Thank you. All right. Sharos King Matthews, you’ll find her at narrows A C K. I’m gonna spell her name so you can find her C H A R R O S C King, Thank you very much. Great, great advice. Thank you my pleasure Next week, the log for j software vulnerability with Joshua pesky, eh, if you missed any part of this week’s show, I beseech you find it at tony-martignetti dot com. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C o. It may be a new year, but some things never change. Our creative producer is

[00:51:23.54] spk_3:
claire Meyerhoff shows. Social media is by Susan Chavez. Marc Silverman is

[00:51:28.24] spk_1:
our web guy

[00:51:41.66] spk_3:
and this music is by scott Stein. Thank you for that. Affirmation scotty. You’re with me next week for nonprofit radio big nonprofit ideas for the other 95%. Go out

[00:51:43.14] spk_1:
and be

[00:51:53.36] spk_3:
great.

Nonprofit Radio for July 3, 2020: Thought Leadership & Content Strategy

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Peter Panepento & Antionette Kerr: Thought Leadership
Peter Panapento and Antionette Kerr co-authored the book, “Modern Media Relations for Nonprofits.” They share their insights on how to build relationships with journalists so you get heard as the thought leader you are. Plus other media strategies, like crisis communications. (Part of our 20NTC coverage)

 

 

 

 

 

Valerie Johnson & Katie Green: Content Strategy
Now that you’re an established thought leader, you need to produce multichannel content that’s relevant, engaging, actionable, user friendly and SEO friendly. Our 20NTC coverage continues as Valerie Johnson from Pathways to Housing PA and Katie Green with The Trevor Project show you how.

 

 

 

 

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[00:02:40.94] spk_0:
welcome to tony-martignetti non proper radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, I’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer with epidermal Asus below PSA if you gave me the blistering news that you missed Today’s show Thought leadership. Peter Pan, A Pento and Antoinette Car co authored the book Modern Media Relations for Non Profits. They share their insights on how to build relationships with journalists. So you get heard as the Thought Leader you are, plus other media strategies like crisis Communications. This is part of our 20 NTC coverage. Also content strategy. Now that you’re an established thought leader, you need to produce multi channel content that’s relevant. Also engaging actionable, user friendly and S e o friendly. Our 20 NTC coverage continues as Valerie Johnson from Pathways to Housing P A and Katie Green with the Trevor Project show you how on Tony’s Take two Dismantling racism were sponsored by wegner-C.P.As guiding you beyond the numbers wegner-C.P.As dot com by Cougar Mountain Software Denali Fund. Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant Mountain for a free 60 day trial and, by turn to communications PR and content for non profits. Your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot ceo. Here is a thought leadership. Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 NTC 2020 non profit technology conference. We were supposed to be in Baltimore. The conference was canceled, but non profit radio is persevering, virtually getting lots and lots of the very smart speakers. We’re, ah, gonna be part of the conference. We’re sponsored at NTC by Cougar Mountain Software. The Knowledge Fund. Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant in for a free 60 day trial with me now our Peter Pan a Pento and Antoinette car. Peter is philanthropic practice leader at Turn two Communications Internet is part of leadership team of women, Advance and CEO of Bold and bright Media. They are the co authors of the book Modern Media Relations for non Profits. Peter, Internet. Welcome.

[00:02:59.99] spk_1:
Great to be here. Virtually.

[00:03:11.74] spk_0:
Yes. I’m glad we could work this out among the three of us. Thank you. And, uh, it’s good to know that you reach well and safe in your respective locations. Okay.

[00:03:12.63] spk_1:
Thank you. Social distancing and full effect. Yes.

[00:03:42.02] spk_0:
Okay. Yes, I see no one within six feet of you. That’s good. Even though you are home. Um, we’re talking about thought leadership and media. Um let’s ah, let’s start with you. Internet. Um weaken weaken usar leverages to thought leadership and sort of ah, used the media to ah, to influence our ah influence are those who are engaged with us, our constituents, and even influence policy.

[00:04:27.40] spk_2:
So the media needs Experts and nonprofits are on the ground there doing the work. And they are the perfect votes to be experts in this conversation in particular and emergency Peter non talks about earlier about crisis communications in a lot of situations, the media scrambling looking for experts if you have establish yourself as a thought leader, which is what you should aspire to do, I know that turn to does the work and helping people to kind of establish themselves the thought leader in this conversation. But right now we need people with good information and who can provide great stories, for example. And nonprofits can do that and they can do that work. And that’s why that that leadership conversations important most non profit don’t see themselves needing to do that. It’s not the first thing we think about. We think about fundraising, right? Um, but not necessarily Media friend raising. And so now the time that you want to have those relationships and be considered as a leader,

[00:05:10.94] spk_0:
because when there’s news that relates to your mission, um, your call is more likely to be taken. Your email is more likely be answered if there’s that preexisting relationship you mentioned. But if if everybody in the sector is calling a LH the over media blindly, then it’s just sort of, ah, crapshoot whether they answer you or not.

[00:06:44.14] spk_2:
Or if you think about the media needing like, you know, going Teoh crisis example like the media needing a source or an expert and they don’t want to quote the same person, that’s, you know something that I’ve learned from my media background and training. I’ve been working as a journalist since 1995 and you know one thing that my editors say, you know, don’t quote the same person, don’t quote the same organization. So in a crisis people will call Big Box. It’s not profit sometimes, um, and they’ll just see them as being the experts for a conversation. And that’s why establishing yourself as a thought leader is so important. So someone can say, You know, I’m a unique voice about this. We have an example in our book Modern Media Relations, where someone who on organization that worked with Children and families involved in domestic violence, became very important in the conversation when a professional athlete in Georgia was convicted of family violence and all of a sudden that person was called upon to be on radio shows and talk shows and they became a thought leader. But they say done the work to position themselves is an expert. And so I know. Peter, you I know you have some examples as well, but we just got a dived in there and didn’t talk about the whole broad concept of about leadership. Well,

[00:06:44.59] spk_0:
all right. What? Um, Peter, I was gonna ask you how do we start to build these relationships? Um, you want toe? I don’t want to back up. What thought leadership is

[00:08:29.44] spk_1:
sure I’ll start with thought. Leadership defined. And that and that’s really the process of establishing ones expertise. And it’s been a specific area and and doing it in a way where they are recognized beyond their own organization in their own kind of immediate networks. As our as an expert, as a thought leader, somebody who is driving the conversation and really, really helping people better understand Ah, key issue or a topic eso for a non profit or a foundation. A thought leader might be your CEO, Um, who are executive directors, somebody who is at the front lines on dhe kind of is in a in a position where they, um not only have expertise, but they have some authority and being able to talk with some gravitas about a topic. Um, but in order to kind of establish your credentials there on get recognized, you have to do some legwork beyond just having that expertise you have to be. You have to be comfortable talking about that topic you have. Teoh. You have to spend some time kind of building the relationships and the and the and the the larger credibility that you are, somebody who has something interesting to say and the expertise to back it up. Um, and the more you do that and you can do that, not just through the media but through your own channels and through speaking at conferences and all kinds of other things. Um, the more you do that, the more you kind of become, ah, somebody who is recognized and is called upon to weigh in on important topics, or or when news events call for it or in a situation like what? Where we are now with with the Cove in 19 response. Somebody who can kind of come in and bring ah, voice of reason and perspective. Toe What’s going on around us?

[00:09:36.34] spk_0:
It’s time for a break. Wegner-C.P.As Changes to Paycheck Protection Program Loan Forgiveness There have been many wegner had and up to date free wedding. Are you missed it? Fret not. Go to wegner-C.P.As dot com. Click Resource is and recorded events. Now back to thought Leadership with Peter Pan, a Pento and Antoinette car, you have to lay the groundwork. There has to be some fundamentals, and you have to have your gravitas, and you need to appear bonified and be bonified, not just appear. You have to be bona fide on the topic that you’re that you’re an expert in the mission of your your non profit. How do you. Then start to when you have that groundwork. How do you then start to build relationships when there isn’t really a need for you to be talking about the subject?

[00:10:39.09] spk_1:
Sure. Um, there are a lot of ways to do that. One, is that you? You start to build some personal relationships with media who are covering these topics, and you can do that either Through You know, somebody on your communications team that helps you or you can kind of do it yourself. But you can. You can start to show up in in their coverage of stories by, um, by positioning yourself and building relationships with individual reporters, maybe even when they don’t need you by having an informational coffee or call so that they can get to know you and know what you stand for. You could do it by your through your own writing and public speaking and making those things available and accessible to the media. Um, and you can you can do it through your own channels to a lot of nonprofits have logs. They have. They have their own podcast. They have different ways where they’re positioning their internal experts externally. So that they were kind of talking about in establishing their credentials around around a subject. And

[00:10:51.39] spk_0:
that’s your That’s your owned media, right? You’re your own media reverses earned media.

[00:10:56.80] spk_1:
Yes, yes. And the value of that is that the more you’re you’re kind of demonstrating through your own to media channels, your expertise. You’re not only building some greater relationships and credibility with your donors and the folks who are already kind of in your network, but you start to show up when people are doing searches, or when people are on social media and seeing stories and articles that air getting passed around. If they may see something you’ve written or talked about, shared in another network, and it sparks a light for them that you’re somebody worth going back to when they need, um, when they need some, you know somebody like you to weigh in on something

[00:12:00.68] spk_0:
good. Peter, I know you and Internet are both former journalists. Uh, I’m gonna jump over the Internet for what? Internet What? What do these outreach, I guess calls and emails to journalists to try to build the relationship. Uh, what do they what they looked like? What would you suggest people are saying to to try to get the attention, um, to build the relationship, Not not when I’m looking to be quoted because there’s a breaking news, but to build the

[00:13:43.62] spk_2:
relationship before him. So full disclosure. I’m a current journalist. Um, so current? Yes, eso I still work for publications right now, okay. And so people contact me on Twitter and social media, which is a new thing. We talk about press releases. I’m a big fan of press releases. Yes, just full disclosure about that. But I still like for people to pitch me on social media direct messages through Twitter. If I’m using my company profile, it’s safe for Don profits to contact me and say, Hey, I have a story. I noticed that you’re interested in this concept. It’s always great when people know what I’m interested in. Like when they’re like I noticed that you publish a lot of stories. Like, right now I’m working on a story, a series of stories about missing and murdered indigenous women. And so when people see Owen notice you’re publishing stories about this and they pitch me on a direct message or um, through Facebook, message or even and say, Hey, would you consider this story? And here’s the angle, um, or have you thought about you know, I’ve had other people reach out and say, I noticed your publishing these types of stories about, you know, missing and murdered indigenous women. Have you considered other stories about violence against women? And it’s always a really great connection for me. So I think just kind of knowing what the journalist is interested in is really important kind of understanding their angle. Are you, um, understanding their angle and just flowing from there and saying, you know, here’s how we fit into this conversation is always a

[00:13:53.83] spk_0:
wonder. And so, um, so outreach by any of the social channels is is fine to you. Talk about Twitter and direct message Facebook. Those are all

[00:14:06.95] spk_2:
yes. And people tagging me like I feel like if a journalist is using their profile in a way that is professional, then you’re safe to contact them and okay, bam And that

[00:14:21.24] spk_0:
Okay? Yeah, yeah, Peter, Anything you want to add to? Yeah,

[00:15:39.87] spk_1:
I think that I think Japan that is done on about making sure, though, that when you do that you are, You are you’re you’re not coming with something that’s off the reporters beat or off of what’s up? What you know is what they cover or the type of story they cover within. That be, um you could spend a lot of effort reaching out to every journalist you see on Twitter about your specific cause. But if they don’t cover your cause, it doesn’t relate to what they what they dio. Then they’re probably they’re going to ignore you or or start to block you because you’re you’re kind of almost spamming them. So, um, it’s it’s important to be targeted with who you reach out to as well, and make sure that you understand that journalists and their work before you before you do your outreach and come at them with a pitch that they don’t necessarily want. So, yes, I think it’s really important to to do a bit of that homework upfront, um, and respect that journalist time. And if you do that and if you come at them with something that is actually on on their beat and is of interest to them, um, then I think you have a much greater chance of getting their attention and getting them to want to follow up with you and help further the relationship. Beyond that initial pitch

[00:16:58.35] spk_2:
talking can, I would share a pet peeve like to pet peeves, actually. And, um, if I write about a non profit and they don’t share the story on their own social, it’s just it’s heartbreaking for me. A lot of times I have to fight for these stories to appear and after fight with an editor to say, This is why this is newsworthy. This needs to be here. And then the non profit really doesn’t share the story. And I think, Well, you know, I don’t write for my own, you know, just deport not to be shared. Um, And then the other thing is, I love when nonprofits support stories that aren’t related to their particular story. So I’ll start noticing, like one thing, um, Kentucky non profit network, for example. Before they ever shared or were involved in anything that I was involved in, they started sharing things or liking things that I would publish as a reporter, and I didn’t know anything about them, but I thought that was interesting. So that when they pitched something. Then you’re more likely to notice it. Because as a reporter, you’re more likely to notice because you feel like they’re really genuinely interested in a conversation, even if it doesn’t apply to them. You’re so interested.

[00:17:01.63] spk_0:
Internet. Where are you writing now?

[00:17:19.41] spk_2:
I am writing working on a piece for guardian. I am from the Guardian am writing for women Advance which we have our own network. And then I write for Halifax Media Group Publications. So I’m on the regional circuit doing all the fun things.

[00:17:25.84] spk_0:
Okay? Halifax is Nova Scotia.

[00:17:39.14] spk_2:
No, Halifax is, ah, media group in the United States. Okay, Okay. They own a series of their own regional newspapers across the country. So, um, let’s talk a little

[00:17:47.28] spk_0:
about crisis management. You wonder, can you get us started with, uh, how you might, um, approach crisis communications? Internet?

[00:18:13.03] spk_2:
I thought that was Peter’s question. No, I’m just getting a crisis communications, I think, actually, Peter is a really great person to talk about this. My crisis communications conversation really has shifted with what we’re going through. So I don’t want to make it so unique to our current situation. So I let Peter start and then Peter, I could back you up on it.

[00:20:06.39] spk_1:
I’m happy. Eso crisis communications. It’s really important to not wait until the actual you’re actually in a crisis to put your plan together. It’s really important to have a protocol that you’ve set up when you’re not in the middle of a crisis of possible to really kind of put together some protocols for not only what you’re going to say, but who’s going to say it and how you’re going to communicate during that situation. So what does that protocol look like? One. Is that you up front? You designate who you are spokesperson or spokespeople are going to be ahead of time. Um, and you spend some time ahead of that coaching them up in terms of what some of the key messages for your organization are, regardless of what the crisis might be. Some things that you would broadly want to try to reinforce and kind of a mood and ah, tone that you’re gonna want to take with what you’re talking about. Um, do that 1st 2nd is that you would really want to have a system in place for how you activate that for how you activate your crisis plan and your crisis communications. So that essentially means that you want to, um, you want Teoh. Make sure that, you know, kind of who? Who needs to sign off on what you’re going to talk about, who you’re gonna be involving in your decisions on whether you need to put out a statement who, ah, how you’re going to communicate in what different channels, the more you can make those decisions ahead of time and have your structure in place, the better equipped. You aren’t actually respond during a crisis situation and be able to get up quick and accurate. And, ah, positive message out in in a situation and often crises or not, they’re crises because they’re not expected. But you could be planning ahead so that you you are able to react quickly and a full authoritatively during that situation.

[00:20:34.02] spk_0:
You’re calm pounding the crisis if you’re not prepared. Absolutely. I’m scrambling to figure out who’s in charge, who has to approve messages. Where should messages go? All which are peripheral to the to the substance of the problem?

[00:21:38.12] spk_1:
Absolutely. And in today’s world, where crises can really mushroom, not only in the media, but on social media. The longer year allowing time to pass before you’re getting out there with with your statement and bonds to it the worst, uh, the worse the situation gets for you. So you really need to position yourselves to be able to respond quickly to respond clearly and to respond accurately. Um, and it’s important to know that you know that planning ahead of time is really critical. But what you say in this situation is also critical to you Do want to make sure that you communicate truthfully. That doesn’t necessarily mean that um uh, you, uh you, um, reveal everything. Reveal everything exactly. But they do. That you do reveal is accurate. It’s not going back to bite you later. Sleep. People

[00:21:45.19] spk_0:
talk about complicating the complicating the crisis. If you’re lying or misleading, it comes back. I mean, people investigate things get found out. You

[00:21:49.55] spk_1:
absolutely. And I was

[00:21:51.94] spk_0:
rhythmically expanded. Your problem?

[00:23:09.21] spk_1:
Absolutely. And you’d be surprised how, How many times when I was a journalist that people, if they had just come clean and kind of got the truth out there right away, they may have taken a short term hit, but their lives would have cut on fine after that. But the more you try to often office Kate or or lie about the situation or or try to spin it in a way where you’re you’re kind of hiding the truth, that the worst your situation is going to get eso Bubi in a position to be as transparent and clear and accurate as possible. Um, with that first statement, uh, knowing that in some cases you might have to say, You know, we don’t know, But we’ll follow up when we do know, because sometimes ah, crisis situation is one in which, speaking of one we’re in now, we don’t know all of the all of the different twists and turns. The cove in 19 situation is going to take So but but rather than trying to speculate, or or or in some cases as we’ve seen, some some public figures do try Teoh, spend this one way or another rather than just saying, Here’s the situation. Here are concerns. Here’s what we know. Here’s what we don’t know. It compounds the situation and in some cases that it could be dangerous to people.

[00:23:15.16] spk_0:
Internet. You wanna do you want to back up a little bit?

[00:23:52.09] spk_2:
I did it so that I think the statement, um I love how people are putting forward Thes Cove in 19 states, and I think we need to have more statements like that. I mean, these statements are demanding and people feel like that, but I’m like we could do more of that. We could have statements as non profit on issues on public issues, public concerns, things that are emerging, an urgent for people I think about in the eastern part of North Carolina. Because, tony, I know you’re in Home State.

[00:23:53.44] spk_0:
I’m in eastern North Carolina,

[00:24:47.98] spk_2:
happy to have you here. And when we have hurricanes, when we have issues like that, if non profits would put out statements like they have with come in 19 if they felt like they needed to say, Here’s where we are, here’s what we do here here’s Here’s what we have to offer before during after and just update them. You know, I feel like this crisis has brought forward a level of communication and help people to see the necessary level of communication that we need the hat, but we don’t have that. All the time is non profits, and people are looking for that. So I feel like in the eastern part of North Carolina, where we had, um, you know, 100 year hurricanes within three months of each other that didn’t think what happened. You know, it is people what people made covet statements like that. I mean, what if people And so I’m just gonna start comin covitz statements, Peter, that I don’t have a better to report. But what if we felt like we needed to make these types of statements when there’s an emergency and interesting.

[00:25:05.24] spk_0:
Thank you. Um, Internet. I’m gonna ask you to wrap up with something that you said, which is contrary to a lot of what I hear. Uh, you said that you’re a big fan of press releases.

[00:25:15.48] spk_2:
I am.

[00:25:16.25] spk_0:
Could you take us out with your rationale for why you’re a big fan of them? I’ve heard that they’re pretty much obsolete

[00:25:23.54] spk_2:
from a journalist

[00:25:29.81] spk_0:
from a country. No right guest of that. I

[00:25:31.14] spk_2:
believe that. I believe that s Oh, yes, because I’ve been reading press releases for a long time and I feel like the who, What, when, Where and how gets me past that part of it. Then I can ask you all the interesting questions. So if you can give me that in a way that I can cut and paste and I will not. But you’re someone’s name like this Bill tony.

[00:25:54.71] spk_0:
More than more at risk

[00:26:15.51] spk_2:
it might be. It might be a challenge so I could weaken. Get all of that out of the way. But a good press release gets me excited. As a journalist. It brings me into the conversation, and if you aren’t excited about your press release, I can probably tell on the other end. So I had a good press release.

[00:26:17.24] spk_0:
All right, thank you. We’ll leave it there. That’s Ah, contrary advice, which which I love hearing. All right, that’s Ah, that’s Antoinette Car, part of the leadership team of Women Advance and CEO of Bold and Bright Media. And also Peter Pan, a Pento philanthropic practice leader at Turn two Communications. And they are co authors of the book Modern Media Relations for Non Profits Internet. Peter, thank you very much for sharing. Thanks so much. Thanks for

[00:26:41.86] spk_1:
having us, tony.

[00:28:23.84] spk_0:
Pleasure stay safe and thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 and TC responsive by Cougar Mountain Software at 20 NTC. We need to take a break. Cougar Mountain Software. Their accounting product Denali, is built for non profits from the ground up so that you get an application that supports the way you work that has the features you need and exemplary support that understands you. They have a free 60 day trial on the listener landing page at tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant. Now time for Tony’s Take Two. You’re dismantling racism journey. That’s our newest special episode. You will have a long journey, so start with this single step. This show will be out the week of July 6th. My guest is pretty itchy Shah. She’s president and CEO of Flourish Talent Management Solutions. She shares her wisdom and solid advice on working through the journey, starting with your people, your culture and your leadership. That is tony Steak, too. Now it’s time for content strategy with Valerie Johnson and Katie Green. Welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 NTC. That’s the 2020 non profit Technology conference. We’re sponsored a 20 ntc by Cougar mouth and software. My guests now are Katie Green and Valerie Johnson. Katie is digital giving manager for the Trevor Project. And Valerie Johnson is director of institutional Advancement at Pathways to Housing, P A, K T. And Valerie. Welcome.

[00:28:32.74] spk_3:
I deliver having us.

[00:28:59.74] spk_0:
It’s a pleasure. Good to good to talk to both of you. And glad to know that you’re each safe and well, um, in in Brooklyn and Ah, suburban Philadelphia. Glad you’re with us. Um, you’re NTC. Ah. What shop was content? Strategy for donor engagement. From tactics to testing. Um, let’s start with you. Ah, Katie. What? What did you feel was the need for the session Where non profits not getting doing so well, it could be doing a lot better.

[00:29:42.74] spk_3:
Yeah. So we have a session this morning at same time as the originally a plan, which is great. You were able to give it virtually. And I think what a lot of donor content strategy is missing is simply structure. I think a lot of people don’t know where to start, and they’re intimidated by it. And we, Valerie and I provided some real life examples on how you can achieve a donor content strategy that does get you closer to your revenue bulls. However, the tone of the presentation changed a little bit, given how the world has come to be our new reality. So we did talk a little bit about the crisis and what it means for fundraising and what it means for content strategy under a tight timeline, knowing that things are changing at a really rapid pace. So really just structure and story telling or the things that we talked about in this morning presentation, which will be available or, uh, viewing later, we’re gonna have a recording available for those who weren’t able to make it. But yeah, that’s what we focus on.

[00:30:29.30] spk_0:
Okay, um, remind me at the end. If I forget, let me know where that recording let us know where that recording is gonna be. Um, were you part of the plug in? That was That was that was today. Is that what that where you did your session or are plugged in now it was made with something else. Where did you do?

[00:30:32.82] spk_3:
Yeah, I don’t Gallery actually knows more about that. Um

[00:30:36.16] spk_0:
where did you did you do this session, Valerie

[00:30:40.14] spk_3:
Valerie was so kind to plan it all for us, so I don’t wanna speak over

[00:30:48.60] spk_4:
Valerie. Sorry. Looking it up. I wanted to make sure I was getting the correct name of the organization that helped us to put this together. Um, So Nyah at Bowery analytics contacted us. Um, and she actually contacted a large number of people who were planning to stick at N 10 because in 10 wasn’t able to do a virtual conference. The what she and Bowery analytics pulled together a bunch of us to help get the zoom set up and get the weapon are set up and get everything scheduled and get some registration links together. Um, all of the webinars for free. And a lot of us had already developed a content, So why not?

[00:31:28.22] spk_0:
Yeah, And for non profit radio as well. I’m glad we could do it here, too. So you want to tell us now where, where condone listeners find the full session? Do you know

[00:31:44.56] spk_4:
the full sessions are going to be available through Bowery analytics? It’s B o w e r y analytics dot com, and we’ll make sure we get a link to our specific such number.

[00:31:58.54] spk_0:
Okay, Okay. Thank you. Um, let’s start with, uh, part of the good strategy is using personas user personas. Can you kick us off with that? Valerie? How do you How do you start to identify what persona looks like? And what’s their value?

[00:32:53.84] spk_4:
Absolutely. So persona is really like a profile or a character sketch of someone that you need to connect with, um, and understanding their motivations and goals. So it’s a way of segmenting your audience. And rather than sending all of your messaging out into the ether trying to tailor that messaging to a specific demographic or a specific group of people, So for pathways to housing p a were actually still developing. What are person does look like? We have an idea of what it looks like, but we want to dig support into the research and analytics side of things to see who exactly is supporting us right now. And what, um, ties they have in common to help us build those profiles. I think Katie might be a little bit further ahead of us in developing this personas. I’m gonna toss it over to her. Yeah.

[00:32:55.44] spk_3:
Yeah. So, uh, user personas are something I’ve been doing throughout my career. I worked in an agency before I came to the Trevor Project, so I was able to get a lot of industry knowledge on how we create user personas and user journeys. But what we did when we started looking at our end of your campaign for last year Trevor Project, we made sure we carved out some time Teoh conduct a little bit of an audit of what our donors were looking like. Where were they coming from, what could be tracked, what could be tracked? We found out we had a lot more questions that needed answers. So in order to get user personas, something that’s really important is tracking and understanding where people are coming from and where their first and Lex last clicks are. So because of our ability to do so. Google Analytics and Source code Tracking Protocol. We did get a lot of tracking during end of year that will improve. What are user pursuant is like going into future campaigns, but now we’re gonna be able to better tell what is actually inspiring. People give what is the moment where they’re actually clicking that donate button. What is the first thing they’re seeing that’s starting a relationship with the trouble project. So

[00:34:06.99] spk_2:
what are

[00:34:13.06] spk_0:
the pieces of a persona? How granular do you get is where they live, to what they read or what? Yeah, give us, um, a depth of this thing.

[00:36:05.73] spk_3:
Absolutely so the main important piece of a persona is to know what their needs are so you can have a persona that says, General, as this is a donor, they need to know how to give. That’s a persona, but what you’d like to do is get a little bit deeper in being able to tell what the values of that persona are. What’s what’s the name? What’s the age? What’s The character is sticks. What are the opportunities, Really. You know, I like to create fake names and really go into a new stock in Madrid so that you can try to connect with who this person might be. You’re really giving ah face to a name and a value to a person, and you want to look at what donors are looking like. So, for example, for the Trevor Project, we have a lot of one time first time donors, and we have a lot of people who come in. They give their first gift, and I’m trying to find where they’re dropping off, right? What is causing that? So I baby create a persona that is, Ah, one time user that’s not really convinced they want to give again one time donor. They may be young. They may be, um, like within our demographic, which is under 25 youth that we serve with our Christ. The service is in suicide prevention. Service is, um so you can get as granular is making a name and an aged in the demographic and the location and what devices they’re using. I think that’s a big one. Is this person usually on their mobile? Are they usually on test top? What channels do they typically like to look at Twitter? You can get as granular email. Are they just looking at your website? So you know it should get a detailed as you can, but I would encourage people to get really creative with it. If the more detailed you’re able to get, it’s just a just a more clear picture of a donor that you’re looking to target just make sure it’s someone you actually want to target and not someone you’re gonna be. Uh, that wouldn’t actually be coming to you like maybe Bill Gates isn’t gonna be coming. Teoh. A non profit website to donate. But you can look at what those specific I don’t as I would like that are more realist. Extra Your

[00:36:27.10] spk_0:
okay, right? You’re basically non. What’s realistic? Not what you aspiration is.

[00:36:36.82] spk_3:
Yeah, two degree. I mean, I think you could be aspirational, aspirational in some facets of what you’re doing. It has to be somewhat grounded in, you know, a realistic approach. We do get asked. I get aspirational myself when I’m creating donor personas. When you know I am looking for major gifts. I am looking for people who are willing to process a $15,000 credit card charge. And there are people out there that that do that. So when I do my donor personas, they may not be the number one target of my campaign. But I do want to consider what those people are interested in, as well so that I can personalized content for them to the best of my ability.

[00:37:10.53] spk_0:
Okay.

[00:37:24.13] spk_4:
Yeah, the other thing to keep in mind is diversifying your donor base. So in looking at who’s giving two pathways to housing right now, they’re mostly middle aged, college educated white women who prefer Facebook and giving on a desktop. Um, which is fine. And that’s definitely one category of people that you would want to be supporting you. But Philadelphia is an incredibly diverse city. So if those are the only people that we’re getting to with our messaging, that we really need to think about diversifying our strategies to build new donor profiles for people who don’t all look the same.

[00:38:14.55] spk_0:
And then once you have a bunch of personas and profile that I mean it sounds like you could have 10 or 12 really different ones different. Um, yeah, different characteristics of people, different types of people that come to you. And like you, said Kate, even people who leave no, you want to capture them back. So once you have these Valerie, then you’re trying to communicate to them. But how do you How do you turn your communications into targets to these personas?

[00:38:27.62] spk_4:
So you really want to think about building content specifically for that persona, so you might be doing a campaign that you want to hit a couple of different personas with. But you’re gonna taylor that campaign specifically to each persona and deliver the message Teoh a specific segment of that campaign. So if you’re gonna do a mail campaign, um, you want to think about how you’re putting together that letter and what you’re writing into the letter and how you’re addressing the donors for each of the different segments of each of the different personas that you put together to really help craft a message and inspire them specifically to donate?

[00:38:59.82] spk_0:
Okay, right. Like it. You, like you were saying, you know, yet know what’s important to them. Um, but

[00:39:00.80] spk_1:
that stuff is this is

[00:39:03.82] spk_0:
very, uh, amorphous to try to, you know, it’s not just what they give and how much do they give And what time of year do they give? You know what’s important to them? What do they value this

[00:39:13.75] spk_4:
is This is

[00:39:14.29] spk_0:
difficult stuff to suss out.

[00:39:29.53] spk_4:
Yeah. One thing our co presenters that this morning, Marcus, was that donors were smart and they’re savvy. And with the advent of the Internet and all of the various channels that you can communicate with people now. But what they want and they know what they want to hear from you. And if they’re not hearing from you what they want, they’re gonna go find someone else who’s gonna provide that information and communicate to them the way they want to be communicated with. So fundraising and marketing for non profits right now looks very different than it did maybe 10 15 20 years ago. Um, and And donors know what they want now.

[00:40:01.31] spk_0:
Okay, so it’s worth you’re trying. Teoh suss out all this amorphous information. A ZX best you can. Okay, Katie, Is there anything more you want to say about personas before we move on to being multi channel?

[00:40:07.52] spk_3:
Let’s go on a multi channel. I could talk. Is the personas all day?

[00:40:11.59] spk_0:
All right? All right. Anything. I don’t want anything important out, though, from

[00:40:16.15] spk_3:
OK, I think we’ve covered the main points.

[00:40:18.25] spk_0:
Okay, what’s what’s what’s important about? Well, I think we all know why to be multi channel, But how to coordinate those messages? What’s your What’s your thinking there?

[00:41:37.71] spk_3:
Yeah, I can jump in here. So I think what people often don’t Dio is they don’t coordinate messages Cross channel at the right time. That’s what I’ve been seeing a lot with, just my industry research. I mean, I’m always looking at what everybody is doing in the space because I want to be part of the best. Uh, but they say they being What I’ve heard on multiple conferences is that there’s a rule of seven, right? So as a non donor, let’s am school after Facebook, I need to see and ask seven times before I’m actually likely to give. So if you’re seeing that asked seven times on Facebook, that means it’s seven posts. That’s kind of a lot, and that’s gonna have to be spaced out through a certain amount of days, weeks, months. Even so, if you’re just increasing all the channels that you’re presenting that message on, so let’s say I’m seeing it on Facebook I’m seeing in my email. I’m seeing it on my instagram. I’m getting a paid ad for it because I liked it on Facebook. That’s gonna shorten the window of which I see seven points of that call to action. So I’m gonna be more likely to give if I’m seeing it in a wider spectrum on the digital space. Then I am in just one channel. So making sure that you’re saying similar things but that our custom to what the channel is providing, like social media has, like paid ads, have a certain amount of characters you can use. So bacon shorts optimized for what channel you’re using but still with the common thread, is really important for increasing your numbers. Right.

[00:42:31.14] spk_0:
Okay, Now it’s a little clear to me why I see so many ads for the, uh, pickpocket proof slacks. I see them across all kinds of different channels. I’m not I’m hardly on Facebook anymore. But, um, I I see them when I goto websites and I’m reading articles and because one time I don’t know why, I swear it was like, three years ago I was browsing through these CIA a approved slacks with 14 pockets, and it’s all supposed to be a pickpocket. Proof for something is, you know, the $200 slacks or whatever they’re you know. But I get

[00:42:39.22] spk_3:
your seven times

[00:43:26.30] spk_0:
I has ever since. Yeah, and, uh, I know I’m not even sure that if I bought them the ads would stop. Maybe the West is sophisticated enough. No, it’s not right. That is now your brother needs pair. Whatever time for our last break turn to communications relationships, the world runs on them. We all know that turn to is led by former journalists so that you get help building relationships with journalists. Those relationships will help you when you need to be heard. So people know you’re a thought leader in your field and they specialize in working with nonprofits. They’re at turn hyphen two dot ceo, we’ve got but loads more time for content strategy from 20 and TC. Valerie, anything you want, you want to explain about multi channel and how important it is to reinforce and be consistent.

[00:44:25.22] spk_4:
I think the biggest thing for me is if you’re starting from scratch and you’re really trying to develop content and put it in the right places, um, you really want to be thinking about who? Your audiences, all those channels. So for lengthen the messaging that you’re putting out is gonna look a lot different than what you’re putting out on Facebook. Most people use Facebook recreational E, and they use lengthen for professional relationships So the type of information that someone is seeking on Linkin or more likely to respond to go on Lincoln is a lot different than what they’re more likely to look for or respond to on Facebook. So for us, we make sure all of our job listings go up on LinkedIn. And all of our that’s specific for me was humbled Lincoln just to kind of show our expertise in the area. But one were posted to Facebook. We’re talking more likely to people that we know are supporters of us and want to do tangible things to support us. So the messaging is different, even though the information is really the same.

[00:45:00.29] spk_0:
Okay, Okay. Again, you’re consistent, but consistent, but different. Maybe different format even. Um OK, yeah. Um I mean, there’s there’s other format, you know, content paper. Were white papers, Um, again, depending for the right for the right channel research. Um, do

[00:45:01.51] spk_2:
either of

[00:45:12.58] spk_0:
you use, um, media working in working through thought leadership in developing thought leadership in media media relationships A

[00:45:14.19] spk_4:
little bit. Yeah. Yeah. So there is a local media outlet here in Philadelphia called Generosity, and they are focused on nonprofits and social enterprises and people who are making positive impact in Philadelphia. So they’re super open to having folks guest post or write op EDS for them. So we’ve utilized that outlet a couple of times. Um, actually, just last week, uhm our CEO wrote an article about the opportunity for kindness in the era of Corona virus. So it’s something that she actually wrote to communicate to our staff members and let them know what our stance on, you know, moving forward was going to be. And we thought it was think that would be beneficial. Not just our staff, but the at large. So we pass it along to they posted it as an op ed and that gave us, um, a little bit more bang for our buck for that we had already written.

[00:46:07.22] spk_0:
Yeah. Good, good. Um, Katie, you’re doing much with earned media.

[00:46:11.38] spk_3:
I am not. The Trevor Project is. But Katie Green is not that our constant handle that.

[00:46:20.12] spk_0:
OK, um, let’s talk about some some analytics. How do we know whether we’re being successful on where we need to? We need to tweak or pivot. Can you get us started?

[00:46:42.48] spk_3:
Absolutely. So analytics is very hard for a lot of nonprofits because it’s such a scientific based, skilled touch. And, you know, that’s something that when I first came onto the Trevor Project, is the first thing I implemented was our source coding protocol. It’s so important to know where people are coming from, but you can actually optimize, but we a be tested and continue to be test absolutely everything. We do it through. Ah, our website radio through email, We do it through our paid social and to see how things work. I think really we just test absolutely everything. Things you think you know you don’t. And that’s what I keep learning through. Testing is what you think works today, work tomorrow and we retest everything. A time of day test, for example, isn’t gonna throw send for email isn’t gonna be the same after daylight savings. It’s not gonna be the same as the seasons change, and particularly not the same now that everybody is stuck at home. So you know, they’re testing and optimizing Really, what you know is working. It just requires retesting, re optimizing and testing.

[00:47:43.41] spk_0:
Could you could you give some more examples Besides time of day. What examples of things you test.

[00:49:01.17] spk_3:
Oh, absolutely. So on our website we tested, we have a little call out box with questions on our donate form. We tested the placement of that. Is it better to have it right up next to the form underneath, directly on tops of dispersing people see to be tested. Placement there. We test what photos we use. A lot does a photo of somebody looking sad versus somebody looking more celebratory and happy. We test a lot of pride imagery because the serv LGBT Q youth We want to see if pride imagery actually helps get our word out there. We test our colors a lot because our brand colors orange, which is can be very cautionary. But we see you think that it’s your brand color. Of course, everybody’s gonna always just on toe, But that’s not really the case like sometimes they like our blues and R purples and greens when it comes to see ta buttons. Um, gosh, I mean, I could tell you every test I’ve ever run thunder test, some using graphics versus photos on the website. You know, the size with the height of our life boxes with mark donation forms. The amount of buttons we have it just the list goes on and on. I

[00:49:21.77] spk_0:
heard one that just made me think of one small example of what? Riffing off What you just said was testing the text inside a button. Yeah, instead of just donate or ah, reviewed or something, you know, beam or more splits explicit about what? The what? The action is you asking for just a single word. A little more descriptive.

[00:49:56.13] spk_3:
Yeah, Testing. See, Ta Izz is something that we dio a lot just to get people some ideas. I think one that can be really helpful when it comes to fundraising is seeing how your donors reacts to the word give and the word support and the word donate. So all the same thing we’re after you to support our mission to give to us and to donate. But those three words have very different feelings when you’re reading them on your screen. So that’s one of the biggest test we ran. But I would recommend always test taking see ta when you have a new one, especially

[00:50:05.61] spk_0:
Was it was it act blue that, uh, change dot or GE, I think maybe change that or GE started calling it chip in, could you? Chimp man,

[00:50:12.99] spk_3:
I think that that flail sounds like a classic act Blue.

[00:50:18.26] spk_0:
Yeah. Okay. Um eso Valerie, can you talk us through some metrics? You’re the director of institutional advancement. What? What numbers do you look for? Decide how you’re doing.

[00:51:11.98] spk_4:
Ah, we look at a lot of things. So we’re looking at the click through rates on our emails and honor Post, actually reading to the bottom and clicking the links that we’re providing. Um, we’re looking at how many people are interacting with things that were posting on social media and whether they are, um, injuring it. We’re not. Hey, son, how many people are interacting with it? Um, we took a lot of surveys to do. So talking to our donors directly and asking them what kind of things they won’t see. What kind of thanks. Um I know Katie’s doing ah lot more with metrics than we are. So this is my friendly reminder to smaller nonprofits where there’s just one person trying to do all of this. You don’t have to recreate the feel eso you could look at an organization like the Trevor Project that does have the staff who can look at all of these things. And you, all of these tests chicken, all of the match person, See, But for the past at a imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. So you can look at what they’re doing and then borrow It s o for an organization like me that has a fuller staff were doing a little bit on our own. But we’re also looking a lot of what other nonprofits were doing and a scooping that they’re taking the time to test things. And we’re kind of, you know, copying what they’re doing, obviously successful for them.

[00:51:44.45] spk_0:
How do you learn from them? Do you just created build a relationship and then asked, What? What kind of metrics do you look at?

[00:51:51.46] spk_4:
Sometimes And sometimes it’s a simple as going to the Trevor Project websites donate page and seeing where they placed things and what they named their buttons and what giving levels they’re putting up there. Um, because, you know, you’re never gonna be exactly the same as another organization. So you definitely want to take a look at your use thing as an example and use someone who’s doing similar work or in a similar location to you. But at the end of the day, there’s only so much you can learn through testing. And after that you’re just gonna have to dive in and do something. So if you don’t have time for the testing, you could do a quick search of what everybody in your industry is doing and kind of take it from there and said,

[00:52:33.45] spk_0:
Katie, since everybody’s stealing from the Trevor Project, What, uh, what? I assume you knew Valerie was doing this.

[00:52:36.65] spk_3:
I didn’t. But it’s such a compliment

[00:52:39.48] spk_4:
is because you do a great job. That’s why we’re looking at you.

[00:52:43.95] spk_3:
Oh, gosh,

[00:52:44.69] spk_0:
What do you want to add about? Metrics?

[00:52:48.65] spk_3:
Um, I think I just want toe reiterate Valerie’s point that there are so many nonprofits where one person is doing us. Um, I’m the only person on the digital giving team. I’m the first person they were hired to do. Digital living. Um, I’ve been still with the team member of one, but, you know, I do have the support of a very large marketing team that helps me with creating all of the tests that we dio and anyone can tweet me, email me whatever it like any non profit everyone to connect. I Moyes unopened resource. But, uh, metrics are increasingly, uh, important. Just critical role to donors. Content strategy. So

[00:53:29.99] spk_0:
is your offering yourself as a resource. Do you want to share your e mail and or your Twitter? You don’t have to give your email if you don’t want to.

[00:53:37.22] spk_3:
Yeah, maybe Twitter is probably the best way to reach me because I’m trying. I’m trying to learn how to tweet more as a digital person. I feel like radio its act. Katie Sue Green like one word. So it’s k a t i e after you e g r e n Katie Stuart Green green. Just like the color. No, ESPN.

[00:54:05.19] spk_0:
Okay. Okay. Thank you. Um, that’s a Valerie. You want to, uh, gonna wrap us up some parting thoughts about content strategy?

[00:54:07.13] spk_4:
Sure. Um, since I am kind of representing the smaller organization here, I just want to remind everybody that you’re doing everything that you can, and it’s everything that you’re doing is important. So don’t try to do everything at once, really. Pick one thing to focus on and get to a point where you’re doing that well and comfortably before you try to add more. Um, listen, podcast like this or going to a presentation like the one that we did this morning is overwhelming in the number of things that you could be. Do you think? And it makes you feel like you’re not doing enough? But you are. And just tackling the small hills one at a time is much, much easier than trying to climb the mountain.

[00:56:13.47] spk_0:
That’s very gracious. Gracious advice. Thank you. Thanks very much. That was Valerie Johnson. That is Valerie Johnson, director of Institutional Advancement at Pathways to Housing P A. And with her is Katie Green. Digital giving manager for Trevor Project. Thank you very much for sharing each of you Thanks so much. And thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 20 NTC pulling it together. Virtually responsive by Cougar Mouth and Software Denali Fund. Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits? Tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant Mountain will get you a free 60 day trial. Thanks a lot for being with us next week. Accessibility and inclusive design If you missed any part of today’s show, I beseech you find it on tony-martignetti dot com were sponsored by wegner-C.P.As guiding you beyond the numbers wegner-C.P.As dot com by Cougar Mountain Software Denali Fund Is there complete accounting solution made for non profits? Tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant er mountain for a free 60 day trial and by turn to communications, PR and content for nonprofits, your story is their mission. Turn hyphen two dot ceo. Our creative producer is Claire Meyerhoff, Sam Liebowitz Managed Stream shows. Social Media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our Web guy on this

[00:56:22.08] spk_8:
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Nonprofit Radio for April 7, 2017: The Agitator’s Donor Retention & Your Content Strategy

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Roger Craver: The Agitator’s Donor Retention

Roger Craver is The Agitator and his book is “Retention Fundraising.” He has strategies to help you keep the donors you’ve got. (Originally aired April 10, 2015)

 

 

 

Brett Meyer & Katie Carrus: Your Content Strategy

What should you create for the communications channels where you’re active? How do you stay consistent with your mission? Who’s responsible? Brett Meyer is director of strategy for Think Shout and Katie Carrus is director of online communications at Humane Society Legislative Fund. (Originally aired April 17, 2015)

 


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Hello and welcome tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent i’m your aptly named host i’m going in from emerald isle, north carolina today because the show must go on. We have a listener of the week abila anis, she tweeted. Tony is a snarky host who tells it like it is now what non-profits need to be successful, i would’ve preferred charming or ah charlie rose knockoff would’ve been nice, snarky, probably accurate, but who cares about accuracy? Facts are overrated. She named it best non-profit podcast on her block fact check that is accurate. She’s at abre auctioneer and auctions generosity dot com abila thank you very much for the kind words, but in your block post you could’ve mentioned my youtube channel isn’t mentioned that one it’s really tony martignetti r e a l abila anise congratulations on being our listener of the week oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be thrown into noma phobia if you called me with the idea that you missed today’s show the agitators donorsearch retention. Roger craver is the agitator and this book is retention fund-raising yeah, strategies to help you keep the donors. You’ve got that originally aired on april tenth, twenty fifteen and you’re content strategy what should you create for the communications channels where you are active? How do you stay consistent with ambition? Who’s responsible brett mayer is with think shout and katie caress from the humane society just later fundez that originally aired april seventeen twenty, fifteen, twenty two non-profit radio on stanford social innovation review responsive by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com, and by we be spelling super cool spelling bee fundraisers may be a spelling dot com here is roger craver with the agitators donor-centric i’m really glad that roger craver, the agitator is with me. He’s, the agitator at the agitator dot net he’s been shaking things up for a long time in big ways. He helped launch organizations like common cause greenpeace, the national organization for women and amnesty international. Damn that’s impressive. His book is retention fund-raising the new art and science of keeping your donors for life published by emerson and church he’s at roger craver on twitter and right now he’s on non-profit radio welcome, roger craver. Thanks, tony it’s. Great. To be with you, it’s. A pleasure, it’s. A real pleasure to interview the agitator. I love that the agitator that’s cool like, thank you. Did you think about the anarchist? Did you consider that or no it’s? No, i don’t need that much chaos. I think they’re stirring things up in agitating ways. Good. Okay, that’s sufficient? I understand. Um, why was there a need for a book called retention? Fund-raising? Well, for the last ten years, possibly fifteen years american non-profits and european non-profits have been basically losing mohr donors than they’re gaining. And that is that is a real problem, not only for the present, but for the future. The history of fund-raising before then was the donors were fairly easy to come by, and the cost of acquiring them was relatively inexpensive. And so there was a sort of burn and turn mentality. That so what if we lose, the donors will will get new donors and simply replaceable that’s not possible anymore. And so people who are caring about their organizations future need to be caring about holding on to the donors they have. Early in the book, you cite a twenty thirteen a f. P association of fund-raising professional study that says that ah, a few things, but it starts with flat fund-raising every every hundred dollars raised from new donors was offset by one hundred dollars in losses that’s, right? And it got worse. It got worse in two thousand fourteen, it was off by one hundred six dollars really way are going the wrong way. Um, and then also that there was negative growth in the number of donors for every hundred dollars for every hundred donors acquired, one hundred seven were lost. That’s, right, that’s, right. Pretty a pretty frightening statistic when you couple that with the fact that the number of non-profit has grown enormously in the last thirty years. It’s grown from about six hundred thousand to a million. Five hundred thousand non-profits so many more non-profits chasing far fewer donors. That, in essence, is the problem. And why retention is so important, many more charities chasing many fewer donors. Right? Alright, so that is clearly unsustainable. Um, all right. So what we gonna do about this? Well, that’s, what i asked myself after after watching these statistics for a long time, i decided there there really has to. Be it empirical way too find out why donors leave on what we can do to keep them in the bowl. Yes, the study and so we set out to do and did a two year study of two hundred fifty non-profits in the united states and in the united kingdom and survey tens of thousands of donors to determine why they leave, and then what steps on organization could take to hold on to them? And that it is the findings from that study that i’ve been encapsulated in this, uh, in this book, along with some quite practical suggestions on what organizations khun due to stem this hemorrhaging, we’re going to get to those because that you call them retention winds. Um ah, finger pointing is not particularly valuable, but i’d like to do some anyway. My show, we’re going to do whatever the hell i want. Where do you think that? How do you think this problem arose? This lays a fair, lackadaisical attitude about how we treat our donors and doesn’t matter. We lose, some will gain more back where does the fault line you think? Well, it arose from the days when it was so easy and inexpensive, too acquire donors and at a time when direct response became very popular way of acquiring donors, and so they the mindset became sort of it’s it’s easier to sign the purchase order for direct mail lists and printing than it is to really worry about how to take care. I don’t owe rather casual, okay, so we consign this purchase order for an acquisition, mailing campaign or whatever, whatever channel we use acquisition, campaign and that’s easier than being interested, active and evaluating and then improving the way we treat our donors exactly, because the the reality is that treating a donor well takes thought takes work, takes planning and, uh, takes the willingness to build a relationship between the organization and the donor and that that involves a lot more than simply mailing a letter or making a phone call. And i love that we’re talking to someone who has studied this problem. I noticed a non-profit radio last couple of weeks, i’ve been saying introspection a lot this, but it just seems to be coming up with a number of guests that non-profits need to be introspective about whatever whatever subject we’re talking about. This there’s not enough it’s critical self evaluation? No, there isn’t. And one of the one of the reasons for that there’s a there’s a so called where there’s a horrible jargon term called brett best practice. Okay, what in the earth best practices are? I don’t know and i’ve been doing this for fifty years, but people latch onto that term and they most often compare their organization with other organisations and say, well, if we’re we’re doing about as well as the other other guy, so we must be using best practices but that, you know, there’s, no interest, thie other the other organization might be doing it badly. You can’t you can’t just say that we were consistent with others they maybe, maybe underachievers. And by the way, we have non-profit radio we have george in jail, but best practices has been used so often that i’m not even sure that’s jargon anymore. It’s dahna it’s more like cliche, but we should send send you do instead of jargon jail within you teo ilsen ugo cliche camp union are you near an airport? There’s a jets taking a knife in your back about thirty miles away but one just came over, so okay, well, maybe we’re being a zombie that kept going. It didn’t stop, right? Okay, we would’ve heard it if it stopped. All right. So we’ll put you in cliche camp, which doesn’t sound that bad joke. It’s like for minor offenders. That’s a juvenile would be in there that trade. I don’t use it. No, i don’t think there is such a thing is best practice. And i’ve been hearing state of the art a lot too. Maybe that’s replacing best practices, but there’s, just a substitution. All right, spare us and thought thought leadership we could we could talk all day about jargon jail don’t leadership. Yes, i know there’s a lot of it in non-profits and that’s. Why? Non-profit right there has drug in jail. Sometimes i let offenders off easy and other times probation is it’s harder to come by. All right, we’re gonna go out for a break. And when roger and i come back, we’ve got a good amount of time. We’re going to talk about ah, some of these retention wins that are easy to do and and had a help you build trust with your current existing donors so they don’t depart, stay with us, you’re tuned to non-profit radio. Tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy. Fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights, published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really, all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder, am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website, philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals, the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent we’re pre recorded this week. I’m sorry, i can’t send ah town and city live listener love but you know that i love are live listeners so that’s out to each of you listening live podcast pleasantries those on the time shift, wherever you are, whatever device whatever time. Whenever however many days or weeks later, you listen to non-profit medio pleasantries to you and never forget our affiliates. Very important affiliate affection out to each of our affiliates throughout the country non-profit radio was hurt. Okay, roger craver. Now, how can we be sure that these retention winds are not cloaked? Best practices? Well, so he could be sure based on empirical data as measured from the responses of ah, thousands and thousands of donors. There’s. No conjecture here on my part. You know, there’s there’s, lots of so called best practices dahna where the people say, well, you know, you ought to print your thank you notes on a very high quality paper. Or you ought to get him out within twenty four hours. Or you need tio send x number of cultivation pieces with no. Asks and all that, of course, is is pure tribal wisdom, so our best practice, whatever you want to call it. So here we wait. In this study, we measured what people care most about and what they don’t care about and put it in priority order according to their responses, and came up with a way of the of isolating the seven drivers duitz that make for retention or flipside of retention of courses is attrition. And, you know, tony, all all of this is really based on apart from our empirical data there’s a lot of common sense here, but common sense, it turns out, is a fairly rare commodity. Ah, the business of building relationships, which is what donorsearch tension is all about is based on two, two things consistency and reliability. None of this, uh, listening to this program have serious personal relationships that don’t have an element of substantial element of consistency and reliability. If i if i say to my spouse, i’m i’m going to meet you at seven thirty, and i’m persistently, uh, late or early or inconsistent with that. That relationship is not goingto laugh the same the same when it comes. To your have you been talking to my wife? You’re describing my marriage? Let’s, let’s keep personalities and personal lives out of this, shall we? Alright? Well, people just translated into into the non-profit world if i if i receive a on appeal a prospect appeal let’s, say from from an animal organization and it talks about rescuing puppies and cat and i send them a contribution. And the next thing i know, i get an acknowledgement letter about the oceans and let’s save some whales that is not consistent, and i will not likely be back to that organization with another gift or if they send that acknowledgement letter and it says roger carver instead of roger craver call their their help line, and i get a rather surly or non carrying clerk, and he says, well, i may try to get to it as soon as i can and isn’t very helpful. I’m not going to go back with another gift because that’s an unreliable organization, so we have to understand that relationships are built on trust and the two pillars of trust or consistency and reliability, and therein lies the key to retention because it leads to the next element of of retention, which is understanding the donors, the importance of the donors attitude, you know, it’s it’s, not it’s, not the donors behaviour that we should be concerned about behavior in the sense of transactions giving money or not giving yeah, donors attitude that we need to care about because the organization dahna determines what that attitude is going to be by the organization’s action. Yeah, when you use organization is doing things that affect the donor positively, then the donor’s attitude will lead to behaviour that makes transaction increases the size of a gift renews the membership, whatever, whatever the desired outcome. But it’s, not the donor per se that is to blame are not to blame. It is the organization’s action that determined how that donor feels about the organizations have something that folks really need to understand if they’re serious about donor-centric we’re also talking about perception, right? How do they perceive? Perceive your organization? Is it professional? Does it care about me as a donor? Aside from all the programmatic important work that it’s doing? But how does it treat our relationship that’s, right? And that that tony that is paramount in ah, donors, psyche, no, they people hyre non-profits to do a variety of of a number of jobs sometimes is to make them feel good sometimes it’s, to enable them to be able to tell their peer group that they’re doing this or that sometimes it’s, because they want to do a specific thing, but very seldom is what is that what the organization claims that is in their appeals? Many people really don’t care that you have ten regional offices or that your ceo has appeared six times in the new york times? None none of that is important. Yet organizations just love talking about themselves, and nothing is more deadly and building a donor relationship that let’s move into these retention winds, which i’ll remind people are just reiterate these air based on empirical study, not not conventional wisdom or would just tribal wisdom that has been repeated at conference after conference. Just because one organization does it a certain way and they’ve been successful doesn’t mean that that’s going to be successful universally it’s not really lesson that’s amore that’s an anecdote? Um okay, hyre you like saying thank you? That sounds pretty simple. Why does it? Why does this need to be? Why does need to be said? Well, it needs to be said because sixty four percent of american non-profits don’t bother thanking their donors. We could start, we can start right there two thirds to two thirds of gifts or not not acknowledged and thanked you’re saying are not are not acknowledged or thank some. Some of that two thirds is acknowledged the sense of a tax receipt, but a tax receipt doesn’t go very far to build it toward building a personal relationship. That’s cold? Yeah, yeah, patane has retained this receipt for your tax advisers evaluation? Yeah, exactly, exactly so they the importance of a thank you is that it is the it is an initial step in building a relationship on we’ve learned a couple things through this study that that air quite important one is it needs to be personal, and by that i don’t mean personalized i mean, personal sounding and warm, warm of heart and meaningful to the donor not necessarily long, but it really has to be real, not we’re. We’re so happy to have received your twenty five dollars, gift, it will be put to immediate ineffective use sincerely, x y z. That is not a that is not a thank you. Rather it is. Dear tony, your check arrived. I can’t tell you how happy it’s going to make sammy who tomorrow will have not only a meal, but he will have a toy for christmas on dh so forth so it needs it really needs to connect the donor to the organization and the donor’s gift to a beneficiary in a real sense of the of the word, something as something way before you get timely there’s no automatic rule that it has to go out within twenty four hours, but it should go out promptly after receipt of the gift. Because we in the studies we we’ve done the preferential time is forty eight hours, but donors of forgiving of taking longer than that what they’re not forgiving of are these form printed, impersonal, thank you’s that just ring ring hollow. So that’s that’s the importance of saying thank you? One of the things you mentioned that i want to emphasize is that the thank you doesn’t have to be long? It doesn’t. I’ve heard this and said it many times on the show i heard it from guests. To be genuine and sincere does not require something long. No, i mean, i love you. If it’s if it’s said in a heartfelt way three words that’s an awful lot to a relationship. That’s your right. That’s it that’s an outstanding analogy. All right. Oh, and the book points out that there’s, um, resource is available around. Thank you’s. You have. Ah, there’s a thank you letter clinic at sophie, which is the showcase of fund-raising inspiration and innovation and your vory thoughtful to point out that people can lift thank you letter ideas from there, but not copy and paste. No, not copy and face. But take, uh, lisa sergeant has put that together and done a terrific job, and she she has an attic full of ah, wonderful. Thank you. Uh, campaigns in there and get inspired by it. And by all means use that. You know, shaul had a saying the mediocre borrow genius steals and there’s. Lots of good stuff on sophie that’s that’s worth looking at that will give you ideas. And this thank you. Clinic is certainly one of them. All right. Mediocre borrow and the genius steals. I’m in the wrong business. We gotta transcend the law’s a little more often, but there we go. You want us to be boring? What do you mean what’s behind that? Be boring. Let’s go back to the to the term consistency, one of the one of the realities of painful realities among most non-profits is they get tired of their of their same message, and as a result, because they’re bored. Uh, they they hyre another copy writer or the same copywriter and say let’s, let’s do something fancy or something that glows in the dark. Something different, something exciting? Well, that is that is not only a horrible waste of time and money. It’s also destructive of relationships, consistency is important and that’s what i mean by be boring. You may be tired of the same message you, mr or mrs organization of same message, but the donor isn’t tired of the same message. They they joined for that reason and they want to stay involved for that reason, so be consistent. That doesn’t mean you have to copy this same thing every time, but stay on the same themes that have produced the donor in the first place and the same the same way a good politician will give the same stump speech over and over again. She may be absolutely sick and tired of it, and the press may be sick and tired of it, and her staff may be sick and tired of it. But it is a speech that works with don’t with the voters, and it has to be given over and over again. You have a background in political consulting, too, don’t you? Yes, ideo i, uh, did a lot of work for twenty years for a number of democratic senators, presidential candidates in the course, citizen advocacy, the work for groups like greenpeace, the seal, you and others that’s all tied to politics. You’ve been around, you’ve been doing this a long time. Did you say fifty years earlier? I believe just, yeah, i’m probably older than most of the trees you’re looking at. Well, i’m in new york, so thie average tree life in new york is, i think, seven years, the street trees. So you got you got those. You got those covered, but all right, you’ve been around it. I’m in i admire its wisdom, its wisdom coming let’s. Imperially no! It’s, empirical. Wisdom it’s not anecdotal. Here’s what’s worked for me in my client’s through the decades. Okay, you want to listen to donors, don’t you? Absolutely. And here here is on area that organizations can really score against the competition and can also help themselves because very few folks in the nonprofit world design effort to get the feedback from their donors. You know, the court corporate america spends billions of dollars getting feedback. If you go on an airline, get off that airline the next day you get a survey you goto to ah, hotel, the next day you get a survey after you’ve checked out my heavens, even ihop, it doesn’t survey on the back of the receipts from their breakfast, and the reason they do this is they know that it, uh, that asking for people’s opinion build satisfaction and builds loyalty, and it is so easy to do, and it is so inexpensive to do, but most non-profits don’t do it, and they just keep the mute button on rather than listen to their donors. But by having feedback mechanisms, you can find out that your website, uh, sucks when it comes to the donate page or you can find out that you’re donorsearch vis program isn’t good, and these these feedback mechanisms are there basically widgets that you’ve been put on your website or questions you can put in your direct mail? Andi, uh, get get the donor’s opinion and, you know, twenty one one of the thing on that you don’t have to necessarily get a written response or telephone response from a donor zamir act repeat, the mere act of asking for someone’s opinion and feedback will boost retention by thirty percent. That is a significant difference. Roger, we have teo to start to wrap up. We just have about thirty seconds left, and, uh, i want listeners, of course, to know there are many more retention winds in the book retention fund-raising published by emerson and church, roger, just spend a couple seconds. Small and midsize shops have a big advantage here, don’t they? They absolutely do. And i love your your slogan for the other ninety five percent because they have a huge advantage because they can do things personally and a well run non-profit shop that pays attention to its donors will exceed return on investment by by five to ten. Times higher than the big organization. Roger craver, he’s, the agitator, to find him at the agitator dot net, and at roger craver on twitter. Roger, thank you so much for sharing all that empirical wisdom. It’s. My pleasure, and i join chelsea and your fan club. Thank you, cool, write something nice, and i’ll make you a listener of the week. Thank you again. You’re content. Strategy is coming up first. Pursuant, they have a free content paper for you. Intelligent fundraisers guide to sustaining e-giving so its forces um, intelligent. You got that? You listen to non-profit radio done fundraiser, you’re you’re either doing it frontline or you’re probably involved in it in some respect. It’s, not you, khun fast forward guide who doesn’t need a guide ever needs guidance in life and sustaining e-giving the research proves that there is a cause and effect relationship between sustaining giving and donor retention wolber roger and i just talking about you need to raise more money. You need to keep your donors that terrible attrition rate. Get it down what you waiting for? Help yourself you can learn the right way to do sustaining giving notice i did not say best practices, you’ll find this content paper. The intelligent fundraisers guide to sustaining e-giving at pursuing dot com quick re sources and content papers couldn’t be simpler. You read the paper to you and don’t make me do it. You want to be with you for an hour, go to pursue it. We’ll be spelling spelling bees for millennial fund-raising it’s a game show. Fundraiser reminds me of the gun show actually, the host chuck barris just died like a week or ten days ago gong show had the unknown comic so does we’ve been telling the got comics gene gene, the dancing machine we’d be spelling has dancing dahna show had a live band there’s live music and we’d be spelling parallels amazing between the gun show it’s the gong show plus spelling equals we’ll be spelling so you so the gun show equals we be spelling minus spelling is when you move it over, you gotta change the sign you could solve for spelling. Spelling equals the gun show minus we’ll be spelling everything else can be derived. Andi, i’m not sure about the natural log with the natural log of we’d be spelling is the video nonetheless is at we be spelling dot com natural log of we be spelling now. Time for tony’s take two non-profit video we’re on stanford social innovation review we are a podcast. Yes, sir. At s i r dot org’s now you don’t personally need this because you’re listening live or podcast or affiliate, but for everybody else, the ones who haven’t yet been born. Into the non-profit radio family, those sheep without a flock fighters without a formation, the fords without a fleet, they are the ones who confined us on stanford social innovation review check out my video that makes two videos for you to watch overviewing paying attention taking notes in my video the random dude in alexandria, virginia, signals excitement about this announcement and i look fat. We’ll find that video at twenty martignetti dot com and that is tony, take two here are bret meyer and katie caress with your content strategy welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference two thousand fifteen it’s hosted by antenna non-profit technology network. We’re in austin, texas, at the convention center. My guest is katie caress she’s, director of online communications for humane society legislative fund. Katie welcome. Thank you so much for having me. That’s. A pleasure. Thanks for taking time on a busy conference. Your workshop topic is content strategy one or one. What are non-profits not doing so well? I could do better at around their content. Strategy. Well, about everybody here has the intention to do much better. I think that everyone here probably is. Looking for something like content, strategy and it’s, just a matter of kind of getting their leaders, the executives onboarding really what it does is it applies like intention and focus to all of your messaging. It’s. A basic plan r the idea that your messages need a plan. A plan focused plan strategy. Yeah, sounds like it starts with goals. Yeah, it starts with goals. It’s just a good idea to start with making sure that you understand oh, yeah, making sure that you understand what your business goals are and discovering how your channel usually is websites with content strategy, but it could be anything social email, whatever making sure that those platforms have goals that are tighter business schools. So you’re avoiding this kind of like sprawl and all over nests of what happens with web sites a lot of time, and the ad hoc put this up things to be just has to go, like, right now, right? I’m taking it that could come from a ceo or a boardmember yeah, and is there someone else senior and becomes hard to say? No, exactly, exactly, and i think that a lot of people who were working on websites or other channels just kind of feel like they’re in this quagmire, right there just likes just drowning and content, and they don’t have the tools to kind of push back or, you know, carve out a better way. So what this says it’s, like we acknowledge that you’re in this like situation where you’re getting input from stakeholders who had all kinds of varying degrees of a definition of what the website is for what this content is supposed to do so content strategy says everybody from their own perspective. Everyone have no perspective, their own priorities, different audiences, and you end up with this website that kind of like pleases nobody, right? It doesn’t drive your business goals, so content strategy says let’s. Ask the question of why, before we do anything and i think that’s kind of revolutionary who worked on the web even the past, like ten years. It’s it’s, just this race to the bottom, like what you said, like publish all the things now, and this has kind of slow down let’s have a plan and it ends up like driving engagement, and it improves your brand it, you know, drives up, conversions, everything if you can kind of get the buy-in take a beat and pursue this, ok, where should we start our conversation? That was great over that was excellent. Overviewing thank you. Should we get started? Well, you should get started by, you know, finding some similarly minded colleagues, right? So talk to your team members about this current problem. Probably everybody started talking about. It i’m sure they are, right. So talk to him about this this, you know, notion that people are pursuing get the, you know, good kind of the buy-in from your colleagues and then start reaching out to people who are, you know, a little above you who could be an ambassador for you to senior leadership and work on getting that buy-in from those folks and then you just start by what you’re basically telling them or trying to get them on board with we need to be more strategic about this. Yeah. Here, our problems. Yes. And here’s, what are potential outcomes are yeah, if we can be a lot more sophisticated about, like here’s, why we’re drowning, right? He’s? All right. Driving here’s where our pages aren’t really converting people here’s why they’re not performing the way we want them go and you don’t even, like start with your business goal and then you pursue it audit we got a big hump dahna okay, just went away. Okay? Great. What that was that was the with speakers. The thie non-profit radio sound system. A cz exemplary it’s beyond question. So that came from the austin convention center. I wish i could run, i could run this convention of the way we run non-profit really agree? I don’t know these losers here. Well, yeah, but so one of the great first step to take us to get an audit done, right? And so it’s an inventory of all of your content, but then it’s the audit phase, which you’re you know, you’re evaluating page by page, and for some people, this could be like tens of thousands of pages on their website, right? Or it’s a couple hundred, you’re evaluating page by page and determining whether that content a piece of content actually lines with what everybody says your business goals are it’s a pretty serious audit? Now you gotta look at every page, every page, and obviously, if you have hundreds of thousands of pages, or if you’re, you know, a merchant’s site you’re going, you’re going to do like a sample size of those pages, right? You’re the idea is to just see, really, hell, well, you’re you’re content is performing and a lot of times that drives a conversation that drives, you know, that gives you the ammunition to make the case that we need. To make a change so an audit is key. It’s the first place to start, and then you’re pursuing just getting that content landscape kind of sketched out determining what you’re ecosystem is right. So let’s say, you’ve got like, you know, thirty things the organization works on for non-profit you’re gonna have all kinds of things somebody’s working on. So you get the executives and the subject experts to agree? Like what? Our priorities right where the organization’s priorities get really clear on that? And then look at how those priorities and those areas are kind of developed on your site. Do you have one thing that’s like this really, really weird offshoot thing? Just like favorite thing, and you have, like, forty thousand pages on it. This should all be driven by the mission. Yeah, exactly. I already should be pretty clear. Yeah, and flow very yeah, smooth from your your mission statement. Yeah, but what you’ll find. But i think a lot of non-profit especially large ones like, oh, my gosh, there’s there’s competing goals were competing priorities and competing interpretations of what that mission is all across organization, which leaves just, you know, a lot of strife in a lot of tension for folks who are, like, right in the middle of that content production system like the web editors. So, yeah, the idea is to kind of, like, sketch out what your content ecosystem should be. So if our priority right here is, like farm animal welfare, we we should have, like, the depth of that contact your sights to reflect that, and it should also reflect what the current priorities are and the tone that you should using, etcetera. But if you have something that’s just, like, really, really low priority, it doesn’t make sense for that to have, you know, take up twenty percent of the site and you’ll find that that happens a lot of times, so okay, okay, so we were going to get some early stakeholders summerlee allies engaged with us? Yeah, who then starts to develop the content strategy. So, you know, you may have someone who is a content strategist on your team, like, if so lucky you a lot of places, all right, let’s assume not. Our audience is small and midsize. Non-profit yeah, exactly, i know and i’m from a huge non-profit and we don’t have anything like that, so usually this falls on the shoulders of, you know that editorial director of a website or, you know, a director of any filler online platforms and usually going to fall on them, and it doesn’t have to be like we’re going to do all of this right now. It can be baby steps. It can be like let’s just take on one like many project and apply content strategy to it, like run that through that screen, kind of demonstrate successive that way, teo to your stakeholders and say, look how well this worked. Look how we drove results this way by applying attention and focus to this, and then you could move on to a larger things, but it always usually kind of just germinates from the web team, maybe someone else, depending on how the organisation structure and maybe someone like development or design. Everybody has a part in this, but yeah. Then it just gets not only getting the work done and turning your website. Are you platform into what you wanted to be? Okay, uh, that all sounds very simple, but there’s gotta be more to it. And we got plenty of time to spend together. So where where do we go now? Well, i mean, yeah, gosh, so it starts with the audit, you know, and you’re looking into how your, how your pages map to your goals and everything, and then you might start with, like, a section of the website, maybe a section that you i feel like the stakeholders there are going to be easy to work with, and they’re going to, like, excited about the process, and so you might start with that that that section that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, but very good to make it explicit. You got some of those early allies tell me some of their content is the place to start, you know, and don’t start with someone who are a section of your organization who, you know, it’s been kind of contentious to work with them, and a lot of people talk about how content started she’s about like therapy, right? It’s like all these relationships, because content is so personal, there’s so many people who were owning content across the organization and to them that that page that they wrote on, like horse immuno contraception is think their baby right? Like, okay, well, this makes no sense to an audience. This makes no sense to a user, how are they going to do that? So a lot of this kind of, you know, revision, work or whatever is collaborative, and you’re getting people on those teams who contribute to content and you’re all coming to a consensus on, like, what it should be based on, like what? We’ve all agreed on the goals, and we’ve all agreed on the audience, like, how can we change? And sometimes you get them involved in writing new stuff? It all depends on kind of the scope of the organization and how involved everybody wants to be, but it should be a collaborative process, and it could be merely taking, like, five pages that you took out from the audit and saying, like, okay, well, these pages are they really working for us? And so you get them involved in that early early stages so they can kind of see it don’t feel like they’re being put upon, right? A lot of this is relationship management, and so, yeah, you may take five pages and two of them make the cut on. The new site, but you’ve all worked on that together. Three the me decide to retire or, you know, you can, you know, contingency of planet, right? Like have a couple of bourbons on any composed it, but the whole thing should be collaborates. You have everybody going on the same page from beginning tend so we should be thinking also about our audiences. That’s, right, who’s, who’s consuming this content, right and so that’s. One of the first things you develop as your, you know, working on your goal, you’re also thinking about your audience. And so anybody who’s working in a content strategy, capacity and organizations should be talking a lot, teo, all the stakeholders throughout the organization who are touching that content, right? So my job would be to go to that horse. Amina contraception page owner i mean, like, why is this important to you? Tell me how to use this in your work. Would you really, really want to see this? And what do you want them to do with it on? Don’t get a lot of really, really good information out of that. It sometimes turns out to be less contentious than you may. Have thought it wass right? You’ll discover that like, oh, actually, they’re you know, they’re worked requires something different, and now i can pitch something different to them that’s more useful than like this page on the website that i’ve seen has gotten like twenty, views and past year and so it’s, just a lot of lot of talking relationship management. Um, and then once you’ve got kind of i guess that section worked on or even the whole site, then you just move on to a governance situation and actually see bret coming right here. Maybe he wants to speak on governance. Governance is actually brett’s section right? Red, you better hurry up, man. Come on. Get in here. Brett, please get in here quickly. Cause we just transition to your section. Take your lanyard off, please. Red came in late, but we can accommodate him. And actually, we were just getting to the section on governance, governance. So please put on your headset because you’ll hear a lot better and filter out background noise. And wes is going to bring you into the picture. We got everybody, wes. Alright, outstanding. Welcome. Thank you. Okay, this is brett brett. Brett meyer, content strategist for think shout welcome, welcome to non-profit radio thank you. Coming closer to the microphone, please should be within an inch. All right, excellent kitty was doing an excellent job. Hopefully you were going to join us, but we would have gone ahead without you. So i don’t want you to think that you are indispensable. Great, but you did show up at the exact right time is very good timing if you’re going to be late was perfect great governance, governance around our our content strategy what what does? What does that even mean? The governance of it governance is the plan for the plan. There are a lot of non-profits these days who are under the impression that they need to create as much content as possible, which is kind of the opposite of having a strategy so governance helps you plan who is responsible for what so you’re going to have probably a team of writers. Is that team of writers going to be able to publish content directly to the website themselves, or is it going to go through a review process? The whole thing around governance is making sure that people understand what their roles are, and setting up the map for how content is going to move from creation through publication to the public. Okay, and as we are, these are these are written this’s, a written plan, this government’s plan. Ideally, it is going to be written down. Usually it is more of a word of mouth thing, and people just have a general idea of what their roles are. We always advised that there is that kind of written plan or map of how things work, because people leave and new people come in. And if you don’t have that documentation for how things were supposed to work, it takes them a long time to get back up to speed. Buy-in like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon, craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger do something that worked and they are levine from new york universities heimans center on philanthropy tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profits to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. You can join the conversation on twitter using hashtag non-profit radio twitter is an easy way to reach tony he’s at tony martignetti narasimhan t i g e n e t t i remember there’s a g before the end he hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a short monthly show devoted to getting over your fund-raising hartals just like non-profit radio, toni talks to leading thinkers, experts and cool people with great ideas. As one fan said, tony picks their brains and i don’t have to leave my office fund-raising fundamentals was recently dubbed the most helpful non-profit podcast you have ever heard, you can also join the conversation on facebook, where you can ask questions before or after the show. The guests were there, too. Get insider show alerts by email, tony tells you who’s on each week and always includes link so that you can contact guests directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Duitz lively conversation. Top trends. Sound advice, that’s, tony martignetti non-profit radio and i’m gale bauer from sponsorship strategist. Dot com. Let’s, go into a lot more detail way got some time left together. What what elements you like to see in in the government governance plan let’s take the idea where it is, it is written. Yes, we try to make sure that things aren’t just happening in the communications department because everybody’s going to have some sort of content that they want to get on the website snd we talked about getting the early buy-in great. So yeah, it’s it’s kind of along the lines of a cross functional team, you have to identify who the best writers are the people who are going to create content that’s going to have meaning for the users who were coming to the website and just generally making sure that they understand what their roles are, who is going to be creating the content who’s going to be editing the content? If you have that kind of evergreen content, they stuff that is going to be kind of a permanent fixture of the website. How often are you going to go back and take a look at that content again to make sure that it is meeting the needs of the organization? Isn’t performing as well as it should be, so part of the governance is also understanding what the metrics for success are and the metro for success are going to be a lot different for the about the organisation information than it would be for, say, the blawg or if they’re doing events. An event is a very time box thing it’s going to have a ramp up, they’re going to be pushing a lot of content or information around the event, but as soon as the event is past that usually doesn’t have a lot of utility as opposed to maybe some of the about us content you want to get across what the goals of the organization is, what the organization does. You want people to really understand what this non-profit is trying to accomplish very important content, so they need to keep coming back and making sure that it’s working, writing down the goals means that they have something to measure against and they’re not just creating content in the dark. Katie, i see you doing a lot of nodding, but there’s things you like to add, i mean, the only thing i would add to that. I’m sure brett nose like you would think really addresses the idea that content is like a living, breathing thing, right? The website this is living, breathing thing it’s very different than an email that you sent out to your list, you know it has to it’s up there all the time. And so what? Brett’s talking about it’s so critical, teo to know that it’s not enough just when you hit publish, you know it’s not like a print magazine. It’s not like an email, he just sent out not even like log, you know, so that’s just the beginning when you hit publish and so this governance is so, so critical to making sure content is still performing, you know, a year from now or that you that you remember that it’s up thinks a lot of times you have a huge website, people were like, oh, that that page? Yeah, it happens to people who are, like, really deeply invested as well. It’s just e-giving huge websites going to it’s going to take over if you don’t govern it let’s spend a good amount of time talking about the measurement and the success metrics go ahead, that’s. Your that’s, your area? Excellent, yes, hyre we’ve been doing a lot of data with our cloudgood data work with our clients recently, so we know for a fact that the home page is not the common way that people come into a website anymore. They’re using google, they’re coming in deep in into the site, through social media or through what’s called dark social, the people chatting each other links buy-in on stuff that can’t really be tracked. So you have to understand that any page of your website might be creating the that first impression for folks, but the goals of the various types of content that you might have on your website are going to be different. So when we do work with clients, we try to help them understand that an event page, a page that somebody might google for. Oh, amplify austin, for example, what? We don’t know exactly what page they’re going to come into at first, but as the data starts to come in, you can see where they’re entering the site and you can help. You can come up with the metrics that are going to let you know whether or not that paige is successful, so if you’re coming into an event page with the registration, you want them to get the information about the event very quickly and decide whether or not they want to attend, and the next step from that would be clicking on the register button, which would be very different from a post on a blogger where you want them to consume the content and then probably share it. So the metrics there going to be slightly different. The important part is to recognize all the types of content and set up the different metrics that will indicate success for that particular organization, because it’s always going to be different, okay? And katie, we were using the interesting example of the equine immuno contraception paige thank, which could be a coin acquaint, contra or something? Yeah, i mean that that was so it was so benefit from governance. I would just so benefit from having those questions asked. Like, what does it mean for this page to succeed? What do you want your users to do with it? And then really, really, like, trail down and see if that’s happening. And i think that that could take care of so much like problem content on so many people’s websites if you’re just sticking to you, like, really direct, objective measurement and then there’s kind of you take away all the, like the sensitivity with that, like, okay, here’s this thing that i didn’t say like, you know, google said it, whatever. Yeah, we still have several minutes left together. What have we not talked about? Whatever i ask you that that you want to share. I like to, and i know that katie agrees with this because we’ve talked about it a little bit. Make sure that non-profits understand that content strategy doesn’t have to be just about the website, and it shouldn’t just be in the commune educations depart multi-channel it is multi channel and the development, the people in the development department who are sending out fund-raising letters that is a piece of content that is going to create an impression and if any one of these things is a little bit off message, i mean, we don’t want to get too far into the whole whole branding part. But if anything’s too far off message or strikes a wrong note with the supporters, you’re probably going to lose thumb, at least in the short term. I’m so glad you brought that up exactly whenever i’ve talked about content started, you know, a lot of people think like, oh that’s, just for websites and even this idea that content is only on a website and just like no like a tweet is content any you know, period it’s, certain pages, that’s, all content that’s why i get so excited about this top because i really feel like it has, you know, with the ability to bring everything together and it can get kind of as big as you want it to be. But that’s what that’s? Why it’s so cool? And the best organizations i’ve seen are the ones who are integrating every single channel into their content strategy and all just completely flows the same ethics the same style, same telling the same priorities and goals and audiences, they’re just really, really woven and deeply, inappropriately and it’s just like it’s cake. I love it. Brett katie knight a zai mentioned, talked about getting some allies early on and then maybe developing a mini project around some of their contents. Do you have? Any other ideas you want to add about trying to get this this team buy-in whether it’s in the early stage or or in the later stages, maybe some, maybe some departments are not as willing as others. What advice do you have there? Katie is absolutely right getting that early win always going to be important because then you’d demonstrate the success or what you can possibly achieve by having a written content strategy other than that getting that leadership buy-in early is it’s not just from the team that you’re assembling, that that’s going to be creating the content. Leadership really has to support this and understand the value they already understand the value, because we’ve been talking about branding at the non-profit technology conference for a long time, there’s a lot of companies who’ve been helping non-profits developed this brand, but the content that is sporting the brand has to be taken into account too. So it’s not a big step for leadership to take, from supporting the brand to supporting the content that is supporting the brand. Yeah, like there’s, so much overlap with just brand and content strategy is the time o que onda geun this all all flows from our mission statement, so that seems like the place to start. Katie and i did talk about that anything you want to add about that non-profits have a built in advantage. They don’t have to worry about what the for-profit companies do because everything should be coming out of their mission and their values when your values driven organization it’s much easier to develop content that has meaning than, say, one, a big company that wants to sell you shoes and thinks that a good way to do that is by showing people succeeding let’s, leave it there, all right? Brett meyer is content strategist with think shout and katie caress, director of online communications for the humane society legislative fund. Brett carry katy, thank you very much. Thinking having real pleasure. Thankyou. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of the non-profit technology conference twenty fifteen austin, texas, thanks so much for being with us next week. Gail perry returns. She was just on for god’s sake, but she’s so good i’m having her back, i’m going to drive to her home in raleigh, north carolina, on we’re going to do facebook live and periscope kapin what did britain, katie just say? Be multi-channel we’ll talk about subtle to the ass. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled, and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers, we be spelling dot com creative producer is quite my off. That lever, which is a line producer. Jenny mccardle is r e m and f m l reach director. To show social media is by susan chavez. And our music is by scott stein. You’re with me next week for not probably radio. Big non-profit ideas for the either ninety five percent go out and be great. What’s not to love about non-profit radio tony gets the best guests check this out from seth godin this’s the first revolution since tv nineteen fifty and henry ford nineteen twenty it’s the revolution of our lifetime here’s a smart, simple idea from craigslist founder craig newmark insights orn presentation or anything? People don’t really need the fancy stuff they need something which is simple and fast. When’s the best time to post on facebook facebook’s andrew noise nose at traffic is at an all time hyre on nine a m or eight pm so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful posts here’s aria finger, ceo of do something dot or ge young people are not going to be involved in social change if it’s boring and they don’t see the impact of what they’re doing so you got to make it fun applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to do if they have xbox, they have tv, they have their cell phones me dar is the founder of idealist took two or three years for foundation staff to sort of dane toe add an email address their card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is fired-up that’s why should i give it away? Charles best founded donors choose dot or ge somehow they’ve gotten in touch kind of off line as it were and and no two exchanges of brownies and visits and physical gift mark echo is the founder and ceo of eco enterprises. You may be wearing his hoodies and shirts. Tony talked to him. Yeah, you know, i just i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It sze, you know, tell you make people feel this is public radio host majora carter. Innovation is in the power of understanding that you don’t just put money on a situation expected to hell. You put money in a situation and invested and expect it to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sabiston. What separates those who achieve from those who do not is in direct proportion to one’s ability to ask others for help. The smartest experts and leading thinkers air on tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent.

Nonprofit Radio for August 19, 2016: Your Supercharged Board & Your Content Calendar

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d grow a foe set if i saw that you missed today’s show you’re supercharged board dolph goldberg reveals his wisdom for keeping engagement civil, revitalizing your board committees and making your board meetings effective. He’s, the author of the book successful non-profits build supercharged boards and you’re content calendar what belongs in it? Who do you need to help create it? How do you get the buy-in and how about resources to help you? Our can do content calendar committee from the non-profit technology conference is laura norvig from e t r james porter at the end fund-raising founder of non-profit marketing guide between those on tony’s take two solitude. We’re sponsored by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com and by we be spelling super cool spelling bee fundraisers. We be spelling dot com. I’m glad that dolph goldenburg is with me. He is managing director at the goldenburg group. Before consulting, he was executive director of an aids service organisation. In atlanta and an lgbt community center in philadelphia, he has more than a decade of fund-raising experience dafs company is at goldenburg group dot com dolph welcome. Thank you, tony it’s. Good to be on. And i have to give you a very you know, it’s, i’m not tryingto humble myself and, uh, you know, be in your in your pocket right away. But i have to apologize because, uh, when i first introduced the segment, i called you dolph goldberg, but that is not correct. Your name is dolph goldenburg. No worries at all of the common short shorthand for the name. Well, okay, well, but inappropriate shorthand. You you have it’s, like calling me martignetti. You know, there is that there is that syllable in the middle. So it’s, dolph goldenburg all right. And you were just recently married. Just last month. I wa sai wass after about ten years together, my husband and i decided to make it legal. So we had a very small wedding with just friends and family outstanding. And that was up in new england, right? That actually was indeed deep, deep south georgia. We’re going ok. Thie twin city metropolis twin. City of helena mcrae, georgia. Okay. I don’t know where i got northeast, but new england. But you are exactly opposite. A small town, georgia. Wonderful. Congratulations. Thank you. And congratulations on this book. Um, why, uh why do we need a book on supercharging boards? That’s. A great question. I have been an executive director for about a dozen years. And? And what i found is an executive director. Was that both my my work as a needy, but also the organization’s mission was was always either supported or made more difficulty because of the board. And what i found was that the time that i would invest in board development and the board would invest in its own development always paid strong reward. You have an interesting personal journey. Is tio how you came to write the book? I do. Actually, i i had been at a housing aid service organization gosh, for about almost five years or so and and realized that i was starting to have a midlife crisis. And so, unlike most people have a midlife crisis, i didn’t have an affair. I didn’t get a corvette. What i did do was i gave ten. Months notice that my job as an executive director and i planned an eight month long sabbatical and my my plan really on that sabbatical. Wass to think about what? What i had done well in my career what i had done poorly in my career and then really kind of put all of that down in terms of my lessons learned around board development and so through that door during that sabbatical, i sort of travel the world. I went to vietnam and cambodia for two months. I hiked around in peru for a month. I hide out west for a month. But between each of those trips, i would come back home. And i would work on this book, which, while it is very short, took, you know, about five or six months to write, and it has tend different zoho areas of topics of improvement for boards were only going to have to time to touch on three, maybe four depending how we go. But, you know, so the message is, you know, you gotta buy the book for the foot for the full ten. I love that message. Thank you. Thank you. All right, and and you’re you’re being very gracious there. I messed up your name. I got your wedding location wrong. We’re starting. I i can’t imagine interview it’s starting worse. But you’re being very kind and gracious, so we’ll get to it. It can only get much better now. Hopefully, i have more the facts, correct. You know, i feel like the interview’s going well, thank you. I do two. Absolutely. All right. Let’s get started. Rules of engagement. You want you want to seymour? Civility on boards? Yeah, and, you know, and and not just not just civility, stability is really important. But board have to sit down and say, what rules are we going to live? These are not the governing rules. These air, not the expectations that every boardmember should have, but they’re really you know, how are we going to interact with each other? What behavior is okay? And his not okay. And civility is a big part of that, you know? But you know, as some other examples we have all seen the boardmember who was the naysayers? Whatever comes up, they try to shoot it down and that’s not on ly unproductive for the board, but it’s also really unproductive for that individual boardmember because what ends up happening is if every time they open their mouth, people sort of roll their eyes. And they just tuned the naysayers. Yeah, this is the person loses credibility. But right now, how are we going to deal with this? Ah, this gadflies, this nay sayer. Well, so i believe that the first thing we do is we help the board developed its own rules of engagement. And so as an example, what would come out of that is, you know, being the naysayers is not okay. And once the board has generally come to alignment on that note, i did not say concensus, but actually come to alignment because, you know, if ninety percent of the board feels that way that’s probably what it should be. So, you know, so once the board has come to an alignment on, for example, may saying is not okay or, you know, or what happens in the meeting stays in the meeting, those types of things. Then when people move beyond that and kind of step outside of the rules of engagement, then the board chair or the governor’s chair can have a conversation with that person and really start to bring them back into alignment on the rules of engagement. Okay. And, of course, the naysayers air going toe may say that rule so on your your your point about alignment? Not not one hundred percent consensus, right? Right. We want to be prepared for the naysayers today. Say that they saying rule right? Yeah, i love the way you said. Okay, well, i spit it out fast. All right? I’ll tell you what, let’s, take our guy lily for a break. And dolph, of course, you and i are going to keep talking about the supercharged board, revitalizing committees and making meetings effective. So stay with us. You’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts a podcast for the chronicle of philanthropy fund-raising fundamentals is a quick ten minute burst of fund-raising insights published once a month. Tony’s guests are expert in crowdfunding, mobile giving event fund-raising direct mail and donor cultivation. Really all the fund-raising issues that make you wonder am i doing this right? Is there a better way there is? Find the fund-raising fundamentals archive it. Tony martignetti dot com that’s marketmesuite n e t t i remember there’s, a g before the end, thousands of listeners have subscribed on itunes. You can also learn maura, the chronicle website. Philanthropy dot com fund-raising fundamentals the better way. Welcome back to big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent adult let’s let’s hit a few more of these rules of engagement. Ah, i don’t want you don’t want this to sound like a battlefield plan or something, but but ah, in fact, your first one is the is the civility rule. So this the board meeting’s should not be a battlefield. All right, working through committees, we’re going. We’re going to talk a little about revitalising there shortly, but you gotta work through the structure, right? Right. So so one of the rules of engagement the board’s often come up with is if someone has a great idea the place to bring that is to the appropriate committee, not to the full board. And then you really let the committee deliberate on that idea developer recommending agent if it’s appropriate and bring that the full board because really, the full board just doesn’t have time to deal with all the good ideas that are percolating up. Is that it? Absolutely. The the work of a bored is done in its committees and one of the one of the things that i always kind of saying, this is sort of the committee math, if you will, is that if you have got five committees that meat between every board meeting for just ninety minutes, what that means is that committee dill deliberation is seven hours boardmember can’t be seven hours long, but when you have five committees each meeting for ninety minutes, you get more deliberation and you get better recommendations and decisions coming to the board. There also is an expectation that boardmember sze will prepare for committee and full board meetings. Absolutely, you know, nothing is more demoralizing both to senior staff and bored leadership, then for board members to show up having already received the meeting packet, but not having read the reports on these financials because then, really, what happens is the committee reports are just reading what they’ve already written what’s mohr has part of that expectation not also means there’s an expectation on the staff, and that expectation is that meeting packets go out with enough lead time that board members can actually review them. I swear i’ve been to board meetings where there are members opening their their packets for the first time, and, you know, they’re there cramming ten minutes. Before the board meeting is about to be called to order, right? And you know what those boardmember often don’t realize is that it is painfully obvious in the meeting who read the meeting minutes and the meeting packet and who did not read the meeting packet it is it comes out, you’re you’re gonna be you’re gonna be you’re gonna be exposed, you might not be called out, but it’s going to be obvious, right? All right. Um, confidentiality right way got to keep the organization’s promise is close to us, right? And it’s, not just confidentiality within, like, in terms of inside the organization’s. Obviously, what is said in the board meeting does not go outside of the organization, but it all does not go to other staff. So, you know, so any staff member not present in the board meeting should also not be privy to the deliberation of the board and one more that you have rules of engagement dahna whether you have authority to represent the organization, talk about that one, right? So, you know, so oftentimes they’re our board members, i shouldn’t think oftentimes sometimes there are board members who feel that they have the authority to speak on behalf of the organisation every now and then. In fact, when i started one, jobs and executive director someone to actually find a contract on behalf of the organization, they were not a boardmember they did not have the authority to do so, and we had to find a way to back out of that contract, you know? So they also do not have the authority to individually sign a contract unless the board has voted and given them that authority. Now all these rules should be adopted by the board, right? That’s what you were saying earlier, but right, right, but and i also think that the board should sit down and see and have a discussion and see if there’s other rules of engagement that are appropriate for them as a board and again to meet these air different from expectations, you know, you know, expectations are, you know, attendance personal giving expectations are a little bit higher level than rules of engagement, right? And that’s, another part of your book expectations, i just i feel like a lot of guests have covered those, but i’ve never seen you know, we haven’t talked. About rules of engagement and and some of these that you’re talking about, like the like the civility and the the the naysaying, the naysayers way have covered those before. So i like like, this whole this also area the book, and if i could say the civility is really a very positive way of saying no bomb throwers kind of like naysayers, we’ve all seen bomb throwers and board meetings and it’s it’s not effective for the board, you have any, uh, any and any bad stories you want to tell. Oh gosh, you know, i’ve only been permanent executive director of your organization, so i don’t want to get anybody in trouble by telling that story, but by telling a story, but but i will share with you that that i have seen one board where, at every single meeting, you know, this person was completely and totally negative, not just being in a sayer, but completely and totally negative about everything and, you know, was literally throwing, you know, little mini bombs into the meeting to kind of set up disagreements between other board members and then we just sit back and watch them fight for goodness. And obviously that someone who we had to move off the board, i should say, right, right, totally negative influence. Yeah. Okay. Um, let’s go teo to our committee structure, revitalizing committees. Why don’t you want to open this when our pal you want to start with with this kind of work, you know, one of the things that i said before that, you know, really ineffective board, a supercharged board does the vast majority of its work through committees, committees will always have a larger bandwidth and a deeper bench of expertise to deliberate on strategic issues that are facing an organization is part of that one of the things that i recommend is that every committee have an annual plan, so, you know, so they know what they’re responsible for that year. Ideally, they’ll have to read a four goals for the year, but then they also say, ok, if we’re gonna have, you know, six meetings every other month, meeting one we want to cover x meeting to we want to cover something else meeting three, so so that way they’re always moving the ball forward on these projects, but they’re they’re also making sure that what? They do is in alignment with the strategic plan and the organizational goals. You said it earlier. The work of the board is done through the committees. Right. Okay, so we need our committees to be effective and revitalized. As you say in the book, let’s, talk through some of the essential committees. Just in case people are not familiar with the work of the executive committee is so, you know, so often times. And let me say that some organizations have justin executive committee. Some organizations have just a governance committee, and some have both and there’s. And depending what the structure is, sometimes there’s some overlap between those two committees. But, you know, typically what the executive committee does, is it it sets the agenda for board meetings. It it liberates or makes decisions on behalf of the board between meetings when absolutely necessary, that should not happen on a regular basis. And then if there’s not a governance committee. Oftentimes the executive committee is also responsible for enforcing expectations, you know, ensuring the committee’s air meeting on a timely manner, ensuring that conflicts of interest are disclosed and deliberated and voted on by the full board. But if there is a governance committee that typically goes to the governing committee now, just like the committee’s air setting ah plan for the year is the executive committee setting up a board plan for the year? Absolutely, you know, ideally in its first month of the year, the new executive committee wants to sit down and think about what the strategic plans goals are for the year, determine which committees can help drive those goals forward and then and then work with those committees. They developed their annual plan as well. Now off. And i think also a part of that, and this is going to bleed over a little bit latto making meetings effective. The executive committee also needs to figure out what the organization’s calendar is, including the board calendar, and make sure that that is in the plan as well. The all the committee chairs sit on the executive committee, right? And it depends for some organizations. Every committee chair sits on the executive committee and other organizations. That’s, just the officers and, you know, again, to a great extent, it probably depends whether there’s a separate governance committee or not. Okay. Okay, so it’s so. Meaning, if you have a separate governance committee, then what? You, you don’t need all the committee chairs on the board, on the executive committee. So, you know, so, so if you’ve got a separate governance committee, then you might actually want all of the committee chairs on your executive committee, because because then what they’re doing, they’re setting the agenda, and and they’re doing sort of, like, very high level board work. But if there’s, not a governance committee and the executive committee, is also responsible for enforcing expectations, ensuring disclosure of conflicts of interest, you know, those those legal obligations that every board needs to be taken care of? You probably want a smaller group of people working on that, okay, so strike three for me, it’s a good thing. I’m the host of this show because i misread that one, too, okay, sorry here, all right. Yeah. It’s a good thing. I’m in charge of the show. All right, let’s. See what else? Another committee finance. And i was finance. Is this the same as the investment committee on a lot of boards krauz investment? Yeah. So? So a lot of aa lot of boards called the finance committee, the finance and investment committee. Some board called the finance an audit committee, but, you know, but typically, especially in the smaller organizations, the finance committee ends up being responsible for the audit, for investments and everything that falls underneath it. Okay. And, of course, a lot more detail in the book. You gotta you just gotta get the book. I’m going to say successful non-profits build supercharged boards. Now the committees that we have they are they’re all supposed to be meeting in advance of full board meetings, right? You i think you recommend a couple of weeks before, right? Right. So in the in the ideal world between every board meeting, all of the committee’s need as well, because every committee is in some way responsible for goals in the strategic plan and it’s helping to drive that forward. So if the committee’s air not doing their work between board meetings, the board meetings are just honestly, no, do not do not move the organization forward is not all right, let’s talk about the fund-raising or development committee what’s your advice there. So, you know, in terms of the fundraising committee, i think it is absolutely critical that and again, this is often for small and medium sized organizations that either have did either have limited or or no fund-raising staff, it is absolutely critical that they start their year looking at actual fund-raising strategies from the prior year determining what was effective, what isn’t, or going, what, as a committee and an organization they want to do again in the coming year and, you know, and i also think it’s it is essential that the fundraising committee have a voice and what the board give get is going to be they don’t ultimately have the decision, but they should have a voice in that on that that goes over to one of the expectations of board board e-giving right, okay, right now, each of these committees needs to have a staff liaison. This is this is going to get a little staff intensive, i am i? I am all about every committee should have a staff liaison. And and really, the role of that staff person is not to run the committee, but it is to help keep the committee on track. And so, as an example of the staff liaison, would help the chair buy-in putting together an agenda and sometimes that’s a friendly reminder sometimes it’s being pleasantly persistent, which is a nice way to say kind of nag, but, you know, but to make sure that the chair puts together an agenda and that it goes out to arrange all logistics for the meeting, so is a room reserved. You know, if you normally have iced tea at your meetings is they’re iced tea there to make sure that the agenda is sent to all of the committee members before the meeting, along with any other information that they’re supposed to review. And then finally, in the ideal world, your staff liaison also takes minutes at the meeting and then send those to the chair of the committee to review and approved before they get sent out. What about the executive committee? Is the ceo or executive director? They have a staff liaison to the executive committee. So in really small, non-profits, you know, so organizations that might only have two or three staff members, yeah, than absolute. The executive director end up serving as the staff liaison in a medium sized organization where the where the ceo or executive director has an executive assistant themselves. They might task the executive assistant with that. Okay. All right, that’s, the that’s, the well we should. We should talk on touch on that that there might be a program committees also that based on your you all your programmatic work, right? And the tough thing with program committees, especially when when the organization has staff, is to ensure that the program committees are operating at a strategic level and not an operational level, and to make sure that the committee really understands what their role is in that respect. And so on example, that i that i often give is, you know, whether whether program operates from seven thirty to three, thirty or eight to four is probably a staff decision. You know where as whether or not a program measures its outcomes is a strategic decision. Okay, right. We don’t want our board meddling in the day to day operations hiring, hiring and supplies and mundane things like that that are taking away from the boards much higher and much more strategic purpose. Right? Okay. All right. Let’s. Look att effective meetings now you talked about the agenda is the importance of agendas. Anything more you want to say about about how important those are? Oh. Absolutely so to me, the real point of putting together an agenda is not just to tell everyone that’s going to be in the meeting, what will happen at the meeting, but it also forces the act of putting together an agenda forces the person leading the meeting to really think through what their goals are for that meeting and to make sure that what happened in the meeting supports those gold. I like your suggestion of putting time limits on each agenda item. I do that when i for the few meetings that i that i conduct usually i’m sitting in them, but i’m not leading them, but when i do, i like to put the time limits so everybody sees it in black and white, and i don’t know how you feel about this. I appoint a timekeeper so it’s it’s somebody different than me? I’m paying attention to the substance of the meeting and the flow, but not the exact timing. Absolutely. I always believe there should be a timekeeper in the ideal world, someone different from the person running the meeting, but the other thing on time and this is something that i’m really adamant about. Especially when there’s a call an option or if or if it’s an entire, you know, teleconference meeting is the meeting has to start on time, so, you know, so even if you don’t have a core on well, you go ahead and you get started when we when we delay the start of a meeting, what we’re really doing this, we’re punishing the people that showed up on time, and we’re rewarding the people who did not show up my welcome. What can we do without what could we do without a quorum, though? Well, so so there’s some things you could do, like, obviously you can’t take votes, but you can start to have some of those strategic discussions. So, you know, so anything that is a report out or just a strategic discussion you can still do without a quorum. You can’t take any votes without a quorum, but you can, you know, but you can have those discussions, okay? And, um, i also think that from from day one, your first meeting, you tell people it’s going to start on time and then you actually do start on time and the late comers they’re going to get the message from meetings too and forward, right, and and also share with you, especially again when there’s a call an option or if the meeting is entirely by phone. You know, i am all about the meeting starts on time, but also late comers. You hear the ding. But we don’t stop the meeting to reintroduce you, to tell you who is present, to tell you what we have already done because otherwise will interrupt the meeting three or four times. So the way i tended when i run those meetings, the way i tend to ask people calling into phone conferences late is to wait until they have something to say in a conversation, and then they introduce themselves. And so for example, they would say, this is dalton, and i want to add, and then they would essentially say they’re comment. Okay, okay, we just have a minute before we have to before we have to wrap it up and let’s leave people with the the importance of minutes in our minute. I’m starting the importance of the minutes, the committee, and it went on the board minutes, you know, so the minutes are the official record of what the committee has done, as well as what the board is done. And, you know, in the ideal world, someone from the outside should be able to read those minutes and have a good sense of the official action of the organization, as well as its goals and issues that it is working on resolving outstanding. We’re gonna leave it there. Dolph the book, thank you, my pleasure. The book is successful. Non-profits build supercharged boards, get the book there’s so much more in it than we could cover here on non-profit radio, i thank you very much. Thank you, your content calendar coming up. First, pursuant, you know who these people are? They have developed tools that help small and midsize non-profits raise the money raised the money that you need to raise falik prospector and velocity. You know, i talk about thes time after time because they’re helpful, and they’re perfect for our audience, even the velocity tool, which was developed for their internal consultants pursuing consultants, running campaigns for their clients. Well, you could get the tool without the without the consultant and that when his velocity and prospector, one that helps you manage time against goal full dashboard keeping you on task day after day, week after week toward that campaign goal, check out these tools at pursuant dot com and we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit fund-raising this is not the spelling bee you grew up with, probably because they bring in stand up comedy, there’s, dance, there’s, booze, there’s, live music. And somewhere in there, the squeezing a spelling bee and fund-raising and not just fund-raising that night, but fund-raising in advance. So it’s ah, i love this because it’s just unusual fund-raising model i haven’t seen spelling bees for fund-raising i got knocked out of a spelling. Bee once on the word lettuce, can you believe it? Let us because spelling bees i don’t know if they’re this formal, but the ones i was in you couldn’t make a mistake and i went, i said, l u e t you see, but it’s too late. I had made the mistake. You’re out out on the word lettuce killed me and the winner of that spelling bee one on aeronautics hyre like i could’ve had the whole thing, but i choked on lettuce. Ever since then i’ve only eating kale. All right, check him out. We be spelling dot com and b is b e now, time for tony’s. Take two solitude. This is important for you because you work in a giving profession. You’re even if you’re back office, you know that your office is giving. Your organization is giving its saving lives. It’s, it’s changing the world. This is this is draining, exhausting work. And you have to take time for yourself. So i strongly suggest. And i hope you did this summer. Or you will as the summer comes to a close. Get time alone. Unconnected. No phones, no text, no e mail disconnected. No. Instagram no snapchat get away and i urge you ah, a little a little jovially in my video this week, it is way beyond typical weekly videos. This one even has a cast and crew. So we need to check out my solitude video. No, a solitude with a cast at tony martignetti dot com. And that is tony’s take two leinheiser love. They will do it a little concisely this time live love going out to everybody. Who’s listening. Now, at this moment you know who you are. You know where you are. The live love goes out. It goes out every single week. Whether alive or pre recorded, the live love goes out. What follows that it’s the podcast pleasantries. I am so grateful for all the tens of that tens. Ten thousand over ten thousand not quite tens of thousands, but the over ten thousand listeners listening in that time shift whatever device, whatever time, whatever activity you are engaged in pleasantries to you and likewise affections to our am and fm affiliate listeners throughout the country, from upstate new york and outside philadelphia in lancaster county to washington and oregon and california and points in between. Affections to our affiliate listeners on the am and fm stations here’s, a panel from ntcdinosaur, and we talked about your content calendar. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference were in san jose, california, at the convention center, and this is also part of ntc conversations, my guests, now our laura norvig, james porter and heavy larue miller going to meet them very shortly. First, i have to shout out the inten thie ntc swag item for this interview is popcorn from microsoft, microsoft popcorn, and i have it from our production assistant, anna hannah who’s. Excellent, that this is very good popcorn. Great. We’re gonna add this to the swag pile carefully. Of course, they don’t want it disseminated across the pile and making everything oily, but i will take a couple pieces for myself. Microsoft popcorn okay. See, the closest to me is laura norvig she is a digital media strategist at tr james porter is associate director for external relations at the end. Fund-raising clolery miller is a founder, the founder of non-profit marketing guide, which is that non-profit marketing guy dot com laura james e-giving welcome, thank you. Thank you telling e-giving welcome back. Absolutely good, thank you. Content calendars and you creating communications harmony. That is your seminar topic. Uh, let’s start the star in the middle. James, what do you think? Non-profits they’re not getting quite right could do better about content calendars or maybe even just having one? I don’t know, right? Yeah, well, it starts off with just having one, but i think a lot of the the problems stem from first of all, not knowing what you want or what you need. There are a lot of tools out there and so is something that i wanted to get across. Was that you, khun? Try things and if they don’t work that’s okay, but i think one of the biggest problems is just not not realizing what you need and what what you want. And if you need something from or long term planning. You need something for data. The project management. Do you need a tool? That’s going to be everything? Or do you just need to fill in gaps with some of your existing tools? There’s a whole host of other problems. But i think step one is just really trying to figure out what you want and what your organization needs are. Okay, laura, anything you want to add at this overviewing point? Well, i know sometimes people struggle with as james said, trying to make your calendar maybe do too much and you wantto keep it simple. One of the other things people experience is getting people to actually use the calendar, so keeping it simple can help. Okay. Okay, kivi, anything for us to get us started kick us off. I think people know they need to plan, but then they don’t have time to plan, and so they run around and don’t feel strategic field too busy feel like they’re too many priorities. But then they don’t give themself a chance to stop and think. And the editorial calendar really is a way to stop and think and be more strategic. Okay, on the editorial calendar is the same, but it’s our can’t content calendar, right? Something okay, um all right, so let’s, let’s, uh, let’s get started with what should be in one? I don’t know e-giving you want to kick us off? What some ideas? What? Sharing your content calendar. So in order for it to be an editor of calendar there three pieces one is the communications channels you’re sending out your content in the second piece is the timing behind that when things are going out and the third piece is the messaging what you’re actually talking about so it’s, what you’re talking about when you’re talking about it and in which communication channels, you have to have those three things or in my mind, it’s, not an editorial calendar. Okay, james, you’re doing a lot of nodding. Yeah, i would also add to that that it’s important to also have who is responsible and who is the driver for these things and for for our content calendar anyway, because if you have a lot of people using it, you need to know who to go to jazz questions about that item who’s going to be in charge of posting. It so i think it’s also important to have that, and then i i also would add that making sure somewhere maybe it’s, not in your exact tool, but we’d like to put it in our tool is to also include your audience so that, you know, for each item in your editorial calendar who the audience is going to be, that that’s the right who the messages that particular messages for yeah, but to be very specific about it. And so we you could even do it, split it out by channels so that if you have different audiences on different channels, but the for me that it’s very important to be specific about the audience. Okay, okay, laura, anything you’d like to add about what belongs in our calendar. I think those are pretty much the basics. And then, uh, we sometimes layer on top the pushing out to social and so you could use your calendar as a tool to track so again the channels. But yeah, tracking them twitter and facebook, as well as a block poster newsletter. Okay, okay, very good. What? Yeah. So? So where were you? We’re developing a calendar. That’s got that gun, each message or each campaign? I mean, does it have has our campaigns that also has messages within the campaign? Is it? Is it that granular? I think that’s going to depend on your organization. You know, whether that’s the way you messages through a long campaign and that’s, one of the things we talked about was the long term planning. You can stretch the campaign out over time, but not that’s not gonna fit all or yeah. Okay. Yeah. And i would just add that for us, it does include every message. So for example, we had campaigner on giving tuesday. That was a video campaign, and we had a different video being pushed out every day. And so each one of those messages was individually posted on the editorial calendar. Along with what channel they were being pushed out through every day. For how long? How long before giving tuesday did you start this? There were five. There were five videos, and then the whole campaign we started when you got a tease, it let people know things were coming, so yeah, it was about about a week in total for the campaign. Okay. All right. Anything else you want to say about what belongs? What that covers it. Okay. I like the idea of making sure somebody’s responsible for each each item, right? You gotta know who to talk to without responsibility. This calendar is not goingto not going to get accomplished. Yeah, we actually go to the level of kind of the process planning. So not only who’s maybe writing a block post. Who’s got snusz edited who’s going to copy, edit it. Who’s goingto posted who? You know. So, dan, are you? There were a lot of non-profits that only had one person in their communications department. However, so in that kind of situation, you know, you don’t need to write your name on every single box, right? Well, that could be a message for the ceo. That’s i like that. Look at all this. My name is next on all this and expect me to achieve this. All right? Uh, who was involved in adopting this this calendar? Because we need to have make make sure that the organization is going to accept it. It’s going to buy-in, but they need to be a part of the process. I would think that makes it a lot easier to have them accepted, so give you let’s start with you had around, we start to get this thing well, at what stage we bring others in, right? So i think it is going very from organization to organization and then session. We did talk a lot about getting buy-in from program staff because they’re often the source of the content that’s where the really good stories come from and getting there buy-in as content creators really seeing themselves as communicators is really important, but then it’s also important to get the executive team involved because they’re the ones that really need to set the strategy for the messaging and lots of times there’s a lot of conflicting priorities, too many priorities, too much going on, really a lot of mixed messaging and in those situations it’s really up to the management team to provide some direction. But you know, those air, those air, often times for communications, director’s relationships that have to be built over time. And so i always urge a communications department to just do it, do it themselves. Do it to manage their own workload. And then hopefully over time, you’re really making it a much more organization wide tool. Okay, how does it work within your organizations? Get getting the organizational buy-in yeah, yeah, i would just say that i think you khun get people’s opinions, but it really matters the most of the people who are going to be using it the most on the day to day, those people have to be the most comfortable with it and really be the most okay with it. So, yeah, it is important to get by and from other people, but it it could also be a problem when you have an existing tool that is there already. And you have a new staff coming in and the new staff say, ok, this tool doesn’t actually work for me. So it was something that i mentioned in the session that i thought was important. Wass that to do periodic check ins. And maybe every six months, you kind of a gut check and ask the staff are using the tool. Is this tool still working for us? Do we need to add anything to it? Do we need? To consider changing it because just because you’re using it doesn’t mean it’s working. So i think it is also important to have kind of periodic check ins to make sure that it’s doing what you needed to do, okay, get laura has that work in europe? Well, that yeah, that’s one of the things we talked about in the session was was not being afraid to change your tool if it’s just not working in sometimes that’s a little hard to dio, as i was saying, we work in an orgy where sharepoint is kind of designated bi i ity but it really wasn’t working for us, so i did have a small enough content team that we just kind of went rogue, and and we’re using our own solution with trey lo and yeah, yeah, any other online resource is that you want to share for creation of your of your editorial calendar, a valuable patrol? Oh, fan myself. I’ve also used a base camp before they base camp base camp base camp has been useful and something i mentioned the session to was that i thought it was useful to for me anyway. Tohave in one place. Both a project management software and a content countering which trailer could do as well? It’s a certain degrees, you know, but and it starts getting messy when you have lots of systems and lots of tools, so the more you can integrate things or just have one tool that could do most things. There’s, no one to look and do all but that’s. Why i like to i like to base camp for having the project management and also a more robust calendar. I’ve seen a lot of organizations use google calendars very successfully because you can layer them what you can do with sharepoint too. But it but there could be so you could have separate calendars. But then you can have a view where there rolled up and you can see all of the calendar’s together. So maybe you have, you know, one of your silos if you have a siloed organization development or something and maybe program staff and they’re each working on their own calendar with either ideas or post there actually writing and then the editorial staff could see them both together. Get a bigger picture. Okay, xero the conflict points right cd you. Have too much content, too little. Yeah. Okay. All right. Where else should we go with with our content calendar? You know, we have ah, good. Another ten minutes or so together. What? What else should we be talking about? Well, i definitely think in this session, the buy-in was still a big issue. I don’t know give me waited like audience members were having trouble with having getting buy-in yeah, what? I think that was a big one, as well as the too many priorities and not enough strategy. So, you know, i really encourage people to just do it themselves if they’re not getting direction on what the limited number of messages should be or what the strategy really is. I say go ahead and you decide is the communications director and believe me, you’ll get feedback if you do something, they didn’t like it but it’s better to go ahead and provide some of that internal leadership from sort of managing from the middle, then to keep kind of floundering around. Yeah, and i think it also can be very tempting to say, okay, we have this editorial calendar, um and that’s our strategy, but it’s it’s not having editorial calendar isn’t a strategy and of itself, so we did talk about long term planning and needing that strategy, so the editorial counter needs to be informed by a strategy, but i think you can fall into the trap that you have the editorial counter, you’ve put everything on it, but then you forget about the strategy, okay, it’s, when you go over and you do the strategy and it doesn’t match with your editorial caldnear calendar, i think that was that was a problem that that came up in, that those two things don’t planning and strategy aren’t always hand in hand, and i would also just add that there was a fair amount of angst in the room about people feeling like planning than miree resulted in this rigid system that they couldn’t then produce any timely content within on. So, you know, what i always tell people is, you know, practice the rule of thirds, so a third of the calendar should be original curated content. Another third is you repurpose ing your original and curated content, and then you leave a third of your calendar open because, you know, stuff is going to come up, you may not know what it is, but something’s going to come up, so don’t over plan, but make sure you do have strategy built into that original content in that third in the in the repurpose content in that second, third, ok, yeah, that’s, really important. So i used to work for the international rescue committee, and they deal with man made and nature made disasters. And so you always needed to have that flexibility in your calendar. So even if it was a big women’s themed campaign in the spring that you have been planning for six months, you need to be able to have a little bit of room within that messaging to be flexible. If a tsunami happens or an earthquake happens or, you know, there’s, famine somewhere you need to be able to quickly pivot. Teo needs that. You need to react you right away without jeopardising everything else that you’re trying to get accomplished and a good content calendar. As katie said, we’ll leave room for those things. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from stand up comedy tv spots and exclusive interviews catch guests like seth gordon. Craig newmark, the founder of craigslist marquis of eco enterprises, charles best from donors choose dot org’s aria finger, do something that worked neo-sage levine from new york universities heimans center on philantech tony tweets to he finds the best content from the most knowledgeable, interesting people in and around non-profit to share on his stream. If you have valuable info, he wants to re tweet you during the show. 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I’m christine cronin, president of n y charities dot orc. You’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. How do you deal with the case? Where you’ve you’ve got your calendar on dh? The organization is not respecting it. Maybe i don’t know if this is just the buy-in but, you know, other other other teams are saying no, no, no, i need this now, you know, or or some some something comes up from above that comes down from above that is now impinge ing on your ability to keep up with your own calendar, you know? But you respected my calendar when i showed it to you six months ago, and now you’re ignoring it for this other administrative thing or for this program problem or this fund-raising problem. But what you you dissing my calendar? What? What do we do? Stop dissing might stop beating up my calendar. Whatever you do, laura. What? Teo? Well, i think one of the things we talked about was showing people the process of what it really takes to roll out communications to kind of push back on that last minute. Itis because there is a process and it needs to be followed. So unless it’s an emergency coming directly from the ceo, you know, like step off, i can’t make that a priority now waken talk later. I mean it’s a process of education. So gotta make yourself heard. Yeah, i would agree with that. I think the mohr outside players can understand how much times something takes, how much time it takes it posa blogged, or to edit a photo or something that they the constant calendar maybe doesn’t do a great job of articulating that. Like how much lead time you need? Sure, it doesn’t get x product up, so it might be very tempting to say oh, well, you’ve got this big, you know, forge a hole between item one and item to let me put something between those two. And no, i need those four days to get item to done. So i think the education that you have to be able to say no and i need the four days i cannot do that. Otherwise item two will get done. So i think content calendars are not good at that. So that’s where the education piece comes. And james, you also talked about reinforcing it in face to face meeting. So if you have, like, a regular staff meeting where you khun very quickly go over the calendar, then it’s it’s going to start to become more clear. Okay, make it public office. Oh, yeah, we we go over. So we have ah, communications meeting once a week. And as part of that meeting, we review the content calendar with somebody from our program’s staff is balls that they’re aware of what’s going on? Sometimes you do need to check what’s in the plan right now. So i think in those situations, you just need to be very clear and articulating the trade off. So if you’re going to bump something, you’ve been planning for something that’s more timely. You need to actually say hay. We’re bumping this thing way, rescheduling it. Or are we completely throwing the work out? There’s an implication here? All right. And there is no plan for this reason, right? There was a purpose for this. And this is what is not now going to be fulfilled. Right? And sometimes you can use it later. You know, if it’s more sort of evergreen in nature, you just bump it down a month. Other times, you know, it’s lost work. But those were strategic decisions that you have to make and that’s where again, having some executive understanding of the communication strategy is important to help the communications team really make good decisions in those situations because they do come up all the time. All right, when are our boundaries respected? Right? Yes. Like i said, stop dissing my calendar. All right, so you guys spent the you all spent a lot of time, uh, in your session. What more should we be talking about? We’ve got another, like, four minutes for five minutes. What else? Whatever we talked about or what more detail maybe about something we we didn’t cover in sufficient detail. Come on. How’d you do ninety minutes together? What would you do for ninety minutes? Well, we turned it back on the audience quite a bit and had them tell us more about what the challenge is, where they were facing so and then you want share some of those challenges that we haven’t talked about? Yeah, short for detail going. You know what? One of the one of the challenges was also just time straight up. We don’t have enough time. So something that can can happen with a constant calendar, which i mentioned. When i was talking with then you have to schedule into your schedule the time to put things on the content calendars, it becomes another task on your list, you know, there’s another half hour of my time when especially for non-profits i don’t have a huge communications staff, it almost seems like it’s, just another thing that you have to do and there’s only two of you and you need to get everything else done. Anyway, i was thinking even just one yeah, i know we had a lot of people we did a little poland said, how many of you are our team of one? And you’re like a third? Yeah, of people who are just by themselves on, and so i think time was a big thing, but but i think that it content calendar can actually give you back some time, because if you’re it helps you plan longer term, if you’re going to use it that way, and so you, then you don’t have to constantly be thinking, well, what am i turning out next week? What am i posting on facebook on friday? Because of, you know already you’ve already done it, so yeah. It can it can take time to do, but it can also make you use your very precious time better than you would without it. All right, so you think it’s worth doing it for the one person short? I think it’s worth it for the one person shot because it just kind of keeps you accountable for what you’re doing rather than every day saying what my posting today, you know, one of the things i shared was that i originally used to do a lot of winging it, and i had a certain kind of a siri’s of facebook posts that i wanted to do, and every monday i was sitting down and thinking of one, and then when i kind of laid it out in a spreadsheet is like, you know what? I can plan like ten of these and schedule them in advance, and now i don’t have to think about it again, so thinking ahead in a calendar kind of way, actually, it did end up saving me time. Good is it worth if you don’t feel you can put every you know, every facebook post into account encounter having you’re bigger, you’re bigger items. All right, we know there’s gonna be a press release required for this announcement, and we know there’s going to be something coming out of the board of trustees meeting and this month, you know, so maybe just putting the biggest items there, you know, maybe not the day to day at least you got something down, right? You got a framework give me to work from yeah, so like a lot of people will just do their block post in their email, assuming that they’re going to repurpose all that into social and so they don’t talk about every single thing they’re going to talk about on facebook same thing with video that tends to be a little more production heavy, and so you’re doing video. You kinda want to treat that almost like a block post in terms of the production schedule to give yourself the time to do it, but you’re right, there’s bigger chunks of content are usually what goes on the calendar, and then a lot of people just sort of in their daily work process. No, that that’s going to go out on facebook or twitter, what other social channels are using? Okay, all right, laura, why don’t you wrap us up with final motivation? Why this is worth doing well, it’s going to help you see the big picture and it’s going to help you navigate your daily to do list a cz well and i think it’s just going to keep you more confident that you’re staying on task and hitting the themes you want to hit for your communications. Okay, thank you very much. Laura. James givi. Thankyou. Thankyou. Tony there. Lord norvig, digital media strategist that e t r james porter, associate director of external relations at the end fund-raising guide and also author and you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc thank you so much for being with us next week. Design on a budget and communications mythbusters. If you missed any part of today’s show, i beseech you, find it on tony martignetti dot com responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled pursuant dot com and by we be spelling supercool spelling bee fundraisers, we be spelling dot com. Our creative producer was claire buyer off sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez. And as music is by scott stein. Be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. 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