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Nonprofit Radio for August 16, 2021: Virtual Events & Design For Non-Designers

My Guests:

Evan Briggs & Gwenn Cagann: Virtual Events

Evan Briggs and Gwenn Cagann share their lessons from 25 virtual galas, which include takeaways for your next hybrid event. They’re both with Wingo NYC.

 

 

 

 

Josh Riman & Mike Yamagata: Design For Non-Designers

Wrapping up our 21NTC coverage, it’s a crash course in good design, covering fundamentals like color, type and hierarchy. Step outside your comfort zone with Josh Riman and Mike Yamagata, both from Great Believer.

 

 

 

 

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[00:00:10.74] spk_5:
Hello and welcome to tony-martignetti

[00:00:13.06] spk_4:
non profit

[00:02:17.44] spk_1:
Radio big non profit ideas for the other 95%. I’m your aptly named host of your favorite abdominal podcast. Oh and I’m glad you’re with me. I’d get slapped with a diagnosis of interception if you blocked me up with the idea that you missed this week’s show virtual events. Evan Briggs and Gwen Sagen share their lessons from 25 virtual galas which include takeaways for your next hybrid event. They’re both with wing go N.Y.C. and designed for non designers Wrapping up our 21 NTC coverage. It’s a crash course in good design covering fundamentals like colour type and hierarchy. Step outside your comfort zone with josh, Lyman and Mike Yamagata, both are from great believer. This week’s conversations are from 21 NTC and they wrap up our coverage of the conference and tony state too, sharing really is caring. We’re sponsored by turn to communications pr and content for nonprofits. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot C O and by sending blue the only all in one digital marketing platform empowering non profits to grow. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant in Blue. Let’s get started. Here is virtual events. Welcome to Tony-Martignetti non profit radio coverage of 21 NTC, you know what that is. It’s the 2021 nonprofit technology conference. We’re sponsored at 21 NTC by turn to communications Turn hyphen two dot C o with me now from wingO N.Y.C. our Evan Briggs and Gwen Sagen Evan is digital fundraising and client engagement manager and Gwen is director of special events fundraising. Welcome Evan. Welcome, Gwen.

[00:02:23.64] spk_2:
Thank you. My

[00:02:25.41] spk_1:
pleasure. Uh, why doesn’t one of you? Uh, well, I’ll pick otherwise everybody was so polite. You work together and nobody will talk and then I’ll end up having to pick anyway, So, Gwen, uh, since you’re both from window N.Y.C. why don’t you acquaint us what lingo does.

[00:03:00.44] spk_2:
Thank you. Wingo is a small fundraising communications and design firm. Um, we have and call ourselves a boutique because we’re so small. We’re 12 people and we specialize in working with nonprofit clients, although we do have some corporate clients, but nonprofit clients that work in the social justice sector. Um and that’s probably about 70% of what we do and the remaining 30% or arts and conservancies and we help nonprofits with their individual giving and major donor fundraising and their special events.

[00:03:14.34] spk_1:
All right. And we’re gonna talk about special events. Um are where are each of you in each of you? In N.Y.C.

[00:03:21.94] spk_4:
I am in new york city.

[00:03:23.84] spk_1:
Okay. Where where what

[00:03:25.64] spk_4:
part? Um in Manhattan Health kitchen specifically.

[00:03:28.26] spk_1:
Alright, 9th and 10th of

[00:03:30.39] spk_4:
What? In between 9th and 10th on 49,

[00:03:52.14] spk_1:
Lot of good restaurants. Uh, 9th of from like 43rd and 44th up to like 55th or so, roughly 50, maybe 53. Some a lot Outstanding restaurants all along, 95. I’m envious of your food choices. There’s everything from Afghan. The Zimbabwe is on 9th. I think there was like 10, 12 blocks or so.

[00:03:58.44] spk_4:
Yeah, exactly. And it’s like almost feels like europe now with all the outdoor dining, they’ve completely shut down some streets and it’s just quite lovely.

[00:04:07.40] spk_1:
Right, right, so not ninth that they didn’t close. 9th of though, have they?

[00:04:11.10] spk_4:
Not 9th at but the side streets

[00:04:20.84] spk_1:
that go off of it. Right, right. We need folks need ninth, they have to get to haunt tunnel every day, Lincoln Lincoln, I should say in your neighborhood Lincoln tunnel every day. Gwen all right, so gwen, you’re an outlier, you’re not an N.Y.C. Where are you?

[00:04:24.94] spk_2:
Um I am actually, although I, when I’m in the city, you know pre pandemic in Boerum Hill Brooklyn. Um and right now though I’m writing out the pandemic in Jackson Wyoming, we have a small family place out here and I came out for a week vacation when things went isolated and haven’t left.

[00:04:44.94] spk_1:
Yeah, the week vacation that, that hasn’t ended yet in over

[00:04:47.72] spk_2:
a year in the great outdoors.

[00:04:49.84] spk_1:
Yeah, cool. So your window, your window Wyoming?

[00:04:52.84] spk_2:
Exactly and we have a window India to right now one of our graphic designers is based in India where she was writing about the pandemic and so we’re worldwide.

[00:05:06.84] spk_1:
Okay, that’s strictly N.Y.C. alright, your Boerum Hill. So you live in Boerum Hill. Yeah. Remember the park slope food co op by any chance

[00:05:13.62] spk_2:
know, but a couple of my colleagues are half of us live in Brooklyn and yeah, so I know it’s changed a lot during the pandemic with the work hours and such, but what a great place.

[00:05:57.74] spk_1:
It is a great place and I’m still a member. I live on the beach in north Carolina. I’m still a member of park slope food go up. Uh you know, they suspended the, they suspended the work requirements for the whole year. Now, they’re just slowly getting back into the member work requirement, but it’s optional for several months. And you know, I don’t know when I’ll be back up, but uh I maintain my membership in the go up because before that you could bank your shift, you could do, you could work a bunch of months. Uh you could work a bunch of shifts like in a week or even in a months and have them for subsequent months for many, many months. So I never lived

[00:05:58.31] spk_3:
in a community.

[00:06:27.74] spk_1:
It’s a great, it is great community park slope food co op shout out. I’m gonna be one of the most distant members. I mean north Carolina, you know, it’s not, it’s not easy to get there, but it’s, I keep my membership, it’s still worth it. All right, so we should be talking about your N.Y.C. you’re not your window N.Y.C. topic, you’re 21 ntc topic, which is a virtual events for the masses inclusive and interactive gatherings, Evan, what what is this all about? You’ve got uh you did like window did like 25 virtual galas in 2020. What you’ve got lessons for us.

[00:07:21.34] spk_4:
Yeah, we um, we quickly pivoted to uh throwing virtual events for our clients. A big part of our business, pre pandemic was was in person events, big Gallas and even smaller donors cultivation events and our firm learned quickly how to transform that experience into a virtual experience. Um, and we’ve had great success and continue to have great success um, with the, with the virtual events. Um you know, we create a space virtually on a platform where folks can gather and interact and have a really sort of intimate moment with, with the charity and we’ve found that fundraising has met or exceeded all of our, all of our goals um, for each of our clients and yeah, it’s, it’s something that we think is here to stay and you know,

[00:07:31.69] spk_1:
why is that why are virtual events going to continue when we can return safely to in person events?

[00:07:37.84] spk_4:
Um, I think people just learned that there’s, there’s so much benefit to having a virtual event. Um

[00:07:43.63] spk_1:
you know,

[00:07:44.32] spk_4:
one of the most obvious reasons is that so many people can, can gather

[00:07:47.87] spk_5:
um from

[00:08:17.54] spk_4:
all over the world and you know, the, we suggested to all of our clients that they make these events free to join um and then still offer sponsorships and other ways to donate. One of the big moments that we always have in each of our virtual events is what we call our live ask. So there’s still a moment where, you know, at a typical gala, there’d be a paddle raise or live auction. We’ve adapted that to a virtual moment and you still feel that energy and get to, uh, you know, have a night of successful fundraising with, you know, sometimes up to 1000 people, sometimes more.

[00:08:48.94] spk_1:
Okay, Alright. So remaining remaining relevant virtual events and uh, so I gather you have a bunch of, a bunch of ideas, like some new, I don’t know, maybe their new best practices or tips tools, strategies for successful virtual events. Is that, is that right? You’re gonna share a bunch of what you learned, how we’re going to bring in some, uh, inclusivity as well. Do I have that?

[00:10:17.94] spk_2:
Yeah, I’ll jump in here. I mean, you know, add on to what Evan said, um, that inclusivity by making it open to a broader range of people, not only your major donors that could afford that $500,000 dinner ticket when we were in person, but also everyone staff clients, People that benefit from the work of the non profit organization, really just reinforce all the positive things about your organization’s community. So the major donors feel great because they’re actually getting to interact with, as I said, some of the people that are benefiting from the programs and you know, it hits home in a really different way. You also get to grow your list. So all of those and we’re saying that, you know, somewhere between twice as many and three times as many people register for these events as you would get in the room. So let’s say you had a 400 person gala at Chelsea piers, see the dinner, you could get a, you know, 800 people registered for your event, usually about 70% of those actually tune in that evening. Um those are 300 new people, you know that you can, you know do some research on prospect with them if they come to the event, they now know about your organization, and so you know it’s a great way to grow your list, it’s really hard to grow your list in in real life, it has been traditionally and so that’s when big benefit in addition to this, just community feel and people really getting to know your organization and be interactive with it.

[00:10:27.99] spk_1:
All right, Gwen, let’s stay with you, let’s get into some ideas that you have about producing successful events. What should we start with?

[00:13:46.24] spk_2:
Yeah, I mean, one of the biggest things is with virtual events is to be creative, there is no one cookie cutter way to do it for all in our opinion, you know, we do, Evan can talk later about some of the platforms we use if that’s going to be relevant to this conversation, but you know, we have a platform that works, but it’s really flexible for whatever program the client wants to put on and, you know, we highly recommend not just translating, you know, speakers at a podium to the virtual world. We want to make it much more engaging and exciting, fast paced dynamic. Um and so one of the biggest things we like to do is a little bit of what we’re doing today, have your speakers in conversation, and that could be honorees in conversation with someone who would traditionally present them in the world world, but it doesn’t even have to be that formulaic or formatted. It can be um an honoree in conversation with an expert in the field of what, you know, let’s say you’re doing immigration or foster care work, who are those experts in the field, let’s work them in because that’s a big part of what your audience is going to be engaged in hearing from. Obviously if you can get some celebrities, it’s wonderful. Um we do find that we’ve been able to get yeses for more celebrities in the virtual world than we did in the real world. I think part of it is because um even though there’s an event day that we stream on this event, we do pre record most of it, that’s the, you know, behind the scenes real life um reality. Um we primarily do that because we want to ensure a seamless experience. Um and prerecorded can still be totally relevant, totally topical. Um you know, during the heights of the pandemic and the craziness of the previous administration, we did end up when there was some, something crazy in the news, we did end up re recording, say um an executive directors piece, very, very close to the event because something relevant happened that, you know, we don’t want to be tone deaf about. So anyway, pre recording really helps as well. And then it helps again with those high profile people, whether they be on res or donors, um you know, who you want to get speakers or celebrities because um you know, you can do it around their schedule. Um also we just find that some very many of these high profile people who may have had just insane travel schedules, you know, our were more available and certainly, you know, had such a big urge to get back. So that was a big piece of it. Um the other um thing that we highly recommend is to share the record and share the event. You know, use it more than event day. You can either, you know, distribute it via your blast on your website through um, you know, as the full piece, which is great to do, but then also, you know, create some video clips um and share those unsocial and wherever you can for the relevant audiences. Uh and then I guess the last big piece and and maybe this should be a whole section of conversation today is looking to the future and hybrid event. So you know, depending on when you want to fit that and we can talk about that as well.

[00:15:28.54] spk_1:
It’s time for a break. Turn to communications. They help nonprofits like your nonprofit tell compelling stories and gain attention like attention in the Wall Street Journal, the new york Times, the chronicle of philanthropy and lots of other outlets. You’ve been hearing me name, Turn to communications. Your story is their mission turn hyphen two dot c o. Now back to virtual events. I love the idea of recognizing that you’re honorees and celebrities are so much more available for a virtual event and pre recording to, to present during the event. Um honorary, honorary timing can be a bet. Yeah, I’d love to be your honoree, but you know, I’m gonna be in new Zealand that week so I, I can’t do it. But you know, you could record from new Zealand or we can record from your home six weeks in advance. You know, it’s very good, very good point. Maybe that’s obvious it’s probably obvious to those of you who are doing events. Uh, I’m a lay person. I’m just, I’m learning this for the, for the 25 minutes or so that were together. So you spend your time studying this. Um, is that all the, the Evan, is that, is that all the strategies be creative pre record, you know, try to leverage celebrities, celebrity availability, honoree availability, share. Repurpose. Uh We could talk maybe about hybrid any any other tips though before we move onto platforms and resources.

[00:16:27.74] spk_4:
Yeah I mean one thing just to add on to the prerecorded tip is you know we do also Sprinkle in um some some live moments and you know and we and we do that strategically so we do reinforce that feeling that this is happening live throughout the event. And then you know we often will have our live moment directly in the middle or in the first half sometimes we’ll open up with a with a live em see that’s another great tip for a virtual event is to to have an EMC who can tie everything together, who’s really energetic um who can end you know can also interact with guests as they’re chatting. Um That really uh we found that the chat is crucial which is um which is why the platform is so so important when producing a virtual event. You know, we uh made a decision not to do our events on our most of our events on zoom because people are you know a little zoomed out and zoomed fatigue.

[00:17:08.54] spk_1:
We’re gonna we’re gonna get we’re gonna get to the platform. Um but the interesting it sounds like you need some you need an M. C. With a little higher higher capacity because all the moments are not gonna be scripted ideally because like suppose there’s a technical glitch, you know you want an EMC who can make fun of it be flexible not get flustered because you know they have to do a little tap dance for for a minute or two while you figure out the back end problem or something. So it sounds like you need a and see a little more uh yeah bring a little more to the game. Yeah that’s

[00:17:45.14] spk_4:
that’s ideal. I mean we you know we’ve also worked with with folks who aren’t professional M. C. S. And part of window service is we are day of support so we on that back end are all on a conference call you know in a headphone in the M. C. S. Ear in case one of these you know glitches happens or we need to communicate something or you know we just had a $75,000 gift. Um So you know really another beautiful thing about ritual events is that they really are you know opportunities for everyone, you don’t have to have a professional EMC does help you know but not required.

[00:18:19.74] spk_1:
It sounds like great fun. I would like if you if you ever if you ever need of an M. C. I would love to do something like that. Uh You seem great. I would love it. I love the flat. I mean I’ve done improv, I’ve done stand up comedy but I’m not trying to give you my resume but it just sounds like fun, it could be great you know, there’s a great energy and you got the producers in your ear, helping, you know, coaching through and, you know, and then you you’re on your wing it for a couple seconds, or like a great gift announcement, Whoa, you know, bring that person up, whatever. All right. Um All right, so what’s the, what’s this cool platform? That’s uh supersedes zoom.

[00:18:28.94] spk_4:
Well, there’s, you know, there’s a number of platforms, The one that we’ve been using primarily is called demio. Um it’s

[00:18:29.69] spk_1:
a

[00:19:07.54] spk_4:
demio demio D E M I O um it’s very intuitive, it’s beautifully designed. You can customize it. The chat function is, you know, very easy to use and fun, you know, it’s not it’s not hidden. You can use emojis, that’s another great thing for this. Um for the chat is the use of emojis or GIFs, um, ways to express an emotion, right? You can also tag people um, so you can speak to them specifically. Um and we’re seeing that, you know, more and more of these platforms are popping up and increasing and that interactivity element more and more, but Demi has been our preferred platform

[00:20:08.74] spk_2:
and the other real important, really important reason. We started with demio and then just Evan and our other team members do a lot of research. Probably weekly on what tuck has changed, you know, should we stick with this or try something else and they keep reinforcing that, this is the right one, but what I was going to say is that there’s a real ease of registration for people, you know, for guests coming to the event and that was really important to us. Well in the beginning zoom was you know, sometimes if you didn’t have the latest app you wouldn’t have the audio or you know it was difficult, I know zoom is really smooth out, but still this is easier than the zoom app, people literally put in their name, their email address, they get a unique link to click on reminders, come to them a day ahead, three hours ahead, 15 minutes ahead, they click in there in and the unique link is nice too, because then you don’t have to worry about someone getting in and zoom bombing or what have you, so you know it really is sort of a great gatekeeper, gatekeeper and really easy to use and then for those producing the event um what we don’t want to forget is that it’s incredibly great for uploading our content, switching between live and pre recorded um going to that live text to pledge moment that have been referenced, so you know, there’s some real advantages to delivering a seamless event as possible.

[00:20:41.84] spk_1:
Gwen, would you just reinforce it please and just spell demio again?

[00:20:45.12] spk_2:
Yeah, I d like dog e m I O demio

[00:20:49.52] spk_1:
alright, thank you, thank you.

[00:21:13.44] spk_4:
And one thing I will, I’m sorry, I will just say is that sometimes what we’ll do is tack on a zoom after party to radio events. So to me is sort of like the main event. This is when you go and you see and you hear and you fundraise and then, um, we, you know, even auto directs people to the zoom afterparty. If that is something that you’re planning, um, where folks can actually get on camera and see each other, we can, you know, do a toast. We’ve done dance parties. Um,

[00:21:55.84] spk_1:
you gotta move on. That’s cool. I love the idea of the after party though. Cool. And after party for virtually all right. Um, you know, we’ve had, I’ve had a bunch of guests from ntc talk about inclusivity. Uh, so I’m gonna, we’re gonna, we’re gonna pass that part with the three of us. But I would like to talk about communicating with these new supporters, Gwen, that you said, you know, you could end up with hundreds of folks that wouldn’t have attended your, your, your in person event virtually obviously because they can come in from all over the world. Uh, we just have a couple minutes more left. So what’s your advice around engaging folks who are new to your organization? First time was is this terrific demio based event.

[00:23:45.94] spk_2:
Yeah, exactly. Well, what we are finding to that many of these new uh, guess, you know, become donors that night they donate in the text to pledge, which is just the first step. And so of course the biggest thing right away is acknowledging and thanking and then, um, which happens right after the event. Every donor to the text to pledge and to the event. You know, anyone who’s, who’s donated any amount, um, pre or at and then post event when we do send out the full event recording, we do give another opportunity to text to pledge. And then, yeah, it’s the thinking. It’s just the ongoing blocking and tackling and cultivation. So, you know, we would add those people to our clients email list. We would include them in our newsletters are ongoing e blast. Um, I will say, you know, we would recommend that the organization screen and rate their new donors like, you know, a traditional, you know, fundraising approach. Let’s take a look at these people owe somebody gave us $1,000 that night. If they give us 1000, there’s probably a lot of capacity there. Let’s do a little more research. And for anyone who’s a real real major donor, um, they should get thanked more personally. So maybe the executive director reaches out after the event and thanks them or you know, has a virtual coffee with them down the road. But you know, just slowly inappropriately. You know, seeing how interested they are in the event and see how you can engage them down the road both as a donor, maybe as a board member, maybe as a volunteer. If your organization has a lot of volunteer opportunities, but you know, just to engage because they came and they got involved.

[00:23:50.14] spk_1:
Can you say a little more going about what to do maybe in the the days following the event that that first, that first follow up opportunity, can you drill down a little more?

[00:24:12.64] spk_2:
Yeah, exactly. We highly recommend a post event. He blessed the exact day after or you know, if for some reason you did an extra day um, within within a couple of days of the event to thank everyone for coming, share the full event, recording with your list. Anyone who both signed up to come but didn’t tune in and are your list of who didn’t sign up to come because now you can see it right? People are busy and while we are experiencing an increased number of people joining these events, there’s obviously a lot of people that just can’t on a given day. So you know, that post event d blast is really important. And again, to give one more opportunity to give to the event and support the work and then sending those, thank you an acknowledgement letters that actually are, you know, the official tax letter that people can use in their, in their tax taxes, um, with any donations that have been made. And then just, you know, I’m going um, can be staying in touch with donors. Um, you know, we recommend that, um, that people use e blast, you know, at least you know, monthly, um, and social posts to stay in touch with donors and then ideally maybe a quarterly newsletter. And then if it’s appropriate, if you can segment your list enough, even some special donor communications a couple of times a year to those most major donors that are a little more inside re

[00:25:26.15] spk_1:
okay. Okay.

[00:25:27.94] spk_2:
And when we can get back into it cultivation events, you know, we love having, you know, pre pandemic and we’ve actually got a couple tentatively scheduled for the fall. You know, that would be outdoor. You know, like a person who has a building with a rooftop, you know, invite, you know, a small group of people to gather and hear from the executive director of the program. People about what’s new and what’s been going on with the organization. We feel like there’s a lot of pent up demand for that.

[00:26:02.14] spk_1:
Don’t feel the events don’t feel the events. All right. Evan. We just have a minute or so left. So why don’t you just leave us with some last minute motivation,

[00:26:39.84] spk_4:
um, motivation for virtual events. I would say do one, do one, do one. There’s, you know, the world is really your oyster. Um, start with developing a run of show that is less than one hour. That’s, that’s the time that we, um, recommend. And just think about the story that you want to tell and then the folks that you want to tell it. Um and you can, you can produce a virtual event on any budget um and you know, do it within three months even less. Um it’s something that you won’t regret and it will live in perpetuity.

[00:26:58.84] spk_1:
All right in perpetuity. Well nothing is better than that. That’s Evan Briggs client and digital fundraising and client engagement manager at window. N.Y.C. along with Gwen, Socgen, Director of special events fundraising also at wingo, N.Y.C. Evan and Gwen, thank you very much.

[00:27:07.77] spk_2:
Thank you. Thank you so much. tony pleasure all you about EMC

[00:30:35.54] spk_1:
Yeah, wait, let me get to my art show for our audience. Thank you for being with tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 21 Ntc were sponsored by turn to communicate, we should be sponsored by window with all these shout outs but we’re not. We’re sponsored by turn to communications turn hyphen two dot C o. It’s time for Tony’s take two sharing really is caring who can you share? non profit radio with may I make a suggestion Ceos Executive directors board members, non profit radio has proven to be valuable for these folks, I hear the feedback from them in this way it sparks conversations, it stimulates thinking, it broadens perspective, gives you something to think about. Maybe even and to talk about and then maybe even act on in your non profit so these conversations these thoughts often start at the leadership level so that’s why I’m saying ceo Executive director board member uh, I think last week’s Show is a perfect example of that. The performance improvement. Talking about the 360 assessments, 3 60 feedback ideal for leadership to think about as a method of performance improvement for for a team. Um, this week’s show, this week’s show more of an example of something that someone in leadership would share with the folks on their team that it’s appropriate for. So virtual events. Um uh, goes to the folks who are thinking about working on, not just thinking about, but who work on events. The design for non designers. If that applies in someone’s organization then they’re likely to pass it on that you know, every every shop can’t afford a design, a designer or design team certainly or even necessarily freelance consulting to help with design as you will hear my guests josh and mike say so in that case it’s leadership passing on segments, conversations that are appropriate to the folks that they’re right for. So C E O s executive directors, board members, they are terrific listeners. They get value from nonprofit radio do you know someone in one of those positions that you can share? non profit radio with, I’d be grateful if you do please sharing is caring, thanks very much for sharing. non profit video That is Tony’s take two now it’s time for designed for non designers welcome to tony-martignetti non profit radio coverage of 21 Ntc the 2021 nonprofit technology conference were sponsored at 21. Ntc by turn to communications turn hyphen two dot C O. With me. Now our josh, Lyman and Mike, Yamagata, they’re both from Great Believer. Josh is founder and president. Mike is art director. Welcome josh. Mike Welcome from Great Believer.

[00:30:38.84] spk_0:
Thank you. Thanks tony

[00:30:40.17] spk_1:
My pleasure. And josh welcome back to a nonprofit radio

[00:30:43.74] spk_3:
Happy to be back to timer.

[00:30:53.14] spk_1:
Yes, we’re talking about the design designed. Your session was designed tips for the non designer. I’m actually gonna start with you mike as the designer as the art director, we can actually do this. We can, we can instill some some degree of design in people in like less than half an hour.

[00:31:05.44] spk_0:
We can. It is possible. Yes. Uh, there’s just some fundamentals and you just have to know it and where you go.

[00:31:22.04] spk_1:
All right, we’ll see where we go. Right. My extent of my design is symmetry. That’s all I know. That’s all I can do. If you go to my yard outside my yard, it’s symmetric. Uh, if you look at my, I don’t know, you look at my furniture, it’s symmetric. Um, when I draw something, it’s a house with a roof and there’s a window on each side of the house, so straight symmetry.

[00:31:33.81] spk_3:
No chimney.

[00:31:34.99] spk_1:
Maybe you could help me? Part of me was that josh?

[00:31:38.03] spk_3:
I said no chimney on that house.

[00:32:00.34] spk_1:
No, because that would be a said, well, I have to put it right in the middle. Usually a chimney is off the side so that would mess up place metric get all right. Um, All right. So let’s go to the non designer josh. I mean, you’re not, you’re the, you’re the chief of this, uh, uh, design company, but you’re not necessarily a designer. You you feel confident to that we can do this.

[00:32:27.94] spk_3:
I do. I’m the ultimate non designer because I started the design agency and I have no design expertise or experience or clout of any sort or kind. Um, mike is nodding and it’s very true. And this session is for people who work at nonprofits who did not intend in starting about non profit to do design work. Maybe they’re Occam’s associate or they work in the marketing department. And suddenly one day someone says, hey designed this flyer design the social media graphic and they’re like, I don’t really know where to start, but our our session is about how those people actually can be designers and they can learn some pretty straightforward basic fundamentals to improve their design and to improve it. Starting today after they listen to this session.

[00:33:08.54] spk_1:
Absolutely. We’re gonna take a day to give some thought to the session to the podcast and then uh, start, start the day after, start the day after you listen. And of course, you know its design tips for the non designer. It’s not great design for the non designer. So, you know, this is not like those ads, those early Photoshop adds years ago, I’m dating myself but you know, take a Photoshop course and you’ll be a great designer. We’re not we’re not advocating that Photoshop even still exist. Mike, is

[00:33:12.22] spk_0:
this still a thing? Okay.

[00:33:16.74] spk_1:
All right. So, um let’s start with some fundamentals. I feel like we should start with the art director. What are some design fundamentals

[00:33:52.14] spk_0:
of course? Um first one, I talk a lot about graphic design in general. It’s all about visual communication, Right? So that’s the whole point. So you want to create strong uh design which equals strong communication, getting your message and ideas across effectively and clearly. And you need a few things to make that happen. And a few of the things that we talked about our session were four design fundamentals. Those are color typography, white space and hierarchy. So those are four of the building blocks. You know, there are more, we thought we’d start with those and I can talk a little bit about them if you want me to or

[00:33:59.64] spk_1:
Yeah, it’s a little it’s a little about each one. Yeah, just like we’re gonna

[00:35:14.54] spk_0:
build on these. Yeah, exactly. We’re building the building blocks. So color used to draw attention, communicate emotions, ideas, meetings without any text at all. So colour is a really powerful tool. Um typography, it’s just the style or appearance of text. You use typography to establish strong visual order. Also known as hierarchy. Readability. Accessibility. Especially for the visually impaired, you want to have strong typography and it balances out the overall tone of the design. Then there is white space which doesn’t mean white space, it means negative space. Right? So the space between the elements, you actually want to use white space as a design element. It helps with readability, prioritising content. Um kind of leading your eye from A to B. And then hierarchy is actually a visual technique where you’re putting all those three fundamentals together to create visual order. So it helps the user go from A. To B to Z. And it navigates you through everything. So hierarchy is kind of like um once you get all these three fundamental together you put those pieces together and then you get hierarchy. So those are the four fundamentals.

[00:35:34.54] spk_1:
I feel like I get I get I I see bad hierarchy uh like all the times you see a piece you don’t know where to read how to read it or you know or how to say the word that they made up or something? You know, there’s not enough visual clues to guide me through this new word or the peace generally like do I read up here or is this more important on the side or you know?

[00:35:39.74] spk_0:
Okay. Exactly. And that’s actually called cognitive overload, where your eyes don’t know where to

[00:35:44.92] spk_1:
look. It takes

[00:35:45.87] spk_0:
so much in, you know you only have so many seconds to retain it and then poof, it’s gone. So then you lose it, you know? So that’s the answer. So

[00:35:58.54] spk_1:
uh so now josh, how do we apply these fundamentals to our blank screen that were expected to come up with? Should we, should we design a sample piece? Should we be working with a, should we talk about a hypothetical piece or should we not do that? How do we, how do we apply? What what might just explain?

[00:36:12.63] spk_3:
Mm That’s good. That’s the ultimate question. I think it kind of depends what level of a designer you are. If you’re someone who’s already done some design work for your non profit, you’ve made a flyer, made a postcard, made a social media graphic. You can kind of look back at the design work you’ve already done through the new lens of colors. You know, Am I using too many colours typography? Is there a nice contrast here between the Fonz? I’m using um white space. Is this work? I’m doing too crowded. Is there no room to breathe and that all ladders up the hierarchy? Like mike was saying. So I think if you’ve done some work, it’s kind of time to do a little audit and look back at what you’ve done. I’m sure you’ve gotten better over the years, but there’s still probably room for improvement to communicate your message even more clearly.

[00:37:18.73] spk_1:
Let’s talk about some of the colors. What what some of the colors mean to me, red is anger or you know, but I’m the symmetric guy, so don’t pay no attention to what I say. I’m just, I’m just a lackluster host here. Um, say say either one of you, uh say something about some some basic colors and what they evoke.

[00:38:16.42] spk_0:
Sure, absolutely. I mean colors it’s tricky, right, because colors red represents danger. Stop. You know, it’s a cultural thing. So it’s, it gets tricky there. What we’re trying to focus on more is um, sometimes designers use formulas, so they use complementary colors which colors are opposite of each other on the color wheel or analogous colors, which colors are that are paired next to each other on the color wheel. Uh one of the really nice tips we like to say is use monochromatic colors. So what does that mean? That just means using one color, but changing the value or saturation, so light to dark or the intensity of that color. And before you know it, you can use one color and spread that into four or five different colours. Uh, so if you’re looking at, you have your own brand guidelines, let’s say you only have a certain amount of colors or you can really get a lot of mileage out of using one color. So those are a couple of things we’d like to use. But yeah, color can definitely use to draw the attention to bullseye into an area to lead each other areas. But we like to start with the basics. So yeah, those those formulas really help people.

[00:38:28.42] spk_1:
Let’s start with some or talk about some of those brand guidelines as you just mentioned it. And that was, that was part of your, your session. What are these?

[00:38:37.92] spk_3:
I can take that one.

[00:38:40.92] spk_1:
it’s your non, you know, non designer. So you need to jump in whenever you can talk about something.

[00:38:45.01] spk_3:
I know a bit over here. Probably

[00:38:57.22] spk_1:
resented by everybody at the agency. Right? You have no guy even Why is this guy leading us? All right. I’m trying to cause dissension and great believer. All right Brain guidelines please.

[00:40:30.11] spk_3:
So every organization needs to have brand guidelines. The brand guidelines need to explain what’s your logo and what are different lockups of that logo? Is there a horizontal version? Is there a vertical version? It needs to describe your fonts, You know, what are the funds in your logo? What are your headline fonts? What your body copy fonts? And what colors do you have in your palate? What’s your primary color palette? Is their secondary color palette? Brand guidelines should also show dues and don’t for your logo. So for example, don’t change the font and the logo. Don’t stretch it. Don’t put it behind a different colored background. Don’t change the colors, things like that. So even if a non profit does not have brand guidelines, they should make them. We actually did a poll during our session, we asked all the attendees if your organization has brand guidelines and about, Let’s see about 85, said they do have brand guidelines, which is great. Um, and if they don’t, we said you should just go make some and you can make them literally in a Microsoft-word document where you just type out here are colors. Here are fonts, here’s how our logo works and then build on it over the years and make it a more expansive document. But it’s really important to have to make sure there’s consistent communication. So if the non designer at a nonprofit starts to utilize, let’s say another colour like Mike was saying, maybe you’re gonna explore a monochromatic color, a different hue of color in your main palette that should then go into your brand guidelines. So other people that pick up on your work, let’s say an external design agency uses those same colors and things feel cohesive. So we’re big believers in brand guidelines for consistency but also knowing that they can evolve over time as your brand

[00:41:11.01] spk_0:
evolves. Likewise. Yeah. And I’ll also like to say that brand guidelines, you know, they’re, you’re mentioning, how do you start, you know, how do you start designing something blank piece of paper? What can you do? Well, you really should look at your brand guidelines in there. There should be also samples of, you know what a poster’s should look like, what should a page and website look like. So these are all guys to help any designer pick that brand guy lines up and start to use it because it’s all about building and strengthening your brand recognition. And the first step is building that brand guideline and then following all of those elements and using them consistent.

[00:42:23.10] spk_1:
It’s time for a break, send in blue. It’s the all in one digital marketing platform that has tools to build end to end digital campaigns that look professional that you can afford and that keep you organized. It’s all about digital campaign marketing, most marketing software enterprise level made for big companies with the big company. Price tag, sending Blue is priced for nonprofits. It’s an easy to use marketing platform that walks you through the steps of building a campaign to try out sending blue and get the free month. Go to the listener landing page at tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant in blue. We’ve got boo koo but loads more time for design for non designers. You have some software resources that are simple enough that people can use them but fancy enough that they can do the do the do at least some basic, some basic design like color topography, et cetera. Where should we, what can we start with? What is what’s the first resource that you like mike.

[00:42:38.40] spk_0:
Oh for me, my bread and butter was would always be creative cloud, which is Photoshop still a thing illustrator in design. Um, but also utilizing newer apps like sketch or sigma, which is more about web design. Digital focus materials josh can talk to more about that

[00:42:53.60] spk_1:
spell sigma pleases ph

[00:42:55.54] spk_0:
f uh f I G F

[00:42:57.66] spk_1:
a thick. Okay,

[00:42:59.15] spk_0:
big and a fig

[00:43:00.13] spk_1:
leaf. Okay. Uh,

[00:44:33.59] spk_3:
and I can, I can pick up on that because the tools that mike mentioned are for people who are designer designers and who are more advanced, they can use the creative cloud programs to design things from scratch. They can use figure sketch to design websites from scratch a tool that we love. And we actually use ourselves and also encourage our nonprofit friends to use those non designers is Canada and Canada is probably a very popular program at lots of non profits because first of all it’s free for most nonprofits to use. But it’s also very user friendly in terms of developing templates. So developing a template for a postcard or a flyer or business cards, something like that. It has a really nice web based kind of drag and drop interface that still lets you make things that are customized and fun and branded. So we think Canada is a really nice starting point because you can really do anything in there are session. We actually asked all the attendees, you know, what kind of design work do you find yourself doing most often? And social media was number one, but people said they do web, they do email, they do print. Um there’s so much you can do within Canada to create something that’s beautiful and still fits within your brand guidelines and your brand architecture. So we were big fans of Canada and something else. Speaking of email, male chimp, constant contact platforms like that, make it pretty easy to develop a blast templates that you can apply your colors to apply. Not maybe not your direct funds, but a font that resembles your font to make things still feel nice and feel cohesive and feel engaging. So we like those tools specifically for email blasts, but recommend can refer a lot of other design endeavors.

[00:44:54.59] spk_1:
Cool. Okay, even I’ve heard of Canada, I think it’s I think that’s pretty, pretty widely known, but I’m glad, you know, a little more detail. Um and you mentioned. So like Canada you can do the postcard template. So those those templates that you do could be part of your brand guidelines. Here’s our here’s our template for an announcing event. Here’s our template for whatever campaign postcard, etcetera. Okay,

[00:45:17.09] spk_3:
Yeah. And camp gives you these kind of starter templates. So it can say, you know, postcard four by six inches. So it gives you the the real estate to work with and then you can actually design the peace within it. So you’re not kind of crawling in the dark. It gives you a nice starting point. Okay.

[00:45:18.49] spk_1:
All right. I’m glad to see, I’m trainable. I’m glad to know that. I’m glad to learn that there’s there’s hope beyond symmetry. All right. Um, but we still got a good amount of time together mike. What what else? Any other, any other resources?

[00:46:03.28] spk_0:
George resources for color. Uh Good one is coolers dot C O C O L O R S dot C. O. What they do is you can start to pick and choose and make your own palette and create different color combinations. What you can also do is lock in certain colors. So let’s say in your brad guidelines, you have a blue or red and a green. You can punch those colors in, lock it and then just start to play and create different palettes around it. So I think that’s a really good resource to use for

[00:46:05.49] spk_1:
colours, coolers,

[00:46:07.03] spk_0:
spellers. Sorry?

[00:46:28.88] spk_1:
Yes, coolers. You said it coolers dot C. O. Right. Yeah, that’s yeah. Okay. Okay. Um um, say a little more about the sweet that you both mentioned. The that includes, um, Photoshop. Uh, what was the suite of, It sounds like a suite of three in design, Photoshop and illustrator, illustrator, illustrator. Yeah. What is that expensive for? For folks?

[00:47:09.28] spk_0:
It can be it’s a subscription based type deal. Now, before you could just buy it outright and then I get free updates, but now it’s a subscription based, so yeah, you’d have to pay monthly for it. Uh To me it’s it’s worth it because that’s what I use every day. Uh interesting what josh says if it’s feasible to have a whole team to use it um because I need to get multiple accounts for it. But yeah, illustrators mostly used for icon vector work, it’s actually drawing things out and making vectors out of it so you can scale it. Photoshop is used to retouch photos um and in design is mainly for printed pieces like brochures, laying those out books, magazines, china reports.

[00:47:16.78] spk_3:
Yeah, I’ll just say, you know, cost around 100 a little under $100 per license. So per per person to access these programs as well as others, a little under $100. And one thing might mention

[00:47:30.34] spk_1:
Like $100 per month per person.

[00:47:32.47] spk_3:
Exactly, roughly. Okay. Yeah. And this is still for like the kind of design or design or someone who’s a little more adept and skilled and has more experience in the design space to use programs like these that can really unleash their skills. And one thing mike said that I think worth mentioning, especially since tony you mention Photoshop before is a lot of non profits tend to use Photoshop for creating templates for let’s say for a postcard for a social media post. And we actually don’t recommend that Photoshop is really a photo editing tool and if you’re going to make simple templates, we definitely recommend Canada it’s a lighter weight, easier to use. Program Photoshop, it gets a little complicated files get big and like maybe you could talk a little more about Photoshop is not the right fit for that. We try to restrict Photoshop to photo editing, which is really

[00:48:31.97] spk_0:
its core purpose. You can get very in depth with Photoshop, but it’s not really needed. If all you’re making is a template for something. It’s a lot of times. Professional people retouch photos, video, all of those things. So yeah, completely not needed. Okay, canvas, canvas, canvas.

[00:48:58.87] spk_1:
Alright. Um All right. We still got some time, uh, techniques. You know, how to how to visualize, you know, like what goes on in this designer brain of yours. Like what what are you thinking about while you’re creating something? What does give you a little peek? That’s like that’s why I always sucked at math and science. I never knew what was going on in their mind. Like you show me how to do it. But what are you thinking about? How do you conceive

[00:49:57.57] spk_0:
of it? Yeah, it’s I’ll give you another peak. Um It’s it’s it’s keeping these fundamentals in check. But then also looking at the world around you, looking at type around you, looking at colors around you, look at how other people are doing it. You know, create mood boards for yourself? Look at other anything that gives you visual stimulation. Go for it. And it’ll kind of help the board. What’s the mood board. So, mood board is something that helps get all of your thoughts Home together distilled onto one board. So that’s photography style color type. You know, you start to combine certain things that you find work well together and then when you then you can step back and you see it as a whole, we call that a mood board. So that helps you visualize um creating systems or identities for for branding and design in general. So it’s kind of like one of the first steps you do in your inspiration process. Okay. But yeah, some of some

[00:49:59.78] spk_1:
other quick tips. Yeah,

[00:50:54.36] spk_0:
yeah, sure. We talked about color, but maybe we can talk a little about type type and white space. Um I think for everything we’re gonna talk about, you really want to keep things simple even for, you know, designers, we’ve been designing for years, keeping it simple is always the best way to go. So in terms of typography, maybe just pick one typeface and use contrast. So different weights, different sizes, but just keep that one, you know, font and you just kind of use that throughout your piece, you know, white space? Just making sure we call a reductive design after you design something, start taking things away, just take things away and see how that looks. Does it feel cleaner. Does it feel more legible or did you lose something, you know, did you lose some of that? Um and for hierarchy, you know, we use all these different devices in terms, But one thing we always try to keep in mind is, you know, the point is to have the user be able to navigate from wherever you want from the start to finish. So you want to really create strong visual hierarchy. So using type, using colors, Using that white space to your advantage, not giving too much clutter, not using too many colours, not using too much type, not using too many shapes. So just keep it really simple. I think that’s that’s really the best tip we can give.

[00:51:22.76] spk_1:
Do people read bold, heavier, bigger fonts first and then smaller funds after. Right? All right, so that’s that’s again, I’m just learning, I’m trainable. So that’s a visual cue, you can absolutely look to your first, then look here that we want you to read this other thing

[00:51:51.16] spk_0:
that’s the smallest. Yeah. Use it to your advantage. Use uh boldness, the size, hit it with a color, get people drawn into that and then pair it with something that’s calmer. Media sans serif. Uh, font sensors, meaning, you know, these two types serif and sans serif. One has a little extra additions to the ends of the letters. Sensory

[00:51:57.96] spk_1:
culebra is a sans serif and times new

[00:52:11.45] spk_0:
times roman is a is a serif. Yeah. You know, so, you know, just using using those things to your advantage. Yeah. Doesn’t matter. Go big. Um go big, go bold draw you in. Um, and then, you know, use type and then use all these other elements to avenge.

[00:52:48.75] spk_3:
Yeah. Just to add on to what mike was saying. I think the most important thing or a really important takeaway is to definitely use restraint when it comes to the number of colors you use the number of funds you use it. So often the case that we’re working on a project where are non profit partner will say we need to do this much in this small space and we say we can’t so we need to start to figure out what can be removed and still get your message across or do we need this to be a two page piece instead of a one page piece. So I think the big take away should be that sometimes you need either more space to get across your message or you need to take pieces out to do so in a way that sticks and gets people to take action.

[00:53:16.45] spk_1:
Okay. And Mike mentioned reductive design white space. Yeah, it’s it’s it’s soothing. It’s calming. You know, what about, you know, I assume this is valid practices to share the peace with other people? Absolutely. Are they reading it right? Does it upset

[00:53:19.71] spk_0:
them, et cetera, yep. What was it was like a B testing where you give two designs to samples? The same user base and then they, you know, then we can see which ones they gravitate more towards which one is more effective.

[00:53:50.85] spk_1:
A B of course, for for a broader audience. I was thinking just within your team. No, that’s absolutely what does this look like? You know, talk me through your as you’re looking at it. What are you thinking, things like that? All right. Um, All right. So there’s, there’s hope, there’s hope for the non designer. You’re not gonna get a fine arts course, you’re not gonna get a fine arts degree in in 25 minutes. Not profit radio but there’s there’s, there’s basic, there’s basics. Alright, Alright, we’re gonna leave it there sound all right,

[00:54:03.34] spk_3:
Sounds good.

[00:54:12.54] spk_1:
Okay there, josh, Lyman founder and president at Great Believer and Mike Yamagata, art Director at Great Believer. Thank you very much. Thanks guys.

[00:54:14.11] spk_3:
Thanks tony

[00:55:07.24] spk_1:
each of you and thanks to you listener for being with non profit radio coverage of 21 Ntc where were sponsored by we should be sponsored by Great believer with all the shout out. I’m giving you a great believer, uh, their design expertise, you know, But no, we are, we’re grateful to be sponsored by turn to communications turn hyphen two dot C o next week. It’s an archive show. I will pick a winner. Trust me 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 and by sending blue, the only all in one digital marketing platform empowering non profits to grow. tony-dot-M.A.-slash-Pursuant in Blue,

[00:55:23.44] spk_5:
our creative producer is clear. Amirov shows social media is by Susan Chavez. Mark Silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott Stein. Mhm. Thank you for that. Affirmation scotty. You’re with me next week for nonprofit radio big non profit ideas for the other 95% go out

[00:55:42.34] spk_0:
and be great. Yeah.

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Oh, hi, hello and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent on your aptly named host. Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d be thrown into a habit ood if you told me the dull idea that you missed today’s, show your website redesign it’s your step by step guide to a web site makeover let’s include gaining stakeholder support, managing contractors and using data to drive better engagement. Our panel from the non-profit technology conference is orin levine with international centre for journalists. Lisa gets off with gizmo creative factory and emily paterson, founder of be measure and over marketing it drives amy sample ward bananas let’s talk through her issues she’s, a social media contributor and the ceo of n ten non-profit technology network i told you to, i’m wagging my finger, responsive by pursuing full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled tony dahna slash pursuing capital p well, you see piela is guiding you beyond the numbers. Weather cps dot com bye tello’s durney credit card processing into your passive revenue stream. Tony dahna slash tony tello’s on by text to give amglobal donations made easy text npr to four, four, four, nine, nine, nine here is your website, redesigned from non-profit technology conference. Welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of eighteen ntcdinosaur non-profit technology conference. We’re hosted by the non-profit technology network, coming to you from new orleans in the convention center. This interview, like all our eighteen ntcdinosaur views, is sponsored by network for good, easy to use donor-centric software for non-profits, i guess now are orin levine, lisa gets off and emily patterson, or in his director of innovation at the international centre for journalists. Lisa is founder and creative director at gizmo creative factory, and emily patterson is founder. Be measured that’s b e like the insect welcome buy-in. Your seminar topic is gourmet taste on a pizza budget. Tackling a website, we design for small non-profits, and i noticed that in your session description, use the word small three times. That’s perfect for non-profit radio because our twelve thousand listeners are in small and midsize non-profits. So i don’t have to admonish you or remind you even taylor, your comments too small and midsize or no, i don’t, because it’s, you’re right, it’s in your dna, it’s in the dna of your workshop topic, anyway, get carried away. Personal. Okay. What what are the challenges? Let’s, start down there with emily on the far end? What are the challenges with website redesign? Hyre? Definitely, i compare website redesigns, teo doing laundry, at least at my house. Okay, that it’s something where it feels like you put all this work into it, and then when you’re done well, there’s a whole new basket of laundry, and you need to start all over again. Yes, it’s, a project that it could take over here and then it’s. You know, another year passes by and it’s, time to start redesigning your website all over again, because technology and trends change so frequently, something you have constantly have to keep up with. What do you part of what you described way? Have you done your workshop yet, or it’s coming? No it’s tomorrow at one thirty and that’s a preparation for you? Okay, she’s like a batting range, putting, putting green. I don’t know too much. I don’t be doing sports analogies that that was a mistake i don’t anything about. I don’t know anything about either of those sports, football or tennis, so okay, what do you need? What do you need to have in place? Could we start with you? Lisa, can you could you adjust that one? What do you need to let in place? But think about before you embark on hiring someone to do it or doing it in house? What do you need to think about? You really have to think about weirder site is now and if it’s working for you and if you comptel, if it’s working for you, since we generally have analytics, but also are you getting the results that you want out of it? Are your constituents getting what they need out of it all of that kind of thing? And then it’s just improving upon what you have if its content or design usability, all of those things, okay? Or you want to add wear at the pre stage now, exactly. And this is in some ways where the small comes in, because one of things your back of your mind is, is what resource is do you have realistically to approach the project, which will probably be less resource is than you would love to have? Especially if you know you’re looking at other websites and say, oh, i’d love to have a website like name your large corporation here and because you’re not small non-profit you can’t. And in addition to the questions, lisa was passing one of the question, in fact, you need to ask is, you know, why do i have a website at all? You know, it’s really gets down to what am i doing? I’m murcott what’s the purpose why do i want people to visit me in the web but who’s coming to visit? What do i want them to do when they get there? And by being really careful about asking those questions that helps you match what you could do there to the limited budget you’re going toe? How do you overcome this stick of the orange? How do you overcome not knowing what could do? It is not your site is not doing it now, but it could, but but you don’t know. What it could do because you’re not already exploiting that. How do you feel that gap, that knowledge gap? Well, it’s ah, sort of a balance between what what it’s already doing, what it could do and what you wanted to do. And a lot of what we talked about in our own organization was trying to distill down of all of our laundry list or went backto the laundry analogy, a laundry list, emily’s basket wish list of all the things you wanted to do or could do or might do an ideal world. It’s really important to try to focus down on a few very, very critical things that you want the website to do. Focus your efforts there that both helps focus the minds of the people who are responsible for the website and then focusing your budget on a realistic set of goals you can achieve. So you might brainstorm and then and then and then focus exactly two realities. Okay, okay. See about something else you pledged to cover in your workshop. Hold your feet to the fire. Think about who to hire. Whether you need is who wants to take this one first? Whether. Whether you need expertise, we don’t necessarily have to go in line. One, two, three, three, two, one, which i don’t i don’t like that, but we can now for now anyway. There’s soup for now, but i’ll bring it up if we keep up with us whether whether you should a lot of small orcs probably do need help, right, then we’re gonna need some technical help. This website project definitely on dh speaking as a designer and developer, generally i come in when they don’t have those resource is on staff, or if those people are overwhelmed and speaking to lauren’s point, sometimes you can brainstorm with those people and find out exactly new things that you may not be aware of ways that you can integrate databases better, etcetera on improving communication. So, you know, so much of it is just what you’re re sources are and what you’re willing to put forth. So you’re often in the role of having tio make the expectations fit the budget. Yes, we can’t do that yet. I know you would love to, but if you want to do these other things that you said were playing top three priorities. And we can’t do this. You can’t have six priorities. Yeah, i’m a big believer in phase development, so if you could do it in six months, then we’ll do it in six months when it’s more feasible. Okay, how do you, uh, how do you message that reduction down, too of reality when it when you’re talking to the ceo executive director? Oh, gosh, i mean, i basically put it the exact same way that we can do this in six months. We can still make it happen with the budget that you have, but if you want to put more towards that, then of course, we could make plenty of things happening now, so okay, so bring it down. Arika money. Yes. Way to spread it out. You can have it, but it’s gonna take longer. Okay? In fact, one of the things we talked about in the session is sort of tricks. I learned i was emily start going out orders don’t get going out at one point, i want i want to head over to emily because she’s really the expert on how to manage to ceo seo, i’d better let her speak for that. I’m not going sequence. I don’t want you to continue, okay? My my one question is that one of the now now a great host, it’s time for a break, pursuing their newest paper is pursuing e-giving outlook it’s a roundup of all the fund-raising data that you need, they took the latest fund-raising reports boiled them down to the essentials into a concise content paper, plus there’s a video archive of the weapon, or that they did around this whole subject. It’s, an ensemble piece, paper and webinar both on the listener landing page. Tony dahna slash pursuant capital p for please now, back to your website redesign say something talk emily yeah, it was like they had a message to you, ceo message manage expectations about the top level uh, so i think one of the things that people don’t realize, especially at the top level around website redesigns is just yeah, how much, how much work and how much? And thus time and money is involved, and i think having teo yeah, message and set expectations around that is a big challenge buy-in vices that i’ve worked and now in a zoo independent consultant, my point of contact is typically, you know, you’re marketing director or your communications person who have, who handles all of communications and all of fund-raising so kind of a mid level person and being able to work with them to help them set expectations with there with their boss around the web website, because i think a lot of a lot of executive directors, you know, they’re a little bit detached from the project and, you know, they’re looking online, and they’re seeing all of this awesome stuff that other organizations or, you know, even for-profit companies are able to dio and they don’t realize, you know how much time and money needs to go into that. I’m going to pick up on on emily’s point, that becoming the position of being the non-profit that’s working with cos, you know, we were designing the web site, and one of the things we try to make sure of is we knew internally in our own organization who who is responsible to make the final decision so that, you know, family’s talking the communications director, she needs to know that when the communications director says we’re not going to do this, then hearst boss is not going to come down two weeks later and say, well, actually, we are let’s keep that anyway, because that’s, how you lied to basically blowing your budget and changing your plans. So it’s, very important as an organization is a nonprofit taking on the project to be clear in advance. Who are the decision makers? Who are the real stakeholders, who is going to make the decisions and who needs to stay out of the way? That’s perfect. So who should be let’s? Go to you family? Who should be part of this design team? I mean, i think having one clear a person who is ultimately one person is in charge. Yes, having been in the position where three people are making the decision, you know that doesn’t really work. So ultimately one person has to have the final say. So we are we are not doing this, but i think lots of people should be involved and be able to have their input because you will otherwise get in this situation. Where oranges years, months later i don’t know. How’d we get this? Yes or no? You roll that definitely derail your project. If all of a sudden you had someone pop up and say hey, what happened? Teo x y z i thought we were doing this, and then as a consultant to be the person who says, oh, sorry, that’s not in the budget, i think it’s so we need to think through in the beginning stages, who are the stakeholders? So but with the web, but at our website affects everybody. Lisa, how do we decide whose we can’t have too many people in the process? I already said that how do we decide who should be part of this process and who should be sidelined? A big part of that for me is design theory. Tio it’s basically starting off with talking to all of the people who are going to be using the site. So if it’s one person from the board, one person from the staff, one actual end user, et cetera, and they don’t necessarily have to be people who are involved in the decision making part of it. But fighting out how they actually use the site and how they would like to use the site and how it all fits into the overall organization makes a huge difference in the end result and how successful it is, okay or anything you want to add to this? Yeah. And that’s another reason why inside the organisation it helps to have somebody you can sort of manage some of those relationships internally in some ways be a bridge between the organization and the external party. I in some ways fulfill that role in my organization. I’m not responsible for the site, partially because i have experiences a web product manager, i’m ableto some ways mediate, i suppose, between some of the internal forces intentions and our external external vendors, and that makes life easier for them because they have fewer people to talk to, and we’re clear decision making it makes life easier for us and that we’re able to resolve some of our issues ideally before we start having to pay for it’s going to more detail on this, managing the contractors or contractor whatever that is doing the process. Emily, you’ve got something you want. I was going to say that i think having your communications director or someone at that level lead the project is a good call because they’re in a role where they khun both understand more closely, like the technical side of what we’ll need to go into this because they’re close enough. To the project, where they might be in a role where they’re updating the website. But then there also. Removed a little bit from it and more into the business side of things where they can understand the bigger picture and the business decisions and the important role that stakeholders play. Where i think if you put the website in the i t department and have that management come from that side, they might spend more time kind of focused on how is everything working exactly and ignore the business side of war on the into the code? Okay, okay, let’s, let’s talk more about managing the contract with doing this project for us out. How do you? How do you like to be managed? I don’t like to be managed, but well, essentially the biggest thing is always communication on both ends of it and setting expectations. Some people love to talk only via email, some are i need to get on the phone with you to make you understand this and it’s an inter generational thing, it’s just it’s. Everybody certainly has different feelings on that bye, setting up expectations of how often we’re going to talk, how we’re going to talk, how we’re going to be managing all of these assets, all of these things that makes things so much easier down the line, and you don’t have developers who disappear or gaps in knowledge where well, we have no idea where we’re hosted right now, which is a huge deal, because so many people don’t really know all their passwords and everything. So let’s, let’s move to something else that you were are going to cover tomorrow. Use of data, you said data tio dr better flew and better engagement. Who’s the everybody plays family, right? Emily, you’re got two thumbs pointing to you. Yes. Yeah. That’s. The data portion of it is really my specialty. Okay, so we’re going to talk a little bit about what the stakeholder they wrote to me in for the stakeholder section because i had had this other presentation that oren saw where it was about using data to kind of manage people’s personalities, but definitely needed to manage personnel. That was that was different. There was somewhere else. Yeah. Is that another? Another kind of interested? Okay, about how you can take the day that you collect and then use it. Tio appears the different sort of questions and issues that pop with your different stakeholders, but definitely before you embark on your redesigned some suggestions about, you know what sorts of data people should look at, a lot of it depends on what sorts of issues pop up with your various people who are involved. I really kind of feel like there’s kind of three basic types of issues that it will happen, you know, there’s the sort of person who doesn’t you might have it from your executive director or from another person, your organization, they don’t necessarily want to spend any money, so helping to make the case that we need to make this investment and we need to invest in better technology, you can use your your google analytics user testing surveys a variety of different things to get a good picture of what’s going on with your audience because who’s using your website is not necessarily reflecting the needs of the person using your website isn’t reflecting. You know the needs of the people in your audience, they’re not in your office, they’re not the same. Okay, what else about data? I’m so you also get the person who is has all the fun ideas, maybe, you know, reads a lot of things. Online about the latest trends, and we need to have this widget and that widget and helping them get a good perspective on, you know, what’s really going on with our users where we really having problems with our site right now that definitely need to be fixed in the in the redesign, you can use google analytics things like back-up they have a funnel feature to see you. Nowhere in your process is people you’re losing people dropping out, leaving your side, and then i love surveys and user testing as a way to hear from riel people how frustrating it is for them to use certain functions on your website. So who would you send those surveys to? Is that that cut across all your constituents metoo donors, board members, people who are engaged, engaged with your programs, receiving your service is all those people get survey like that? It depends. I’ve done ones on the website, which i think are nice. Google has ah, very low cost pop up sort of survey you may have seen them before that you can answer a couple questions, and then there’s typically kind of an open end response, which is a great source for people’s france. Ok, things are kind of questions. Do we ask? You can certainly ask about user rolls if you want. If it’s important for you and your your website to understand who’s used what constituency you would word it this way, but what constituency they fit into. We’re delivering services, etcetera. Okay. What? What else do you want to find out? That’s? Fine, but you could totally keep it super simple. And just as something like, you know, what brings you to the site today? Are you satisfied with your experience? If not, you know what recommendations do you have for us? Those three questions? I think we’ll get you a good picture of what’s going on. I mean, i’ve had guests on who say the best survey is, like, five fewer questions. Oh, yeah, definitely. Okay, so short is not problematic. It all it’s preferred? Yeah, especially if you you know, you’re kind of you’re popping up at them. They’re coming to your sight because they’re trying to do something else. So you want to keep the survey short because you’re kind of interrupting their experience? What else can wait? Talk about around this? You’re going, you’re going to feel ninety minutes tomorrow. Well, let me add another more point about data again. I’m coming at this from persuaded emily. So i thought the data when emily stop, okay or you can talk about data. Whenever we took a breath, i thought that was the end of the day that i could talk for days about data e talking about okay, just the one small point i wanted to make again back to managing expectations, it’s away to also manage expectations your stakeholders had about people who are wedded to. We’ve always had this section on the website i love this information is valuable and it’s useful to be able to go to analytic state and say twenty, people visited this page in the last five years. We don’t need it. Okay? Spell, myth it’s also a legacy pages that people are tied to strongly, but nobody else cares it’s also testing out processes to like, how long does it take someone to actually make a donation or to find the volunteer form or something like that? Does it take to long for them to get there and they get tired of it? And they just leave, or does the executive director have an idea that they love this particular feature, but no one’s clicking on it or they wantto accident actually everyone’s clicking on it. And we don’t know that unless we actually get true user data, so it helps it. A lot of scenarios are based in reality. You know, the numbers no like yeah. All right. Uh, okay, so we still have you just took it five or six minutes together. What else can we talk about on this topic website? Redesigned. You promised a step by step guide. We missed any step. Well, there’s, plenty of stuff. Cemetery. Alright, so name some names, something we haven’t talked about it content auditing of your current site. So actually, i’m going to cut you off there, like three or four sessions ago, we talked about content, name another one and another step way of linking on it that we haven’t talked a lot of sessions, police about post launch care and the whole yeah, because to me kind of the laundry analogy to but to me, a website is a living, breathing thing. And just because you’re done with it, because it launched does not mean that it is done. You need to keep feeding that for google to pay attention to and for your users to pay attention to. You also need to be aware of the ongoing costs of maintaining the site and keeping it secure. Ilsen and already you have a laundry. Now you wanna bring laundry and maybe a lot of what you want. I’m thinking more about sort of laundry all of a sudden, you know, chris created out of no where in your hamper, because what happens is part of the consequence. If you’ve been really successful, i think in managing expectations and limiting the scope of your redesign and coming up with a very clean site, that means there are going to be items that fell off the must have list that are now on the might have list or nice to have list, but after launch that’s an opportunity to sort of incrementally add in some of the things you may have wanted to do earlier as budget becomes available. That’s part of what lisa was saying about it’s, an ongoing project not only maintenance but ongoing improvement i remember, but i used to work at a large non-profit before people with sort of a background in your television program, you would say that keep iooking cleanse the website done, and i think least i mentioned at the beginning of our talk it’s never done that’s an ongoing lisa, do you see? Oh, our emily also commonalities around things that people want but don’t really need or, you know, durney generalities about things that they say is a top priority, but really it’s, not any any generalizations you could make around that. How about home paint sliders? I was just thinking that way, but everybody loves big sliders, right? No one clicks on them. They really don’t know. They don’t stop it to go back. So many guys attract many home page sliders. Yes, they get teo slide too, i think. Yeah, they and then they go to what they really want. Okay, i think people, maybe this is at least as different impressions. But i think there’s just too much emphasis and too many politics around the home page and what goes on on the home page because most sites people are coming in sideways, you get a lot of people coming in. From search, especially if your sight is well designed and has, you know, all the ceo best practices. People will come in to your bog post or to your content pages, and they’ll never see your home page. And so in projects i’ve been involved with, the home page gets very political and can stall things. Okay, that’s, old thinking that everybody’s coming directly to our our main, our main domain. And everybody wants a piece of it. Yes, there’s a lot of fighting about. Okay, so you are generalizing about okay, george, as i was going to bring this up before, but yeah. There’s a lot of oh, you know, my department needs to go on the home page. This is very important. Very important to this organization. All right, all right. What else could we were going to flush out? A little bit more? Got another couple minutes left. What one thing is, i was going to advise i came up with a bunch of sort of tips and tricks. If you’re inside the organizations that have ways too, to keep your stakeholders, i was going to use the word under control. But that’s a bit of a loaded term, but back to the prioritization, you know, prioritization is really critical, you know, making those choices about what you want to do and there’s been lots of cases in several projects i’ve worked on when you know your stakeholders might have a long list of things they want to do. And as somebody who’s running a project it’s really important to learn how to say pick one really focuses the mind i sway for, you’re not going to need that. That sort of thing to really help helps sort of focus the issue. Everybody gets one right, you could. You could name as many as you like, but you’re gonna get one priority. Okay, okay, yeah buy-in talking to clients. I used to say to people, you know, we can do this, you know, or we could do this and that response, wass, what can we do both. So i have learned to rephrase it and say, here are three options, pick one, okay. We asked what you, uh so what do you love about the work that you do? You know, organizations i work within cos they’re so wide ranging that it always amazes me what you can learn, what you can pick up and all of the commonalities of them too, you know, there there’s so many things that they’re all trying to get across, even if they’re a tiny little organization. So it’s, um, and making a difference with it with the actual and product from what they can about you are what you love about this work. I think what’s really interesting about the work is one year’s going setting off on a website redesign you think you’re doing a technology project, and it almost inevitably ends up being a management project because i think we’ve alluded to it before that the company’s your organization’s website is really related to how it’s organised how the organization works and you end up sometimes having more conversations about how the organization works and how we’re running on what our strategies then, about technology, about the actual some introspection. Okay, emily, i’m gonna give you ten or fifteen seconds. What do you like? What you love about this work your work about the work that i d’oh. I mean, i like that it’s always changing. I specialize in data stuff and it’s a field that’s constantly evolving. So i like that aspect of being able teo, keep up on it and always be just like our websites. Yeah, conley evolving. Always changing. Never finished. All right, they’re orin levine, director of innovation at the international centre for journalists. Lisa lisa it’s. A guess off. Yeah. Sounder and creative. Director of gizmo creative factory and emily paterson, founder of be measured. Thanks so much for being with us. I think this interview like all of them here it eighteen ntc sponsored by network for good, easy to use dorner management and fund-raising software for non-profits. Thanks so much for being with non-profit video coverage of the twenty eighteen non-profit technology conference. We need to take a break. Wagner. Cps for pete’s sake, talk to you. Eat huge tomb. You know the man. You heard him on our four hundred show. Did he sound high pressure to you? Of course not. He sounded like the gentleman that he is gentlemanly and professional. Check out the farm of course. Got to do your due diligence. Do your research weinger cps dot com then pick up the phone. Talk to you, wagner, cpas dot com then moved to real life now tony steak too it’s finger wagging time. I want you to plan ahead so that you make time don’t just look for it try to find it. You make time for yourself yourself over labor day weekend time alone, its restorative you heard last week steve rio talk about thie the benefits throughout your day of of mindfulness and presence, and even maybe ah meditation for a couple of minutes. I mean, they do virtual meditations of bright webb, he said, every day for five minutes, take time for yourself. Make time for yourself over labor day weekend, even if even if part of it is a nap. It’s restorative, you’re in e-giving profession you give you give, you have to be a little selfish and take make that time for yourself wagging my finger and there’s a little bit more on that in the video at tony martignetti dot com what a pleasure to have amy sample ward back. She is our social media contributor. Ceo of intend the non-profit technology network her most recent court third book, social change, anytime everywhere about online multi-channel engagement she’s at amy, sample board, dot or ge and at amy rs ward. Welcome back, amy. I think having me back, it’s always a pleasure. You’re always you’re always welcome back. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Should be a surprise to you. We always work well, i hope that you’ll let me know if i get cut from the roster will stop taking your calls. Know that we’ll have to wait on the phone. I’ll call in with a different say. I have a question to make up a different name. All right. Um, we’re talking about over marketing over marketing. This is a, uh, a bothersome thing for you. Yeah, yeah. I mean, i think it’s probably bothersome to everyone. That’s. Why it’s not successful? Yeah, it’s. In the long run, it annoys people and they turn off. Okay, i think that’s true. You know, maybe we’ll look att cem symptoms of over marketing so that you can do some self assessment. I think it’s it’s, probably one of these things is much easier to see in other people which may be coming totally right. I think it’s definitely hard to self diagnose your organization as an over marketer and instead very easy to look at other communications, other websites, what have you and feel like? Oh my gosh. You know and just to be clear, when i say over market and maybe this is a point of clarification between the two of us, i am curious how you define it. But for me, over marketing is when you market everything equally instead of choosing as an organization what your priorities are. Okay, so it seems very scattershot the marketing then from that those kinds of organizations very scattershot, everything is equally urgent. Everything is equal, equally impactful. Everything is, you know equally the thing that you want people to do right, then yeah. Okay, interesting might might my sense of it is it’s it’s i’m more looking at the frequency you know, if i get too many emails too many if i see your twitter you know, blowing up my twitter stream you know, i see i see too much from you it’s it’s too much it well in however, you define the time but e i’m seeing too much, um, well, and i think that that frequency piece could is, you know, one of the ways that over marketing manifest, because you could also say that it, um, you know, separate from frequency, it could just be type it could be that you are just like your web site is, you can’t even navigate it because every single thing has to have its own space on your home page that’s the call to action and whatever, you know, there’s different ways that it might manifest, but frequency certainly is a big one. Ok? And christie’s bleed over. I mean, you know, if your if your website has everything is an equally high priority, then that’s the trouble you were, you know, that’s, the trouble that you’re that bothers you the most is that every everything is urgent going on and everything has a page, every page is called action. You know, his first came to me as an idea because someone sent me an email with i printed it. It’s literally the the email signature is a half a page and i did not printed in eighteen point five i put it in twelve point fund. A very reasonable size. I’m this person’s email signature is a half takes up a half a page, right? I’m sure that the emails they’re sending two people are, you know, a very reasonable, like hi, tony, and then a couple sentences and thanks so much. And yet their signature is three times that. Yeah, yeah. Or more. It’s, you know, there’s itt’s. Well, i gave it away. It’s a he you know, it’s it’s it’s filled up with i mean there’s like zoho linked in you are el there’s a well there’s there’s web sites. There’s a you are elves, but then they’re not linked. And then separately there’s www the length number one w w was like number two and number three and there’s the mailing address and there’s. Ah, fax number off a twenty eighteen a fax number on then there’s and then there’s some congratulate, you know, self promotion stuff about anniversaries. How long he’s been in different lines of business and it’s it’s a half a page. So that’s what? Put this on my radar? You know, i guess i’ve subconsciously i’ve probably been thinking noticed it certainly, but tio got into my consciousness and i asked you about it and you said, whoa drives me crazy. So so here we are here we are. I’m just commiserating in the things that drives, but it’s for a good purpose, we’re helping where i’m not complained, my larry david, i’m not i’m not complaining, i’m helping, but, you know, what’s so interesting to me about that, like, the starting place where this conversation is that so many organizations, i don’t think, ever think about the signature line of there down both from the perspective that that, uh, i mean, that’s, you know, hundreds if you count all of your different staff, hundreds of messages a day to community members that could be reinforcing your organization’s brand or voice or mission having a standard, you know, signature block for everyone in your staff that, you know, great, everybody has the right information there, we probably don’t need to list our fax machine, you know, for all of those things because i see so many times where you know, one person, one organization writes at one way another person you can’t they don’t have a signature block, all you see is like, thanks, amy and me, but who? Are you, you know, co-branded spectrum that’s a missed place for just reinforcing the brand of the organization, but so few organizations know that you’re their signature block is kind of a passive called toe action space. Um, and at intend, we test that and we have a we use our goal for non-profits account, and that allows us if anyone listening uses the google suite for your organizations, you have, you know, females, you know, you could just administer as an organization what everyone’s you could add, like a call to action at the bottom of of the signature, and you don’t have to worry that some staff forgot to put it in, like, you could just administer that, and it is immediately in place for all of your emails, and we change that regularly, but we also track that and, you know, there are people that click on that signature link where we’re promoting that and you see and actually click through and register. So it is a place to call people to action. It is not necessarily a place to successfully call them toe action with eighteen different things that you’re saying, you know, it needs to just be one and have it be something that’s actually relevant to why you’re emailing people vs maybe, you know, links all of these different awards and promotions. You actually test different signatures. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Eminently doable. Eminently testable. You know us, we test everything. Okay. That’s, you technology network? Yes. Bonem all right. So let’s, let’s encourage some self assessment. We just have about a minute or so before before taking the first break. Um, i thought of i thought of some symptoms that you might that that that maybe hitting you in the face if you’re if your engagement numbers are declining, if you’re if you’re of actual follower numbers or connections, if that’s, you know, if people are dropping off that way, so i thought of either one of those, you know, people might still be following you, but they’re not engaging that’s, that’s bad or they might just stop following you or being connected. No thing can in fact, tonight, adam a nuance to those numbers. Certainly it’s healthy to have people stop following you on twitter or toe unsubscribes miree male because it means people are reading it and it no longer, you know the priority in their life, it’s not the topic that they care about it’s. Fine, you don’t need to feel bad of someone on subscribe to the newsletter but that’s the point you’re making tony is that if you are getting in ten people unsubscribes sections one new person subscribing then your ratio is a little off you want tohave, you know more people continuing to subscribe. Then you have a fall back off. Thank you for refining my point. Thank you. I mean, i mean that generally we gotta take a break. Take a break. Tell us enough with the talis moughniyah. Lt’s you’ve heard them. You’ve heard them from charities that referred companies for credit card processing and, of course, those charities air getting that revenue each month that long tail you’ve heard the talis moughniyah, lt’s from companies who are using tello’s for credit card processing. I bet you could use more revenue. Tell us long stream of revenue. You know how this works? You refer cos they take on tell owes you the non-profit get fifty percent of the revenue from those fees. Watch the video at tony dot m a slash tony. Tell us now. Back to amy sample board. Thank you for that indulgence. Yes. All right. So, indeed, big numbers, you know, that’s bad and unsustainable. You know, you’ve got your tenant followers a day and one new follower, your that’s that’s, not sustainable. Um, let’s. See, um, if you i thought you know how about reading your own stuff reading your own to spend a little time romping through your own, you know, your own twitter stream your own instagram, facebook, these things boring you your own website, have you read? Have you read the last a couple of weeks of content on your website? A few if you have something that’s regularly updated that that often does it bore you? I would say that’s a bad somebody i think what’s interesting about that suggestion and that so many people we’ll overlook is that we, of course i have read all of it listed it, right? So the idea that we would go back and look at it feels like some time wasted because, of course we wrote those tweets. Are we, you know, posted those pictures? Never, but the value in what you’re suggesting is not look at any of those. Single post it’s look your feed without looking at your whole timeline or whatever, right? Like, just look at for twitter, profile and all the content in order that’s been posted or your instagram profile or your website, because that’s where you can really start to see from your followers perspective or your community’s perspective. Whoa, you know, this is this is what it felt like, or this is what it sounded like. I think that’s something we don’t do often enough it’s organizations because we don’t feel like we need to, because we’ve already reviewed all that content when we posted it individually. Yeah, we wrote it ourselves see, this is this is why you’re an author, co author of two books, and i’ve never written a book because you you put a finer point on it. No, i’m the shallow guy, i got this idea and then you refine it, give it depth and meaning and eso like on the comic book writer, and you’re the you’re the writer of books that actually get published by, you know, by well known publishing companies. Yeah, but i haven’t even done one of those yet. Yeah, ok. Er and you just and i’ve been thinking about it, and you just heard it. And you you put you put, you add depth and, uh, greater meaning to it. So thank you. What a team. You know, good teamwork. Yeah, work. If i didn’t have this show, you could because, you know, i don’t think you need me to get started, but i need you to add the depth and the color enough beating myself up. Okay. Um, no. I’m having fun doing it. So what are you? Nobody. Nobody listens to this show anyway, so nobody here’s the nobody here is the self loathing. Oh, that’s not true. Thousands of people listening. Yes. Don’t remind everybody said you have more in your list in this moment. Don’t remind me more of my list more my list. What of these of these things? I have more. I have things on my list. I can add, um, i have one more staff complaints if the staff, if the staff is feeling that their content is you know, however, they describe stale o r, you know, repetitive. You want to pay a lot of attention to that because they’re the ones producing the content. So if staff or if you’re hearing from staff, i think that’s a bad sign, what do you what do you have totally eye? You know, now i feel obligated to add depth and color all of your suggestions, but the piece that i would add there is i feel like it’s, not just staff saying that it’s repetitive, but the conversations that you might over here amongst your staff that are kind of like a warning sign warning flag that you’re maybe doing over marketing is when people are saying, you know, i’m marketing this in someone else’s say, no, the postcards you know, went out yesterday for this someone else, eh? Zoho on twitter were saying that you have people, you know, you’re cross team isn’t talking about the same thing, then you’re probably doing, you know, equal parts promotion of five different things at once and that just naturally not going to be a successful your community members can’t take in five different request to do something that are different and actually do them all for you. Very bad sign if there’s conflicting messages across your across your team, i thought it was this i thought this was the priority, right? Okay, what else? What else do you have on your symptom symptom list? Well, i don’t have as many symptoms. I have a list that’s, more like things that you khun d’oh. Okay, um, yeah, okay, we could switch over there. I’m game for some guests. I would say you’re not a baby, we can talk about a few things underneath is i really liked the idea for organizations, you know, of course, we all know that we should have, like, a content calendar and marketing plan and all of these things. But the reality is i’m going toe just operate within reality that we don’t have those things or we have them and they’re not updated or or or whatever. So instead of saying, oh, just go finish off that editorial calendar that you should have instead of that recommendation, i’d say just pick a team. It could be every month it could be based on certain weeks that, you know, we’re leading up to events, whatever. And having a team i think, really helps people across the organization, you know, in whichever team there in know that they can still talk about their team. Or their program or their service. But do it in a way that still aligned and advancing whatever over our james focus organizationally needs to be the priority. So it maybe we can use in ten for an example. Course i could speak to that, so we might say, ok, this month’s needs to be focused on the ntc, but we still have membership campaigns that happened, we still have course promotions that need to happen, you know, where there’s still all this other work, but we don’t need to be saying register for the nbc become a member. Sign up for this course that’s happening next week, you know, apply for this program because that’s not going that’s, where we get into the half a page email signature, you know, someone said saint arthur, steam is auntie si lets people say culwell instead of just talking about membership, i’ll talk about how members engaged at the ntc instead of just talking about, of course, next week, i’ll say this course has a similar topic at the mtc, and this is a way for you to continue your learning. You know, it just gives people more oven umbrella that they can talk about their programs while still staying. Kind of on message. Okay, yeah. I can i can i can toss out one for recommendation, and that is to put yourself on your own lists, make sure that you are seeding yourself so that you’re seeing the feed, the posts, hearing the podcast, whatever it is the same way, same frequency as everybody else. Yeah, and then had a way to do that. It’s not just getting your own organizations emails, because to your point, there are lots of different channels were using in ten does this and i’ve talked to a number of our other organizations who do this, too, whether you use black, which is kind of an internal messaging tool, or you have an internet or whatever tool you’re using for kind of internal content and conversation. Most of those tools there’s probably a way where you can have your organization’s account, your twitter account, instagram show up in there and that way you have essentially, you know, one channel in slack or whatever you used that just is showing all of your tweets, so not only can you see when a tweet has gone out, but what it was about, and then you can very easily scroll through and say oh, my gosh, way! Look at what we have been saying or what we haven’t been saying or whatever on dh you don’t have to say, okay, now everyone on staff has to create a twitter account and go follow the organization and check it every day. You can just pull it into a central system so everyone can see it. I see. Excellent. Okay, okay. She’s, the co author times two. Amazing. All right, let’s, take another break. Okay, let me take a break text to give you’ll get more revenue because text to give makes e-giving easy for your donors. If your donors can send a text message, they could make a donation to u not only simple also affordable and secure the way to get more info and to claim your special listener offer you text npr two, four, four, four, nine nine nine couldn’t be any simpler. Npr. Four, four, four, nine, nine, nine we’ve got about six more minutes for over marketing with amy um, we run really medicine, okay? Please go ahead. So this suggestion is coming from a place where at and ten, we have definitely seen return on the work, but also in recognition that if you’re if you’re organization is suffering from over marketing, you’re already putting in the time to do a bunch of work so let’s just move that work to something else, and that is the idea of promo, okay, it’s, not just for your big annual fundraiser or, you know, once a year event for anything programs for things that are year round, even creating again, you’re already doing this work because you’re already over marketing, so instead of putting it all out as an organization, all the work you did to come up with those tweets or those block post or whatever put them into, you know, a a shared document or a wiki or google doc or whatever, and instead of sharing them on your own feed, share them with community members that can that are interested in that that maybe participate in that program before whatever that they want to be out in the community scene is talking about your work and promoting it and it’s still getting out there. People are still hearing about your programs, but you aren’t saying okay, well, our twitter feed today is going to have to cover all ten of these topics you say today we’re covering this topic, but we know that we’ve supported community members and they have access to these promo kits. Tio help us spread the word excellent using yes using your most dedicated constituents, friends, followers sort of a back channel way of getting them to help you promote board members boardmember could be idea for that, right? Okay, are for sure, all right, i’m going to get one out because i know you’re going to say it, i’m gonna get out first, okay? If you feel you’re over marketing on promoting your own work, share the work of others instead. So the obvious, you know, sharing on facebook, facebook shares, they’re so they’re so rare. Now facebook shares please share other people’s content obviously twitter, the re tweets on twitter or you go or spend that time going out and finding, you know, curating the content of others and sharing that because, you know, it’s relevant to your community. I know you’re going to say that yes, well and i think something to remember to when when you’re thinking about content and mixing it up so that it isn’t just you talking. About the thing that you want people to do over and over, another place where you could look to content in addition to sharing, of course, you know that i’m always going to say, share other people’s work and rise up the community is just as you are doing, too be the one that reminds your community that they can take a break, that they can have fun, that the world is really hard, it feels right now, and so much is going on, and we’re always asking our community to take action to support us, whether it’s fund-raising or advocacy or local actions. But maybe you are also building community and building trust with them by being the voice that says, you know, we hope that you take a saturday off and just be with your family or go to the zoo her, you know, go for a hike and and you aren’t always calling them toe action that you’re also treating them as full people that need to take a break and be healthy too. Yeah, that space space critical. We had steve rio on last week talking a lot about that he’s. Interesting do you know, do you know steve rio, bright webb? I don’t know. And i know i heard he’s, based in vancouver. Andi has twenty five employees. Maybe that includes contractors, but they’re all over north america. Very interesting. Okay. Um, they do. They have. They have virtual meditations. You probably heard me or not. Uh, not not mandatory optional, but they do a forty five minute virtual meditation every day a couple times a week. Sorry. Three times, three times a week? Um, yeah, i think yeah. Mindfulness, you know, presence. Oh, and, you know, there’s there’s research that shows that that that helps you be be more efficient in your in your workday. Um, every sample would really have, like, two minutes left. Um, you have another. You wantto recommend something else. If you feel you’re over marketing, do you have another recommendation? While the other piece that i was going to suggest is kind of the office that and that is just in case there are listeners who are, like, no, our problem is that we never marketed anything we never, you know, actually promote ourselves because it’s all you know, maybe they’re your web site is is just kind of content, because your programs or your round and you don’t feel like you have timely things, so if somehow you are on the opposite end of the conversation and feel like you need more help finding ways teo to market, i would say, just look through whether that’s, your social media accounts, your website, whatever and look for those empty spaces places that i think organizations could really take advantages putting in in their twitter bio or their instagram bio, or whatever that you know, a girl that shows up right there and the short kind of narrative box you have to write something, put what feels more like a timely kind of a call to action or reference a campaign that you’re running or whatever that is, and put a girl in there that doesn’t just go to your home page, same with your email signature. Look for those empty spaces where you can make it feel more timely instead of just the permanent kind of here’s our home page here’s, what we do here is our mission statement she’s amy sample ward she’s the author i’m not you’ll find her at, you’ll find her and amy sample ward. Dot or go! And also you should be following the woman for god’s sake, twitter is so much wisdom coming follow-up for god’s sake that’s the end of it just for pizza. Just follow at amy rs ward. Thank you, amy. Thank you, tony. My pleasure always next week. Maria semple returns with real estate for prospect research. If you missed any part of today’s show i deceit, you find it on tony martignetti dot com. We are sponsored by pursuant online tools for small and midsize non-profits data driven and technology enabled tony dahna slash pursuing wagner, cps, guiding you beyond the numbers wagner, cps dot com by telus credit card and payment processing your passive revenue stream tony dahna may slash tony tell us and by text to give mobile donations made easy text npr to four, four, four nine nine, nine a creative producers clam meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer shows social media is by susan chavez. Mark silverman is our web guy and this music is by scott stein of brooklyn. You with me next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent go out and be great. You’re listening to the talking alternative network to get you thinking. E-giving cubine you’re listening to the talking alternative network, are you stuck in a rut? Negative thoughts, feelings and conversations got you down? 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Nonprofit Radio for August 26, 2016: Design On A Budget & Communications Mythbusters

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Oliver Seldman, Leah Kopperman, & Jessica Teal: Design On A Budget

Oliver Seldman, Leah Kopperman & Jessica Teal at 16NTC

Component based design will help you whether you’re working with a consultant or designing internally. Our panel talks through the process, from site map to comps. They are Oliver Seldman with Advomatic, Leah Kopperman at The Jewish Education Project and Jessica Teal of Teal Media. (Recorded at 2016 Nonprofit Technology Conference.)

 

 

 

Melissa Ryan, Kari Birdseye & Burt Edwards: Communications Mythbusters

Melissa Ryan, Kari Birdseye & Burt Edwards at 16NTC

What advice is truly useful and what has overstayed its welcome? Our panel from NTC will help you separate myth from reality in video; thank you’s; mobile; virality; press relations; and more. Advice comes from Melissa Ryan at Trilogy Interactive, Kari Birdseye at WildAid, and Burt Edwards with InterAction.

 

 


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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 with the breaking cracking fourteen year old voice. Did you hear that? But i’m still glad you’re with me. I’d go into a wreath is, um, if you irritated me by missing today’s show design on a budget component based design will help you whether you’re working with a consultant or designing in house, our panel talks through the process from site map to camps they are oliver seldman with advomatic leah kopperman at the jewish education project and jessica teal of teal media. This was recorded at the twenty sixteen non-profit technology conference and communications mythbusters. What advice is truly useful and what has overstayed its welcome, our panel also from ntcdinosaur will help you separate myth from reality in video thank you’s, mobile virality press relations and mohr the advice comes from melissa ryan at trilogy interactive, carrie birdseye at wild aid and burt edwards with interaction on tony’s take two don’t be in the woods on planned e-giving we’re sponsored by pursuant 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 here’s, our first panel from ntcdinosaur with design on a budget welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference. This interview is also a part of ntc conversations wrapping up our coverage on day two. We’re in san jose, california, at the san jose convention center and with me are oliver seldman, leah kopperman and jessica teal. We’ll meet them very shortly. Talk about their topic design on a budget first, i have to do the obligatory swag swag mentioned shoutout for this for this interview, which is from m d they do wordpress droop elin sales force. You see it’s a pen that’s also a very, very sturdy suction cup holder for the pen. And we have a what we call this our ever know bourelly also there bobblehead what troll now it’s, a combination bubblehead troll doll with very thin thinning orange and white hair. I implore you, if you’re only on the audio feed, please go to real tony martignetti dot com. You can turn it off after the first one minute twenty seconds and you’ll get the benefit of this, but you won’t get the benefit of our panel. Yeah, please stay for that, you’re sure. But if you only want to see the bobblehead troll doll, you could turn it off after one twenty. All right, so we’re gonna add this to the day two swag collection. Not too elegantly. I’m gonna add it. Thie bubblehead troll dollars now horizontal. Okay, design on a budget. Let’s, meet our panel. Oliver seldman is technical lead for advomatic llc. Leah kopperman in the center is analytics and digital director for the jewish education project. Jessica teal is teal media. She is co founder, founder, co founder and ceo. Executive director. Yeah. Everything all right. Hr as well. Right. Welcome. Welcome to non-profit radio. Thank you. All right. Design on a budget. Jessica let’s. Start with the teal media. Sure. We do not have to spend a lot of money. Tohave elegant, meaningful, impactful design. I would say that it’s more of a wise use of your money in terms of design. Buy-in all right, so how did i what did i miss state then what do you mean, it’s? More about how you approach the design. Our entire panel was about a new approach to design, which is component based design. Kind of trying to stop the old way of doing things which was static individual pages and kind of stopped that way of thinking and move to more of a component based approach. A component being little chunks of information that can be grouped together. On a page and then you bring in the individual components to form your website experience. Okay, all right, so we’re talking about website design the worst okay website design little little chunks of of content, and these can be repurposed and maneuvered. And okay, leah, help me understand more about this. This component based design absolutely three of you have been thinking about this for months leading up to a ninety minute presentation, and i’m only in my first three minutes and twenty seconds. So bring me along and it could be, i think, a little abstract toe understand at first. But in the more traditional design process, you get sort of to a phase where the designer has designed out on paper, using photo shop or some other design tool. What the website is going to look like a right and then that goes to the developer, and they build that and there’s this long period of time between the design that you saw and then the build out and what you get, and they always look different, because print design and web design are not the same thing. And so when something’s just designed in print and then you see it on the web, there’s always ah, hold up where you get the delivery herbal and your stakeholders see it and say, that doesn’t look like that looked, and we don’t see what we expected to see. And so you get sort of surprised and held up, and lots of little things need to be fixed before you can move forward in the component based design process. You get it. You do get some pages concept of what it’s gonna look like. But instead of having this long lag period between the getting the design and building the design, what you get is a design that’s like the overall mood and look of the site, and then it actually starts to get built in html in prototyping, using that look and feel, and then the the deliver ball comes to you, that is, say, just a form and you get the form and you get that tow look like you wanted and it’s being delivered to in html, so it looks like it’s really going toe look instead of what it looked like on paper, and if you don’t like something about the form, that doesn’t mean you can’t keep moving forward with what does the header of the page look like? What does the men you look like? What did the button look like? What does the you know? The subheading text look like verses. This page is no good. This doesn’t. This page doesn’t look like what i was expecting. So you build all these individual components? Each one is a small delivery ble. You can get them to look like you want them to look. And then the beauty is when they all get put together they can be re combined and like almost infinite ways. And so the content people who are working with it don’t have to think about so much like oh, should this be green here? Should this be blue? Here it is mohr that they can just okay, i need a video block here. I need a header here. I need a sub header here. I need a text block and you can. They could just take all those blocks and put it on the page and put the content and they want and they don’t have to worry about making sure it’s going to be formatted correctly. Okay? Okay, oliver, are the three of you anarchists in the design world? Why are you causing trouble? I don’t think it’s causing trouble i mean, we we’ve we’ve used this approach for for big budget projects as well, i mean, it’s not it’s, not just about trying to disrupt something or to get things cheaper. The the the ideas here are beneficial, even on very large projects. One of the main pieces of this puzzle is building this component library, which which s so it’s, the entire style guide of the site and all of the components exist in a living library. So as you go through and make new additions or changes, you’re maintaining this consistent, readily available and reference oppcoll library of your styles and your components, and so you can always make sure that even i mean from the beginning, but also through the life cycle of the project that they’re all they all remain consistent with one another. A change you make six months down the road doesn’t break some other component. It allows you, teo, maintain a consistency and, you know, kind of build up your site and in fact, the functionality around on building. Pages like thinking of these components as like lego building blocks where you build the key essential pieces, but in a way that they all fit together gives sight builders and content creators quite a bit of flexibility when the time comes to build a page, because they can grab this component and grab that component, and they actually can put together completely different looking pages by combining the different components. So part of the way that we save money is you can limit the layouts, but but then the content creators can actually customize their their page builds on a page by page basis. So, you know, you design a layout that can accommodate a sidebar and a bunch of different chunks of content stacked on one another, and then they kind of piece it together, like pulling components from here and there and your lego metaphor? Yeah, all right, all right, you’re tuned to non-profit radio tony martignetti also hosts the 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. Dahna so we’re here to learn this component design process, okay, now i’m a non designer, the only non designer on the panel, i presume i’m not. I’m not way have only on one representative. Lee is the only thing she’s the outlier not made alright, i mean, just sorry, jessica, not me, all right dahna where should we start with my our instruction? Well, the two of you have already learned it, even though so my instruction in this of this new process where we where do we begin? Sure, you need to start with some careful planning on that would be, of course, perhaps the client sitting down with the consultant working through all of the various content chunks on the website to determine what that inventory of possible components might be, and kind of doing a lot of preplanning within your own internal teams just to figure out what you’re going to need what’s going to be my key functionality? What? What are going to be my key features? And then working with your your way web design and development partner through the first delivery bubble, which is a site map, which is an organizational diagram of how that site is organized that will show page hierarchy how maybe pages might link together. We also start to get a sense of where can we? We reuse page templates and similar layouts and kind of nail that down everything’s going to be organic throughout this process were constantly learning as we go, but once we kind of feel pretty solid about that site map, then we go into what’s called the wireframe ing process, so think of wireframes those blueprints, they’ll be black and white line drawings that show how a page is laid out, approximately where the content little blocks will go, where the components will go. And as we begin to plan out, those page templates will also be able to see repeating patterns and places where we khun re use these little chunks or components of information, by the way. Jessica it’s very good that you explain what a wireframe is because okay, on tony martignetti non-profit radio, we have george in jail. Oh, didn’t even i didn’t have time to put you in your excellent work. You just walked past the jail. Well, even even notice notice you’re walking past a penitentiary, i mean the purpose of our discussion as well to we wanted to make sure we helped to find some of these. Concert. Yes. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. From wireframe leo, do you want to take it from wireframe? Sure. So once you get past the wireframe phase, which again is sort of abstract, you get a concept of what the site might look like, how things are going to fit together on various like what the pieces are, but it’s black and white it’s like it’s, like name or a skeleton it’s. Almost like thinking of like, a napkin sketch, right? I mean it’s a little more developed than a napkin sketch. But it’s really? Just like what? This could potentially look like that the that there’s going to be a hero across the top, that there will be the block column on the side. There was a video here, o o c i just got in georgia jargon. Jorgen, what the heck is a hero? Ah, the hero is you’ll see this on a lot of sites. It’s ah, large image across the top. That is a very visually striking. And that creates ah, sort of tone for the page. Often they also will rotate images, but there there will be maybe text across it. It’s it’s tries to sort of set the whole feeling of the page through a through some type of image. A photograph. Okay, okay. All right. Good. So, yes, you’ll know the location of the hero, but you won’t know what the hero is going to be. Not at all. Not at all. It will just be like it’ll say hero that, you know, okay. And and then there will be a a block that’s like black, and it’ll have a little youtube play button in it, and they will say video like, you’ll know that that’s where the video is going to live. But you have no idea what it’s gonna look like. Okay, so you get those you agree how that’s gonna work on and then you move on to the next phase, which is where you get style tiles. And that is where you get a sort of conceptual idea of what the look and feel of the site is going to be. Think of it, sort of like what you might get with an interior designer when you they come to your home. And they have, like, fabric swatches and, like a little piece of, you know, like a photo of ah, wall sconce and, you know, so bored, yeah, mood board and you ah, so you get a few different ones of those for different directions you might take without them having to build out a whole kant visual concept, right? So you get you picked the one that fits you best, or you work with one of them to get it to fit you best, and and then you can move on to the actual designing dahna keep a jj comprehensive design like, like the photo shop type of design, you do do a little bit of that because you do need to have some deliverable to take to your stakeholders and say, okay, this is the direction that we’re going in, but will be, but you’re not goingto take them a design for every single page on the site, you don’t do a comprehensive design for every page on this every primary patient. Exactly, yeah, and pages that require either heavy branding or heavy visuals. So think of your want photo shop cops for like, your home page or a major issue landing pages, but you might not need a full come for like your blogged page, which really is just a list of information that looks is repetitive in a list format that has a photo and a headline in some paragraph text. You don’t need to do a full comp and photo shop for that because you could just drag those components over the headline style, the paragraph style, the photo style in the link. Okay, okay on and then so then you’re now you’re getting feedback from you’re you’re your your client, the whoever’s in charge of this project and in this scenario, i’m the client in charge of the project right there working on the design for me. Yeah. Oliver, what? What was your role? This? I thought you weren’t you’re not a designer. I’m ah technical lead. So i’m just i’m doing the development building. Oh, you’re building here, just your building, just building building design. Eso just just point out a couple things. So in terms of like the title of this session the budget element of it on the benefit of the style guide i’m sorry the style tiles is thatyou khun uk rather than focusing on redesign coming up a five or six different designs or three or three designs for the site, you can actually do in the in the same prices. One design you khun do multiple style tiles so that you can be really thinking about and talking about what, what the site is supposed to feel like and look like with many options on a on a much deeper budget. All right, so just so we’re sort of breaking this all down in tow, component pieces are it was called the component based design problem, so you’re so instead of us having to conceptualize and approve or disapprove an entire pages and maybe an entire site that may not be quite right, but yeah, big, big pieces, yeah, we could take a little pieces and say, you know, i don’t really like this hero, you know, you should wear a quick study, i don’t like that here or there don’t really belong there, but we can talk about other things that are cool, like the donation, the format of donation, the button and the forms and landing pages, etcetera. Okay, yeah. Breaking into chunks, in fact, measurable chunks. During the dirt at the next phase, after these, you know, these these delivery bals are are approved is to actually start building out the prototypes of these components right component, which can actually happen quite apart from the back and development, quite apart from all the other phases of the project. These these things can all because they’re modular, they can all be happening in conjunction with one another. And, you know, to to your point, one of the major benefits is that you can actually start delivering versions of these prototypes, the donation button, the hero, whatever way, before someone would ever expect to see a page and so you can really get the client can really feel empowered to affect the overall process of the site and also just gets incremental reassurance things you’re moving. Oh, i’ve approved the donate button. That’s cool. We got it covered, right? I proved the donation form that things are moving along very nicely. Verses got this project is never going anywhere. Well, i get his designs that i can’t stand or then that two months go by or three months go by and then you just kind of get handed. The whole thing, and then you’re that’s when, like the worry begins or you you encounter stakeholders who didn’t quite get something from a piece of paper before now seeing it in real life for the first time, whereas in this in this process there, seeing it in real life from the very incrementally and when they see it in that older way for the first time it’s already completely built, and then you have to spend mohr labor ongoing and rebuilding stuff that and when your prototyping it in html you, khun, do a lot more of the build, and not have to rebuild on a bigger scale later on. So that’s, another money saver what’s the genesis of a component based design. Who created it? Was it one of the three of you? You know, it wasn’t e i thought that maybe you, jessica, there was not. I don’t know the genesis of it, though i have a feeling it may be developed out of the agile design and development process. Julie again, we’re programming pieces and right i know about and, you know, taking the approach of let’s create a minimum viable product first of the bare bones that will get you there and meet the criteria that you need for launch. And then as we grow and expand, tested yet learned and pivot and testing exactly and so component recent brain process, yeah, it’s a good match for that, because you’re constantly building on things as you’re learning and it’s better to do that in little chunks versus big pieces. Okay, i think they’re also like multiple many facets of this approach each kind of coming from different disciplines for example, the notion of ah, like a living style guide, it has been ah, semi recent, but ah increasingly adopted technique for managing the look of your site on dso, you know, fitting components into that is just a kind of natural, natural progression. You know, the sum of these things like that we’ve been talking about wireframes and page comes and site maps are have been part of the development. It’s not those elements are nothing new, it’s just the kind of way that we’re combining them for this purpose, that is, that is but it’s tze more of an evolution than somebody coming up with a new thing. Yeah, that’s very good, actually on evolution and i oh, i think lee, amid an awesome point on the panel yesterday in terms of just having an organizational change on don’t know, flee if you wanted to mention talk about it seems to have been retweeted a few times, so i guess people liked the analogy. I was saying that there’s this older organizational mindset, that building a website is like a one time investment like you’re investing in a piece of furniture, like a file cabinet, and really, the mindset needs to change because websites air living and breathing things that need to change along with the organization. So you should really think of your website as more like a program than like a file cabinet. Okay, yeah, this process really allows that flexibility you you end up with, you’re not you’re not locked into something because a new component can be added whenever you have a whole language of a visual language. So it’s very easy to change or add things when the time comes it actually, the process is about kind of thinking about howto refine or no hone the essence of what you need so that you can grow and pivot and change it without without issue major just rocked out are their opponents to this process. Naysayers who prefer toe prefer to do it the old traditional way of designing a website. I mean, i can i can imagine that there might be a client for whom the suspension of disbelief for talking about what is a component and seeing how you know a style tile will lead to a design on dh feels that unless they see everything on every page finalized a visual of it, that they’re unwilling to you, check off the approval checkbox, and that for that, for that person, it may be difficult, or for someone who doesn’t have ah, internal technical advocate s o that there they don’t have anybody on their end advocating for ah process like this, it might be difficult for them to buy into it. Ladies, have you seen objections to this or or heard them yourselves? I wouldn’t i’m sorry, i wouldn’t quite call it objections like oliver was saying, i think there’s a certain level of discomfort with an unfamiliar process and that in the past when people that the folks who are, you know the stakeholders working on. This site rebuild, they’ve been through a site build before, and it’s followed the old process and so that’s what they are used to and changing the process so much feels it’s there’s a i think a fear of making small decisions on signing off on this is the site map. This is the wireframe because there’s a fear that once you approve that wireframe you’re completely stuck with what it’s gonna look like because in the old universe, once you approve what a layout was going to look like, that was the layout you were getting. And in this universe, when you approve something, you still have this flexibility of these components, that you’re going to be able to move around and using different ways. But until you get to the place where it’s more concrete, i think that that that that hesitancy and discomfort with this new process continues to play out. So i think it move some of the anxiety of the project to the front end of the development cycle and as you go through it, that there’s less and less anxiety and by the time you get to the final design people are comfortable with it, and what they get is what they’re expecting to get. Yeah, jessica working with it the whole time, right? Jessica has till media had clients objective, this method of web site design. Like leah said, there hasn’t been objections it’s just been we’ve had to spend extra time educating folks about the process and making them feel comfortable as they go along. So, yeah, i don’t think that there’s any strong opposition it’s just hard with zsystems because the last one wasn’t like this, right? Right, right. Okay, wei have just like, another minute or two together. What do you want to leave people with that we haven’t talked about yet, leo. You’re leaning into the micro? Yeah, there’s one thing that i didn’t talk that none of us talked about that i do want to talk about that’s, another real money saver for the project. The the way that we’re doing this design process is actually with two separate scopes of work. So the first is this design phase where we’ve been talking about getting through to style tiles and during that process, the technical lead oliver is is listening in and participating and understanding what we want. The site to be able to do technically and making a list of all the functional requirements for the site and we have a set budget and we’ll get a scope of work at the end of this cycle that respects that set budget and tells us with this budget we can get these components built on dh this khun b on the maybe we’ll get to it list and this khun b on the you we can do this in the future, but it’s not going to fit within this budget. And so you get a really good prioritization of what really matters and you build like jessica said, the minimum viable product now at least, and you have a sight that you can launch and then you can continue toe add functionality to it once it’s already live? Yeah, that that concept takes into account the world of development, being in perfect and hard to estimate, and you don’t always know how long something takes to build when when the time comes and so it accounts for prioritizing what’s most important on dh then, you know, finding a range of what to accommodate and about as they were. Saying finding a kind of minimal point where we can say this is done, it works the way basically needed tio and then kind of continuing to add to it and okay, how about we leave it there? Thank you. All right. Thank inky advocates are advocates for the component based design process. All right. And they are oliver seldman technical lead. It advomatic llc. Leah kopperman analytics and digital director for the jewish education project, and jessica teal of teal media. And you are with tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of ntc teen the nineteen nineteen. The twenty sixteen technical women i’m losing. It was our last last time technology conference. I need to take this in chunks component it’s. Tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntcdinosaur the non-profit technology conference. Thank you so much for being with us. Thank you. Thanks. Pleasure. Communications mythbusters coming up first, pursuing you know them. You know, these people that you have fund-raising tools for small and midsize shops. I beseech you, i implore you even check them out. You need to raise more money. I know you do. Pursuant has tools to help you. Ideal for our listeners in small. And midsize or eggs? I can’t say it any simpler pursuant dot com and we be spelling spelling bees for non-profit fund-raising this is not your mother’s spelling bee. They incorporate concerts, dancing, comedy and fund-raising and is a spelling bee. 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It’s just a matter of when live love to our live listeners from asia and now recently europe has been checking in and of course, the domestic live love goes out as well for those listening right now, which is later than now when i’m talking it’s it’s now, then for those listening now, then later, then now my love to you and the podcast pleasantries. Who knows when you’re listening it’s so much easier to do podcast pleasantries couldn’t have to explain the difference between live and now and then and later the pleasantries go out to the over ten thousand podcast listeners and i am an affiliate am and fm affiliate listeners affections to you let your station know that you’re hearing non-profit radio please affections to our many am and fm affiliate listeners. Here is our next panel from auntie cia, and this is communications mythbusters welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc the non-profit technology conference in san jose, california. This interview is also part of a t c conversations with the convention center in san jose. My guests now are melissa ryan carry birdseye and burt edwards. We’re going to meet them. Very shortly. First have to highlight our rust and ten ntcdinosaur swag item of the of the interview. And this is from jmt consulting. Very nice green your earbuds in a case. Very nice jmt consulting. We had that to our swag pile for today. Would have had a bigger pile. But from yesterday, when it got stolen overnight, who knows? Who knows what happened? It was a good and ten scarf there. There. I mean, i’ve already said the scarf gots carved. All right, let’s, meet let’s. Meet the panel. Melissa ryan. Is it right here? Melissa ryan? Yes, of course. Is director of client services at trilogy interactive she’s seated closest to me. Carrie bird’s eye is us campaigner for wild aid. And burt edwards is director of media and web strategy at interaction. And there seminar topic is communications mythbusters. Best practices versus bad advice. Let’s. Start in the middle. Okay. Um, carrie? Yes? What? What are the why are there so many misconceptions and so much popular wisdom out there about marketing communications? How does that how do these things perpetuate? I think that people like to make money off of telling other people what to dio and so there’s a lot of people in a cottage industry trying to make basically what’s good manners, being a real person and being true to your communications, they they put out, you know, a lot of misinformation around, you know, something that need need not be a difficulty as they make it sound auras? Yeah, right. I’d come stated. Yeah, all right, all right, bert you’re nodding a lot. I am that all right? I’m sorry, bert. I didn’t have your makeup start again. Please. Yeah, actually, this is how the panel first came about our other mythbuster, colin delaney, who is actually in a panel. It was a discussion that he and i were having about what we were hearing he’s now on the consultant side, i work for an ngo called interaction, and we were just talking about some things that we were hearing, and it was like, i don’t know if that really shakes out and that was kind of idea as far as like, putting together a panel of miss busters and to try to get the audience and engaged in a conversation. How are you, melissa? You want teo to? Yeah, i mean i think it’s often like a game of telephone, right? Like you read a case study and you tell me about it and you get very excited. I’m very excited about it. Without seeing the case study, i tell car e about it. And then what it ends up to me is, you know, i hear from a client or a potential client or another consultant. Well, i hear the on ly time that’s where sending an email is thursday at nine. P m s o i actually i approach it with the best of intentions. But i try to think of it it’s like a game of telephone. Okay, okay. And i’m sorry. I mispronouncing names it. Khari khari nufer i answer to both. Well, well, which would you prefer if your name you have a choice. Carry. Oh, i’m so sorry. Oh, she pronounce you mispronounce it it’s my fault. Don’t apologize if you believe this it’s. Unbelievable. All right, i think it’s pretty the way you say it. Curry is pretty. Sounds very exotic. Alright, but carrie ok. All right. I got lucky. I should have asked. Okay, let’s. See? So should we just start with a bunch of myths around communications. Uh, i don’t know. Thank you. Notes have to go out within twenty four hours. Is that a legitimate one? Because you have you have some of the legitimate right? Some or not, thank you. Notes for gift should go out within twenty four hours. True or false myth or myth or fact, i would say that spots is long as the sentiment is genuine. Okay? And and an authentic i mean a canned response that comes out really quick. And it looks like it can response. I don’t think that that really, really get you much with anyone. Okay. You rather seymour? Genuine sincerity. Maybe it’s. Thirty six hours or forty eight hours, but not a week. A week is too long. Is that a myth or fact? I mean, you want to get them the thank you note where they still remember having made the donation the world fuzzy feeling my hat is off to everyone who can get the thank you note out within twenty four hours. But i think it’s a nice toe have not a mustache. Ok. How about the week, though? That seems to me now my voice is cracking, although like a fourteen year old a week. Seems like, you know, you didn’t really care that much. Um, i wrong is a week. Can you burn? Let me challenge you. Can i can? Is it possible to have a really sincere message? A week after the donation? It leaves my office the week after the donation so it might not get to the person till eight, nine, ten days, depending out far away. They are. Is my outside the bounds of propriety in thanking donors. Yeah, i would say that. That’s a bit that’s. A bit long. Okay. Okay. So we could say somewhere between a day in a week. All right, but the panel doesn’t feel it has to be twenty four hours. Okay, it’s. A good goal, right? I mean, it’s, something to strive for. Well, if you’re doing online donations, you should be able to get the thank you out very shortly afterwards, because so much of that is automated, that sort of unless you want to sincere that’s. Too sincere. I mean, automation can certainly personalized. But if you want to sincere, maybe a hand written note. Last panel was talking about handwritten notes. How was that small organization? Yeah, or a very big gift, right? Okay, all right, um, all right, so i threw out the first one, greece, to slide a little bit. Now, now, it’s your turn, let’s, start, throw out some conventional wisdom and let’s beat it up. Yeah, so we had one myth that came up when we chatted previously, and that was the concept that online videos only work for cats or kardashians. Oh, yeah, now people believe that i mean, i think, alright, carrie, what, you’re laughing the hardest. Why is this wrong? Cat or kardashian never hurts, but you don’t need them. Sure, i think thoughtful, authentic, engaging material targeted to your specific audiences, always gonna work okay, can we? Ah, can we say that production value is less important than sincerity? I think that’s bearing out to be more true, i think we went through a trend where everything people wanted very highly produced content, and i feel like we’re sort of moving away from that online. Yeah, okay, sincerity trumps ok, we’re going through these rapidly, so well, i see big jugs of chocolate milk is that somebody was talking about? Yes. Yeah. Looks like they’re setting up a snack because the time is about to eighteen now, uh, snack is good. So you may hear something. My voice cracked against it. So you may hear some food setting food preparation. I mean, we’re in a convention center, you know, it’s gonna happen. But there are these big urns of chocolate milk, man. I mean, who doesn’t love chocolate? Look, once in a while, at least i do. Okay, big. We’re talking gallant multi gallon earns some giant. Yeah, yeah. It’s clear. You can see through. All right. Sorry for the aggression. Alright, more myths let’s do over here. But, melissa, what do you mean? One of this? That i i used to believe fervently. And now, through testing, i know is no longer the case. Is that email has to come from a person to get the highest response rate s o you know, from melissa ryan at x environmental organization rather than just the name x environmental organization or even in some cases you don’t even need the brand you can say in the action is the centre what you’re going to do, so save the polar bears as the sender? This one, this one broke my heart because i used to believe that people very much they wanted personal communication in email and they wanted to feel like they had a relationship with the person who was asking them for money. But it makes sense when you look at what retailers like amazon or doing. Jeff bezos doesn’t email you about persons or shoes that you should buy. You get that email from amazon on and i have found in in testing with with my clients and in my work that that generally, unless your surrogate issue no barack obama or kim kardashian, since we’re using that name often times the brand of the organisation is more powerful than any individual staffer. Okay, excellent, very concise let’s not use the let’s not use came anymore. Really non-profit radio was above that. So cats or fine or some other name, i don’t mind people, but i don’t mind people, but not the kardashians. Okay, what else? Uh, carol, you wanna take one in the middle? Sure, i was brought on to this panel because i’m a former journalist and been in the non-profit world for about a decade now. And one myth that i always hear is journalism is dead, and i think that that is not true. There’s for-profit journalism that is driven by ratings and often goes for the lowest common denominator. But there’s also some really great journalism going on. That mainly online outlets like center for investigative journalism, our center for there’s. Quite a few of them that are really doing a great job. And hiring seasoned professionals. Or the really smart kids out of out of college, to take their time to be thoughtful and do riel reporting. And not just what is going to sell, you know, get the most ratings on tv or or still the most newspapers. So the other thing that we were talking about is our news, our newspapers, debt. And so we were talking a little about communications. Career is also not just communications within non-profits but if you if if communications is your profession right. Ok, newspapers. Are they dead? I just want to say that if i i feel guilty reading a newspaper outside of my home the new york times on a sunday in your own private home is one one thing. But when i really get looks on the ferry, if i have an old fashioned newspaper, so, you know, in a very is this that you’re taking what is this? I take discriminatory fremery take it where i take the ferry across the bay. I work in san francisco and i live thirty miles east, so i have ah, almost on our ride across. So because this is such a tech tech heavy area it’s pretty young analyze the paper it’s pretty, you know, an online community and so on. So they look down on paper, they dio i have to read my newspaper under myself. Do it proudly, proudly right in front of their faces put it, put it between their face and the and their phone is that they’re reading. You just dropped the paper right in there, right in between. All right, all right. Newspapers are not dead. Journalism’s, not dead. What else we got? Well, let’s, try to keep stick to non-profits okay, odds are you know, you might have a lot of communications professionals in your in your audience, but in our listeners probably don’t have, you know, a big portion. So? So we have a lot of little bit. Well, we have a little. Well, a lot of a lot of these journalistic outfits are non-profit are non-profits okay. Okay. All right. Yeah. Good. Another minute came up in discussions was the question that all that matters for web design is mobile. All that matters no way she ought to be multi-channel mean mobile is not unimportant. Certainly. But it’s not it’s, not the end old it’s, not everything, is it? I think this is one where there was some debate. Actually, among among the panelists, i’ve been toe add presentations by tech companies who are pretty openly saying that they are on ly designing for mobile at this point, because most of the usage is more and more of the usage is coming in on mobile instead of dusk up on mobile, we’re speaking more broadly than just the phone were also speaking the tablet on dh you have, you know, large loss to the country for whom mobile is their primary point of access for the internet. So i am going to step out on a limb and say, i think that’s true, you do think it’s true, ideo kari what’s your opinion, it depends on who you’re trying to reach so multi-channel multi platforms, i mean that if you have an older demographic that you’re one of fund-raising from you have to you have to meet them where they are, and that probably is still in there their desktop, okay? And you’re doing policy advocacy from and, you know, i mean, you definitely will have constituencies, whether they be in the hill or some policymakers that will definitely be looking at things on there regular laptop and the crystal be checking their mobile devices as well, but you can’t, nor the stop can’t ignore desktop, right, well and funders to like, if you want to. Reach out, latto, you know. Large foundations, they’re still in a in an office. They’re not always doing the reading and the research on, you know, on their phone, yeah, it’s an interesting example. We were working to redesign it’s, a tool that we have in our website that specifically for hill education and for what kind of education. So it’s tio educate members, the hill on a hill. And so one of the new members of our policy team, he had just come off the hill. And he said, you know, we really need pgs, because when i would take things to my member if there’s going to be effective tool, i need a nice print off because they want to see things in print, which was interesting because we haven’t been thinking that way at all right. Prince of washington. Okay, your your comrades carry, they could ride the subway with you more, more, more paper, the better get some of the recruits. Yes, oh, silicon valley needs to meet washington, d c and beat each other up. Yes, all right. Like what you’re hearing a non-profit radio tony’s got more on youtube, you’ll find clips from a standup 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 only 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-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 guess directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. I’m peter shankman, author of zombie loyalists. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Dahna all right, we got more minutes. We got plenty of time together. What? What other myths are out there? Anybody? Melissa, you suggested a myth lately, i can suggest another one. Another myth i have is about crowdfunding. People think that if you build a web page, the money will just come in on one of the biggest misconceptions that i see about crowdfunding. Is that it’s not you. Put up a web page, and money comes in there’s actually, a lot of communications work and offline outreach and work that goes into a crowdfunding campaign. So for non-profits that air considering doing it, which i think it’s a good tool, you really have to think of it. Not just azan. Internet tool, not just as a fundraising tool. It is a combination of all your best assets to your goal. I love that you mentioned off line there’s a lot of back channel work that goes into, you know, it’s been several days that we have a donation. Could you please help us out? You you know, you. I mean, this is a targeted either phone call or e mail you’ve been loyal. We noticed you haven’t given to. This campaign could you help boost us? We’re in a molise. Where? In the doldrums here. Exactly. And i would like that goes on. Yeah. And i would say if you don’t know who your first twenty thunders, are that air goingto get onto your the site and donate your you’re not ready to do a crowdfunding campaign yet nobody wants to give to that xero level that and when the bar is that there is no bar is just an empty shell. Where the borrower toby it’s. Very hard to get the first people. You’ve got to recruit them back. Channel. Yeah, that is a common mistake. Anything else about you want to add carrier bird around just around crowdfunding? Anything more about that? That miss? Well, i think we’re good and they will come. Myth. Well, this was related. I think this was melissa’s myth. And that was that. What? You? What you say is what people will hear. What you say is what people will hear. That sametz at least that’s what i wrote down in my notes. Well, it’s, no. Does it sound familiar to you? No. Okay. Okay. All right. Well, i mean, it sounds like reality versus perception or your message vs? Yeah, that, yes, the intention of your message versus how it’s received. Well, i think we can agree that that’s not always the same, right. I mean, if it’s not even carefully crafted, buy a communications professionals sometimes leads the misunderstanding, i mean, this is also a great argument for testing messages. Very good. Alright on email on social, then your coms channels. Okay, okay, it wasn’t that one of our myths that small organizations can’t test or don’t test. Yes, well, may be that they don’t test is a fact, i don’t know, but that they can’t. That sounds like a deep myth, right? Absolutely, i don’t know. Is there an e mail provider that doesn’t provide that doesn’t offer those simple ist a b testing, and i mean, can’t we just do it on our own, even if we don’t have? Ah une male vendor. Well, you certainly could look at open rates. I mean, and that will give you mean that will be a least give you a primitive way of doing a be testing. Okay, i mean, i also think it’s ah it’s, a value proposition and it’s a capacity. I think it makes sense for everyone to develop a culture of testing, but whether it makes sense for your organization to test subject lines every time or run multiple tests, if you’re dealing with a list size of a couple of thousand people and that’s maybe get a net you fifty extra dollars, there might be a more valuable way and spending your time maybe it’s, actually just pushing up the draft of another email. S o i think it’s it’s always good to be thinking about testing and things you contest, but that time that you spend setting up a test is time. You’re not spending doing something else, so i think that’s worth weighing when you’re thinking about testing, all right? We got time for another couple of myths. What else we got? Birds got the phone. You you got the device, you know, check out the list. Okay. Well, when the myth that came up it was after the brainstorm was on curiously here, uh, former journalist and as you’re a journalist, is the question of what he should ever seldman podcast don’t know from journalists. Well, thank you, that’s. Very thoughtful. You sound like a journalist. Oh, thank you. I take that as a compliment. I admire journalist, but yeah, i don’t know, but you don’t. Okay. Well, the question was, do you ever say because there is the professionalism that you should never say? No comment to a journalist? I really never say no comment to a journalist. All right, what is that? Is that fact or fiction? We busted busting that myth. Carry going? You’re the former journalist. I know a lot of people that that live by that mantra. But i do think that there’s other ways of meaning. No comment and not saying it as in well, we’re not the best people to talk to on that subject, but but we can definitely put you in touch with people that could give you a statement on that. So it’s pivoting instead of no comment. Ok, but you gotta know, i learned a really good phrase from a coms director i work with, which was i cannot be a good source for you. Let me refer you to someone who can, which i think is a little friendlier than no comment and keeps the conversation going. Okay, okay, you know what? If we’re in a crisis situation, i mean, you’re, you’re, uh, you know, we’re talking worst case now. You’re the organization’s reputation is on the line for some reason, you’re in the headlines and it’s not a good it’s, not a good headline, and you’re the i mean, you’re really the only source because it’s, your organization is talking to and you’re the ceo of the communications director and you mistakenly picked up the phone because you had read the headline yet, i guess. Now what do you do? You can’t you can’t you can’t give it to somebody else, you’re the you’re the person. Well, you you say, i need to get right back to you, and then you come up with a a good response, especially if it’s about it’s, about your organization on when you’re not under pressure against the right, but you always have, you know, at least fifteen, thirty minutes unless they’re completely on deadline right now to take to get your statement, right? Okay, you know, i think you never want to take a press call cold. I mean, even if they’re on a tight deadline, just like, can i get back to you in five to ten minutes? Me? Because people are on the go on dh. Just give yourself five. Minutes. I kind of think through what you want to say. Okay? Never taken. Never take it cold. That sounds like good advice. All right, we got room for one more who’s. Got another one. Now we’re going to burn because he’s got the phone. But, ladies, you have you are you thinking of something? Go ahead. I mean, one more, i think is the idea that something has to go viral to be successful. This when i feel like if you’re in communications and urine digital, you fight against all the time. And to me, the most important thing is that the audience that you are talking to seize it not everything has to get ten million views to be successful. Okay, your message could still be heard. Depends who’s hearing it, right? I mean, and who? You want to hear it, who you need to hear it. And what the goals of that communication are too mean. If you have a specific goal in a specific audience that’s going to help you reach that goal. It’s successful if you if you move the needle on with that with that communication and even if only reached one hundred fifty people exactly. Or that the decision maker and everybody around them. Okay, lots of nods. All right, this was fun, you know? Alright, i like this a light one, but we got a lot out. We covered at least ten of these things. At least ten myths, all right? And the panel has been seeded closest to me. Melissa ryan, director of client services at trilogy interactive. And karen birdseye, us campaigner for wild aid. And burt edwards, director of media and web strategy at interaction. And this is tony martignetti non-profit radio coverage of sixteen ntc non-profit technology conference. Thank you for being with us next week. It’ll be september and it’ll be a good show. 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 super cool spelling bee fundraisers. Our creative producers claire meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director shows social media is by susan chavez on our music is by scott stein thank you, scotty be with me next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other 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 yeah 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 post 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 and applicable to these young people look so otherwise a fifteen and sixteen year old they have better things to dio 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, sort of dane toe add an email address 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 on dh 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 zoho, 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 expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. 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 December 18, 2015: Tips From Maria

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Good lo and welcome to tony martignetti non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. I’m your aptly named host animal said good afternoon, but it was that applies to, but hello, i’m glad you’re with me. I didn’t do the agony of austin pieces if you leak to the idea that you missed today’s show tips from maria maria semple is our prospect research contributor, the prospect finder and has a new book magnify your business. She shares her wisdom for your non-profit on tony’s, take two new non-profit technology conference video interviews still up we’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com maria simple the prospect find her she’s a trainer and speaker on prospect research her website is the prospect finder dot com, and her new book is magnify your business tips, tools and strategies for growing your business or your non-profit she’s our doi end of dirt cheap and free, you’ll find her on twitter at maria simple. Welcome back to the studio! Thanks so much for having me and excited to be here. We’re here we’re by phone so often and you’ve been to the studio before, but it’s been a while? Yeah. It’s been a while. I think i was here for one of your recent celebratory fifty. Every that’s, right. Every july, we hit a fiftieth show. Milestone july this year. Next year will be three hundred. But you’re here for the two fiftieth that’s, right? Yep. Um, congratulations. Thank you, magarri. Exciting. Magnify your business. It has a magnifying glass on the cover. Not unlike your logo. Your prospect find a research logo has is ah, kapin kept that theme girl has a magnifying glass embedded in it. Um, so how does this book relate to your work and prospects research? Because there’s only one chapter that’s specifically about finding new prospects. How does the work overall relate to what you do? Specifically? So, you know, prospect research is really one component of you know what? You would call business development or donordigital elopement or fund-raising right on the non-profit side. And so it is definitely a very important component. But my business is, you know, really morphed it in and of itself over the last several years to really, um b not just about the prospecting part. But about connecting as well. So it’s one thing to have, you know, that great list of prospects. But then how do you connect those dots? How do you go from just building a list, or or even having a great list of donors that you’re maybe, um researching because you already know they donate to you? But then how do you make it happen so that they get more engaged with you? How do you keep that engagement going? So that’s really? More of a communications and marketing element. And so this book tries to address all of that cool that’s, ovary, ovary, concise and articulate recitation of the need for the book and how that’s all of it was very good. You start with you’re. Ah, you know what? I should have said? Happy holidays. Merry christmas, happy hanukkah. Happy new year and t was i wouldn’t open with that. And this is going to be our last show of the year before for non affiliates for the podcast listeners. So lots of good wishes, i would say at the end too. But, um, wishing that to you, maria. Something tina’s. Well, right here in the studio. How? Could i not, sam? You too. Sam gives thumbs up. Everybody’s taken care of. Now. Now, it’s, back to me. You start with the unique selling proposition r u s p i i think that’s pretty well understood, but let’s, make sure just in case there are people not so familiar with the u s p what is this? So, really it’s a way to distinguish you from all of the other people that do something similar to what your organization does. Right? So if you live in a community and there are, um, you know, multiple organizations that are social service agencies, right? Well, how does yours differ from another? Where? How do you collaborate? Even with the other one? So we’ll talk a little bit more about that. But you know what sets you apart? What is it you do better differently? Um, is it your you know, how does your mission toe differ from other people? So it’s important that organizations understand that? And so that they’ll be able to position themselves to attract the right types of volunteers, attract the right types of donors. Eso messaging, you know, it’s very important that your niche, your niche. But unique, right? But but, you know, a lot of lots of organizations. I mean, anybody listening who was already in an organization, one of the first things they do is their mission statement, right? So that mission statements already set right? But that mission statement could be long, right? It could be something that that is typically is going to be on all their printed materials. It’s going to be something that’s going to be on their website. Eso it’s going to be articulated? Perhaps in sometimes i’ve seen mission statements that could be, you know, a paragraph long, right? Rather than just think what’s preferred like a a sentence or two a sentence or two? Yes, but go ahead. So you have along if you have a long. So if you have a long one, how do you then to still that down? Can you take a look at your current mission statement? Is your entire board when they are out in doing there networking and so forth and they’re acting as ambassadors for your organization? How are they able to articulate what you do in one or two concise sentences? And some of the mission statements are you know, really bold, you know, in terms of you know what their their overall goals are on dh sometimes it’s it’s a bit of a stretch even, but it’s it’s really it’s showing in a very concise one or two sentences where that organization wants to be, you know, eradicate poverty. Ok, if that’s your bold statement than that’s it you know eso it’s, it’s it’s important for everybody. Not only staff, but bored to be able to articulate it. Okay, so if it’s eradicate poverty, how are you going to do that? Uniquely right? There are thousands of organizations working tens of thousands working on poverty alleviation throughout the world. But what’s your again your niche what’s your usp. How do you do it? Different than everybody else, right? Exactly. Yeah, i like bringing in the idea the board do. How do they describe your work? You know what? I’ve even had a guest recently. I remember who was now but recommending that there be bored training and conversation around the messaging and the keywords that you’re bored should be using when they’re out talking about your organization? Absolutely. How do you tell that stories to simply you? Know, and if you want, i can share just one or two that i thought that i have actually as examples in my book of organisations, i thought had a really great u s p yeah, we have just about two minutes before a break, but it was a go ahead. Okay, so one of them is make a wish, right? So i think most of us are familiar with the make a wish foundation and we make a wish group so here’s their their mission statement, they’re here they’re us pay their vision statement. Our vision is that people everywhere will share the power of a wish. All right, very short, very concise. Is that there is that their stated mission that’s that that’s what they’re calling their vision state vision, vision statement so that that so from that, you know, you can see how that that’s showing their unique selling proposition power of a wish, right? Absolutely don’t know if you know another one is save the children, right? So we envision a world in which every child attains the right to survival, protection, development and participation, right? Very clear, very succinct. So yes. So if if your organization doesn’t have that, you know might be might be time for youto to think about doing something like that for the new year. Okay, that sounds like this could be valuable to you if you’re developing a business plan or a plan for the well strategic plan. Ah right, yeah. Oh, yeah, absolutely, yeah, absolutely, because if you’re as you’re doing that type of planning, you know, ifyou’re, especially if you’re articulating this to your your funders, whether they be donors or perhaps you’re you’re getting alone for something seed funding, you know, it’s going to be important thatyou articulated in that way? Yeah, okay, usp, i’m not sure too many non-profits think about that really, they think mission statement, but we’re talking about distilling it down, all right? We’re gonna take a break, and when we come back, we’re going to keep talking. Marie has got lots of tips should be back next in january do we’ll talk some butt today about your ideal clients and your presence online? 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 let’s take care of them live listener love we got asia checking in i love it always, always loyal, really start with beijing, beijing, china knee how also, seoul, south korea so loyal in seoul unbelievable on your haserot and in japan we got tokyo also incredibly loyal. Konichiwa mexico city, mexico when a star days and i don’t know how to welcome correctly. Sharjah, united arab emirates i would just say live listener love, let’s, come back domestic st, louis, missouri, florida! We can’t see your city and we got some other masked us ah presence, we don’t know we can’t even city or state, so that could apply to just any anybody was listening, but we’ll we’ll catch up with mohr city and state live listener love always thinking about our podcast listeners pleasantries podcast pleasantries to the over ten thousand listening in the time shift, whatever you’re doing while you listen very glad you’re with us and all our am and am and fm affiliate stations equally grateful that you are with us throughout the country affiliate affections to our am and fm listeners. Buy-in i love i just i love knowing that there’s people out there live even if it’s even when it’s only a dozen or fifteen, i don’t care. I just like knowing that there’s people out there listening live and it’s so cool that they’re all the way around the world to indeed and you have no idea what time it is in any of this. Country’s leon is a twelve hour beijing i know was twelve hours. No china’s twelve hours. So it ze midnight it’s one one am there? Ah, great loyalty coming out of beijing. Absolutely. Um, your you know what kind of tracking your chapters through your book, which is which is excellent mind doing it that way. You go on, teo, talk about ideal clients, what we’re talking about, the people who are benefiting from our work. Right? So? So, people benefiting from your work and, um, you know, also you have to think about, you know, getting targeted in terms of who are the people that you want to attract as volunteers and donors. So, yeah, there’s definitely that the beneficiaries of your services, right? The people that you serve, but broader? Yeah, but you know, you want to think, you know, client could mean could mean a number of things, right? So when we’re talking in the business world, client is pretty specific, you don’t want to say i interrupt all the time when you’re in studio c this is the benefit of being on the phone. I can’t get away with that. You don’t know, i’m doing it. I cut in, but you can hear me sometimes eso yourself you’re suffering with us, but so you don’t want the ideal constituents that doesn’t really constituents and its end. So, uh, no clinical does third party. It sounds like something terrestrial, right? You want to use it, but i don’t care for you. But we call them ideal people. Then people i feel people to bring into your world right clients is good. All right. I’m sure you spent a lot more time thinking about the night that then i have. I tend to be a little shallow about these things. But you put some thought into it. So i interrupted you blatantly, brazenly. All are different constituencies, right? That that’s, right. So you do you know you need teo. Really get you. Know, laser focused as as much as you can, and you know it. I know for me, even as i look to grow my own business that to which i gave focus is what expands right. And you hear a lot about this right there. Lots of writings that you can find, definitely true. Yeah, you start to focus on something and it gets done right. It gets done notice thing, right? Or or like if if you buy a red car, then suddenly or if you’re thinking about buying a red car, right, then suddenly you’re driving down the road and where there’s red cars all around you. Whereas before maybe you just never noticed them before. It’s. Your perception. Yeah, they’re right there, not just all out of the woodwork. Now, suddenly you know the way to do that siren coming down seventy seconds i did. This is our this is our state of the art soundproof studio. Nothing. Nothing gets in except street noise. All right, so identifying we’ve got so let’s let’s think about volunteers. I mean, that’s it that that could be a struggle, not necessarily board members, but they’re just, you know, your garden variety volunteers, the ones we’re going to come in and they’re going to stuff lunch packages or their maybe gonna do some office work for you. Although we know from jean takagi months ago, you can’t have volunteers doing the same labor that you’re paid employees are doing that’s illegal. We know about that. You could search jeanne takagi on my site and go back a couple of months, and he and i talked about that, um, but volunteers that are doing other kinds of work volunteers are we going, like, find the right one? Yeah, but that’s always a challenge for organizations, you know, certainly there there’s so many ways that you can employ online strategies right? To try and find the right type of volunteers there’s often volunteermatch type of organizations that exist within communities. So make sure if you have a gala coming up and you have some very specific tasks around that, for example, that you list those opportunities with those organizations because there will be people who will say, you know, i want to do something for my community. I only have one or two hours a week to give um or you know, i know i’m going to have some time off of work, so i only will have time during that stated week or two period of time. So it’s, great to have these volunteermatch clearing houses in the communities that will be able to match all of that up for people, of course, there’s always the bigger sites nationwide. Volunteermatch dot com catch a fire is one we’ve had rachel cheung on ceo of catching fire where might you find the you’re the diet of dirt cheap and free, which i love we’re in the local community might you find volunteermatch opportunities locally? So i think it’s a good idea to start with those two websites that you just mentioned and see if they have those local affiliates. Another good way to to find out is to contact your local united way office because they they very often will serve as that sort of clearinghouse capacity as well to match up volunteer opportunities. S o that’s one good way you know, to do that if you don’t feel like you have another separate organization handling that in your community, might a chamber of commerce or or no? Um yes and no, it you know, it really depends. It depends on how large of a chamber it is. I know the chamber that i belong to in new jersey, we launched a non-profit council within that chamber, and that sort of thing exists in other chambers in new jersey, where i’m from s o it’s great when you when you have that because you you do some programming that are specific to the needs of nonprofit organizations. But then there are also created opportunities to make sure that the for-profit and non-profit worlds have an opportunity to mix. And i know with with our events were always looking to make sure that we are including people who are board members, right? So to get their skillsets up in terms of their boardmember ships, including them where at the events that we do for the non-profit council within the chamber. So so if you have ah, larger chamber, then yes, definitely approached them and see, you know, does it make sense? For your organization to join, what events do they have specifically around non-profits do they list? Sometimes they will, you know, perhaps facilitate, you know, they might have a certain section in their online newsletter or something like that that will list specific opportunities that exist within our community and of course, you know, these a sze yu and i go through, you know, talking about your book now and the next one’s gonna be january fifteenth, the next show that you’ll we’re continuing the conversation, you know? These things all blend together. I mean, we’re going to kind of cover, um, discreet topics, but one of them is in person networking, right? You know, we’re going to talk about you have lots of tips around that, and so obviously, when you’re meeting people face to face, you always want to be thinking potential volunteer, maybe even potential boardmember potential employees, if you have an opening, you know, so obviously these things all meld together, right? And that’s, why it’s so important to have that u s p clear in your head and to really be living and breathing so that when you you know, your organization, whether here that i’m just living and breathing, right? I mean, you have to be thinking about it all the time, like, you know, in terms of upcoming needs or, you know, what air cem specific wish lists you have in the organization right now? So, you know, maybe maybe the van just broke down, right? That you that you’re using to transport the children back and forth to events, right? So you’re thinking to yourself, you know, how are we going to do this? We don’t have the funds to replace this van it’s going to be expensive to repair the van, so suddenly you’re thinking about the van all the time when you go to a networking event, right? And so of course, that is in your psyche, right? That to which you give focused, right? So suddenly, if if you really and truly are just thinking about that a lot and you go to a networking event, for example, with the intention set that it be really great if i met with somebody here today that could connect me to a great opportunity that would get us near closer to a van, you know, it’s amazing how those things could end up coming to fruition suddenly. It’s, you know, there there might be a car dealer who’s who’s in attendance at that event or somebody that you’re talking to his brother in law is a car dealer, and suddenly, you know you’re you’re just you’re making the right connections, but you have to have it as really part of your psyche. Cool. And sometimes people will just ask, you know what? What is it the organization does, you know, and that’s that’s a natural question. But, you know, you kind of morph that into what the organization needs, you know? Yeah, we do this and, you know, and you know, and i was just telling you about this program we have for children and wouldn’t you know, just earlier this week, our van i was i’m the only guy in america i wish i knew enough about cars to able to say what happened to the van, but no more than a flat tyre that’s all that and change the windshield washer axle broke up. Okay, axel that’s. Perfect. Here we go. You getting technical now? Actual axel that’s a technical. Okay, if it’s not windshield washer fluid, i don’t have change, but through a through a through a, uh, piston rod camshaft, you know? And just all of a sudden, this just happened. And, you know, wouldn’t it be nice if you know, you got any, you know, lisa lee, any leads in that direction or anything? Maybe maybe even low cost repair now, but okay, you know, you want to find out more for the conversation to what you need. Yeah. No, no, no. Absolutely. Absolutely. So if you know you, but you have, you have to be clear. You know, when you’re attending that event at the chamber or other types of community events, you have to be clear about what the needs are of the organization. And then on the flip side, i think it’s super important for you to be ableto approach those events and approach other people in the community with how your organization can help them, right? Yeah. You have a lot of you have a lot of mutuality recommendations, right? How can i be of help to you? How can i be of help to you? Right? So, it’s, you know, you don’t always want to just be seen like that organization. That’s constantly got their hand out and okay, here’s that person again? Oh, yeah, they’re you know, they’re always hitting us up for this. Are we selling us the tickets? Always this that the bake sales or, you know, whatever. But you want to be seen as a partner in the community and, you know, what is it that you can give to the business community? So if your organization, for example, ah, does have programming for children, okay? And you’re at a networking event. Well, maybe there are some people that you’re going to be talking to. Hu have young children who all of a sudden, you know, they need an after school program. And so when it be great to be able to talk about what the re sources are that you have for the local business community, um, jumping back teo, the ideal client topic, you have some ideas about measuring and listening and monitoring what your clients are talking about. What we share some tips so some of those tips would include obviously seeing what you know what’s being said about you. I think some of these tips we’ve shared in more of the prospect research world, but they’re equally is applicable in in this situation too. So google alerts um and then the other two sites that i’ve been having tremendous success with since i reviewed it for your show is matter-ness remember, because we talked about google lorts not being so good so much anymore. And and you know what? I have seen it go down, isn’t that so? That was like a year ago that was yeah, you were you were saying they were declining because you were measuring side by side and google was not coming, so maybe we shouldn’t be so yeah, enthusiastic. Yeah, the the ones that i am getting great success with our talk walker dot com and mentioned dot net, i do the exact same, too. Since, since, you know, that review was a year year and a half ago, i use those exact same, too, and i find them really valuable. Yeah, and they pick up it’s interesting because they pick up on the social mentions. Not just what’s. No. Maybe a blogger article or a news article. Tweets and whatnot. So, it’s it’s great. So so here’s a way that a non-profit could could use this. In terms of especially in terms of fund-raising and so forth, so why not take your top ten, um, donors, right? And you’re bored and put alerts on their names so that if there is some interesting mention about them, maybe there’s some success that they’ve had, um, you know, maybe they’re company did something fantastic or whatever it’s an opportunity for you to have that point of engagement that touch. That touchpoint that that isn’t just take, you know, calling them up and asking them to get involved in an event or ask for money. Now you’re being like a friend. Yeah, i saw this mention of you, you know, and they may not. Even if they’re not having alerts for their own name, they may not know about it or think they do if they’re quoted or something in newspaper piece. But whatever you know, you want to be proactive, just like a friend. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, you don’t need to tell them, gino, i’ve got on alert. Having to see this in the local paper and, you know, congratulations, that’s all has to be absolute brats, you know, great quote, great mentioned for the company. Your work, you know, we have a great day. No that’s it that’s it just you show that you’re thinking about the person. Exactly. I just want to say those against its talk walker, dot com and mention dot net, i get alerts every day. Sometimes you can say whether you want it as it happens or daily digest or weekly digest, you know, there’s different options, right? And i would do your non-profit name, right? Yeah. You mentioned boardmember tze maybe the ceo i have one set for at tony martignetti. So my twitter is my twitter id, right? Any other suggestions? What? You should be checking. I think that those air probably the primary ones because it’s it’s just it’s that technology is going to be, um, that push technology is going to be helping you, right? So you set the alert up once and then you just let let the thing go and just it’s just going to push you the results so you get to sit back and just watch it come in just thinking your twitter id because a lot of people, you know, the twitter ideas, not the exact name of the organization. So if there’s a variation or if it’s you personally, you know, a lot of people have different ideas than their names. So you want to you want to be able to capture both, um, let’s see? Oh, you yeah. About your tribe finding your tribe, right? Is that all what we’re talking about here? Is that something different? What was that? So, yeah, a little bit different. So yes. So you’ve heard of seth goldenburg baizman argast heard of him. He’s been on the show when there’s no years ago? Yeah, i captured him until view with him. It’s on the youtube channel? Yes. Oh, my goodness. We’re gonna have to look that one up. I missed that one myself, but, you know, so he he’s done a lot of he’s a talker. Speakers, you know, an author and he his book, you know, tribes we need you to lead us was, you know, it was an interesting book for me, right as a business owner in terms of trying to figure out how to grow my own business, and i started thinking about that in terms of non-profit organization. So you know what we’re talking about? Tribe, we’re talking about, you know, who are those collaborators in the community that we should be looking to do more with, you know, who are the people that ah, well, really rally around you and help you? And they’re kind of like your ambassadors in away, right? Help you and are very concerned and want to see you stay successful in the community. So, you know, who are those tribe members? Certainly you’re you’re bored, right? Obviously should be your tribe, and if they’re not, you better get a better try because they should be your your your your biggest tribe. But then, you know, start thinking, you know, outward from there in those concentric circles, right? You know, who do they know? Who else can they bring to the table and and really, you know, become part of your tribe? It some in an online world? It’s, it’s, it’s super important, especially if you’re going to do any type of like a crowdfunding campaign, you need that tribe of people that is going to get out there and help push that crowd funding strategy out to their own to their own peered networks and so forth. Or your tribe is your loyalists? Yeah, most loyal people, yeah, yeah, and and, you know, they could be people to that. Maybe they just have certain skillsets that that the that the nonprofit organization occasionally needs, right? So maybe, um, maybe it’s an advisory panel or a focus group that comes together twice a year t measure, you know, the perception of the organization in the community and maybe there it’s, you know, somebody that maybe you can get ah, focus group together, like i said, that meets twice a year just to give you their feedback and and, you know as to what they’re hearing about the organization, the community, and maybe their feedback as to how a new program is being implemented, um and they may look at it a little bit differently, right? Because they’re not as entrenched as staff and board would be in in a new program, for example, so they might be able to kind of step back and say, you know, well, we you know, we’ve heard this is working really well or word on the street is it’s not working so well? So, you know, you need people who are going to be able to give you that honest feedback. Yeah. Okay. Uh, sound sounds a lot like what peter shankman would call zombie loyalists. He was on the show to his book zombie loyalists. And the family wants to hear that you could just search the word zombie at tony martignetti dot com and my interview with peter will come up but similar, you know, the people who are doing there’s so committed to you that they just want to see you. They want to see you soar and they do a lot of work for you marketing in your pr and all the stuff you’re not talking about, you know, whether online or face-to-face, right? Right. And they will help you. You know that that’s why i built that into this book, you know, magnify your business because they are there going to be part of what’s going to help you get magnified. Yes. Okay, we get ah, lot more tips from maria coming up first. I want to say little about pursuing one of their online tools is velocity makes your gift officers a lot more productive and efficient because it’s helping them manage their work flow. You import prospect data from your own constituent database, and in fact, ah, marie and i are gonna be talking about your c r m in the next next time. She’s on january eighteenth. Ah, but you bring data and from your own database, and then this velocity tool has a personalized dashboard for each fundraiser so that they’re tracking their progress. And of course, if you have multiple fundraisers that you’re supervising, you khun see each of their progress or if you’re the fundraiser, you know, you’re tracking your own, um, you know, access it, whether it’s by phone or tablet, et cetera, you know? So you cross platform. The point is, you know, it’s it’s a tool that is going to help you just raise more money, and of course, that leads me to think that you’re going to raise seat back pockets, more money, and i’m not talking about those foldout ones. They’re like file folders glued to the back of a seat that don’t even hold a small bottle of water on the airplane. I’m talking about those deep ones in business and first class on the boeing seven eighty seven that is stuffed with the toiletry kits and the socks and the remote controls, and they still have room for a leader bottle of water filled with money. That’s what pursuing dot com is going to do for you now. It’s time for tony’s take two the new non-profit technology conference videos are still up they’re on storytelling and content strategy links to those and my video that introduces them or at tony martignetti dot com, you don’t need to go anywhere else. I mean, for god’s sake. Well, you know it’s, just no point that’s the only sight you need if it’s about tony martignetti or non-profit radio. Of course, if it’s about maria simple, then you go to the prospect finder dot com but for me, please. Tony martignetti dot com take a look at ntc twenty sixteen it’s hosted by you know who and ten the non-profit technology network it’s going to be, uh twenty sixteen march, twenty third through twenty fifth in san jose, california. I’m going to be there getting non-profit radio interviews and i’ll be hosting their live audio stream for those who can’t get there but get there. But if you can check it out either way, whether you want the stream or you want to be there live in march twenty, thirty, twenty fifth and ten dot or ge and that’s tony’s take two for friday, eighteenth of december forty seventh show of twenty fifteen. Okay, maria, you’re thankyou for little patients. Thank you very much. Let’s let’s talk about some of your online tips about online presence. I guess we should start with the website, right? So so the web site one of the super important things to remember right now about websites is, um, is that earlier this year in twenty fifteen ah, google came out and announced that websites that were not mobile responsive are actually going to get penalized right in the search results. So if any of you listening on the show are thinking about revamping the site, make sure you’re talking to the web master. They should be well versed in this, but, you know you should be on educated consumer. So you make sure that you you request that your website have a mobile, responsive ability. Tio it’s super important, we talked about that on dh what was going to happen was if the person was doing their search by phone and i believe it was sixty percent of searches on google are by phone, then your site wasn’t going to rank if it wasn’t deemed mobile responsive by google pushed down or it wasn’t going to rank it all right, when phones air when phones were used for certain right and now they just came out with something else yesterday, i’m not sure if you heard about this, but just yesterday they announced that sites that didn’t have the https the secure site, right? Ah, the same thing is gonna happen. They’re going to be penalized in search results. So google really wants to start seeing organisations have secured sites now, you know i don’t do websites, i’m not mine. No, mine doesn’t have an s on it. So if you’re not a commerce site, you know you’re not sharing any data. I mean what’s the i hope that’s only for sites that collect data from well wouldn’t non-profit though, if they’re well they’re like, well, yeah oh, yeah, yeah, right, yeah. So they’re thinking about suspect finder dot com right? Yeah. Okay, so i’m not sure, but i may be even i have to do it anyway. Someday something else for me to put on my twenty sixteen to do list and ah, certainly. Anybody listening on this show might want to take a look at it. So that announcement just came out yesterday, november seventeenth, so i’m sure that you’ll see i saw a number of articles on it online. So there’s data out there there’s something like december. I’m sorry. December. Okay, yeah, i think we’re don’t people to think i’m foisting this as a live show when it’s actually pretty good. You know, you don’t i don’t do that. I’m very up front when it’s pre recorded. Yeah, no, no, we’re in december if i must i must wish it was still november so i still have a month to go do some shopping because i’m a little behind you’re screwed if you don’t get christmas it’s a week from today yeah, i know. All right, what else? Online? You’re well, let’s. Think of the website you got more, more advice for the web site should have and how it should have it come on, amglobal back now, right? So so the website should definitely have, you know, obviously all the programs and services that your organization does, it makes me crazy when i go to a website and i don’t see who the board is listed out not i want to know who’s running that organization. So, you know, put your boardmember its name on bio file. Yeah, yeah. Lengthy. Just their corporate affiliation. And may you know, maybe a hyperlink to that person’s website. You know, i’m sure you know, if there are business owner, they would love to have, you know, hyper linked to their site. But yes. Oh, so that and then clear distinction is too how to donate online. That’s very important for non-profits tio have on there, um and ah, their social media presence, i think, should be on every page of the website. Yeah. Concierge header. You know, footer something, something that static on every page. And an email sign up form, i think, should be on every page. Sometimes. I noticed that when i go to visit an organization’s website and they asked me to kind of, you know, doing a quick overview assessment, um you know, i start poking around going well, there must be some way for me to leave my email address and get news about their upcoming events or volunteer opportunities or whatever, and i’m amazed it some sometimes i have to hunt around now i’m doing it because, you know, i’m being asked to write, and i’m thinking, no, now somebody who’s just happens toa land there because maybe they’ve done a google search. They’re not going to hunt around as much as i have, so or they came from one of your social sites where they came. All your social sites ought to be pointing to your website for people want more than just what you what you share on twitter or facebook, whatever. Yes, so they might very well be directed by your own work, and now they want to be more engaged and you’re making it hard by not making your email sign up obvious. Yeah, yeah. So it should be very obvious. And one thing i noticed that they do sometimes when they do have that sign up, sometimes they ask for too much information. You know, nobody wants to teo give their home address and phone number, you know baizman mandatory fields should be minimum many, mike, i mean, i’ll i think first and last name is okay. You definitely want first because you want to build a personalized emails, right? I think first and last is okay. Uh, besides the email address and i’ll give zip code, i’ll do that. But beyond that, i don’t want to put a phone number your friend’s address, even state. I mean, i think that’s just i think that goes too far. It’s just, you know, we’re just getting started here, right? No, i like tio, i like to kiss before i sleep together, you know, or whatever hold hands before we sleep or whatever it’s supposed to be. I don’t know i’d like to jump right in bed, but i’m trying to keep it clean, but but now, i mean, it gets too carried away, you know, minimal required fields, and you could put another optional fields, but keep that get that required stuff to a minimum. Yeah, absolutely. And so don’t make it hard to find and don’t ask for too much information, am i? Okay? You have some have some interesting advice about head shots. I don’t never where it is in the book, but doesn’t matter, but you have some really cool headshot tips, and i see some really crummy ones. Yeah, well, what do you got around there? S o if if there you’re going to have any head shots of your your border, your staff on your website on your social sites on your linked in um definitely it’s got to be a professional head shot. This is not the place for your you know your fun weekend photos that you take and put up on facebook. There’s a place for that and that’s for your family and friends ilsen selfies, even even a professional looking selfie it you know it’s it’s just doesn’t do it anymore. No, not for head shots on your you know, on the website i mean, you could have fun with them. Jean takagi are legal contributor he’s got a picture of him playing volleyball on the beach in a suit. You know that’s great it’s. Because he’s just diving and you know the next shot after that was him face down, planted in the sand. But you know that’s fun. You could have fun with it. But no, not the not the cheap selfie is not not on a professional. Yeah, so there’s a place for that. So you got some other headshot tips in turn move yet for women, especially i want one of the things that i’ve noticed you sometimes that i’ve seen these head shots where women have they taken them at a place called glamour shots. I don’t even know that that place even exists anymore. Be basically it’s like this airbrushed look ok to a head shot. And i swear to you, tony, one time i was meeting somebody for for a cup of coffee that we had first connected on linkedin. Um, and we said, okay, so we, you know, going to meet for a cup of coffee, and so i knew in my mind what i was looking for because i had literally looked up the linked in profile before we met, and this woman came up to me and she said, hi, maria, you know, you know, i’m so and so and i hope she didn’t see the shock on my face because i thought to myself, that’s not you like, oh, you know, i mean, it was so so drastically different. So, you know, your headshot should should look like you, you know, like bad plastic surgery, right? And and and it should be a somewhat current head shot, right? So this is not the place to pull out your college photo as much as you might have loved. The way you look back in college, you know, you are who you are, your experience level is, you know, i remember when my photographer was taking my head shot, he said, you know, ah, don’t ask me to erase too many wrinkles, he said, because you earned them all and he said, you know, it’s it’s, you’re experienced and, you know, let let’s not let’s not erase that, yeah, yeah, my the head shot’s story was i my most retouched one, which wasn’t much, it was like around my smile or something, and it got really got bad reviews, good friends are the only ones were going to say anything, and i put it up and i used it for, like, six months or so, but a couple of good friends over those six months said, you know, that that’s just not really a good photo of you and and as i scrutinized, you know, the smile looked a little false, and that picture has gone. Now you’d have to dig. You’d have to dig to web archives to find that was your tribe, wasn’t it? That was your tribe. Who gave you that feedback? Yeah. Yeah, those were those were two good friends, actually. Even my own wife didn’t. She thought, you know, i don’t know what you don’t remember. I don’t disparage what she thought of it, but i don’t disparage her opinion of my crummy photo. Uh, she probably was brilliant. No, but no. Yeah, they were. They were. They were good friends. Those are the ones we’re gonna tell you the truth, you know? Yeah, i’ve seen some out there and, uh, depending on my relationship with the person of all oliver, with them or not, you know, it’s, not your place. If you’re not real close to the person i don’t write, littlefield, but anyway, i buried that very that one it’s the one if you want to go look it’s. The one with me in a black turtleneck and eh, i remember that once you do a camel, i’m wearing a camel colored jacket and there’s lance there’s not landscapes, there’s, buildings in the back building, fire escapes, landscapes, fire scapes in new york, they’re the same thing fire scapes in the background, beautiful setting. I didn’t love the photo. Okay, maur anything more about the web site or you want to go a little broader than than just a website where you wanna go next for your online presence? Yes, so of course then, you know beyond that, then people start thinking about social media, right is sort of like, you know, you gotta have that that great centralized websites that’s thing you’re going to point everybody to even from your social sites, then you start thinking about, well, what social media sites should we be on? And that can really vary most non-profits love to have a presence on facebook, it’s a given, you know that, you know, so damn annoying, right? And they keep changing their algorithm, you know, the boosted posts they’d want they want to, you know, put some money behind it and so forth, and yeah, they’re for-profit company and they have shareholders to pay, you know, it says whatever a billion and a half. People there were two billion right you need facebook is pretty much right, right? Um but then you have to think about, you know, your your audience, your demographics, um, and who you serve and and who your volunteer bases. I mean, i’ve had some non-profits asked me, you know, maria, you know, is there is there any way, any reason we should be on pinterest or any reason, we should be on instagram? And my answer is always, well, you know, who are you catering to for the people serving, you know, universal answer to that question, no, there isn’t there really is would you do on it? Who would you talk to on it? Exactly? You know, but if you’re a known organizations serving women and and the primary, you know, the people you’re serving or women, you have a lot of women donating to you then, yeah, you know, you really should be on pinterest the other things to keep in mind is the mind set of people when they come and sit down in front of each one of their social media sites, right? I mean, i think of my own activities, right? So when i won, linked in it’s you know i’m on there and and my mind set is around business. When i’m on facebook, i’m a little bit more relaxed and i’m thinking about interacting with friends, seeing what people are up to, socializing, if you will when i’m on pinterest my mind set is completely different. My mindset is, you know, i’m i’m almost looking to shop when i’m on pinterest and and that’s and that’s, the key thing there is that non-profits sometimes fall short and dont and will develop a site like pinterest but don’t realize the mindset of the person sitting in front of the pinterest boards and they’re losing opportunities because they haven’t created boards of wish lists, for example, and and photos vibrant photos of their work in action and really using those photos to tell their stories. Um, because when most people are on pinterest, their credit cards are really not that far away from them. All right, let’s, go out for our last break when we come back, maria and i’m going to move teo the in person networking strategies that she’s got hang in there. 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-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. Hi, i’m kate piela, executive director of dance, new amsterdam. And you’re listening to tony martignetti non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Oppcoll what a luxury it is to spend the whole hour with you, maria. You know not, we’ll have to squeeze it into just a second segment, which is what we usually do. I know this is great. Isn’t it wonderful. I told you i don’t take carrier remains the city. I’ll take care of you. All right, let’s, move. Face-to-face now, first, you got some ideas about how to find good places to go, to be doing your networking. Right? So you want to be somewhat targeted, right? Cause you know, some people hate to network personally, i love to network so i could spend every last hour of the day and every last dollar i have on and networking groups. Right. So you so you do have teo be more targeted. On the other hand, if you’re more of an introvert, then you do need to figure out a way to get yourself out there. Stop hiding behind the social media stoploss hiding behind your desk. You know, you you are a part of the community. And so you really need to figure out a way to get over your anxieties around, meeting new people and meeting and greeting. And so forth. And you could get lots of, um, you know, that chambers, for example, will often run, like, sort of a networking one o one where it’s a safe environment and it’s, a group of people who are all sort of newbies to networking. So it’s a great place to get those tips. Um, so make sure you go with plenty of business cards, right? Yes, i always have that. I’m amazed when somebody says to me, oh, i forgot my business card. I know, officer, i was just yeah, we’re going to talk in a few minutes about conferences, but coming up, but i was just i was in the nielsen audiocasting prince and people, you know, they ran out of business cards. But, you know, it’s like, ten in the morning or so it was i know is before lunch, you know, i i don’t have many. I ran out. Well, you carry two for the dae hee. You like your pocket. Should be stuffed with business cards, but no more in the hotel room. Yeah, yeah, you should have run up right, it’s worth it, especially because i was a speaker at the time. So he doesn’t miss. Miss, miss plenty of my content. Go get your business card. No, i don’t speak it that but, you know, let’s focus on business cards for second because they are an important part of networking. And one of the things that people fall short on is they don’t use the back side of their business card. Yeah, they don’t put on their their social media sites, right? So why not put your linked in profile? You know, customized that that that linked in earl, you’re cut your public profile, earle, put it on the back of your business card. Make it is easy as possible for somebody after you’ve met an exchange business cards to go back to their office, find you one linked in and stay connected and engage that way, right? So so it is super important to do that and actually started using my photo on the back of my business card as well. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, i don’t. I wouldn’t that’s pretty when you put that on the front. Um, well, my logo was on the front and, you know, the pertinent information is on the front and i decided to use the backside or my photo and my social sites and so, you know, but i think a lot of people don’t take advantage of that back side real estate on a business card. I also find it particularly annoying when somebody hands me a business card that’s you know, that really, really shiny card stock right on right on, right? So you can’t even write a note like, you know, send them the white paper they asked for whatever it is and glasses, doc, yeah, yeah, when you when you say to somebody, well, let me send a t afterward, then you go to jot it down on the back of their card and you can’t so so personally not a fan of the glossy stock of myself because i can’t write on them. I think in some some countries is a japan where you’re actually not supposed to write on anybody’s card, i think that might be the case. Um, it’s kind of considered quite rude if you do that. So i’m saying do that if you’re in the us, but our japanese listeners might be taking offense to what i’m telling them to d’oh okay, thank you. Qualifying how about some other places where you can go? Besides, i know you’re a big fan chambers of commerce. Ah, professional associations air good one professional associations or a good one and think about those professional associations where, like, this is a perfect example junior achievement, right? So they one of their their, you know, things that they focus on this financial literacy programs for children, youth, right? So and they have a lot of programming around that and, you know, commerce park and all the stuff. So one of the things that you want to think about is, well, where are we going to be able to network with more people who are in financial services, right? So it’s important to network for your own professional development, but then thinking about where we’re going to network so that we’re going to be able to attract volunteers and donors. So it’s it’s a perfect fit for them to be networking in financial planning association type of meeting’s financial women’s association so, you know, find out where that that counterbalance is so that you can go ahead and start networking and some of those environments and you don’t have to join. The association’s, very many of them will will let you actually attend meetings for a nominal surcharge. On top of with the regular ticket prices for members. Eso it’s something that you can sort of float in and out of and not commit hundreds of dollars a year to join a professional association. And this relates to what we talked about earlier with german ideal clients. You know those related fields to yours? That’s, another constituent group? If you don’t mind that word that groups that can be helping you find resource is make referrals to you, to whom you can make referrals and again be helpful to them. So these sort of allied professions, you know, that’s. Another one of your groups of good clients? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s, really important for you too. To think a little bit more broadly. And, you know, ask your board. You know what? What groups do you belong to? Where you doing? Some networking. You know, if it’s you know there’s, some groups like b and i and ll a tip, maybe you have your boardmember czar are part of some of those organizations and ask them, can i come? Is your guest some of the meetings, those air formal networking organization unionize business network international. Brian like tip i don’t know what they’re trying to be french, but it’s ellie abila tip may i say what you’re not saying you’re saying with the new jersey? Let you’re saying late tip now, it’s no good let’s tip tip we’ll get you have that new jersey. I was, but i was born and, you know, i majored in french, so oh, you did. Did you know you should be telling me. Well, but you say i do something once it makes me an expert. So i’ve said i spoke french once sometimes. So now i’m an expert. So late. Look, it is loose. So it looks here importing the new jersey. Know why it was a slip on work. Okay. All right. We’ve got just a couple minutes left. You have some ideas. Specific teo conferences. Maybe if you’re a little introverted. George joining a group that’s chatting at a conference, you know, to share some ideas there. Yeah. So, you know, i mean, for the most part, people are there to network, right? So, you know, there there. You definitely don’t. Hesitate to approach a group of people who are talking, you know, don’t be rude about it, but if you just sort of stand, you know, they usually will be very inclusive and invite you into the conversation. Um, i gotta hover. You have around the group a little, yeah, you just gotta mingle in and, you know, people are welcoming. Yeah, people are welcoming. I mean, you’re there for networking purposes, so, you know, this is you know, where this isn’t, you know, middle school, right? Right. Flix, right? This isn’t a collector in that respect, so, you know, but by the same token, you need to know when to remove and extricate yourself from situations as well. I like to use the bathroom for that. I excuse me, i gotta use the men’s room or the food line. I’m going to get some food. You have another ways of getting yourself out of a group. Um, well, i think it’s, i think you can very nicely say, you know, you know, it was great to meet you. I know you’re here to meet a lot of other people, so i’m going to let you go ahead and do. That and, you know, hope hopefully we’ll see each other before the evening is over something like that. So, you know, you’re not there to talkto one person for an hour, and everybody, i think, realizes that so another good thing that i like to do, uh, you see somebody standing alone or sitting alone, go in or stand with that person, you know, introduce yourself. I mean, they’re probably feeling the same anxiety. Like she’s everybody’s got everybody’s got something around them except me. I feel like, you know, outcast, yeah, go up to the single people. Yeah, and sometimes particularly chambers will make available a list in advance of who the all the registrants are, like sometimes it’s on the website like where you’ve signed upto actually ten and that’s. So that’s really good to check out who’s going to be there? We gotta leave it there. Very simple, but she’s going to back january eighteenth, we’re going to continue this conversation about her book, which is growing your business. I’m sorry, it’s called magnify your business tips, tools and strategies for growing your business or your non-profit and on twitter, of course she’s at maria simple, thanks. So much for being in the studio. Thank you so much for having me. I can’t wait to come back my pleasure next week. We don’t have a live show or a podcast show or the week after, however, of course we will have affiliate shows both of those two weeks. So that’s, we’re talking about the twenty fifth of december and the first of january. No podcast or live shows, but affiliate shows those weeks live an affiliate podcast shows return friday, january eighth twenty sixteen if you missed any part of today’s show here in twenty fifteen, finding on tony martignetti dot com, where in the world else would you go? Not sure if i’m going to continue that in twenty sixteen. We might, though i’m not saying it’s going away, responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits whatever type of work you do to improve our world pursuant dot com, our creative producer is claire meyer off. Sam liebowitz is the line producer gavin dollars are am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by dino russell on our music is by scott stein. Thank you, scotty, for that information with me. Next week for non-profit radio. Big non-profit ideas for the other ninety five percent. Go out and be great. Dahna 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 yeah 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 p m so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post 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 do it. You 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 December 11, 2015: Human-Centered Design & Research Pre- and Post-Event

Big Nonprofit Ideas for the Other 95%

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Sara Aye: Human-Centered Design

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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. We have a listener of the week, shannon johnson, she tweeted, and i quote, you are a blessing to me and those who recently started a new non-profit organization i listened to your podcasts everyday endquote oh, my god, sachin, that is so lovely. Thank you. Are you doing it on the overnight to there’s a lot. There’s a lot of research that says if you listen tio podcasts overnight just with little headset on you can you can learn you can enhance your learning overnight, so please don’t stick the daytime hours. Shannon johnson, listener the week congratulations and thank you so so much! Oh, i’m glad you’re with me. I’d suffer the embarrassment of clint, especially if you hit me over the head with the idea that you missed today’s show human-centered design what is it and what’s this process that puts people at the center of innovation for social change? Sarah a is principal of greater good studio and research pre and post event. Maria simple is our prospect research contributor and the prospect finder. She shares strategies for using research to support your cultivation events on tony’s take two between the guests knew video interviews we’re sponsored by pursuant full service fund-raising data driven and technology enabled, you’ll raise more money pursuant dot com very glad that sarah is with me in studio from chicago. She co founded greater good studio in two thousand eleven to bring human-centered design to overlooked problems and underserved people. She does a lot of speaking about design and is a guest lecturer at kellogg school of management at northwestern university. She believes that by making research tangible, visual and memorable, we can generate the empathy needed to create mohr and better life. We’re going to talk about that research process. She’s at greater good underscore and att greater good studio dot com sarah, welcome to new york. Thank you so much for having me. Thank you for coming in from chicago. Yeah, no problem. Always good to be here. It’s. Pleasure to see you again. We met at the opportunity collaboration we did. We have the same home room. That’s, right? Our colloquium that’s right? Our ground are our safe space every morning. That’s. Right. Good to see. You back? Yeah. Thanks. Um, yeah. Mohr mohr and better life. Not just better life, but more life. How it was research and design going to do that for us? Yeah. That’s. A great question already. First one’s. Great. Yeah. They’re all going down hill from here. So enjoy this one now. Well, you know, we started this company in order to work on social problems. And i would say that in contrast with our earlier careers, my co founder and i both were innovation consultants for many years. Cofounders your husband, my co founder, is indeed my husband shoretz give. Give george a shoutout. Let’s give george a shoutout after all, for being both a great co founder and a great husband. But we were essentially using design and the design process to solve business problems. So what that means is that a client would come to our consultancy and say, you know, we need to reach, you know, we need tio reach this new target audience or, you know, basically create a new product line, things like that. And so we would go out and conduct human-centered design. We would understand the end user we would synthesize design. Opportunities and brainstorm lots of ideas. We’d have a whole ton of fun learning and designing new things that would meet people’s needs. But ultimately, what we kind of came to is the conclusion that we were solving problems for users, but really, we were solving problems for businesses in order to, you know, make more money. And so we basically said, you know, business problems very important, lots of good people doing that we want to use the same process, the same set of skills and tools to solve social problems. Teo, solve the really challenging and honestly really interesting problems that don’t get as much attention from design as a field today. So more life, more life and better life through research and design. Yeah, yeah. I mean, we target, you know, we we work explicitly and exclusively with clients that are on a mission. S o many of our clients are non-profits the others, air foundations and in some cases, government agencies. But we have a really rigorous gut check process for determining who should be a client. And that includes, you know, are they are they serving a vulnerable population? And do they really believe that? This population can you? No can have its needs. Madden can can get problem solved. What is this human-centered designed were talking about. Yeah. So you say it like it’s. Ah thing like a new disease. Maybe i’m just what is human-centered design? Maybe i’m laughing about the fact that you say you human center human human-centered so i didn’t make it up. I certainly did not invent human-centered designed that said it’s a process it’s, an approach to problem solving. That’s really grounded in empathy. So it came out of stanford and, you know, large design consultant sees such as ideo that really started to propose this method off creating new products and services with the end user kind of at the center of that process. So typical product development. You know, you get some smart people in a room you say what’s the problem, the problem is acts. Therefore, the solution should be why? And then you go and build that we kind of take a couple steps back. So we start by understanding that end user their needs and context. For example, in a social sector context, you know, you might understand the end user as a client or a beneficiary who kind of comes into your office let’s, say, but then your understanding them just in your context and not in theirs. So the research that we do is always in an end, users context so for example, will be in someone’s, home looking anthropologist. It is very much like an animal in their environment. Yeah. And it’s, it’s, ethnography, it’s the study of people in their space and on their time. So we often will two observations that take a day, you know, to really understand what is going on with these with these folks and kind of how our offering may or may not fit into their life. So that’s kind of research the first stage and a lot of your work is not tangible product like salad dressing or the new container or a truck. Or you know what? But but actually programs. Yeah. So it’s a lot more kin to service design, which is an absolutely growing field that takes, you know, human-centered design and applies it to services. We would say that we apply it to programs in the same way. So our end product is because we work mostly in the us, the social sector is still more of a services based environment. Whereas in the developing world you get more product design. Like ah, solar, you know, lantern or a crop, you know, irrigation system to get more products that are kind of needed their wares in the developed world. In the us, we have a lot of products. What we need are oftentimes don’t have our great programs and great services that make a difference for people. Okay, we have just about a minute before our break. So why don’t you just tease the different steps of the research process? And they were gonna get a chance to talk about them when we come back from our from our break. Just what are different steps? Yeah, i can tease those. Well, we start with research. Like i said so understanding people in context and research is really just the first step. We then go through synthesis. Which is to say, we heard a lot of stuff. What’s. Most important, what are the design opportunities? Articulating those opportunities is really important. Then we brainstorm we generate ideas, lots of good principles there around generating many ideas in order to get teo a good idea once we have those good ideas, we prototype so prototyping would be the process of making an idea tangible in order to answer a question about it. So we’re still in that kind of fuzzy front end, and then we get feedback. Feedback would be kind of the most literate. Ivo and probably important step is, once we have those ideas to not just assume that they’re right, but go back out and get feedback and in order to reiterate them, okay, so i misspoke when i said, well, let’s, not say it the wrong way. So this is the design process, which begins with research correct design process. Okay, we’re gonna take a break. Of course you get you gotta stay with us. I mean, for pete’s sake, why would you not there’s live listener love coming up, and sarah and i will continue talking about human-centered design hanging there. 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. Live listener love st louis, missouri is with us. Clifton, new jersey. Uh, i used to spend time in clifton. My grandmother worked at a big ah, a big company might have been. Clifton, new jersey, ridgewood, new york. I believe that’s queens live lesser love in new bern, north carolina live, listener love, let’s go abroad fortaleza, brazil and mexico city, mexico live listener love mexico city that is so close to where sara and i met and there’s more live listener love coming for abroad podcast pleasantries never forget the over ten thousand listening in the time shift. Whatever it is you do dahna i heard a new one. Now i guess that was not into one painting the house that’s not so new. Whatever it is you’re doing as you listen pleasantries to the podcast audience and affiliate affections our am and fm stations throughout the country. Very glad you’re with us. Affections out to those to those terrestrial listeners. Okay, sarah, eh? Let’s, by the way. And sarah’s name is spelled a y e and what you think she only uses like she’s like just uses an initial sorry. A dot it’s. Her last name is es y e let’s. Get started in our in our process to talk about the the research step of this. Yeah, and i thought it might be helpful to share an example to kind of bring that to life. So stories eso won project that we did early on in our time at greater good studio was a project to redesign three cafeteria experience at a public elementary school. And our goal was to make that environment and that service more more conducive to kids eating healthfully. Okay? And actually, what we quickly found is that we wanted them to eat more and more balanced, because right now, kids would just sort of take one one dish, eat it and then tossing the rest of their lunch in the trash on you. You did this found this out in the research phase by watching them in the cafeteria. That was kind of the first start where you sat with them or you stood around like you were a monitor elected monitor all of those things. So initially we did observations. We sat with them and talked with kids. We talked with teachers and we just observed the mechanics of the lunch line, but then we had to get a little deeper. Why aren’t kids eating all of their food? Why are they skipping the vegetables, for example? And so we did some more in depth research, which in this case, in order to really empathize with elementary school children, we actually put video cameras on their heads, a little girl code, we’ll go pros. Yeah, we’ll you know, we’ll had camp to see where they look, what yeah, as they’re choosing their food in the cafeteria line and to really experience what it’s like to be four feet tall and not be able to see the food actually, until you get right up to the counter and are basically handed a tray. So we were looking at the timing that it takes to choose your meal and the social interactions in the lunch line. You know, one of the big complete conclusions there was that the lunch line itself is a complete waste of time and it’s supposed to inspire choice, but kids basically take what you’re given. We also found this out through working as lunch ladies. Did you lunch room attendant smoking, a hair put on here, glove absolutely way crept served and cleaned up for two hundred kids. Good, because that’s, another important user, you know, the students air one main user of the system, but the lunch room attendants are the other main user, so we had to empathize with them so that you wouldn’t even think of that because you’re trying to exchange the experience for the children. Correct, you would think of only the children’s perspective. See, this is so much more that i would just have a lecture system. I would just a mandatory lectures i every morning i something yeah, mandatory, right? Flashcards with cauliflower and succotash, you know, and turkey meatloaf on how those those those most touching pains just don’t okay? Behavior change is hard. And if you don’t understand who people really are and what their motivations are than you, you can’t really designed for them. S o alert working as lunch room attendants we quickly understood that you really want to see those kids eat because you made the food for them. You got it together lovingly you’re happy when they ate. You want them to? Be eating, but you’re also motivated to move them along quickly, you know, hurry, take your trade, go take her trade. Go. You want to get them to the tables as quickly as possible. And so what happens as a result of this is that kids are given no time, maybe one second to make a choice. They don’t really choose their food. They just take what they’re given because both sides are encouraging that the speed. Yeah, and so what we said, you know, it’s kind of a theory. One of our opportunities was how might we increase the time for choice? How about we give students a little more time to actually pick the food that they want to eat because they’re required to have a choice? And so that was the opportunity when we brainstormed, so so i should say, you know, we did some synthesis in order to come to that opportunity analyzed, you know, the behaviors across a number of factors, you know, before, during and after the lunch line. Is research the largest a component time wise of this process? I would say research and getting feedback are the parts that take the longest. And the stuff in the middle, the synthesis and the brainstorming can be done in a you know, a two day workshop, if need be s so yes, you had said earlier research is always on site, but then there is their back end. Research about what? What is good nutrition for children? I mean, you have an objective were trying to shoot for yeah, and, you know, we often learn about just as much as we have to learn in order to operate in that context. We don’t become experts in child nutrition for working on nutrition. We’ve done renter’s rights projects, we don’t have to learn all of the renter’s rights we have to understand our clan and there’s their situation. So working with the empty oh metropolitan tenants organization, for example, you know, we we observed their working hours. We sat with their call center reps who actually listened in on phone calls to understand them, but we don’t have to become subject matter experts are clients or the subject matter experts itself. Part of what you’re trying to do is gain insight into their their personalities, maybe the individuals who are involved in the process, but then then there’s the organization, personality and culture to whatever alternatives are prototypes you develop have to fit within personalities, absolutely. And you know that that this is a very big distinction between research and human-centered design in the corporate world and in the social sector because in the corporate world, the users that you talk with our kind of representative of a market so you might talk with ten let’s say mom’s about, you know, baby food, and then those moms air are essentially meant to represent, you know, a market of millions of moms who are buying baby food in social impact work. Your end users are the actual users that are going to implement the product or service that you’re designing, so you can’t just talkto one at that such a representative approximate exactly so in this case, the school was the client, if you will. And so we we engage. We had, i think about twelve stakeholders. Everyone from the school’s founder to the janitor actually was a really insightful interview, and he became kind of an advocate for work we spent. I think we did ten in home interviews with parents and kids. Tto learn about how they wanted to see their kids eating at school and you know what air their positive experiences? We weren’t so much focused on nutrition, like i said, because we weren’t actually able to change the food, so he called the project is training everything but the focus is that just a little digression? But is that a shortcoming in commercial design that they do use focus groups so much? And you’re talking to a proxy for the ultimate user and not they themselves? Yeah, so i will digress with you for a moment. I think that there are no other choice. If we’re going let’s do it. There are there are many challenges with focus groups, focus groups, i think have a time and place. I don’t think that time in place is exploratory research. I don’t know that you, khun generate ideas or truly understand needs when someone is in an out of context location with a lot of other people because they’re saying what they want you to hear and what they think the room will appreciate. Plus, you know, people are really bad at knowing what they did yesterday or what they will want tomorrow. So it’s really hard for us humans to project ourselves on anything other than the present moment, which is why we observed, we observe in real time, we watch people as they work as they teach as they serve and that’s how we understand them because they can’t tell you what they need. They don’t they don’t know it in a in a present way, they do it in a deep way. Yeah, i know. Yeah, i’ve seen seen that in other instances of i guess, of research, you know, surveys are not great because people, sometimes they’ll they’ll answer what they think you want to know or what they think the answer ought to be for themselves tohave esteem and said so but observation. Oh, yeah, and also user lead interviews. You know, we don’t really interview in a traditional sense, you know? You and i are sitting in a room, you’re asking me questions. I’m pretty much answering them. It’s a conversation, but, you know, i’m the interviewee. Ah, a design research interview is really different. It’s, ethnographic, it’s tell me about your your home. Actually, could we go see the bedroom that you’re mentioning? You know, tell me about your backpack? Let’s. Go there. Let’s. Look at it. And it makes the person the interviewee, if you will, the user in that in that scene feel really empowered if they can trust you and they can open up. We often in a feeling like therapists and people often end up saying thank you at the end of a session. Like i don’t tell that’s up to pete because nobody’s ever asked me about how i saved money, for example or, you know, negotiate things with my landlord who care no one’s ever cared to ask me those things before. So design research can actually be really engaging as a process. We moved to the opportunity. Yes, steps that were starting to identify alternative. Yeah. So we go through a process and we teach this process set at the kellogg school in other places where we go from the themes just like, what did you see in here in the world, too? The insights. What were the surprises and the moments of great need? And then to the how might we statements? Which are the opportunities and that’s where we go from describing the world to prescribing what? The world should be like esso how might we is a really powerful phrase for framing an opportunity in an open ended and generative way you’ve probably heard of hell? Might we statements, but i haven’t, but that’s because in my world, you know, i would come up with one idea and then that’s it, and i would just be wedded to it and i would never and i wouldn’t even ask for feedback. I would just say this is what well, like my lecture idea for the kids we just it’s just that’s a yeah lectures and flash cards and that that’s how you and i have trouble getting off the first idea i’m just so proud of it exact that i can’t give it up. It’s my ego now my ego is on the line. If my first idea is not the best, then what’s the point of what i’m going to try i’m but yeah, so i would not be you know i’m not a trained designer. Oh, tony show let me tell you, it s so help me if the opportunity stage how do i free myself from the first opportunity i identify tio have a broad enough mind for something that may be radically different from the first opportunity. Yeah. So the first key, i think, is framing those statements. Those how might we statements in a pretty open ended way? So how might me statement can be? It could be too broad as to not actually give you any ideas. Or it can actually be too small and narrow in order to just give you one idea. So a good example there is, if you we wanted teo work on ice cream. This is an example we use in our teaching. I keep it basically for me. For me. We’re working on ice cream here. Ah, how might we statement that is too broad would be how might we redesign dessert? Well, i don’t know. God, you know, for on why, which we wanted should we do new kinds of chocolate? You just can’t think of too many things, and they’re not directive enough. I almost get overwhelmed by that question. On the other end of the spectrum would be something like, you know, how might we design an ice cream cone? That is more, you know that an ice cream cone that carries two scoops instead of one. Well, you designed an ice cream scoop that carries two scoops instead of one like it’s. One idea where is something like? How might we design ice cream? To be more portable is kind of in that sweet spot of a how might we where i can think of a few ideas off the top of my head for how ice cream could be more portable? So that’s a generative statement and kind of getting those statements right, that makes you as a designer and as a facilitator able to inspire ideas and others, which is what you want? Oh, you teach us a tte the kellogg school around around you teach the whole process? Ah, yeah, opportunity. So, no, we teach the whole process from research through prototyping and with feedback, but it’s part of a larger social enterprise course. So once you have those great, how miree statements you want to move into idea generation and the first idea is almost guaranteed to not be the best idea. Sometimes we say that you have to get seven bad ideas out. All right, so i’ve got i’ve got a lot of bad stuff going. On at the rate i’m holding on to a lot of first ideas. Yeah, i feel like if i do something once that makes me an expert. Do you think that’s unreasonable? No, i don’t. In fact, i think i think the bias of our client’s expertise is often what’s holding them back from really innovating and thinking outside the box. The more you know, the less it is easy to open up to things that maybe are less traditional. So when we brainstorm, you know, we start with those how might be statements we say, how might we know? In the case of the cafeteria project kind of coming back to that. How might we increase the time for choice in the cafeteria? I think we had some other ones around. How might we increased the focus on food? Because kids were so social, they were just goofing off for twenty minutes and not eating on dh. How might we just increase their engagement with the food? And so, you know, we had lots and lots of ideas when we braced. Lecture and flash cards. Was that one of your idea? You know, it probably was one of the first one of the first things first worst but, you know, you get a group together in this case, we brainstormed with teachers and parents from the school. So brainstorming is a really fantastic moment in the process to bring in a wider range of people who are interested in solving the challenge and can can be creative. So we teach them how to sketch. Um, all our ideas are visualize so everybody who’s sharing an idea, they have to draw it on, and people get really nervous and say, i’m a horrible artist ha ha ha. But once we move past that and we force everyone to draw maybe five things everybody let’s, draw person, we all drop person together. See, that wasn’t so bad. Okay, now, let’s, draw school, we all drop box. Okay, it’s a school of done, you know, lo fidelity, we’re talking statue. So we, you know, we kind of rapid fire have those ideas. So we’re sitting in a circle. We’ve all got pens and paper, and we’re drawing and we’re saying, what if it was? Ah, you know ah, cart that served the food, you know, automatically? Or what if it was ah you know, poster at the beginning of the lunch line. I mean, just every idea under the sun, you kind of have to clear all those all those, maybe less exciting ideas out of. And one of the great things about brainstorming is you are inspired by the other people’s ideas. So you hear an idea and you say that makes me think of something else, and then you can kind of get to a good place in that way. I think we all know what brainstorming there’s. No censorship, right? Exactly. That’s not going that’s gonna fly so well. No, that would be little bit. That would be the brainstorm killer there’s, usually one in a room. Oh, there is. So we kind of pre empt that, you know, we say, how would you shut me down? I mean, shut that person down. Yeah, well, before we get started, we say, you know, one of the rules here for the next twenty minutes is going to be that this is a judgment free zone. So we are going to suspend our judgment. We know you are all very smart people. In fact, you’ve probably gotten this far because of your great judgment. But nobody is allowed to say anything other than that makes me think of this. You have to build on the ideas of others. And if someone is still saying, you know, we tried that back in the day, we would say, well, if you tried that back in the day and the problems still exist, then what did you learn from trying it back in the day? Because if it didn’t work, then maybe it could work now. So we generate all those ideas, and then we start to narrow and decide which ones. We want a prototype, let xgo to prototype. How do you start? Maybe can use the cafeteria example. You test your prototypes. Yeah. So in the case of the cafeteria, one of the ideas that kind of got the most traction and people were excited about with the idea of serving food in courses. So rather than a lunch line it all kids go straight to the tables. The l arrays come out from behind the counter and a lunch room attendant way of george in jail on non-profit radio that’s cool. L a is a very high, very highly complex term. You know, much room attendant, i hesitate to call them lunch, ladies, because, you know, there are men in this profession as well. And, you know, it’s, not the super kind of storm, but the lunch lady from attending for notices it yeah. You know, the keeping you out of george in jail? No, i appreciate that. Thank you. I appreciate that as a listener shows well, they come out from behind the counter there, not behind a counter serving serving kids where there’s a big wall between them, they’re actually out between the tables and they have a cart with these long treyz. So the on ly tangible thing we designed was like tim. So you go to the authentic dim sum restaurants the ladies coming through with the card so karak little buns that i can’t identify but that’s, right? But but that they know that’s, right? And then they pretty much well, then we go back to the problem i take what they give me irrespective of what i asked for. I take what they give me so i just hope for the best and i cut it open. So that’s cool. A little dim sum cart. It is like some car cafeteria and its four courses spaced five minutes apart. So the services designed so that the first comes let’s. Say the salad and you have two choices for salad you can have, you know, chicken salad or green salad. So both both foods air on that tray and kids have as much time as they need to make their choice. Okay? And so what they dio is they choose what they want and they eat it. So we did test this. We started by testing it with ourselves. You know, just as a team saying, ok, how what would the timing be and how would we use? And, you know, we didn’t get real food. We had shredded food that was just made of paper from okay, so one of the big principles prototyping is that it’s low fidelity. You do things as quickly and cheaply as you can to simulate an answer that question. You know, ken, this work we have to jump to the the honest feedback stage because we just have, like, a minute and a half left together. So let’s start to get feedback on our prototypes. Yeah, absolutely. And so what we did with the cafeteria, so in general giving, getting feedback, honest feedback is hard. People tend to say, i love it. That sounds great, yes, totally, you know, and no one wants to hurt your feelings, but getting feedback on a prototype is a lot easier when you, um, can give them two choices and say, which do you like better this or that? And then they’re going to be a little bit more honest, but the best kind of feedback is behavioral. So rather than showing someone a picture and saying, what do you think? Which one do you like better? You actually act out that new service? So in this case, we prototype hit with one table of twelve students, and we saw their behaviors, they were standing up to reach the next tray. They were fighting for the carrots over the green beans, and they then, of course, we’re telling us afterwards, you know, this was really fun. This was really different. Um, the next stage of prototyping, we’ve now done a trial with the same foods in a before and after center ilsen we have to leave it there. Yeah, sarah a with a siren in the background, co founder of greater good studio. They are at greater good underscore and also greater good studio dot com. Sarah, thank you so much for coming. Thank you so much for having me with pleasure. Thanks. Research pre and post event coming up first. Pursuant, one of their online tools is velocity. It makes your gift officers more productive and efficient by helping them manage their work flow. You import your own prospect data from your c r m whatever system you’re using that z multi platform, you know compatible. Um, there’s a personalized dashboard for each fundraiser to track there. Progress. It’s fully responsive. So whether you’re on phone or tablet or desktop laptop, it works and gives you high level perspective along with micro level so you can look at the campaign overall. Or you can look at your individual prospect prospect. Hopefully more than one prospect for your campaign. Be pretty short lived. Um, you know you’ll raise storage containers more money. I’m not talking those models that roll into your bed to put sweaters in for the summer. I’m talking deep, wide, cavernous ones that you filled with junk and put on the garage shelves and they don’t come down until you move or die, and then your kids are stuck emptying out your old junk filled with money pursuant dot com now it’s time for tony’s take two. I’ve got new video interviews who doesn’t love video? They are from the twenty fifteen non-profit technology conference. They will help you with your storytelling and you’re content strategy, lynx and my video introducing these videos are at tony martignetti dot com and all my videos on youtube. That channel is riel r e a l tony martignetti or just search my name in youtube, which is the second most popular search engine, so you’ll be in good company over two hundred videos i’ve got there and that is tony’s take two for friday, eleventh of december forty sixth show of this year. Here is maria semple with research pre and post event maria semple is with us she’s, the prospect finder, she’s, a trainer and speaker on prospect research. Her website is the prospect finder dot com and her book is panning for gold. Find your best donorsearch prospects now she’s our doi n of dirt cheap and free ideas you can follow maria on twitter at maria simple. Hello marie. Welcome back. Hi, tony. How are you? I’m doing very well. How are you? Just fine today. Terrific. We have two follow-up something from last time you were on. We talked about you mentioned actually something that the postal service runs called called every donordigital. And we promised we promised that we would fill that out a little bit. Yeah, actually. It’s called every door direct the resort for connector. And in there, george, very different donor endure, but, yeah, i think we were talking about it at the very end of our last call together when we were discussing census data and delving deeper into zip codes and finding affluent zip codes and so forth. And you asked, well, what would you do with the information? And i said, well, one possible thing you might do is get involved in this program that the u s postal service has called every door direct. I think it’s also goes by neighbor male andi it’s. A very interesting program. Because within a zip code, tony, you can actually break down some household income data by route. Um, so if you were interested for example, in within even a specific zip code in trying to create some sort of a postcard that would go to every household that had the highest affluence in terms of of household income. Even within that one specific zip code, you can break it down even that much further. And so i thought it was a pretty interesting programme and perhaps worthy of a mention each piece to mail out ah, is seventeen point five cents oh that’s, cheap that’s cheap. Yeah, and also they should, though i i’ll just press set, though, by saying that they should have a nen depth discussion first with their printer or their printers air very much tied in. A lot of printers are tied in with this program, so they should either discuss with the printer or with the postal service to see what would be cheaper to go with they’re non-profit rate, they’re indicia, or is it cheaper to go with this program? But anyway, i thought it was pretty interesting because of the fact that you can really delve down by household income and really just get it to those households only yeah, and the other thing that the postal service promises, is that you? You you don’t have to know the addresses within the within the zip code that you’re targeting you just specify the zip code and this other data that you’ve mentioned, and they will they will guarantee that it gets delivered to all the addresses in that zip code that meet your meat, your criteria without you knowing what those addresses and names are exactly ugly and that’s a big stumbling block for a lot of non-profits is, they have a sense of where the pockets of wealth might be, but they don’t know, you know, short of driving up and down those stairs leading flows in those mailboxes, they don’t really know exactly how to do that. So this is very, you know, very geographically focused on, and it could be something to explore the printer that i was having a discussion with about this is based in new jersey there called chatham print and design, and i was asking them some specifics around this, and they were the ones that kind of enlightened me to the fact that in some cases, depending on how many suppose they wanted to hit and so forth. It might be cheaper to use their non-profit indicia instead, so you know something to think about something teo delve into, and i’ll make sure i provide the postal service web site where people can get started on exploring this further i’ll provided on your facebook page. Good were all posted takeaways later today, and the program again is called every door direct the postal service. So we want teo talk also today about research for events ah pre and post your cultivation events that’s, right? So, you know, very often, non-profits will hold smaller cultivation events either in somebody’s home or in their facility on there really geared more toward major donors, right? Or your plan e-giving donors, for example, and so i thought it would be interesting to talk about, well, what are some of the steps you could do from a research point of view before the event to prepare adequately? So you know who to target in what to talk about? And then after the event, what additional research do you think you should do after the event? Ok, so i guess pre event we’re starting with who were going to invite exactly so with the board, if i would think that you’d want to start it, they’re typically it is a boardmember or someone close to a boardmember who might be hosting an event at their home. And so you would try and ask your your boards to provide the names of maybe five to ten people that they think that they can invite to this event and of course, ideally thes people should have some financial means to contribute. Ah, larger gift to the organization and, you know, the the board then might also need some i guess you would call it education around why we’re even hope holding this event. No, now you’re suggesting these be people who can make a larger gift because we’re envisioning a pretty small event, right? This is not a major event with hundreds of people where you’re you’re, you’re prepping us for something smaller and a little more intimate. Yeah, you know, depending on the size of the home, i would say somewhere around twenty, twenty five people might be a nice, comfortable number. That’s why? I said, you know, if you’ve got the board and, you know, coming up with the name of, say, five to ten people each by the time the invitations go out and you get the actual level of, you know yes, responses to attending you might really end up with a good, solid twenty or twenty five people coming to the event and the advice on how many people you need to invite to get twenty or twenty five. Well, you know, you could have attrition rates anywhere from you, no one third to a half in terms of, you know, getting the invites out and then even right up to the day of the event, you could end up having cancellations because of things that just come up in people’s lives. That’s why i always suggest kind of over invite on and, you know, we’ll make it work, okay? And then once we know who these people are, what are we still doing pre event tio to make it clear where board members and the ceo and other sea level people should be who they should be spending their time talking to so there’s probably some sites that we’ve covered in the past, but i think the top websites, for example, that they might want to go to, of course. You want to start with google, google that person’s name? We’ve talked about this before in terms of putting quotation marks around the person’s name so that you’re you’re getting that name or if there’s a middle name or initial, you might include that in there. Um, if the spouses coming along google’s spouse’s name is well on dh find out where they’re connected to other nonprofit organizations. Eso sometimes you might have some prominent people on the list and you already know perhaps where they’re employed, but you don’t really know that much about where they’re spending their volunteer time and their donors so you can break google down even further by having them target just the sites that have a dot or gora dot edu in the search result. Okay, okay, so that’ll that’ll give you something some good information there also another great sight that i think would be good to delve into is the federal election commission website ways talking about that one, you know, try and figure out where else they are. They’re donating. Um, i was on a webinar a couple of weeks ago that actually talked about the high correlation between, um, political. Donation dollars and then how that could translate to the non-profit sector? Um, and that was ah, webinar that i had attended just a few weeks ago, and i thought that was very interesting because they actually played place quite a bit of emphasis on finding people who are contributing high levels of election dollars there i thought, well, this is something that non-profits should perhaps take a look at when they’re thinking about who’s going to be attending their cultivation events. We’ve done a show on political fund-raising too, i’m pretty sure i think we devoted a show to it. I know it wasn’t part of a conversation, i think we devoted something to it. Political fund-raising how about your own your own database to you’d like to know if the person made a gift recently so that if you see them at the event, you can thank them very much for that gift that just came in recently or if there’s some other information in your in your cr, m or fund-raising database you so you should be looking there too, i think. Oh, absolutely. So, you know, first off, hopefully you do have a good c r m keeping track of some of this great donordigital but yeah, knowing a little bit about how much they’ve given when they’re left skipped wass um, and then also knowing, you know, safe your your organization has various areas of programming let’s say you’re a why, for example, and you might have programs for the very young and and and older populations you might want teo figure out, did they even designate that their donation had gone toward, say, youth programming so that when you’re having that conversation and thanking them for their past support, you can allude to their past support specifically toward x y z program so that that would really, i think, go a long way, so that donor knows that, you know, you’ve taken the time to understand where my passions like, okay? And there are lots of sites that people can go to, and we’ve talked about scores of them through the through the shows we’ve done together. So once you’ve once you’ve done the research now, you need to share it so people know who, what this what this background applies to and who to be talking to about it exactly. That’s absolutely right. Okay, so you share it with the sea level people who are going to be there and a cz you suggested, hopefully they’re boardmember is there? Andi, you know what? You know, they have little conversation starters type especially if i think if it relates to the the organization to the person’s relationship with the organization, like a recent gift or something, or when where the giving has been the way you suggested, right? And keep in mind part of the reason why you also have the cultivation event is to get some new people in the door that haven’t made a donation to your organization before, right? So these are people that this could very well be their very first touchpoint with the organization. So you want to make sure that you are broadening your your talk during that cultivation event to enable people to understand what you know that a brief history of the organization in terms of you know who you’re serving now you’re some of your success stories and where the organization is looking to be poised to go in the future. We have to go away for a couple minutes, maria and i will keep talking about you’re a cultivation vents will move to post event. Stay with us. 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 guest directly. To sign up, visit the facebook page for tony martignetti dot com. Hi, this is claire meyerhoff from the plan giving agency. If you have big dreams but a small budget, you have a home at tony martignetti non-profit radio. Yeah. Live listener love let’s start in the uk bury st edmunds welcome i love it’s it’s berry bur why st edmund’s is he is st edmund’s buried there? Or is that something aspirational? St edmunds is alive and you’d like to bury him. I’m very interested that’s a that’s a cool name bury st edmunds you uk welcome live listen love to you musashino japan! I kind of feel like i said that with an italian accent musashino! But so if i’ve mispronounced it, i apologize, but you’re musashino. I’m not sure in any case you are ponyo korea has joined us on your haserot we had others from korea before beijing ni hao always listeners from beijing, and we have listeners in italy, mongiardino and murata, and i’m going to be in italy and not too far from either of those cities. I see they’re there in the north of italy, i’m going to be it at a resort in lago de guarda speaking at the festival del fund-raising i love that name festival del fund-raising the week of may twelfth, maybe you’re going to be there. It’s right on the lake it’s, a resort on the southern tip of lago de guarda live listeners love to everyone who is with us fremery a simple you’re with us from new jersey. You’re still there, right? Yes, i am. But i wish i were going on that trip. It sounds fabulous, just fabulous. Yeah, i’m i’m leaving on the the twelfth of ah living on the eleventh of may mother’s day yeah it’s going to be wonderful, infuriating festival del fund-raising bonem biaggio grayce that’s as far as i could go. So that’s not talking more italian, i’ll embarrass myself. Um, except for the except for the city in japan, i’m very good at pronouncing that in italian and, you know, i apologize to musashino we’re after are cultivation event now and, uh what what ideas have you got for us? Well, i think that right after the event happens, i’d say within twenty four to forty eight hours, ideally twenty four hours the team that put together the event staff board volunteers should really have a conference call that that should be scheduled as part of your overall event planning, build that right in and understand that, you know, the people who were involved and attended who are part. Of the organization should be on that calls you could really debrief. Um, people attending the event will hopefully understand that they’ve gotta have their listening ears on at the event because post event, they’re going to be asked to put those same listening ears on and be asked follow-up individually with some of these people that have attended the event, these events, the key is really in that follow-up tony, as you well know, listening ears, but that’s interesting for, like, bunny ears. Yeah, you do want to listen to the person’s feedback about about the evening? Yeah. What did you think? What was there anything that you liked about our programming? Is there anything that concerns you mean, this is an opportunity for people to perhaps, you know, air cem concerns, you know, your previous guest was talking about the financials and so forth. Maybe if you’re talking to somebody who is really into financials and numbers, they might start asking some very specific questions on that follow-up call about how the organisation is run fiscally on dh if you don’t have the answers so at your fingertips that’s okay, it’s okay to say that, but just indicate that you will certainly get that information right out to them. It feels like when i put my listening years on, then i would be wearing my father’s old shirt as a paint smoke, and i’d be laying down for a nap. I don’t know it just about think that listening years makes me sound, but but it’s not juvenile, it’s just that’s the way i’m thinking. Well, no, i mean, because there’s, there’s, there’s a difference between hearing what somebody says and truly listening to what somebody says, pardon me, i’m sorry, but i was busy. I was busy doing something else, never hearing, of course, that’s a stupid joke. Yeah, no, you’re absolutely, yes listening, listening skills, and this is a perfect time to be listening because you do want to know what resonated with the person you’re trying to cultivate them too profnet to the organization, you want to know what resonated and and what didn’t yeah, and in terms of prospect, researcher donorsearch research, this is precisely the type of information that you’re going to get on that on that follow-up phone call with the attendees that you’re simply not going to find for the most. Part online, you’re going to be hearing information about how they feel about your organization, you’re not going to find that anywhere online is a prospect, a researcher, right? I mean, there’s not going to be something, you know, hopefully there’s not gonna be some block post about your organization and really, really feel about it. It’s usually they should have any negative feelings, god forbid, um, but, you know, you want to be able to bring that information, then back to your organization and say, you know, g, you know, i just had a great follow-up phone call with this attendee and, you know, he really liked what he heard about what we were going on had going on with our youth program and as much, much more interested in having additional conversations with us around that that information must get into your donordigital base that becomes part of what you’ve done, your prospect research on, right? Yes. And and now we know we have this motivated donor, and by the way, you’re point is very well taken that the best some of the best prospect research may be the best comes directly from the person’s lips we’re not going to find it anywhere else where s so now we know we’ve got this cadre of people who we’re moved by the event and, you know, we know who wasn’t moved, so we know not to spend more time with them. That’s also valuable information, but for the ones you well, yeah, for the ones who were moved, where do we how do we take our research to the next level now? Well, you might then start looking through if you have access teo well, screening services make sure that you put their name through that service and you could even do that pre event if if you’d like, um and certainly sites like lincoln to determine, you know, a little bit more about their background in terms of their professional background, if they’re on lincoln and, you know, a host of other websites that you and i have talked about in the past, but you’re really trying to determine, you know what the best approach is going to be to this individual, what their level of wealth is and where else they’ve given before so any and all resources that you have access to in terms of doing. That research that are in the public domain, you’ll want to get access to that also there’s, you know, we talked about tony that research that you can’t really find online, you know, you might have somebody who’s very interested in the organization, but it could be a timing issue this just if you find out that they’ve got several children in college, for example, maybe a boardmember happens to know that it’s really important to know and in addition to all that the what about the person you need to figure out who in the organization i should say, who in the organization is going to continue the cultivation, maybe it’s the person who invited them? But maybe that person isn’t comfortable and maybe someone else in the organisation is more appropriate, yeah, that’s, that’s absolutely right. I’ve had i’ve helped put together some cultivation events where people have said, you know, i’m very comfortable inviting these people, but i’m not going to be comfortable in the follow-up and the ask certainly not the ask they might be okay to stay involved in the cultivation phase. Some people just really don’t want to be the one to make the ass. And if that’s the case, you certainly as the non-profit executive, you don’t want them to be the one to be make the ask because thie ask is likely either to get botched or not happen at all. Yeah, and plus, you just have ah, a volunteer boardmember or not who’s uncomfortable. You’re asking them to do something that they said they’re not comfortable doing that’s that’s a bad practice, right? Exactly. All right, so you find the right person, you developed a strategy and hopefully then you ends in a solicitation that that’s that’s what it’s all about, right that’s? Why we start the whole process with identifying and researching and ultimately it really does need to end up with an ask somewhere along the line. Otherwise, all of that work to put together the cultivation event will have been for naught. I couldn’t agree more marie simple she’s the prospect find her, you’ll find her at the prospect finder dot com and on twitter, you’ll find her at maria simple. Thank you very much. As always, maria, you’re very welcome my pleasure to have you again next week. Maria is back for the hour. She has a new book. Magnify your business. Lots of advice for non-profits. We’re going to talk about it. If you missed any part of today’s show, find it on tony martignetti dot com. Where in the world else would you go responsive by pursuing online tools for small and midsize non-profits whatever type of work you do to improve our world pursuant dot com, our creative producer is clear, meyerhoff sam liebowitz is the line producer. Gavin doll was our am and fm outreach director. The show’s social media is by dina russell, and our music is by scott stein. You’re with me next week for non-profit radio big non-profit ideas for the other 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 yeah 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 p m so that’s when you should be posting your most meaningful post 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 and 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 card. It was like it was phone. This email thing is right and 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 on dh 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 i’m a big believer that’s not what you make in life. It zoho, 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 expected to grow and savvy advice for success from eric sacristan. 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.