Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 346. The Habits of an Impactful Digital Fundraiser - Jon McCoy, CFRE, Becky Endicott, CFRE and Caroline Griffin

Transcript

346. The Habits of an Impactful Digital Fundraiser - Jon McCoy, CFRE, Becky Endicott, CFRE and Caroline Griffin · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Becky Endicott: Neon One makes software solutions specifically built for nonprofits. You can finally have your donor management fundraising software, program management and nonprofit operations all in one place.
• 0:10
  Becky Endicott: Learn how Neon One can help your nonprofit create long lasting relationships by visiting
• 0:17
  Jonathan McCoy: Hey, I'm Jon.
• 0:17
  Jonathan McCoy: neonone.com/weareforgood.
• 0:18
  Becky Endicott: And I'm Becky.
• 0:24
  Jonathan McCoy: And this is the We Are For Good podcast.
• 0:28
  Becky Endicott: Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world.
• 0:37
  Jonathan McCoy: We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories, all to create an impact uprising.
• 0:46
  Becky Endicott: So welcome to the good community. We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness
• 0:54
  Jonathan McCoy: So let's get started.
• 0:54
  Jonathan McCoy: into the world.
• 0:59
  Jonathan McCoy: Happy Friday, Becky what's happening?
• 1:01
  Becky Endicott: Happy Friday! Favorite human alert in our podcast studio today.
• 1:05
  Jonathan McCoy: And we'd like to stack the deck for today's conversation. I'm so excited. If you're joining us for today's Friday episode, you may not know we're in the middle of the habits of an impactful fundraiser series. And this week, we're talking to your digital strategist. If you don't have this on your team, maybe you're wearing this hat, this conversations for you if you've not made the investment yet, this conversation is for you. We have pulled one of our favorite digital marketers Caroline Griffin with us, you may know her as Fothergill, she's recently married. And so we're trying to rep the CG acronym here. She's the marketer on a mission, a digital marketing partner for do gooders including us like we have literally hired Caroline to help us figure things out. But she works with nonprofits and social impactful businesses to bring in new fans.
• 1:46
  Jonathan McCoy: You know, we love the rabid fans around here and use his creative digital marketing strategies and campaigns are so if you've missed she has the best year in episode ever. So we're gonna drop that up in the show, Link.
• 1:58
  Jonathan McCoy: But we're so glad to have you back in our house. Get in this house. Hello.
• 2:01
  Caroline Griffin: Yo, how are my best friends?
• 2:04
  Becky Endicott: Hey bestie, glad you're back here. Yeah, I actually am so glad you mentioned Caroline's former episode, because if you're somebody that's trying to get your arms around giving Tuesday, your urine strategy, go find episode 183. It's the key ingredients to rock your year end giving campaign and that'll just set the tone for what an awesome teacher and human the Caroline and we're excited to dive deeper today.
• 2:27
  Jonathan McCoy: Seriously, I mean, the whole heart of us doing this series is that we really want to help orient around prioritizing the stuff that matters. And really distancing ourselves from things that we're doing that's taking our time, our bandwidth, our energy, all of that. And so that's what this conversation is all about of thinking through the lens of digital strategist.
• 2:44
  Jonathan McCoy: So let's kick this off right, like I mean, I think asking the bigger right question is so important for our role. And so that is like zooming out and saying, what's really at stake here? Like, why are we even doing any of this stuff in the first place, help orient the right questions to be asking.
• 3:01
  Caroline Griffin: Okay, well, there's so much there's so much to unpack with digital. But first, what I think of is the fact that even having digital and your title is a fairly new thing, especially in the nonprofit world. And I never had the word digital in my title until I made my own title a few years ago.
• 3:21
  Becky Endicott: There you go.
• 3:21
  Caroline Griffin: It was always, Marketing and Communications Manager or marketing strategist or you know, many things lumped together. And digital wasn't necessarily the focal point. And it's so important that it is like it's so important that someone is focused on what's going on online and with all the tech that your organization may be using.
• 3:46
  Becky Endicott: I'm so glad that you said that because even before we started this conversation, and you were such a great marketer, and you're like, Who is this conversation for talk to me about your key avatars and all those right questions. And the thing that we said was, you know, what, digital strategist and nonprofit is a lot of people, it could be a donor relations, it could be an events, it could be an annual giving, you could have somebody in your ops team doing it. And it's like, no one has that title. But maybe all of us wear that hat, which is why I think this conversation is so applicable today. And so I wonder if you could like, go right into the daily habits talk about three daily habits or actions that you would define success for as a digital strategist. What would you recommend?
• 4:34
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, I think about three buckets here tracking, strategizing and learning. So first, this person is constantly tracking and optimizing and keeping tabs on all of those evergreen marketing efforts, the emails, the social posts, any ads, how is the website performing? Someone needs to be devoting time to continuously like on a monthly or even a weekly basis, checking in with the Google Analytics, seeing which social posts are actually enjoyable and like working for us and which web pages need to be improved. And that welcome email are people even opening it all of these things we should not set and forget any of that. And this is the person who is keeping tabs on all of that ongoing.
• 5:26
  Jonathan McCoy: And speaking of tabs, we always have like a million tabs open. So this is really translating to me. I'm going to keep tabs on this.
• 5:32
  Caroline Griffin: You're a digital strategist, if you have 50 plus tabs open on any given day. Okay, so that's like all the ongoing stuff. And then they're strategizing around campaigns, what can we do that's new to take advantage of specific events, or times of the year or awareness days, things that tie in with our cause, or that our people care about. And then thirdly, this person needs to be able to allocate time for learning and keeping up with digital trends, new technology, this is so hard to actually do like to actually block out time to read articles, listen to webinars, use your professional development budget, like go watch some amazing content on We Are For Good PRO, it's really hard to carve out the time. But to be good at this job, you need to be keeping up with what's new and integrating it into your organization. So you don't fall so far behind.
• 6:32
  Jonathan McCoy: Okay, I mean, you know, you are our soulmate here, whenever you talk about learning. Because we've kicked off this whole series, I think we thought we're just going to run straight into this series.
• 6:41
  Jonathan McCoy: And when we started to sit down, we're like, we need to take a pause and just like talk about learning, like this idea of growth mindset kind of eludes us, but it's like central to everything. And it's the idea that like, we can figure out what we don't know. And the digital world is just like this frontier that is changing so fast. You know, how do you learn? Like, I'm just so curious, because it feels to me, like there's so many places to plug in, what are some of your favorite places to learn, and just kind of the space right now.
• 7:08
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, I'm on a lot of newsletters, from all my favorite people. And sometimes I have to bank them and then carve out an hour when I'm going to read 10 of them. But that's fine. I definitely do the webinar thing, because for me, it's like if it's on my calendar at a set time, I'm more likely to tune in for a topic that I care about. And I follow a lot of sources in the for profit world who are talking about lead gen and SEO and analytics. And then you just kind of train your brain to apply those lessons to the nonprofit world. And that gets easier, the more you do it.
• 7:49
  Becky Endicott: I just have to compliment you. Because this is this tracks completely with what we were saying when we were trying to pitch to everybody, like you need an intentional professional development plan for yourself. Because if you're not fighting for it, no one else is going to fight for it. And what you're saying is really helpful in terms of are you creating space on your calendar for these things, and how many of us and my hand is raised in full confession, you know, subscribe to newsletters, and it's like, oh, I don't have time to do that. Because I've got too many other things, my inbox is blowing up. But if you actually made some space on your calendar, you know, even for an hour a week to go through and filter, imagine the growth that you could not only glean from that, but the creative ideas of how to implement something, the case studies of who's doing it, well, you're going to look like a rock star, if you take that information back to your organization. And so we just got back from the Association of donor relations professionals conference. And I'm just all the feels from the wonderful people that were there. But something that was coming up to us over and over again, as we're pitching these We Are For Good mindsets, and we're hosting workshops about how to start donor journeys and how to tell those stories. A lot of what people are saying is I'm so overwhelmed by doing all of it, it seems like there's so many tools, you know, it seems like I should be doing so much. And we're telling them, automation is your friend. And so can you respond a little bit to that, and also talk to us about what kind of an environment would really help this role be successful.
• 9:27
  Caroline Griffin: Okay, automation first, a lot of these digital tools can kind of run themselves, if you know how to harness the algorithms. If we're like talking about advertising, for example, those platforms are set up so that they're going to run and optimize and get you the thing that you're saying that you want. So if you can learn kind of those tips and tricks you do not need to be monitoring all the time. Same with Google analytics you can just set up a few custom reports for exactly the things that you want to see on a weekly or a monthly basis and get those delivered to your email. And you don't need to be like setting those up over again every single week to compare and contrast the things that you're interested in. So a lot of these take like a little bit more upfront effort to set up the right way so that your life is easier, and you're just seeing what you need to see there already set up.
• 10:28
  Jonathan McCoy: It's so smart. I mean, because I think when you broke down the first three habits of tracking, strategizing and learning, it's something that a lot of times will gravitate to one of those and then not take action on the other. So the more that we can automate in those different areas, whether that's subscribing to a newsletter, so maybe you're gonna see that content, which is gonna encourage you to learn or getting those reports, like the automation can help us push into those three lanes, because I feel like no matter what seat you're at, you have to be doing all three of those to really be successful.
• 10:55
  Caroline Griffin: And I would argue that for that reason, the learning is actually the most important of the three. And there's the great free content, like the newsletters and the webinars. But there's also a lot of psychology behind the fact that when you pay for something, you're going to be more invested in it. And I pay for courses every year to learn about these different ad platforms, SEO, I do my Google Analytics training, I'm in We Are For Good PRO learning from other pros like these things that I pay for that's how I learned how to automate, optimize, set things up to make my life ultimately easier and better.
• 11:34
  Becky Endicott: All of us. It's an amazing thing. And I'll share the tool that we shared at the ADRP conference. I mean, we love Zapier because if you're going to build a tech stack, and we're just talking about, you know, we're on an audio platform, and I'm using my fingers. But Zapier is just the bridge that allows one piece of tech to talk to another piece of tech. And if you have a great tech stack, whether you're working with emails or ads or whatever, you know, your website it having that kind of automation, it is like the 1950s set it and forget it kind of an operation. And it's just going to help you work smarter, not harder. So thank you for those great tips.
• 12:13
  Caroline Griffin: Yes, if you're spending your days importing and exporting spreadsheets, something is wrong. It can be fixed, I promise.
• 12:21
  Jonathan McCoy: Okay, that's so good. And I love that we're kind of talking about this as a team sport, because you got to have the whole team bought in on this, let's double click into the environment that you're really trying to help set up for this role to really be successful on the team.
• 12:35
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, this person is pals with everyone else on the team. And it's so fun when you don't think about digital as a silo. But you think about digital as affecting everything and being integral to everything. And you're over here scheming and collaborating with the development folks, or the comms folks or the executive team. It touches everything. And so you get to be pals with everybody and kind of be in on all of the planning and all of the conversations, which I think is what makes it so overwhelming at times. But being synced up and not thinking of those as separate departments ultimately, save time, saves time and keeps everyone like running the same
• 13:21
  Becky Endicott: I like that. And I think it really dovetails in race.
• 13:25
  Becky Endicott: nicely with our next question, because I think you answered this a little bit, which is what are the relationships you prioritize? And I love? I love asking you this, Caroline, because it's so easy to pitch this question to an annual giving officer and ED are a major gift officer. When you're a digital strategist, you have very different relationships that you need to nurture. And I would love to talk about those that you really prioritizing your work.
• 13:50
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah. Because within your team, your your pals and collaborators with everybody. But then when you're thinking externally, the donors like the existing donors shouldn't actually be the people that you're the most focused on.
• 14:06
  Caroline Griffin: And that's what makes this role really unique. You you are focused on humanizing and identifying the people that the organization doesn't know yet.
• 14:14
  Caroline Griffin: Isn't friends with yet. Who are those people? How do you find those people? How do you figure out what they care about what you care about? And what is the center of that Venn diagram to pitch to them to bring them into the fold. And then once you found creative ways to present yourself to them, to hopefully gather their contact information, to maybe get a gift from them or uplevel them, then they kind of get like, ushered on to the donor relations, community retention folks to maintain that relationship.
• 14:57
  Becky Endicott: Taking a quick pause from today's episode to thank our sponsor, Sir, who also happens to be one of our favorite companies Virtuous? You know, we believe everyone matters. And we've witnessed the greatest philanthropic movements happen when you both see and activate donors at every level.
• 15:11
  Becky Endicott: And Virtuous is the platform to help you do just that. It's so much more than a nonprofit CRM.
• 15:14
  Becky Endicott: Virtuous helps charities reimagined generosity through responsive fundraising, volunteer management, and online giving. And we love it because this approach builds trust and loyalty through personalized engagement. Sounds like Virtuous might be a fit for your organization, learn more today at virtuous.org or follow the link in our show notes.
• 15:36
  Jonathan McCoy: I think I would love to just pause for a second and say, because you've taught us this as we've worked with you on an ad strategy is this whole idea of like trying to find look alikes, I think is really interesting. Because if this is a new world to you, you are trying to like cast a bigger net. So where do you go, you know, this is not when we're gonna go buy lists, like, you know, like, it's not like that it's how do we use the power of all this information that's out there all this chatter that's happening online and find people that mirror the people that we already have? If you could kind of explain that?
• 16:13
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, there's, there needs to be an understanding of marketing, 101, psychology, fundraising psychology, whether this person considers themselves a marketer, or a fundraiser, or both, I like to blur those lines, because I think they're just separate points on the same journey. And we shouldn't silo them. But you really want to think about the people who you already have in your court, and how do they identify themselves? Like, how do they label themselves? And how can you tie into that, instead of just pushing what you do and what you care about?
• 16:54
  Becky Endicott: I gotta riff on that for a little bit. Because I think that is so powerful, what you just said, because, you know, as we're talking to everybody through this series, and we're prioritizing, you know, whether it's the largest donor, the biggest funder, whatever it is, this is such an opportunity to find your rabid fans, and they will self actualize, they will raise their hand and their community in the most subtle ways. And I have to compliment you for saying that listening is got to be one of your keys. Because if you're truly watching someone in a digital space, and you're watching how they show up, it's not just you know, they're putting a heart on something or a thumbs up, you know, they're engaging with the content.
• 17:32
  Becky Endicott: They're leaving comments.
• 17:36
  Becky Endicott: They're sharing. They're telling a story. They're peer fundraising. I mean, these are rabid fans that are not going to show up in your traditional ways. But what you're saying Caroline is so smart about how do we nurture them? How do we see them the first time and I think that I want to challenge everybody out there, is how are you bringing that story into your staff meetings? How were you socializing it with your boards that we're seeing this emergence of this new avatar, and maybe it's somebody that you know, fits within your buckets, as you know, a young professional or somebody that's been giving to you for a really long time. But the way they show up is very unique and untraditional. And I think that if you can start nurturing that donor engagement in the way that Caroline's talking about, you know, in that global digital space, the world will be your oyster. And it will be what we call our second value, which is playing the long game. And it is such an easy way to just kind of every time somebody talks you know, you guys know I say this all the time. Respond. If somebody ever comments on your social respond, if they share something heavy, shoot them a DM, like there are ways to do digital engagement with purpose and with an intention. And I don't think it can start unless you start to see them and you're listening. So bravo. Absolutely love that, Caroline.
• 18:59
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, there's a lot of listening involved. And there's a lot of balancing the quantitative and the qualitative, because it's like, you need to pay attention to the numbers, but then that one comment on your Instagram post may tell you just as much as a month worth of analytics, and they're both and very important to tune into. Yeah, absolutely.
• 19:22
  Jonathan McCoy: Okay, so let's transition into some dispelling some you know, ideas of like, this is maybe what people think that we should do. But really, this is what we should do some do this not that kind of ideas for us.
• 20:09
  Caroline Griffin: This one's tricky because this person can get tasked with so many things totally. And I also think this role depends a little bit on the person who's in the seat and it should be shaped to fit that person in their strengths. If you are a digital person or want to be any You are, you really thrive around like storytelling and content creation, and you love copywriting and maybe you're even doing some design.
• 20:42
  Caroline Griffin: But the thought of like coding, web development work setting up Google Tag Manager, if these things are not for you, then you need to find like a developer or someone who can come in maybe on contract and fill that gap and help you in that way. Or if you're the opposite, and you love the numbers, and you love the data, and you like doing like the coding and all that, but you're not a writer, and you don't want to be responding to the Facebook comments, maybe you can have someone come in, like even part time to help with that piece. So I think people typically fall a little bit more on one side, or the other of that. And if they're trying to do both all the time, you start to get a little burned out. So finding some support for the area that you just like naturally don't want to do is love that is okay. And it will help you stay motivated. And it'll give you more time to learn in the area that's like naturally, a better fit for you.
• 21:46
  Becky Endicott: I feel that cuz I am not a data gal. And I wish that I was more because we know every time we pour into data, you know, it informs the next move. And if we're not creating time to, to look at it, we're not going to know we're just blindly jumping on our strategy.
• 22:02
  Becky Endicott: So I want to talk about KPIs that matter and those that don't. And I think this is a really interesting question for you. Because I think a lot of people when they're looking at their digital strategy, and what can we track, there are some traditional things that we will be looking at in terms of open rates and click throughs. And those kinds of things, what are the key metrics that you're looking at that show actual movement that people should be watching?
• 22:30
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, there are so many, what we call vanity metrics out there, things that we spend too much time thinking about that don't really matter.
• 22:37
  Caroline Griffin: I for every campaign or project or channel, I always identify one, the one metric that is the most important for me to pay attention to. And typically, it's what is the one thing we're trying we're trying to invite people to do here? Is it to donate or to sign up for something, whatever it is, how many people did it and how much did it cost us to get them to come in and join us? All of the other engagement beyond that, like how many people opened an email, we all know opening an email doesn't mean that you've read the email or liked the email. So that doesn't really matter. Same with questions on on an ad or a social posts. That means nothing to me. But how many people are actually engaging, commenting, liking, responding, signing up for the thing? Those are the proof points that what you're doing is resonating with them and how they identify and want to think about themselves.
• 23:44
  Jonathan McCoy: So did I hear you were blessing and releasing follower counts on these platforms? Because that's what the, like, wants to obsess about. Right?
• 23:52
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, fly away. Especially because if you think about it for yourself, why would you follow a Facebook page today? Like, would you ever even follow a Facebook page at this point? Probably not or in very rare circumstances. That's kind of it's dying out a little bit.
• 24:10
  Caroline Griffin: People are becoming more loyal and following fewer accounts and kind of trying to shrink down our circles in that way because we're also bombarded with content and information. So yeah, that's another one that I really wouldn't, I care more about how engaged are the people who are in the crew?
• 24:31
  Jonathan McCoy: I think that's a much like, healthier thing. And it it becomes relevant for everybody, whether you're just starting and you have 100 followers, and I know something we heard early on in our journey was like, imagine, like you're standing in front of a room of that many people, like all of a sudden the follower count becomes a lot more epic, you know, if you think you've got 300 people. So it's just like, we get so wrapped around about these numbers. And it's like, it's people, and each of those people could be a really deep connection for us. So thank you for unwinding that with us. So, I mean, as we start to kind of wind down, there's a lot that somebody can get lost in this role. And we're really big here that we want to talk about how can we do this sustainably because this is a long haul?
• 25:10
  Jonathan McCoy: This is the long game? What are some habits you know, for just taking care of yourself as a digital strategist, taking care of your mental health and creating space? What are things that you found that have been really effective?
• 25:21
  Caroline Griffin: Yeah, I think I learned these things the hard way just like everyone by doing way too much for a while getting burned out a couple of times over and realizing that was happening. And I think first and foremost, I was not carving out the time for learning. And so I felt like I was just in the content creation hamster wheel of being the person who everyone's like, Oh, can you share this? Oh, can you create an email for this, create a flyer for this. And it didn't feel strategic, because I wasn't giving myself the space to ask questions internally, like, okay, what is our goal here?
• 26:03
  Caroline Griffin: What are our priorities here, and doing the learning on the side to be able to bring to the table, while actually it probably makes more sense for us to be directing our efforts here online. And once you kind of get to be more of the teacher with the team, instead of feeling like you're just constantly in the hamster wheel, you can prioritize more, focus on doing fewer things better, and kind of get everybody thinking and moving like that, and it works better.
• 26:35
  Becky Endicott: And just having that heart of focus is going to help you live better. I mean, if I could give a one good thing for everybody, it's create a content calendar, like put it out there, map it out for a year if you can, or do it three months to six months at a time.
• 26:50
  Becky Endicott: Because when you walk in the door, and I will tell you, I was also guilty of this working at a nonprofit and doing some of the social of that fear of walking and going, oh, what are we going to post today? And then you obsess over the writing and then the writing the little caption takes 45 minutes and you're overthinking it, and then you're trying to socialize it up the chain, take, take that monkey off your back, please put together a content calendar of intentionality, it's gonna give you that focus. And for heaven's sakes, know that if there's a little red one that pops up on the organization's notifications, you don't have to check that after hours. Like, I don't think that many social media emergencies happen in nonprofit and I'm not saying that to shirk any of our social services people or people that work in disaster relief, because those certainly do happen. But but build some space for yourself folks, like you don't have to answer those all day every day. Just because you're a digital strategist, you're not getting paid for that time off, give yourself a little break and go and do the things that bring you joy so that you can go back in the next day important to those missions and get back into those little red ones.
• 28:01
  Caroline Griffin: Yes, Becky preach.
• 28:04
  Becky Endicott: And that's a total do as I say not as I did.
• 28:07
  Becky Endicott: So I wish I would have done that.
• 28:09
  Caroline Griffin: We've all done it. But if you keep those important KPIs and goals in mind for yourself for the quarter for the year, then you'll stop spending as much time on the things that don't actually support those goals. And you can it becomes easier to recognize like the excess that you can do away with.
• 28:27
  Jonathan McCoy: So I mean Carolyn, every time we hang around you we learn so much and we just smile more so please tell people how they can find you online connect up all the ways that you show up for people to connect with you.
• 28:39
  Caroline Griffin: I'm on LinkedIn mostly that's the social channel I prioritize for my own sanity he's connected me there, my website is marketer on a mission dot work and I have a couple of freebies and things on there to
• 28:56
  Becky Endicott: Thank you my friend for coming in here bringing the digital strategist wisdom and thank you for the mental health component at the end. Feel boosted, you guys can do this. We're rooting for you.
• 29:06
  Caroline Griffin: Totally. Thank you friends so much fun as always, appreciate you.
• 29:11
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• 29:13
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• 29:32
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• 29:44
  Julie Confer: Thanks friends. I'm our producer Julie Confer and our theme song is Sunray by Remy Borsboom.