Latest / We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits / 527. The Influencer Effect + Harnessing the Power of Pop Culture for Good - Paul Katz

Transcript

527. The Influencer Effect + Harnessing the Power of Pop Culture for Good - Paul Katz · We Are For Good Podcast - The Podcast for Nonprofits

• 0:01
  Speaker 1: Hey, I'm John.
• 0:02
  Speaker 2: And I'm Becky.
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: And this is the we Are For Good podcast.
• 0:06
  Speaker 2: 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.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: 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.
• 0:23
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the good community.
• 0:25
  Speaker 2: We're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabid fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: So let's get started.
• 0:35
  Speaker 1: Oh, Becky.
• 0:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, john, oh community.
• 0:41
  Speaker 2: I literally am sitting here just thinking how lucky we all are to just be sitting here in this time and this space with our guest today.
• 0:50
  Speaker 2: He is not only an extraordinary visionary, but he is such a kind man, and so it is an absolute honor for us to introduce Paul Katz.
• 1:00
  Speaker 2: He's the founder and CEO of Entertain Impact, the leading social impact agency, and over the last two decades, paul's marketing and advocacy campaigns have raised awareness, support and funds for philanthropic, social justice and purpose-driven organizations like and hold on to your butts while I just casually drop some of these names Rotary International, the who Foundation, elma Philanthropies, with the support from hundreds of celebrities and influencers like Lang Lang, kevin Bacon, john Legend, dr Bernice King, lupita Nyong'o, usher and Desmond Tutu.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: He is also a Grammy-nominated music executive social entrepreneur.
• 1:41
  Speaker 2: So welcome to the we Are For Good podcast.
• 1:43
  Speaker 2: We're a little delighted, can you tell?
• 1:45
  Speaker 3: Yes, well, that's very, very nice of you, and don't believe your press release necessarily.
• 1:50
  Speaker 2: It's just, things happen over a long career.
• 1:53
  Speaker 3: And I don't want to yeah.
• 1:55
  Speaker 2: Well, we just are really in awe of what you've been able to inspire and the movements that you'd be able to create.
• 2:03
  Speaker 2: But before we get into all of that, we just want to get to know little Paul, tell us about growing up in London, tell us about your interests and tell us what really awakened this desire to want to do good in the world.
• 2:17
  Speaker 3: As you can tell from the accent, I am a Brit and I am from London and I grew up there and I didn't really have any significant desire to do good in the world growing up.
• 2:26
  Speaker 3: Um, what I really had a passion for was music.
• 2:30
  Speaker 3: I DJ'd all the way through high school, undergraduate, postgraduate, law school.
• 2:35
  Speaker 3: I was just DJ and I wanted to get in the music business and for the first, second, like I think eight times before I was 16, I'd applied to emi records, that's the beatles record company to go work there.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: Oh my gosh I never worked.
• 2:49
  Speaker 3: I didn't work with the beatles, but I wanted to be in the music business.
• 2:52
  Speaker 3: And so after I um, finished my law stuff, uh, I went and applied for a job at emi records and I managed to get in with one of those questions that changes your life, which was basically, um, it's business affairs, it's kind of a legal position, and it was who's better at business affairs, a lawyer or an accountant?
• 3:09
  Speaker 3: And I said it could be a garbage guy if they were sensible or you know.
• 3:14
  Speaker 3: And so the guy who was asking me wasn't either of those things.
• 3:19
  Speaker 3: He wasn't a lawyer or accountant.
• 3:20
  Speaker 3: So I managed to get in and I got into business affairs, worked at emi during when we signed Duran and Dex's and those kind of folk, and then went to a very small company which I was there for 20 years and I'm still very connected to the people there, even though the company was sold 20 years ago called Zomba Z-O-M-B-A, which was like Elvis Costello and the Boomtown Rats and looked after some of the producers that did Def Leppard and Iron Maiden, all those cool bands at the time and then came to America with Jive Records, which was part of that group, which at that point was Billy Ocean and Flock of Seagulls, and then we got really very much into rap music a tribe called Quest, jazzy, jeff and the Fresh Prince lots of different people, and I can tell you about that journey later.
• 4:09
  Speaker 3: But the week I came to America, which was 85, I went to Live Aid.
• 4:15
  Speaker 3: Live Aid was in London and was in Philly and it was about the famine in Ethiopia that Geldof and Mijia Geldof was the lead singer of the Boomtown Rats had put together and Bowie was Madonna, all those kinds.
• 4:28
  Speaker 3: I was a member of the audience but we had Billy Ocean was singing and that's when it really hit me that, while I'm not going to be the guy that goes and builds houses, because it's not my skill set, I really saw the power of music and what it could do to bring people together, to have collective impact in the sense of changing behavior, changing hearts, raising money.
• 4:54
  Speaker 3: And I thought, man, this is interesting, you know what can we do here?
• 4:59
  Speaker 3: And that was really the start of my journey.
• 5:01
  Speaker 3: So it was much later.
• 5:02
  Speaker 3: It wasn't, like you know, my were involved in, in charitable endeavors, not not as their main profession, but they were, they were, they were charitable, but it was really that kind of light bulb moment that started me on my journey it's really an amazing story and I just I can't help thinking about little becky in 1985, who had a similar awakening when she watched and I may be getting my years off we Are the World and watching that live musical gathering of all these artists and loving that song, but understanding that it was connected to.
• 5:41
  Speaker 2: is it USA for Africa?
• 5:42
  Speaker 2: I can't remember exactly what the charity was, but it gave meaning to the fact that, oh, I saw so many of my favorite artists and I love this song and PS.
• 5:52
  Speaker 2: I was like six but I remember playing that on my record player, my little Fisher Price record player, and understanding the connection that it wasn't just a gathering, that it was bigger than a gathering and it was about these people somewhere.
• 6:07
  Speaker 2: And it's just startling to me how music and that can really raise the veneer of why we need to be involved in things that are bigger than us.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: Just had to make that correlation and love that you brought that up.
• 6:20
  Speaker 3: Yeah, yeah, yeah, we are.
• 6:27
  Speaker 3: The world was also very powerful and was kind of the us version of the live aid song, which was a christmas song, which is the biggest hit of the year usually in the uk and which raised billions for famine relief.
• 6:35
  Speaker 1: Yeah, wow, I mean, paul, like it's.
• 6:37
  Speaker 1: It is so fun to hear your story and I think, as like your average kid growing up in oklahoma and starting to hear these names, of how they influenced our culture, of how it did shape a lot of our defining moments, and you figured out that pop cultures just could be this vehicle for social change early on.
• 6:55
  Speaker 1: And I want to talk about now.
• 6:57
  Speaker 1: I mean here we are all these years later and now you've had all these experiences to get to thread together incredible influencers before the term influencer was even around and causes that seem hard to wrap our heads around, like you figured out a way to bring those together to make it more real for us.
• 7:14
  Speaker 1: What is some of the things you've learned as you've kind of done that work over the years?
• 7:19
  Speaker 3: I think what I've learned is and this is over the 18 years since I started Entertaining Impact, so it's been refined and learned from experience is commit to it.
• 7:30
  Speaker 3: In other words, we all know now influencer marketing is a very productive thing.
• 7:36
  Speaker 3: It's kind of de rigueur.
• 7:38
  Speaker 3: People use it in business the whole time.
• 7:40
  Speaker 3: Nonprofits are using it less than they should, I think, in my view, and it's kind of a periphery area.
• 7:46
  Speaker 3: I think if you bring it into the mainstream in a way that still maintains resources because I know we're all bandwidth challenged and resource challenged but you persist with it, it can have really big upsides for the organization in terms of awareness, fundraising and driving the mission or getting people to act to help the mission.
• 8:07
  Speaker 3: So for me, I think the big lesson is persistence.
• 8:10
  Speaker 3: I think persistence is a really big thing.
• 8:13
  Speaker 3: And then the other thing is authenticity.
• 8:16
  Speaker 3: So we know from the academic research the McKinsey's of the world, the Manchester Business School that with younger donors and the average age of a donor I think in to quote the Beatles again is 64, when I'm 64, the average age of a donor in New York you want younger donors, you want people who are more engaged and Gen Z, especially in the kind of younger millennials.
• 8:40
  Speaker 3: They are way more likely to be influenced and to mimic a social media influencer or an influencer meaning a public figure that has sway.
• 8:53
  Speaker 3: If you like an equity in the marketplace, then they are a brand advert, and so if you want to get to those folk in a way that's going to have results, uh, influences are really, really important, and I can get into the ROI, the return on investment, and the SRI the social return on investment later.
• 9:12
  Speaker 3: But when you're looking at these influencer campaigns whether it's Rotary or you had a guest who I know well, who was fantastic Neda Asafar.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: Oh Neda.
• 9:25
  Speaker 3: Yeah, just on the podcast.
• 9:26
  Speaker 2: Thanks for mentioning her.
• 9:28
  Speaker 3: Yeah, she did a campaign for Aleema, which is Doctors Without Borders, which was just a beautiful campaign.
• 9:35
  Speaker 3: We had done a campaign together for Aleema before that and we had used medical doctors as the influencers.
• 9:42
  Speaker 3: It doesn't have to be Robert Downey Jr, who just won the Oscar for best supporting actor.
• 9:46
  Speaker 3: It could be medical doctors.
• 9:48
  Speaker 3: It's who really relates to your audience, who are they gonna connect with?
• 9:53
  Speaker 3: Who's gonna have credibility and authenticity?
• 9:55
  Speaker 3: Commit to it, do it, be persistent with it and you will see results that will move your organization along.
• 10:03
  Speaker 2: Paul just speaks so calmly, like I feel like you're taking our hand and just taking the fear out of how the heck do I do this?
• 10:11
  Speaker 2: And so I want to kind of move into this influencer effect.
• 10:15
  Speaker 2: You mentioned academics.
• 10:18
  Speaker 2: Talk about some of those academics behind this influencer effect and then talk about the opportunities that exist for organizations, social enterprise today.
• 10:28
  Speaker 3: I want to just go back a little step.
• 10:30
  Speaker 3: So a lot of people think, because I've been in the entertainment business and I still am, in terms of music and film music for film that it's just like I know everybody.
• 10:42
  Speaker 3: Actually I don't really at all.
• 10:44
  Speaker 3: I'm kind of shy on that stuff and so I've always kind of been a behind-the-scenes type of person.
• 10:50
  Speaker 3: But I wrote a book called Good Influence how to Engage Influencers for Purpose and Profit.
• 10:55
  Speaker 3: It came out about a year ago and the reason for the book was to give confidence.
• 11:00
  Speaker 3: And I think if you have the confidence and just go for it, if you have the confidence and just go for it, if you have an organization that's credible, even if you do a cold call or you reach out through email, and you're persistent, you will have success.
• 11:15
  Speaker 3: And that might be at a local level, but you could also get an a-lister.
• 11:26
  Speaker 3: I've had situations where I many, many a time I haven't known a connection or known anyone, but through research you find out who and you've, you've reached out and I've had, I've had significant success.
• 11:35
  Speaker 3: So I think those organizations that think I can't do it whether it's a small arts community organization or it's a, you know, a bigger one that really has the muscle to devote to this.
• 11:48
  Speaker 3: You should go ahead and do it, provided that you have the culture inside that feels comfortable with it.
• 11:55
  Speaker 3: Unless you have everybody's buy-in, then it's not going to work.
• 12:00
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about the influencer effect.
• 12:01
  Speaker 3: That's very simple.
• 12:03
  Speaker 3: So let's talk about the influencer effect.
• 12:06
  Speaker 3: That's very simple.
• 12:07
  Speaker 3: That's really the effect that somebody has on you to make you want to do something and to go ahead and do it, and it's usually a public figure.
• 12:13
  Speaker 3: The biggest influencers parents, caregivers, teachers.
• 12:17
  Speaker 3: I mean, how many times have you heard an actor, a musician, a business leader, a politician?
• 12:23
  Speaker 3: I want to really thank my music teacher.
• 12:26
  Speaker 3: I wouldn't have done this.
• 12:27
  Speaker 2: I love it, when that happens.
• 12:29
  Speaker 3: It's true, though it's true they're just amazing people, teachers.
• 12:32
  Speaker 3: Over the years they'll influence a lot of people, but I'm interested more in public figures that can influence a greater number of people over a shorter period of time and, given the use of technology these days, it's very immediate If you have a singer.
• 12:52
  Speaker 3: Olivia Rodriguez did this song Driver License, which was a breakthrough song, and she then did a whole thing with President Biden at the White House about vaccinations.
• 13:05
  Speaker 3: You know that the moment that that was going on, there was some young person in, say, richmond in California or in Rio in Brazil that was watching that and basically determined okay, this makes sense, because I trust that particular artist, olivia, and that's the influencer effect.
• 13:31
  Speaker 3: The influencer effect is the exponential benefits you get when an influencer and a nonprofit, and if you can have business involved as well, if business has the right mindset, if you get those three together with a social initiative, it's phenomenally powerful.
• 13:50
  Speaker 3: Matt Damien, the actor, was a co-founder of waterorg and it did a campaign with Stella Artois, the beer company, and basically matt damien did these adverts, kind of commercials about stella toise, not to sell the beer but to talk about the water um situation.
• 14:12
  Speaker 3: They raised three million dollars.
• 14:14
  Speaker 3: So it was fantastic.
• 14:16
  Speaker 3: Waterorg's great profile.
• 14:18
  Speaker 3: Matt damien, who founded it's involved.
• 14:20
  Speaker 3: But and the interesting thing was for st Artois, the chief marketing officer, they said that it made Stella Artois cool with a younger demographic, so there was a business benefit.
• 14:32
  Speaker 3: It wasn't necessarily the reason they were doing it, but there's a business benefit, so that's a win-win-win, looking for creative ways to drive that.
• 14:57
  Speaker 1: And so, paul, I'm glad you teed up your book because we are just.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: We love that it is in the marketplace.
• 14:59
  Speaker 2: We love that you're sharing your frameworks.
• 15:00
  Speaker 1: But I want to share a little bit about good influence and then I'm going to kick it to you to share about your framework.
• 15:05
  Speaker 1: But you know Paul's worked on more than a hundred marketing campaigns and through that developed this like five-step sequence called dream for creating and executing influencer-led campaigns.
• 15:16
  Speaker 1: So this is really like a playbook because you know, in your book you're threading a lot of case stories and little lessons and practical tips and obviously you've got stories for days.
• 15:24
  Speaker 1: But I'm wondering if you would take us through that dream framework because I feel like this is so applicable to all organizations as we try to take, you know, back into creating that magic of the overlap of when, those when the influencer effect comes to being in our organization.
• 15:39
  Speaker 1: How do we create that?
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: What are those steps?
• 15:40
  Speaker 1: Kind of walk us through that framework.
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: Yeah, so, so.
• 15:44
  Speaker 3: So the book itself, the first part is is really the kind of the rationale, the academics, the influencer effect, what it is.
• 15:50
  Speaker 3: That's just one chapter, but for me I'm a practical person, I come out of a business, so I want to know how do you do it and I want to know how to do it in a very simple, entertaining fashion.
• 16:02
  Speaker 3: So that's my kind of five serious subjects wrapped up in entertaining packages.
• 16:06
  Speaker 3: So the rest of the book is basically the dream, dream method, and each one of those stands for one one, one particular area of how you go down the road.
• 16:20
  Speaker 3: So there's a, there's a chinese philosopher called lao tse tung who talks about the journey of a thousand miles starts with one step, that's true, but this book is the gps that helps you get there in a much better fashion than might otherwise be the case.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: So, so what?
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: What we start off with is the d that helps you get there in a much better fashion than might otherwise be the case.
• 16:35
  Speaker 3: So what we start off with is the D for dream, which is design your action plan.
• 16:41
  Speaker 3: What are the goals, what is the budget, the activations, what are you doing?
• 16:48
  Speaker 3: You know it could be a campaign like the one Netta did.
• 16:50
  Speaker 3: It could be a campaign like the UNICEF one in November Is it the pennies for UNICEF around Thanksgiving time?
• 16:59
  Speaker 3: Whatever the campaign is, it could be a local thing.
• 17:01
  Speaker 3: So first of all you have to design it and you have to have your roadmap.
• 17:06
  Speaker 3: The second part which I really want to emphasize is the R is research.
• 17:09
  Speaker 3: The more research you do on influencers with an S, the better, and I'll tell you why the S is there.
• 17:16
  Speaker 3: If I am an organization and I want to reach different desired audiences because that's what the influencer effect does so it's better that I have several influencers to do that.
• 17:31
  Speaker 3: Because if I'm trying to get, say, the Latinx community and one of the groups is a Cuban in Miami and the other one is a Mexican family in the Valley in California, they're different people, different cultures completely, so you need different influences to reach them.
• 17:49
  Speaker 3: The other reasons to have the S is because scheduling, I may want to get an influencer to an event or on a trip, or to shoot a project, a trailer or something for my gala or my organization.
• 18:06
  Speaker 3: They might be in the playoffs.
• 18:09
  Speaker 3: Third reason is reputation is reputation.
• 18:16
  Speaker 3: So if I have one spokesperson and we can all think of these and I have an example in the book but I don't really want to go into it now where somebody just does something really awful that they regret later and maybe they were under the influence of alcohol or they were going through a bad time.
• 18:26
  Speaker 3: You don't want that to be the face of the organization.
• 18:29
  Speaker 3: So if you have more influencers, you are protecting yourself from reputational damage.
• 18:33
  Speaker 3: The third part of it is to educate and reach out.
• 18:36
  Speaker 3: So if you're a nonprofit, what you want to really do is get out to a lot of people.
• 18:41
  Speaker 3: Say you want to get eight people, you're probably going to reach out to a hundred.
• 18:45
  Speaker 3: If it's a social impact campaign, less Social impact.
• 18:48
  Speaker 3: To get people to post is easier than getting someone to go from where I am in New York to, say, lagos in Nigeria to do a trip.
• 18:58
  Speaker 3: But people will do it if it's something that they believe in.
• 19:02
  Speaker 3: So reaching out is really important.
• 19:05
  Speaker 3: A very, very, very simple letter we get bombarded.
• 19:08
  Speaker 3: When I say letter, I mean email.
• 19:10
  Speaker 3: I should say we get bombarded with so many emails a day.
• 19:13
  Speaker 3: Influencers get bombarded with 40, 50 requests a week.
• 19:18
  Speaker 3: Sometimes If you're a Beyonce, you're getting 40, 50 requests a day.
• 19:21
  Speaker 3: Beyonce has an Ivy McGregor who's fantastic, who's a philanthropy person, by sending that email out?
• 19:29
  Speaker 3: It's the start of a conversation to get them interested.
• 19:31
  Speaker 3: It's not meant to be the whole conversation.
• 19:33
  Speaker 3: Short, sweet, maybe a social media kid.
• 19:36
  Speaker 3: If you want them just to do social media posts and just follow up, the persistence comes into it again.
• 19:43
  Speaker 3: You may not hear it doesn't mean that they're ignoring you, it just means they're a publicity person, their manager, not their agent.
• 19:49
  Speaker 3: Never go to the agent.
• 19:50
  Speaker 3: The agent is there for money.
• 19:51
  Speaker 3: Okay, taking that off, it's their job, but it's not their job to do philanthropy.
• 19:56
  Speaker 3: Some are different, but I'm just saying generally.
• 19:57
  Speaker 3: So that's the third thing.
• 20:01
  Speaker 3: But the good thing about reaching out is, even if you get a no and there's a no, a yes and you're all cheering, if it's a yes and there's the don't hear, the don't hear are always the ones that are problematic because you're not quite sure what to do.
• 20:15
  Speaker 3: But that don't hear are always the ones that are problematic because you're not quite sure what to do.
• 20:21
  Speaker 3: But you persist and eventually, at some point you say if you don't get a yes, you say well, we'll move on, but say you go out to go out to say 50 different influencers and all the influencers I work with, um, the traditional influencers and most of the social media influencers do not get paid.
• 20:31
  Speaker 3: I think that's really important to state because the research is so good You're getting, you're getting into um, into their passion projects, and they don't get paid.
• 20:39
  Speaker 3: Social media creators, if they create something for the project, will get paid, although the uh, the, the nonprofit rate, as we call it, is much less.
• 20:50
  Speaker 3: A is the activation.
• 20:51
  Speaker 3: What are you doing with them?
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: Is it a?
• 20:53
  Speaker 3: Is it a gala appearance?
• 20:54
  Speaker 3: Gala appearance is it?
• 20:55
  Speaker 3: Is it a?
• 20:56
  Speaker 3: Is it a video?
• 20:57
  Speaker 3: Is it a social media post?
• 20:58
  Speaker 3: Obviously there's more likelihood with the social media posts than getting them to.
• 21:02
  Speaker 3: To go to uh, to india for a polio campaign, like archie punjabi the actress did, and then having a media as a result of it is the tree in the forest if it falls and no one hears it.
• 21:12
  Speaker 3: The, the zen, the zen.
• 21:15
  Speaker 3: One proverb is did it fall?
• 21:17
  Speaker 3: In my world it didn't.
• 21:19
  Speaker 3: It absolutely didn't, unless people know about it, because you want to get the word out about your organization working with the platform of the influencer.
• 21:28
  Speaker 3: So that's how you raise your money, you raise awareness, et cetera.
• 21:32
  Speaker 3: So you really need to make sure that you have really great PR internally, externally, as well as the influencers, platforms, which can reach literally millions of millions of people.
• 21:43
  Speaker 3: And then the last one is measurement.
• 21:44
  Speaker 3: So why are we doing this?
• 21:46
  Speaker 3: I'm assuming A lot of your audience me for sure and you for sure are doing this because we want to move the needle, we want to make a difference in life, in people's lives, in the environment, whichever is the cause we're interested in and, as a consequence, measurement is really important.
• 22:02
  Speaker 3: So measurement is going to have a couple of facets that I mentioned earlier.
• 22:05
  Speaker 3: One is return on investment.
• 22:07
  Speaker 3: Your chief financial officer, the folks that are dealing with development, slash, donations, fundraising they're going to want to know that the money that they've got within the organization is being well spent.
• 22:21
  Speaker 3: And we found that the average return on the dollar spent is basically about one to five to one to eight.
• 22:32
  Speaker 3: When using influencers, it can actually be a lot more if you're taking the fact they're not paid.
• 22:36
  Speaker 3: You can also look at it with proxies.
• 22:38
  Speaker 3: You can look at it and say, well, if I had done an advertising campaign at a discounted rate, not the card rate, then the return would have been much, much, much more.
• 22:49
  Speaker 3: But I kind of find it.
• 22:51
  Speaker 3: You have to be careful not to pump yourself up too much with these metrics, because the organization may have never done an advertising campaign.
• 23:00
  Speaker 3: You want to under-promise and over-deliver, really, and I think influencer marketing and cohorts can definitely do that.
• 23:08
  Speaker 3: But then there's the real impact, which is the impact of your organization, and that's what we're all here for.
• 23:13
  Speaker 3: There's the impact which is the impact of your organization, and that's what we're all here for.
• 23:14
  Speaker 3: There's the impact which I call kind of the interim impact, which is did we get more followers?
• 23:21
  Speaker 3: Did our website grow visits?
• 23:24
  Speaker 3: And then the real impact is did you move the needle?
• 23:28
  Speaker 3: Did it make a difference?
• 23:29
  Speaker 3: And we've seen four or five times more donations in the exact same period come in through influencers.
• 23:36
  Speaker 3: So you get financial, you get behavior change.
• 23:39
  Speaker 3: That then will fall into policy change and so you can see real impact.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: It's so helpful, and I just want to lift a couple of things that I heard that I don't want anybody to miss, and they've been said on this podcast many, many times and by many people like Paul, like Netta and people that are working at this intersection of impact and influence and it's are you starting with your values?
• 24:04
  Speaker 2: Who are you, and does the influencer share your values?
• 24:07
  Speaker 2: I mean, we can't just lop everything on the influencer and hope for the best.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: We have somebody in this community that got a retweet from Selena Gomez and only got eight followers out of it, and then we have another nonprofit who worked with a local influencer and got 10,000 Instagram followers overnight.
• 24:23
  Speaker 2: So it's not something that just happens.
• 24:27
  Speaker 2: We've got to work on this.
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: But you mentioned voting rights and this is such a moment in time, especially in the American democracy, and you have this really interesting take on building local networks of impact, and I just think that these same concepts can be replicated locally in communities, like during this election year, to activate for collective impact, and we really want to talk about this in community and we really want everyone listening to think about how do we activate around that.
• 24:58
  Speaker 2: So, paul, tell us a little bit about your work on voting rights and how people can apply these concepts to build impactful campaigns and movements like in their hometowns.
• 25:42
  Speaker 3: Well, yes, this just happened, purely Well, yes, this just happened purely, very organically with me.
• 25:49
  Speaker 3: In February 20, I got COVID, which turned into long-haul COVID, which I'm doing much better at with now.
• 25:55
  Speaker 3: But when I was kind of coming up for air, I saw that the US, under President Trump, had withdrawn from the World Health Organization.
• 26:06
  Speaker 3: I'd worked on the polio campaign and I thought to myself this isn't right.
• 26:11
  Speaker 3: And I had friends of mine who really wanted to get involved but didn't know how to really get involved in the political process, and so I started a website where we looked at voter turnout and voter suppression.
• 26:22
  Speaker 3: We looked at 40 different organizations.
• 26:23
  Speaker 3: We chose three like Michelle Obama's or Stacey Abrams, etc.
• 26:26
  Speaker 3: We looked at 40 different organizations.
• 26:27
  Speaker 3: We chose three like Michelle Obama's or Stacey Abrams, et cetera.
• 26:29
  Speaker 3: And then we would make kind of introductions Not that I knew them Again, it was cold, cold calling.
• 26:33
  Speaker 3: It wasn't like I knew them at all.
• 26:35
  Speaker 3: And so that then took off and we got funding.
• 26:43
  Speaker 3: And then we worked in Georgia, working with what they call returning citizens, people who have been incarcerated for a felony and who are out now.
• 26:47
  Speaker 3: They lose their rights when they go in.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: They come out.
• 26:49
  Speaker 3: They can get the voting rights back.
• 26:52
  Speaker 3: They don't know it often or they're not sure if they qualify.
• 26:54
  Speaker 3: So we do a quiz takes 11 seconds, basically, and then, if you can vote, you get pushed across the registration site for the Georgia state and that's it Really easy.
• 27:08
  Speaker 3: Population of Georgia voting voting population 8 million People with a criminal record over 4.1 million.
• 27:13
  Speaker 3: This is a terrible perspective of America, which has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's prison populations.
• 27:22
  Speaker 3: Horrible, anyway.
• 27:24
  Speaker 3: But to get those people to take the quiz and we've had several thousand take the quiz how do we do it with influencers?
• 27:31
  Speaker 3: I'll tell you.
• 27:32
  Speaker 3: We do it in two ways.
• 27:33
  Speaker 3: Way one is we have people like Common and Kerry Washington who get involved, but what we really did?
• 27:41
  Speaker 3: That made a difference.
• 27:42
  Speaker 3: There's 105 different counties in Georgia.
• 27:45
  Speaker 3: We went to every county and we engaged with a nano influencer.
• 27:50
  Speaker 3: They're people who have less than 10,000 followers, the point you were making before.
• 27:55
  Speaker 3: And so it's the baker, the hairdresser, the minister in those communities and got them to post and that really had a huge impact.
• 28:05
  Speaker 3: So I think they say all politics is local.
• 28:09
  Speaker 3: It's true, with influencer engagement in politics, they're all influencer engagement, for politics should, should, be local, and so we have have that in that, but working with these local community organizations, like there's ones that you know, georgia justice project, or ones that deal with women who've been formerly incarcerated.
• 28:27
  Speaker 3: So that's really what we're doing and we're now going into Arizona, which is a much tougher state, frankly, to get your voting rights back.
• 28:36
  Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, it's important.
• 28:37
  Speaker 1: I mean, Paul, I love that you're taking these principles and applying them in such a like, relatable way, and we talk about the power of like.
• 28:45
  Speaker 1: Marketing is mission, like equipping people with these messages that have influence in the smallest of small communities really can change the world.
• 28:52
  Speaker 1: It starts with that belief and and how we can just spread our messages.
• 28:55
  Speaker 1: So I love this conversation so much.
• 28:57
  Speaker 1: You know, every time we talk to you and now I'm up to two times, Paul every time I hang in your presence, I just think like what a beautiful life you have created and gotten active and really taken what these opportunities and turn them into such incredible things.
• 29:12
  Speaker 1: The Father.
• 29:12
  Speaker 3: Rick in Haiti, who started a hospital there 30 years ago, who's still there, who went over as a priest and became a doctor, who does the most amazing work in the most difficult.
• 29:33
  Speaker 3: So I'm the one who's been enriched by the people I've been in contact with much more than the reverse, and I think that history that's imbued through me and experience is now what I want to give back with this idea of this field of cause.
• 29:47
  Speaker 3: Influence, the use of popular culture and entertainment for social impact in a more formal way is the mission.
• 29:53
  Speaker 3: So that just interrupt, but I don't want to.
• 29:55
  Speaker 1: I think it's the reverse.
• 29:56
  Speaker 1: Honestly, that's why we have a kinship with you, because we feel exactly the same way.
• 30:02
  Speaker 1: But I think you chose not to just receive information and sit on the sidelines.
• 30:07
  Speaker 1: You chose to take that and create the change that you wanted to see in the world, and so we want to champion that.
• 30:12
  Speaker 1: And I want to ask you to tell us a story, because we talk about the power of philanthropy every day on this podcast.
• 30:18
  Speaker 1: What's a moment that philanthropy is like shaking you and will always remember?
• 30:23
  Speaker 1: You know, kind of in your heart, I think going to Haiti.
• 30:27
  Speaker 3: I talked about Father Rick and the work that they do over there, and now that hospital, st Damien's Pediatric Hospital, has 400 employees.
• 30:36
  Speaker 3: It's run by Haitian doctors who could earn a lot more money and be much safer.
• 30:41
  Speaker 3: We had a doctor that was kidnapped from that hospital recently.
• 30:43
  Speaker 3: If they came to the States but they don't they stick in there and they stay in there because they believe in the people in the country.
• 30:50
  Speaker 3: And so damien's hospital you can't, um, the people don't have the money to pay for it, for example, you know.
• 30:58
  Speaker 3: So I think those type of experiences, um, where where you just see the people on the ground doing this amazing work, is really the ones that much more than the and maybe this is because I come out of that business but much more than seeing an artist on a stage, although they can do fantastic work and look at the Taylor Swift effect recently, in terms of voting in the Super Tuesday primaries, there was a huge, huge bump in voter registration of over a thousand percent with vote voteorg.
• 31:30
  Speaker 3: So so I don't want to deny the amazing impact that they have, but really we shouldn't forget the people on the ground doing the work.
• 31:38
  Speaker 3: Um, and I just would like to say.
• 31:40
  Speaker 3: There's one other thing that I'm working on.
• 31:42
  Speaker 3: It's not really this is the first public chat about it.
• 31:45
  Speaker 3: We're putting together a website.
• 31:47
  Speaker 3: I did hear folks that if people yes, if people want to get involved in the political process from whichever side of the aisle, we're putting together a website with a lot of detailed information about organizations, about if you want to get voted in an issue like voter turnout, youth vote, democracy, whatever it is.
• 32:05
  Speaker 3: If you want to get involved with different it is.
• 32:06
  Speaker 3: If you want to get involved with different candidates, or if you want to get involved through a particular way of being, like vote, like donating, volunteering, etc.
• 32:16
  Speaker 3: That's that's going to be coming in the next month or so, and so it'll be called.
• 32:21
  Speaker 3: I think it's going to be called politivolveorg like politics and involve together.
• 32:26
  Speaker 3: That was a chat, gpt prompt there, so AI is everywhere.
• 32:33
  Speaker 2: It is everywhere.
• 32:34
  Speaker 2: I mean, I think people came for the influencer conversation, but these conversations are so important because it's not just about the influencer.
• 32:44
  Speaker 2: It can lead in to democracy, it can lead in to democracy, it can lead in to humanity.
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: And we got to wrap up and we want to ask you your one good thing.
• 32:54
  Speaker 2: We ask this to all of our guests.
• 32:56
  Speaker 2: We want to end this conversation with something that someone can do today.
• 33:00
  Speaker 2: What would be your advice?
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: Maybe a life hack that you would give to everyone today?
• 33:07
  Speaker 3: Wow, that's a really interesting question.
• 33:08
  Speaker 3: Um, I'm going to go back to the one step.
• 33:11
  Speaker 3: Take the first step.
• 33:13
  Speaker 3: I think I think if you can commit to one thing, you don't have to do 50 different things, but just start the process, start the journey, get involved.
• 33:22
  Speaker 3: You'd you'd be, you'd be amazed, um, um, where it can lead.
• 33:26
  Speaker 3: I had a conversation with with uh rita who, who does a podcast platform.
• 33:31
  Speaker 3: She's starting for latinx.
• 33:32
  Speaker 3: That led me because I was talking about elmer philanthropies and this um, youth, uh community organizations that we work with to to uh, to to fund music for young people as a youth development thing.
• 33:47
  Speaker 3: She then got me to a city council person in Houston, who then got me to the head of Houston Arts Alliance, who I spoke with yesterday, and now we're looking at a whole structure.
• 33:57
  Speaker 3: You never know where it leads.
• 33:59
  Speaker 3: Look at my journey, look at your journey.
• 34:01
  Speaker 3: So I just think, get started.
• 34:03
  Speaker 3: That's a good way to move forward.
• 34:06
  Speaker 1: Paul, you've blown our minds, You've grown our hearts.
• 34:08
  Speaker 1: We mentioned your book.
• 34:10
  Speaker 1: I want people to not miss that.
• 34:12
  Speaker 1: You know that you can get Paul's wisdom in this beautiful shell called Good Influence.
• 34:16
  Speaker 1: Don't miss that book.
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: But, paul, what are the other ways that people can connect with you and your work over at Entertain Impact, like?
• 34:22
  Speaker 1: Point us to where you hang out online.
• 34:23
  Speaker 3: Yeah, sure, linkedin is a good way for me and you can.
• 34:29
  Speaker 3: I'm Paul M Katz at LinkedIn and you can just search for me on that.
• 34:33
  Speaker 3: I'm on Instagram as well, and then you know if people want to email me, you can go on my author site and just send me an email.
• 34:42
  Speaker 3: I want to have dialogue.
• 34:43
  Speaker 3: Part of what I'm trying to do now is build up this whole idea of local communities taking action.
• 34:49
  Speaker 3: So I'm around and willing to have those conversations.
• 34:54
  Speaker 2: There you go, you have got a someone nonprofit that is willing to help.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: I mean, we literally just had this conversation with someone in our community who's trying to build a pitch for a major movie star, and it's like if you have questions, if you're stuck, Paul's giving you access.
• 35:11
  Speaker 2: Thank you, Paul, for just not only coming in here and sharing such wisdom, but thank you for your humanity, your humility, your kindness and your generosity.
• 35:20
  Speaker 2: These are the things that are going to push us forward in our humanity.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: So just wishing you well, can't wait for the next conversation with you.
• 35:28
  Speaker 3: Well, thank you very much for having me and the work that you do.
• 35:31
  Speaker 3: I mean 500 plus podcasts.
• 35:32
  Speaker 3: You've given a lot to the community, so congrats.
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: That's our joy, thank you.
• 35:39
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for being here.
• 35:40
  Speaker 1: Friends, and you probably hear it in our voices, but we love connecting you with the most innovative people to help you achieve more for your mission than ever before.
• 35:48
  Speaker 2: We'd love for you to come join our good community.
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: It's free and you can think of it as the after party to each podcast episode.
• 35:55
  Speaker 2: Sign up today at weareforgoodcom.
• 35:57
  Speaker 2: Backslash hello.
• 35:59
  Speaker 1: And one more thing If you love what you heard today, would you mind leaving us a podcast rating interview?
• 36:03
  Speaker 1: It means the world to us and your support helps more people find this community.
• 36:07
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much, friends.
• 36:08
  Speaker 1: Can't wait to our next conversation.