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Diversifying Nonprofit Strategies through Social Media with Julia Campbell | Nonprofit 411 Podcast · Nonprofit411 Podcast

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Hello and welcome to Nonprofit411, where we dive into resources and strategies that help nonprofits not just survive, but truly thrive.
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I'm Sarah Barton, your host and fundraising advocate.
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Thank you for joining us today at the Nonprofit411 podcast.
I'm your host, Sarah Barton.
And today I'm excited to welcome my guest, Julia Campbell, host of the nonprofit nation podcast.
Welcome.
Hi, thanks so much for having me.
Yes.
I'm so excited to meet with you and be able to have a conversation.
We actually met Um, a couple of months ago at the marketing summit, that's where I met with you.
So, yeah, so I'm excited to have a conversation about digital fundraising and marketing and nonprofits today.
But before we start, let's do a warm up question between one and 10, 10, it's my favorite number.
Oh, awesome.
Okay.
Who is someone who has inspired you in your life and why? Well, if we're, I mean, I'm in my personal life, it's obviously my mom, like a lot of us.
Um, my mother really inspired me in my professional life.
It's the author Seth Godin, who I actually had the opportunity to have on my podcast.
So I've read his books.
I've, I've, I've, Taken his courses.
I followed him throughout his career.
And then when I actually did meet him, I mean, they say don't meet your heroes, but he was so lovely and wonderful and phenomenally just amazing.
So I would have to say, yeah, Seth Godin.
Oh, I like him.
So what's your favorite piece of advice that he gives that you want to share with other listeners? Something that he says that I repeat very frequently is people like us do things like this.
And he says that because you want to build a community of like minded people.
This is not excluding other people, but it is attracting the people that are going to take the action and join you in your mission and your cause.
People like us do things like this.
Like I have a bumper sticker on my car for various causes and various political candidates, you know, and then it signals to other people that we are like minded or maybe we share some values or we share some things.
People want to be part of something bigger than themselves.
So that is probably my favorite piece of advice that he gives.
Oh, I love that.
And that's going to be something that we'll definitely talk about because I think that's kind of key when we are sharing our mission and our purpose and fundraising, that's really a key starting place, you know, creating community.
So, all right.
So would you like to formally introduce yourself and what you do? Sure.
So I am Julia Campbell.
I have worked with and in and adjacent to nonprofits for, I don't want to say how long, maybe about 20 years now.
And I've done everything from being a volunteer to being a board member.
To being a director of development, director of marketing, I've washed, you know, the coffee pots.
I've picked up the balloons and the catering for the events.
And then I met with a donor the next day and asked for a 50, 000 gift.
So I've really done like kind of run the gamut, um, throughout the nonprofit sector.
And right now, I help organizations small and large sort of demystify digital and really gain clarity and confidence in their digital fundraising, digital marketing strategies.
So focusing on websites, email, and social media.
Oh, that's great.
So I think that that's such a key area of need for a lot of nonprofits.
They're not really sure where to start when it comes to digital marketing or digital fundraising.
And they kind of tie in together because both of them are really, how are we communicating our mission out into the world to attract new people? Right.
So where do you recommend that nonprofits start? I think we have to unlearn everything we've learned and that's very difficult for us.
So if we think about the last 15 years, this, the shift towards digital, not just for our donors, but just for our lives, like the way we do things.
I just was talking to my husband today.
We have five apps on our phone for our, actually, nope, six to manage just our children's lives.
So that's a sports app.
That is a, an app parents wear that I think most people have.
There's a special app for one of my kids schools.
There's an app for, um, keeping track of their whereabouts.
Like there's so many different ways that we use digital in our daily life, but when it comes to our work, we fail to translate that.
And we fail to understand like, this is what we're doing in our daily life, but why aren't we not doing this In our professional life, our digital, uh, our fundraising life, our marketing life.
The other thing that we have to unlearn is that these platforms do not have our best interests at heart, right? Like they are designed to bring benefit to their shareholders.
So even if you think of Google, you think of Amazon, you think of Facebook, you think of Meta, any of those platforms that we are using every day to communicate.
We have to understand that this is a lot of it is rented land and a lot of it we cannot 1000 percent count on, um, in the future.
So that's why we kind of have to diversify.
So I usually recommend, you know, starting out focusing on your website.
Your website is something you can control.
If you create the content on your website and you own those images and you own the language and you own the stories, you can bring that with you wherever you go.
If Squarespace goes down, bring it to WordPress.
If WordPress goes down, bring it to Wix, wherever it is that you build your website.
Same with your email list.
We focus so much on social media, which are, those tend to be audiences that we don't own.
We can't bring with us.
We don't really, you know, we don't have a way of connecting with those audiences unless it's through an algorithm.
So there are powerful ways that we can build an audience on social media, but I do think we need to kind of go back to the basics and look at our website and our email as the main focus of any digital fundraising or marketing program.
I love that.
Yeah.
I heard a podcast not too long ago and it was talking about digital ownership, right? And so, Oh, I love that.
Yeah.
I loved that too.
Because yeah, there's so much.
And I liked, I liked your analogy, rented space.
Um, and I, I was speaking with someone yesterday and I said, well, you know, if the algorithm changes, It means that nobody's seeing the stuff that you're putting on whatever social media you're using.
Or if the CEO changes and the whole platform kind of falls off the earth, like X, you know, what, what are you going to do? Yeah.
So I always recommend starting, you know, with a CRM where you have a place to capture it.
Right.
So that is that information you own, you own that if you get it ethically, you own it.
Yes.
Yes.
And so many organizations that's just new to them.
But then once you own, so once you start to own these things, how can we use them? I mean, we feel, we feel like social media still are maybe our primary way of engaging.
How do we start to utilize our own data to engage? Engage people who are like us, right? I agree with you.
I think, so what you're saying, just to go back to what you said before, social media, it's so easy.
It's so free.
It's on our phone.
It's frictionless.
It's been designed that way.
It's very addictive.
It's, It's that's how it's been designed.
Right.
So we do want to think, Oh, we just can post on Facebook, post on Twitter, or X post on Instagram, post on Tik TOK.
And all of a sudden the donations will be rolling in.
The, the issue is that that that's not really what people are on those platforms to do.
So we were sold this bill of goods where people, you know, and Mark Zuckerberg said this, he said, Facebook pages are going to replace websites, which we know is now not true.
But I do.
think a lot of nonprofits wanted to believe that because they thought, Oh, a Facebook page is free, a Facebook page.
We can reach all of these people.
We can post every day.
Everyone's going to see it.
The issue is that now what we've come to discover is that we are at the whim of the algorithms and the company and the features that they decide to prioritize or deprioritize.
Um, and it's, it's really a pay to play situation.
purchasing social advertising.
So with your CRM, with your database, with your email list, what you are building is sort of a longer term relationship.
The problem, it's like anything else, right? It's literally like everything in our life.
We want that quick fix.
Building up your donor file, building your CRM, building your email list, all of that takes a lot of time.
It's a lot harder and it's a lot less sexy and it's a lot less fun.
So we tend to not do it.
It's sort of like, Oh, I know that I can, you know, I don't remember what's the latest fad diet.
You know, you, you do a fad diet, you lose.
10 pounds in a month or something.
And then immediately when you go back to it, um, go back to your regular life, you find that it doesn't really fit into it.
So that really is what I think social media, it's almost like a fad diet.
And it taught us some pretty bad habits about marketing and fundraising.
So we want to constantly be using these tools.
As a tool in our tool belt, but not relying on them the way that we would an email list or even a direct mail list.
If you're, you know, if you're using direct mail, I would never say that Instagram could replace direct mail.
I really think.
Unfortunately, we need to be using, well, unfortunately, or fortunately, we need to be using all the tools to communicate with such a distinct set of different generations.
Oh yeah.
Now that, that is a great, um, observation there that we are trying to communicate cross generationally.
So we're not just trying to communicate with the, you know, the average social media person, which is females in their, you know, 30 to 30 to 50 age range.
Um, so yeah.
So I agree that it needs to be part of a strategy.
And when we talk about strategies, So I feel like that's a, it's a mixed bag word.
People hear strategy and they tune out.
But I know, and you know, that strategy is really important.
How do you help people buy into an understanding about strategy and about having a plan for both social media and fundraising? Because I think those are really, really vital.
I agree that the term strategy.
Can seem very daunting, I think, because a lot of us come from the realm of the time.
I mean, I know when I was a development director, we hired a team to write a strategic plan for us, and it took, you know, six months and cost 10, 000.
And then it sat on a shelf.
And it wasn't, I don't know, we didn't really do it correctly.
This was a long time ago.
But a strategy really just means looking at what the next steps are.
So if you if your goal Is to become a thought leader in your space, or if your goal is to move the needle on legislation, your goal is to serve two times more people in your community than you did this year.
If you're looking at your goal, how is everything else a means to an end? We tend to think of social media as an end to an end.
So it's sort of like, Oh, let's have 10, 000 Facebook fans.
Okay, great.
Why? Like, why, what, why do you want 10, 000 Facebook fans? What can they help you achieve at the end of the day? We need that North star and the North star needs to continually fit in with our mission and our organizational values and what our organization is trying to achieve.
But how can.
Digital tools help you towards that North Star.
It's almost like if I wanted to go to Alaska, what would I need to do that? Oh, I would probably need a plane.
I would probably need a car.
I would.
Those are the tactics to get me there.
So I think we, we tend to think of all of these different platforms as the goal, like getting on X or building a big following on Instagram or creating a blog, but those should be means to an end.
And the key here is really, Focusing down.
So when you get strategic, you focus, you're not spreading yourself too thin.
You're not on all the platforms.
You're not doing all of the things you really are thinking about.
What is my two year, three year, five year plan? Where do I see myself and which tools are going to help me get there? Yeah.
Thank you for sharing that.
Actually, I think it was in your session in the marketing, um, summit that really made me evaluate why I'm on each of the social media platforms.
And for my business, I've really narrowed it down.
I need to be on Facebook and I need to be on LinkedIn, you know, um, and the other ones like, I have a CRM that can post to them and it does just so like it's present, but I don't focus on the strat.
My strategies are not related to those two at all.
You know, absolutely.
That makes so much sense.
Think about if you're a photographer, you do have to be on Instagram.
I hate to tell you because that's visual and people want to see your work.
And maybe you want to have a blog that's like visual.
You don't need to be necessarily on YouTube.
Like you don't necessarily need to be on tech talk.
You don't necessarily I think you want to be.
And a place where your audience is and where you can connect with your audience and a place that can also best showcase what you want to be known for.
What do you want to be known for? What do you want to be seen as? What, what are the words that you want people to use? So I think for us, like the, in the business that we're in, LinkedIn is very key because that's all about building thought leadership.
I have a blog, I have a podcast.
And for me, I, I know that people need to hear me, to listen to me, to read, you know, to trust me before they, they tend to hire me or work with me.
And that's just part of the way that's just part of the business that I'm in, but I choose my platforms very carefully and realize you cannot be everywhere at once.
And in fact, you know, you might be getting burned out if you are on 20 different platforms and you are a team of one.
Yeah.
And I think for a lot of nonprofits, that's where they're finding themselves, you know, especially after COVID where we had a lot of shifts in how we work and the ways that we engage.
And so then, you know, again, buying into this misunderstanding that we needed to build social media platforms just for the sake of building social media platforms.
And then I work with a lot of nonprofits and I tell them, you know, just because you put it on Facebook doesn't mean that people are seeing it.
And so I, I create, I have two Facebook accounts.
It was really interesting.
When I created the second one, I was really intentional.
I only follow, um, businesses and I started with a lot of businesses in my community.
And so I've lived in this community for almost 25 years.
I have probably some of those same businesses on my other Facebook account.
And, um, when I created this new account, all of a sudden I'm seeing all of the events that these nonprofits are doing, which was fascinating to me because it helped me understand Like, Oh, like I don't see what they think I'm seeing, you know? Oh yeah.
No, you never do.
And we can't control any of that.
And the, that's why I always encourage nonprofits to focus on email because we can control the message and email.
We can't control if someone opens it, but we can control what gets sent out and what gets served to them and whether or not they want to see it or not.
But on Facebook, things can be completely suppressed.
and not even surfaced at all.
So it's, it's a little bit, it's a lot less control.
Yeah.
So, um, just a little bit about email.
So if nonprofits are new to using email as a way to interact with their donors and supporters and leads, A lot of times they're afraid of being annoying, you know, and so, so we are the only industry that's afraid of that.
Have you noticed that no one else is afraid of emailing me 90 times a day, like no one else is.
So why are we afraid of that? Yeah.
So is, is there a recommended frequency that you know, is a good one just to be.
In people's consciousness, because you're right, they're battling and competing against a lot of people who don't have any problem emailing them every day, a couple times a day, sometimes seriously, and we have imposter syndrome, we have to get over it.
I'm willing to bet for everyone listening.
However much you're emailing is not enough.
I'm literally willing to bet.
I would probably bet.
I say this.
And every time I teach a course, every time I speak, I dare you to tell me how much you email.
And I guarantee you it's not enough.
So people will be like, Oh, I email once a quarter.
And I said, well, if I delete that or I don't get it, then that's six months.
I haven't heard from you.
And then I'm wondering why did I make that donation? What's the connection? What have they done with my money? What is the impact? And then of course you're going to send me your year end or you're giving Tuesday appeal.
This is where we just get it all twisted and wrong.
Like donors want to know what's going on.
They want, they look to you as the expert in the field of food, literacy, food, literacy, food, Um, insecurity or literacy or domestic violence or whatever it might be because we, you know, as a donor myself, I can't be on the ground every day with every cause that I care about.
So I really look to the nonprofits to tell me what's going on.
Tell me what I need to pay attention to.
Tell me your biggest win.
Tell me something that maybe didn't work.
I just think we need to really.
Look to our donors as partners in our work, talk to them like we would talk to a friend and say, this is what's going on.
I mean, just being honest and transparent.
This is why trust in the nonprofit sector is so decimated because we hold our cards so high.
So close to our chest, because we think we are inundating people with communication when really they want to hear their donations have done and accomplished and the impact.
I, I just see this so often.
We're not afraid of posting, you know, 20 times a week on Facebook, but we are afraid of sending an email.
Um, we are afraid of that kind of targeted communication.
I think shorter emails more frequently.
So good united actually did a study where nonprofits went from one email a month to To once a week and they found that open rates actually increased.
And sure, you're, you will get some people that unsubscribe.
I see unsubscribes.
I never see unsubscribes badly.
I think if you're not getting any unsubscribes, that means no one's reading or opening your email.
Uh, people are gonna never not remember why they signed up.
They might have signed up through a friend who knows.
It doesn't matter.
It might just, it, it's just not for them right now.
That doesn't mean they won't come back, but we are.
Terrified of rejection.
We're terrified of getting that one person on our email list to write back and yell at us.
We're just terrified of any kind of feedback.
And to me, when you put an important idea out in the world and you're doing something important, you're going to get feedback positive and negative.
And if you get zero feedback, that means you're not doing something important.
Yeah.
Or that they're not, yeah.
Or they're not seeing it or listening.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I agree.
So one of, one of the things I say about fundraising is that fundraising is saying, I see this problem in humanity and I have one way to solve it.
Would you like to join me? Right.
And so it's like inviting you to a party.
It's like, Hey, do you like Halloween parties? No.
Okay, cool.
And then it's like asking another person, do you like a Halloween party? Yes, I love Halloween parties.
It is like that.
Like you are not for everybody.
It's just like you said, not everyone cares.
About serving children breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
Like, sadly, not everyone cares about that, but that is something I care about.
That is something a lot of people care about.
So try, we, we spend so much time focused on talking to the non believers, right? Like convincing people to come with us, but we don't spend enough time talking to the people that do believe in what we do.
Yeah.
And getting them on board.
And then how about like bringing five of your friends that probably believe the same thing? Uh, that is my big struggle with fundraising is that we do spend so much time putting out, you know, how much, um, is an ad on the Superbowl? Millions of dollars.
And I see nonprofit ads.
And I think Why? Like, what are you, you know, I mean, actually I need to see the ROI from that because maybe there is ROI, but why it seems like spraying your message out into the wilderness and hoping people will care.
We should be focusing that money on people that we think would, would join us or have joined us and then cultivating their networks.
And we need to stop being focused so much on people that don't care and will never care.
And that's so hard.
I mean, I know as a development director.
It's like what, you don't care about domestic violence? And then you get, I was shocked.
When I started that job that there were people that didn't care or blame survivors or yeah, I was really, really shocked.
I like to say they don't align.
They don't align.
Exactly.
I was surprised.
And then I realized, you know what? I'm not wasting my energy trying to convince them.
I am going to give them information and then I'm going to help other people that really are like interest, genuinely interested and genuinely, um, want to like are aligned with me and then help them.
Learn more about the issue and then hopefully spread the word to other people.
So it does, we are not going to ignore entire audiences, but we focus so much time on just like, Convincing people to care.
And it's like, there are people that care.
There's so many people that care.
Let's talk to them.
Yeah.
And I think the alignment's good because they, people may align differently at a different time, but right now they're not aligned.
It doesn't mean like, I don't align in a few years or a few months.
It just means right now it's I'm dealing with other things or it's not for me.
It's like parents that I don't know if you, do you have children? You know, I have two kids.
Yeah.
So sometimes our kids, you know, they absolutely are like, no, I hate that.
And then they come back and it's their passion in three years.
Right.
So, um, or, or they love something and then you buy 10 tons of it at Costco and they're like, I will never eat that again.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's yes.
Yes.
And so there's, and we just have to let those go.
We let it, we do let it go in our personal life, but it does seem harder sometimes in the professional realm.
That's true.
You know, it's more, more angst.
So.
I love what we've talked about so far.
If nonprofits decide that they need to invest some resources in digital marketing and digital fundraising, where do they start? Well, I do think that getting some kind of professional development is helpful.
So, you know, I have courses myself.
I also, like we talked about before, work with the fundraising school, um, at the Lilly School of Philanthropy.
There's nonprofit tech for good.
I think finding a course or even just trying to do a little bit of like coaching and direction with someone or some agency that you really trust and really aligns with your values and your mission, I think is helpful because they can lead you in the right direction.
What I don't.
Want people to do is just go to like what I've called YouTube university and just Google a bunch of things, put in YouTube, you know, I I've gone down that rabbit hole and I think it's a huge time waster.
I would actually talk to other nonprofits that you really respect, go to your community foundation, perhaps go to your nonprofit association for your state, go to those conferences.
Like I've seen.
I've spoken at those conferences.
I've, I've been to those conferences, you're going to meet people and you're going to really gain that kind of professional development, your local AFP association of fundraising professionals chapter.
And then if they don't have topics that you care about, just talk to them to say this is a topic that I really care about.
But being very intentional where you put your professional development time, and then spending a lot of time.
Really thinking about your audience.
That's probably the piece that's missing for most people.
They, they focus on the tools.
They say, okay, I'm going to go on Instagram.
And then I say, why, and who are you reaching and what do they care about? And what are you going to post that relates to them? Because it's not about us and our agenda.
It's about what our audience wants to see from us, what can they gain, what value can they ascertain from these platforms.
So spending a lot more time on your audience and what did they want, and rather than our agenda which is oh we have a gala, we have a golf tournament.
Oh, we have 90 things we have to promote, but what makes these particular events and these things that we have to offer, what makes them interesting to our audience? What kind of turns the table for our audience where it's something of value to them? Yeah, I love that.
I write grants and it's one of the things that I think set.
My grants apart from other people is what I don't assume that my audience knows what I know, right? So the curse of knowledge is so real.
Yeah.
And so when we do that, we're missing out on opportunities to educate and to engage because they don't know what we know.
Um, you know, and they want to know what impact we have.
So I think that's, you know, I love that.
I love what you said.
Focus on your audience.
Bring some in, right? Bring some of those people in and ask them what they want to know.
I think that's a great way to start.
Hey, what do you want to know about our organization? And, uh, so, so thank you.
That's great advice.
And I also agree investing a little bit of money, even, you know, I think so often our nonprofits are very conscientious about the way that they spend their funds.
But I think investing in professional development and in health, you, you know, so many of them have limited staff and they don't invest in consultants who can do the work for it.
I mean, they, the consultants can do the work quickly and can just.
you know, move them light years from where they are in a very short period of time.
And that can help with the burnout.
Oh yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, I, I really, I see that all the time where it's like, Oh, we, we don't have enough money.
So we, we couldn't hire this fundraiser, but then there's definitely people that.
Can, you know, can bridge the gap and can help you get to that next level.
And then I think in a grant writer's case, create templates, create all of the documents, create these SOPs that are so valuable.
Like I started my consulting career as a grant writer and I did grant writing for a long time.
And just having those stories, having all of like a place to pull all of this stuff from, um, like a bank of grants.
That are well written and serve you well.
I mean, that is just.
Think about how much time, but yeah, we have a really, we just are constantly putting out fires.
We're putting out fires.
We are twirling all the plates in the air.
Um, and I'm guilty of this too, you know, as a solopreneur, I just think the seeing the forest for the trees will really help get nonprofits to that next, that next level where they want to go.
Yeah.
And allowing someone else to put out our fires for us.
So sometimes it's completely possible.
So that's true.
All right.
As we wrap up, what is, um, so can you give some advice on sustainability that nonprofits really need to think about? You've given great advice because we've really talked about sustainability this entire time, but what, what's one thing that nonprofits can really, um, find valuable and sustainable in the areas that you focus on in marketing fundraising.
It's so interesting because Marketing is often focused on the tools and the sexy new thing and the shiny object.
When really the principles of marketing, I don't think have changed since, you know, the actually one of the very first marketing campaigns that I usually cite in my work is the abolitionist movement, people trying to abolish slavery and storytelling and consistently talking to people like they were humans and talking to people like.
You care about humans, right? So here, look at this and look at the facts and look at the stories.
And it's so interesting that I think in my work, people say, Oh, you know, they just want to talk about tick tock.
And I said, well, if you don't actually have a premise and, and, you know, if you don't have something that's going to, Make you stand apart.
If you don't have that, those stories that you can tell that are actually going to help people connect with your work, it doesn't matter the platform that you choose.
So sustainability in terms of marketing and even digital is being incredibly thoughtful, just true to your story, true to what you're trying to accomplish, true.
To your mission and your values and standing for something.
And when you stand for something, people will follow you.
You will attract the right people, no matter if it's threads or X or whatever, you know, there's going to be 10 new platforms probably tomorrow.
And the platforms are not important for sustainability at all.
It's that message and that.
Staying true to your audience and, you know, committing to giving them what they want and creating those stories that are really going to help sustain your organization, especially in terms of marketing and fundraising campaigns.
I love that.
Thank you so much.
It has been wonderful chatting with you today.
I was, I was, I was so excited to have you on because I really enjoyed your perspectives at the summit.
And so it's been wonderful.
I'm excited to share you out with my listeners and to all of our listeners today.
Thank you for tuning in.
I look forward to seeing you next week.
Thank you so much for tuning in to this episode of Nonprofit411.
I hope you found today's conversation as insightful and inspiring as I did.
Remember, building a healthy nonprofit requires a holistic approach.
There are many resources available to support your staff and we're dedicated to helping your organization access what it needs to thrive.
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