wait what you can use LinkedIn to increase your non-profit's presence what are you talking about David well welcome to the non-profit digital success podcast I'm your host David and in this episode I'm going to talk about leveraging your LinkedIn profile for your non-profit with Daniel alfon Daniel is a LinkedIn Guru who helps organizational leaders leverage their LinkedIn presence to get leads and in the non-profit world that means raising awareness getting more volunteers sponsorships and dono
rs thanks for joining Daniel how's your day going so far thank you very much David it's a pleasure to be with you today wonderful [Music] so let's start at beginning and let's talk about some myths that charity leaders might have about LinkedIn right so there are many many um that LinkedIn user actually have and without permission I'd like to go over a few of them that also affect charity managers and Geo managers and the first one is that they usually think of LinkedIn as a way for them to thin
k in terms of their page or company page and in fact just like you said their individual profile is way way more important now why is that David because if as an NGO executive or leader your team is made of perhaps only you and you're a one-person army or maybe you have a couple of other people on your staff even if you have thousands of volunteers your page doesn't count the page starts being important enough when you have a thousand employees so forget about the page set it up have it located
every six months share once every six months something but the communication with your stakeholders the donors the volunteers and your marketing efforts will actually happen through your individual profile that's that's the first thing if you look at your own LinkedIn profile then you have thousands of followers where is your page has hundreds of followers and this is not something unusual this is likely to be the situation for everyone listening the number of pages we follow is relatively limit
ed but the natural action on LinkedIn would be for someone to send an invitation request as an individual to David to Jane to someone else so forget about the page and simply focus on your individual profile this is where you're going to get more exposure a very common myth is about the size or the importance of our Network and I found that there are three ways to to look at it one is to aim for Quality the second is to aim for quantity and the worst is not picking aside let me tell you why beca
use most uh NGO managers and charity leaders start with quality they connect with a couple of people they they know very well and then they keep hearing all the time that they need more exposure and they need to grow their Network so they would increase the number of connections from a few hundred to a few thousand but the truth is that a few thousand doesn't count as exposure on LinkedIn so few people maybe to up to two percent will see whatever it is we share that unless you have 30 000 connec
tions 40 000 connections or 50k then few people will actually sit so the simple question to ask as a leader in two years time would you rather be the most connected or the best connected and because it's so painful to move from one end to the other it's best to ask yourself for the long term in a couple of years time where would you like to be there's a great way for you to have to reach exposure if you have 40 000 connections because many people will see what it was you shared but if you had 30
0 connections and you knew all of them well then you could run a simple advanced search on LinkedIn and you would find amazing stakeholders there could be donors they could be they could be volunteers they could be staff members and if you know David the mutual connection then that enables you to leave LinkedIn to communicate with that person and sometimes to gain a meaningful introduction to that interesting person so pick one my choice is quality uh for most people when you start but if you se
lect quantity Go the whole way don't stop when you have 3 000 connections thinking you get exposure because in most cases I'm afraid you don't So for anybody that's listening to this instead of watching it on YouTube Daniel is sharing his screen right now and on us this slide he's saying that your individual profile is greater than your company page that you should focus on quality over quantity that you should look at your website over a CV so we're going to talk about that in a second they sho
uld look at content over advertising and time over over dollars so let's talk about this website over CV that it's greater than your your resume what does that mean excellent if you are not looking for a job then instead of thinking about your LinkedIn profile as a CV you need to think a bit of it as a website that needs to convert your ideal reader to a deal reader if you're a non-government manager could be either people you're working with your staff your external stakeholders it could be don
ors it could be employees it could be volunteers and they need to understand fast why they need to read and why they need to reach out to you so forget about the CV aspect it's not really important for for the reader whether you worked at that agency started in October 2016 or December 2015 but have you provided them with the information that is likely to make them convert and when I show your profile what we see initially is a banner so please take the time to upload a banner just like you've d
one the upload will take you less than a minute and it is likely to make anyone who visits your profile stay longer on your profile and David you know that the more I stay on your profile the lighter I am to scroll to see what you offer to better understand why I need to reach out to you and to be able to do it so a visual Banner that could be either from an event your NGO has produced or a slogan of your NGO or something that relates to the charity or even a slogan or a motto you believe in is
likely to make people understand that they need to get a little bit more information and stay here and that would be my recommendation for anyone listening now forget about the CV think about it as a website that needs to convert your ideal reader and even before that ask yourself who's that deal reader you'd like to attract anything this simple question is likely to help anyone understand what LinkedIn could bring them and your answer could be different or my answer could be different doesn't m
atter whoever is the most important for us this is the person we need to serve and David your profile is not here to serve you nor is my profile here to serve me it's here to serve our ideal reader so thinking about it from their perspective and looking at it from their perspective and understanding that the way you see your profile is not identical to the way someone else would see it is very important and a quick suggestion I could make is simply ask someone you're not connected to online thin
g to bring your profile up through the app or the website and tell you their thoughts like when they look at it do they really understand what you want and in some cases you will be amazed because you've used very simple language but they look at it and say okay does it mean that you're doing X and instead of correcting them you just now then you say okay why are you why are you thinking that why do you say that and then you go on and you think about why have three people misunderstood what you
wanted and how can you best educate them in order to make them better understand not not only them but anyone about what you bring to the table ask someone you're not connected to to have a look and see what they'll do some people will click some people will go up to the contact info some people will stick somewhere here or or check something else understanding it from their perspective is likelier to make your own profile built or shaped in an even stronger way so so far we've covered three uh
myths maybe it's uh I don't want to become too overwhelmed I think that's a really interesting point to think of your profile as serving your organization not serving yourself and letting people really understand what it is that you're passionate about why is it that you're working at this organization what is it that drives you and then also publishing content or republishing content into your profile to create more content and awareness social media is what I would call a Fickle kind of medium
right you publish something it's in the feed for seconds maybe you get some views on it maybe you've tagged it and people are searching for those tags and it's coming up a little bit more but if your organization's publishing articles and content on their website you can repurpose that for your own profile as an organizational leader to create some thought leadership around whatever that topic is that your organization does and one of the things that you should think about enabling in your prof
ile is called Creator mode and enable that and then it opens up some other kind of functionality in there like this newer type of thing that's happening with newsletters in LinkedIn where you can actually get subscribers to your post and then when you post it on LinkedIn it'll also shoot them an email after you publish so you're getting right into the inbox of people that you may not have otherwise connected with you're absolutely right I was listening to the episode you uh the conversation you
had with Abby about content and repurposing and because content is so important in in Social and on LinkedIn specifically the best type of content I found to work on LinkedIn is top of funnel educational Evergreen content what does that mean it means that if your organization or your NGO has content that answers your ideal readers questions about the cause itself not necessarily about what you want to achieve not necessarily the donations but the cause itself the size of what what's happening or
why now why should we pick you instead of something else then that sort of content would be likely to resonate with your ideal audience and you can educate people and then when they visit your profile they'll some of them will leave the profile and go to your websites and conversion as you know is likely to happen on our websites and not on LinkedIn simply think of LinkedIn as one channel that could increase the exposure of your website and even in terms of your website you have all sorts of co
ntent think about the top of final educational content that is likelier to resonate with all your audience and try to highlight that you can do it through your profile like you said by featuring content by uploading a banner by having rich media in your experience section you could tweak your headline you can write the about section in an interesting way and we mentioned the ideal readers it's natural for for many NGO leaders to think about everyone and to try to serve everyone donors and the st
aff and the employees and the volunteers but it's when you try to serve everyone in some cases you end up serving very few people and sometimes no one at all so who's the most important reader you'd like to focus on and if you have someone else on your team then it could be David that you would speak to one type of audience maybe donors and that the other person on your staff would actually cater to volunteers so if you think about donors what kind of actions can you perform on LinkedIn probably
not what we're thinking about if I had a list of donors and I would find some of them on LinkedIn and another question is when we run a Google search for ourselves and for the donors in many cases our LinkedIn profile will Top the Google results so that's another reason why it's important it doesn't matter whether we visited the account it lasted 24 hours or haven't visited in two years if Google remembers it then we need to make it look professional you mentioned the Creator mode your creator
mode makes it very easy to follow any LinkedIn member LinkedIn has close to 850 million members and since we started this conversation thousands of people have joined LinkedIn according to July 2022 it's a statistics every second David three people sign up so you need to really understand or remember the sheer size of of LinkedIn find them on LinkedIn and simply follow them even if they haven't listened to this podcast and haven't turned on greater mode within two clicks you can follow anyone on
LinkedIn you simply go to their activity section and you click on follow and in some cases if they have the Creator mode you will also have a bell that enables you to be notified instantly whenever they share something on linked to you why is that so important because whenever they will share something on LinkedIn you will be one of the first to be notified and in some cases that could bring you PR opportunities or an opportunity for you to reach out to them not necessarily on LinkedIn and cert
ainly not publicly the fact that you monitor them doesn't mean that you have to shout the name of your NGO every time you see them do something but it would help you and your team to know that that person has will be given a speech about XYZ or they now care about topic ABC that is related to your organization of course so start by following them and if you connected with people you know well look at the names of the mutual connections and ask yourself can you leverage that relationship so when
you look at someone's profile next to their name you'll see a figure if you connected on LinkedIn to that person LinkedIn will tell you your first degree contact if it shows you a second degree just like I'm showing your profile now it means that you and I share at least one mutual connection and usually LinkedIn will show us the name of that Mutual connection if we're looking at this and we have no idea who Michael D live it is we're in trouble but if we know him is the burnout uh ghoul so if w
e wanted to reach out to each other if I wanted to reach out to you I could actually leave LinkedIn communicate with Michael and ask him could you put me in touch with David and if he says yes then I will have a meaningful conversation with you thanks to Michael's name simply because I connected with someone I knew well I took the time to leave LinkedIn to speak with him and he said sure with pleasure he shot a quick email and now we're having a conversation so one follow the the donor or the po
tential donor and two if you want to if it's important for you leave LinkedIn the best kept secret in town is to know when to leave the platform LinkedIn has shown us the name of the person and the most important name is the mutual connection but it doesn't mean that we have to stay on LinkedIn and the worst thing to do would be to hit connect because we would basically bypass our Network and nothing is likely to happen after we're connected with that person that reason for accepting our connect
ion does not mean they have become the owners of they don't necessarily care about organization but if we leverage the conversation to have a meaningful chat with the person thanks to a mutual connection that could bring a lot more exposure a lot more donations and and a better outcome for the organizations and and for ourselves absolutely and you know with millions and millions and millions of people out there on LinkedIn it might be helpful if you're a larger organization if you don't have a l
ot of time if you leverage your team to help with that so you know willingness to give them access to your profile to do some of this Outreach to have some of those conversations on your on your behalf and make some of those connections will help you in the long run but there's a certain Comfort level that people would need to have in order to to give up access to their profile um if you are going to I guess go against what Daniel just mentioned and hit connect you want to make sure that in that
message you have a really clear conversation about hey you know like Daniel mentioned that I should get in touch with you because XYZ you know I'd love to to chat with you etc etc versus a I see you've got a lot of money and you're a fan anthropist and I'd love for you to donate to our charity right it's a very different tone in a very different way to have that conversation and you want to do it in a very organic meaningful and Progressive Way well I couldn't agree with you more because uh eve
ryone expects you to run your research before you reach out to someone certainly a donor certainly an influential person and within a couple of hours you can gain a lot inform a lot more information about that person for you to understand what's the best way to approach in some cases that means you don't approach them now or you find some other way and if we're thinking we're seeing that some donor has become more interested in the field of education so we can look at let me mention on a number
of wow digital's educational clients so the University of Toronto versus uh Leo back or Durant college everyone here is basically competing for the same attention but what makes someone become a donor are there an alumni or is it important for them because they like uh to contribute to Medicine research or something else that is something that your your research is likely to help you uncover and leveraging your team and your staff and your volunteer could also be done very organically if you sha
re photos and images and videos from your events if you have a yearly event or something that involves the people you you're working with then sharing that and commenting on that even if you're a small team could gain you a lot more exposure for volunteers for donors and for other stakeholders absolutely so we're talking about this platform and there's hundreds of millions of people in this platform as you said there's three a second signing up like those are some pretty fantastic numbers let's
talk about numbers for a second right and in terms of people's profiles and number of connections what's the upside versus downside of connecting with people that you don't know should we as non-profit leaders be racing to get like 500 followers or 500 connections as quickly as possible and then let's say that many people listening to this or watching this have 499 so David win the hit the 500 will this will uh the the cause they're trying to help will disappear will something change probably no
t probably not so I think connections is a means to an end and even before uh tackling the issue of connections I'd like to mention the timing okay like when is it a good idea for you to grow your the number of connections you have so what I'm I've put up here is something from from a book and it shows the number of connections we have so whenever we open up or sign up for LinkedIn we were here in the x-axis and each connection we had moved us further to the right so if I have 100 connections ma
ybe I'm here if if you have 2 000 maybe you're closer to the right but I'd like to draw your attention David to the y-axis and that is related to the amount of information you're providing your ideal reader for them to convert so if no information is available here we're probably in the lower quadrant if we have provided a banner like you have and an interesting headline and the about section and featured links that gives a lot more information to whoever sees this so we want to reach the fourth
quadrant let's Imagine David we had only two ways to do it one is to grow our number of connections and then care about our profile or improve our profile make sure it converts and then sending all those invitations what would make sense for you go right or go up you would want to have a full profile right so as you connect with people they've got more detail more insight more background and more information absolutely because this is the equivalent of promoting your websites before it's built
you don't promote your website before it's built you build it and then you want people to see it so I'm not saying the connections are absolutely worthless but if you focus on connections before your own profile converts then you're leaving money on the table because many people will see that uh profile are not likely to convert and according to LinkedIn statistics can you guess what is the number one activity that all LinkedIn members worldwide are performing on the LinkedIn platform what is th
e single most important action that everyone does more than any other action on LinkedIn looking at people's profiles absolutely you're absolutely right so LinkedIn is peculiar in in the sense that if we're heading to to Tick-Tock or Instagram or Facebook or Twitter we're usually here for the content and we don't spend that much time visiting and reading and analyzing the person's profile but on LinkedIn people are here to basically assess you and they would do it not by the what it what it is t
hat you shared but the quality of your profile and if your profile helps them understand what you bring to the table then they're likely to reach out to you or to perform the action you want to perform so before uh sending a million invitation just to have a look at your profile make sure it converts and then you will gain a lot more traffic from adding more connections or sending more connection requests and the good side about it is that I was listening to uh I think it was another episode you
you had with Devin Mueller about the Gorilla Marketing yes and you mentioned the number of the frequency of sharing so the good news for audience here is that you don't have to share that much on LinkedIn no one is going to call the cops if you haven't shared for 20 hours it's It's Perfectly Normal and most of our network is actually not interested in seeing us posts too frequently because if they know that we share every couple of hours then they might become blind to our content at one point
or unfollow or disconnect and certainly not engage with our content you don't have a quota of of things to share simply ask yourself maybe even every quarter or every month if you have a lot of content what is the single high quality piece of content you would like to share as an individual and if you that will could take you five minutes and that will be good enough for for most people but do make you sure that your profile converts let's pretend I'm a non-profit CEO president and you've convin
ced me all right I need to be on LinkedIn I need to have this profile I need to get my team access to it so they can have some of these conversations I'm a busy person I've got lots of stuff to do I'm in meetings all the time I don't have time to deal with this I'll get people to help what are three questions that non-profit NGO leaders and marketers should ask themselves to turn their LinkedIn presence into something that will return some kind of result for their organization excellent so the t
hree questions I would ask is this number one who's your ideal reader number two what action David would elect that person to perform when they visit your profile and number three are you helping them are you showing them the right information in the right order at the right time in order for them to understand that they want to reach out to you and when people visit your profile they come through a variety of sources in some cases it's a piece of content you shared in other cases it's the fact
that you commented on someone's post or some or someone who shared something so if Michael shared something and you commented on it even though we are not connected on LinkedIn I may see it and discover you something simply through that so first question was who's your ideal reader the second question what action would you like them to perform and we would usually want them to reach out to us to visit our website or to attend an event or to register for forthcoming webinar or something that woul
d basically move them to our system hopefully we have some kind of system for us to nurture them maybe they will not be able to act today but in three months or six months they would be glad to to help us and the third question and the most difficult one when we look at our own profile does it make sense that anyone visiting our profile will understand within five seconds why they need to read it and why they need to care you mentioned the the importance of of Storytelling as someone who leads i
n an NGO you have human stories and the human stories could bring you more attention and more donations than the abstract problem we know that there is a problem of poverty or illiteracy or whatever it is we care about but I was uh earlier this year I gave a lecture to the uh Weitzman Institute uh leading scientific University and so the third question is are we the the human story thinking or or describing the Journey of one underprivileged teenager who managed to go and attend college or the U
niversity and then became a world known scientist it's just an example but it could resonate with your audience way more than saying that you have helped thousands of people or ex millions of dollars whatever it is the human story is often very very powerful and we can also take that lesson to our own profile if we manage to write the about section or the headline as an interesting story then we're managing to make people more interested in what it is we want to show them I think those are reall
y important pieces as an organization if you're a large organization you could talk about you know how you're raising all this money and how you have this Gala but bring it down to that small little story that you can help people feel empathetic about right and I talk about this all the time and I'll probably I would say at least half of the podcast episodes right you need to tell that story you need to weave that through everything that you do and that also means doing that in your LinkedIn pro
file absolutely a thing you also have a Content workshop and wow strategy program so I don't think our audience needs to create uh content for the sake of LinkedIn but David I do believe that once you've created high quality content making sure that people see it on LinkedIn is a no-brainer because producing that content may take you a lot of time and a lot of energy a lot of resources but sharing it smartly across the LinkedIn platform is relatively easy you can do it within minutes and you can
gain a lot more eyeballs and interesting people to sit once you've produced it and and repurpose it or used it in a way that would um be appropriate for the LinkedIn platform 100 percent so when we're talking about our profile and making sure we're creating kind of some story there and letting people know what it is that we care about and why it is that we do what we're doing you need to look at your profile headline right so why is that so important and how should we be thinking about that exc
ellent so by default the headline is usually the title of our latest position and the name of our company but is that so important for our ideal reader in many cases David the answer is no so think about this way when we run a search or when we look at someone's profile the first the headline is the most expensive real estate because that's the only piece of information we see even before visiting your profile say I want you to I'm looking at someone's profile or I ran a search so I see here a n
umber of people and what I see is basically their name their photo and then a text and you don't have to have your default headline the default headline for you would be probably Chief digital Aficionado what did well digital Inc but that doesn't necessarily tell the story from the reader's perspective and I'd like to read out the headline you've tweaked and that's I'm passionate about helping non-profits with strategic digital accounts with the Canadian flag that I can't show here on desktop fo
reign for the type of people you want to attract again we can't attract everyone so if you're not into non-profit maybe you'll you'll uh you won't be interested in this but if you are into a non-profit this is way more important than knowing the name of the company you're heading so have a look at your profile and have a look at your headline and make sure that the headline is inviting or if you just had a look at it would it make people move and check you out especially David if you if you want
to search and we have you know 600 results and we're basically scanning and seeing one two three or four and whenever we hit on David or Sean or or Chris there is a huge clock ticking in our in our brain saying hey don't spend more than two seconds here because there are many other curtains out there so we really the headline is really the single most important piece of text that could draw people into a profile and once they're there thanks to the banner you've uploaded and thanks to the featu
red items you've added here a hundred percent of the visitors to your profile are likely either to click on one of those or to better understand what you bring to the table and that everything we mentioned doesn't cost anything it cost you some time but you don't have to pay for a LinkedIn premium account you just have to use your brain and focus on your objective if you're not looking for a job turn your LinkedIn profile into a way for you to gain more volunteers or more donors or more stakehol
ders interested in the cause you're matching awesome some fantastic insights on that you've convinced me as a leader I need to use my profile you've convinced me I need to have you know a byline in there a description that will show up that is engaging that talks about you know what we do you convince me I need to spend a bit of time in terms of getting content into my profile so that you know I'm doing some stuff in the space where my potential audience is hanging out I've gotten a little bit o
f searching I've done a couple connections I found an ideal donor or volunteer they have accepted my connection request but nothing happened why is that and do you have any tips on how we can kind of make that conversation happen into a more meaningful way okay so I think it would make more sense to prevent the situation rather than try to handle it now now why has this happened happened because you've probably received hundreds of unsolicited connection requests and the minute you accept them y
ou're spammed with all sorts of services there is no chance on Earth you would need so people and and donors and and volunteers have become a lot more cautious about who they accept and it's like basically uh receiving a phone call from an unknown number or or having a Spam alert when you do this but you don't necessarily have to send them a connection request right in some cases if you connect with people you know well then you run a search and you see that you have two or five or 15 interestin
g donors leave LinkedIn find the name of the mutual connection and find a way for you to start a conversation with and the easiest step for you to do would be maybe to invite them to an event or to help them better understand about the cause that you're defending and if you make it easier for them to attend if it's a zoom meeting if it's something that would not be too difficult for them maybe you could move them one step further to what is it you wanted but don't bypass your your network start
with getting introductions from people you know well you need to have a system either before connecting or after connecting if you decide to you wanted to go for the quantity and you want to have 30 000 connections then David you need to have a system and as soon as the person accepts an invitation LinkedIn will pop up a message saying see what what Jane is up to or start a conversation with Bob and that means they have accepted your invitation request now for the first time usually you have acc
ess to their email address at one point or another it makes sense to leave the LinkedIn platform to communicate with them through email and to nurture them based on the system you have if you have one or forget about this focus on on connecting with people you know well and gain meaningful introduction meaningful introductions thanks to Mutual connections Daniel this has been a fantastic conversation some amazing insights that you've brought to the table um thank you so much for your time I hope
that the people listening have been able to get some great advice from you on how they can leverage their profile they likely already have a LinkedIn profile if you don't it takes maybe a minute to go and create one and then get the I think they send an authentication email to make sure it's a legitimate email but like that's about it it's super easy to do go and set one up use Daniel's information and resources and items that he spoke about today to help you uh get more traffic and and build y
our profile and create those meaningful conversations that need to happen and you know like 20 years ago you would be having these conversations in person at events you would be having these conversations you know walking through your facility or walking down the street or at dinners with friends and family right take those conversations apply the same way that you would speak with people but in the digital realm everything's gone digital certainly over the last two and a half three years right
with covid but you know take these insights apply them and you're going to start to see some kind of movement from there if anybody wants to get in touch with you Daniel what do they need to do thank you very much it's been a pleasure to be part of the non-profit digital success and the best ways to go to danielalphone.com you'll find all the sort of information there and I'm happy to uh to help awesome so before our show Daniel we were talking you have a freebie for people so head over to danie
lalphone.com we're gonna have a link in our show notes page for you so that people can just click and jump right over there it's a PDF that you'll get access to that talks about you know creating a profile headline that sells it'll give you instant access to all of that information and why that's like super important for you to do um Daniel also has a book available on Amazon it's called how to build a LinkedIn profile for business success and Ultimate Guide go and check it out there's some amaz
ing resources in there thanks again so much Daniel it's been great having you on the non-profit digital success podcast to everybody listening if you find this concept a little bit abstract or you don't have the time or a team to help you deal with this Daniel also has a done for you package so head over there and connect with them and he'll help be open if you want any of the resources like I mentioned we're going to have it up on the show notes page just head over to nonprofit digitalsuccess.c
om podcast click on this episode for all the details and until next time keep on being successful
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