the nonprofit podcast powered by donor Buck we
all know that the digital landscape is constantly evolving new platforms emerge Trends coming go and
tactics seem to change with the blink of an eye as nonprofits navigating this Dynamic environment
can be both exhilarating and challenging now we all understand the importance of staying ahead
in this digital world but what if I told you that amist all the everchanging tactics and platforms
there's a set of deep principles that can stand the tes
t of time welcome to the nonprofit podcast
I'm Jenna nonprofit advocate here at donorbox we are here each week with practical actions you
can use today to increase donations and take your nonprofit to the next level tomorrow today
we're diving into the realm of digital marketing for nonprofit and joining us as a true expert
in the field I'm thrilled to welcome Chris Barlo founder and director of beine marketing
Chris has been a fantastic partner to donorbox and brings a wealth of knowledge
and insights to
the table and he's here to explore a principle that is often overlooked but holds incredible
value for nonprofit marketing active listening welcome Chris thank you so much Jenna I'm excited
to be on the podcast I always love learning from you anytime we've had you on for a webinar
or for anything else I just leave feeling so energized and inspired so as we dive into today's
discussion I want to explore that fundamental aspect of nonprofit marketing this is your bread
and bu
tter we often hear about the importance of staying current with the latest trends and those
tactics especially in this digital realm but you're suggesting kind of a different approach
something that's really unique something that I'm learning about for the first time focusing on
deep principles that withstand that test of time so could you break down for our listeners what you
mean by Deep principles because I think that might sound a little intimidating for folks who may
not be initiated a
nd why this perspective is so important for nonprofits especially in building
relationships at scale yeah well what you just said something there in the last sentence that I
think is a great definition of marketing is that it's building relationships with people at scale
and I think it's really easy and normal for us to when we have tools that can reach hundreds
of thousands millions of people at the tip of our fingers and we can suddenly send a message
to many many people for no cost or ve
ry little cost it's easy to forget that we are talking to
people and that in the olden days if you were doing a campaign you might send letters but then
if you're in a political situation you're like hitting the ground hitting the payment talking to
people face to face and you're seeing the people you're talking to and you're communicating that
message face to face and so in our marketing I think that's just it's so easy digital marketing
it's just so easy to forget that so I feel like it c
an become extremely difficult and feel
overwhelming to stay up with all the latest trends I mean the speed at which Innovations are
happening and platforms are developing and things are becoming popular and the next youngest
generation adopts the newest social media platform like it's impossible it's impossible to
keep up with it all like literally you cannot no one can and so I think one thing that can Center
us as nonprofits in our marketing is to remember that like what we need to base a
ll of our our
strategies and our tactics on is what works in human relationships what is the ultimate like
core principle that works here so if I'm wanting to build a relationship with someone then it's
usually a good idea to reach out to someone like just take a step toward them instead of expecting
them to take a step toward us like just because it's the digital space and they could find us it's
probably more likely that someone new will find you at a conference with a thousand people tha
n
for regular potential donors to find your website or to come to your your social media page online
because there's just so many things buying for their attention so just thinking about like okay
if I give to someone then they may reciprocate by following me or learning who I am or being
attracted to I am so that's kind of the idea is just like what are the Deep the things that don't
change and if we hold of those then we can figure out how to navigate whatever newest platform or
technolo
gy or innovation that's come out in the digital space and it also can help us figure out
where we should be putting our efforts too I love how you said the olden days first of all I just
like cackled a little bit in my head olden days snail mail and hitting the pavement what was that
the 2000s so but yes it's changed so much and the way that we engage people are expecting more
too they're more Discerning and to have this mindset shift and this shift in the way that you
are marketing it's ab
solutely necessary at this point so bringing it back you talk about active
listening this is such an intriguing principle to explore again it's often just about delivering
messages and promoting your causes right but how does that active listening piece fit into this
Narrative of you know looking to build those relationships with their audience what are those
tactics and what does that actually look like well and active listing is right just one of the many
deeper principles that we can loo
k at that are based on how to build a good relationship with
someone how to have a healthy relationship so yeah there's a lot of areas we can apply it to
so like you an advertising and our and our email marketing and our website other are social media
whatever to to like pull main points from active listening that I've written about and thought
about is after listening is listening closely to someone asking them questions to really
understand what they're thinking and their emotions restati
ng it to make sure they know that
we understood them and just being focused on that person and so if we're actively listening to our
donors we're being centered on our donors so like I said we can apply that in in advertising we can
apply that in our website and we can apply that in in our Communications okay let's see how this
concept translates into one specific Channel how does that play out in the realm of search ads can
you share some insights on how folks can actively listen to what T
heir audience is searching for and
tailor their ads accordingly is that what you're saying yeah so in ads and specifically search is
is a simpler place to kind of see how to apply this principle I think you're going to apply it
in any kind of advertising platform but someone's on doing a search and you want to run an ad you're
using maybe your Google Grant or whatever a search engine you can first of all before you even run
ads do some research and see what are people searching for and then
before you just throw out
ads that are about your organization you have to think about what are people searching for that
our organization can respond to in a relevant way that's helpful to the person that's based on
what they're searching for not what I want them to find and even more specifically like getting
down into the nitty-gritty people don't spend a long time reading the search results they don't
read every word we all just kind of skim they've shown that in a few milliseconds peo
ple make a
quick decision about what page they're going to click on and and result and look at it and then if
it's not good just hit back and go to the next one so we are not trying to write this really strong
copy with persu you know pers weigh someone that you the best result you just need to show them
that you're irrelevant the best way to do that is to restate in your headline what they searched
for it's that I'm not going to Mock You by like copying exactly what you said but I do want
to in
my first two three headlines say exactly what you said basically closely and then in the headlines
two and three kind of give a little bit more context add a little who you are or what you
could do to help or give them a call to action just expand and say Here's what you're saying and
we find for example that if your first headline matches the keywords of what someone searched
it significantly increases the clickthrough rate instead of you know Google with a grant program
you need a
5% clickthrough rate minimum so if five out 100 people click you're at and if you restate
what people said you usually can double that you can usually at least get a 10% clickthrough rate
sometimes higher can you give me an example of what those statements look like or what those
searches look like and how that translates from the search to the ad with the grant we will do
something called single keyword ad groups and this is kind of getting technical but essentially
an ad group is a group
of keywords that are kind of related that have two ads you know two two
variants basically so instead of having a group of yoube five to 10 keywords that have a similar
ad because they're related we will actually use one or two keywords in an ad group and so that
way let's say someone is searching for help my angry child then instead of creating one ad for
help my angry child and child tantrum and angry three-year-old and having one ad for all three of
those different keywords we'll actuall
y have one ad for each keyword and the headline will be the
same so help my Angry Child the first headline will say help your angerly child or help your
angry three-year-old that's different or like help your child's tantrum whatever it might be we try
to match that keyword that they searched because it's showing we're actually taking the time to
connect with what you said and so that practice of active listening repeating back to them what they
said in that first headline so people click o
n these ads they find your organization and now they
are landing on your website it's the central hub for all the information this is the home for all
the things that you do so how can organizations use their websites to create the same effect of
that active listening there's a lot of different ways that you can do this going back to like the
example of you're showing up on a search engine whether through an ad or through just organic
results you want to continue that restate and that proce
ss of giving people the sense of being
understood as quickly and simply as you can cuz obviously this isn't a real conversation but it's
as close as you can in a short digital context is match the keywords what does the headline of the
page say to what they were searching for and you know a place like your homepage you can't match
everything that everyone's going to search like you're going to have one specific message but if
you're running ads or if you have blog articles just make sure th
at your meta description in a
blog article or or your ad headline matches the headline or has close relevance to the headline on
the page obviously you're not going to you know an example I gave my angry child and child tantrum
my Angry three-year-old like you can't have three different headlines on your landing page think
from a perspective of a newcomer and saying does this still feel like we're talking about the same
thing and are they going to feel heard and listen to it that's the firs
t thing but then there are
a lot of tools out there to help you engage with people before they ever like even become a Subs
subscriber there are tools where you can have a poll on your website and you can just ask like
are you finding everything you were looking for on this page yes or no and if they say yes you're
they're great if they say no you can have you know what were you looking for and not ask for their
email you're just wanting to get feedback from people there's a lot of differen
t tools that do
that one I know of is called hot jar and uh they so they allow you to add surveys and polls to your
to your website pages and then similarly like you can look at user Behavior aggregated like no uh
specific users you can watch a you don't know who these people are you can see a recording of where
their Mouse movement went or like how far all the users in the last month scroll down the page or
what they clicked on and you can just see like people are they're moving their Mous
e over this
particular text that means they're reading it they're ignoring this entire section of the page
or they're clicking on something that can't be clicked on it's not to spy on people you're just
trying to say how can we design the website in such a way based on what our people are doing and
what they think they ought to be able to do that's like paying close attention to people and how
they're responding to you again because you're not having a face Toof face conversation the closes
t
thing you can do is react and respond to and make changes according to what people do so that's
getting feedback from people and then finally like a great way that that we've used with clients
is after someone let's say they they come to your site and they download a resource or they make
a donation on that confirmation page we will put a survey a short survey like one or two questions
and ask a question like why did you choose to give today or why did you choose to download this book
wh
at was the issue you were facing and and how how do you think this will help you asking those
questions allows us to get to know people better who are you know in our audience and asking them
you know for feedback or like yeah you could ask would you like to talk to someone on our team to
share your story how you're connected how we can improve as an organization like asking for that
obviously that opens up a real dialogue a real chance to really listen but it also gives you the
language th
at your users are using the words the word choice and you can take that and improve
how you communicate in the future so people are telling you why they chose to give today we'll
take all of that feedback put it you know we did this with a organization we took all the feedback
for all the different ebooks they had put together and then organized it based on the different
specific things that people pointed out and we use that to rewrite the landing page copy so that
it would use the same la
nguage same issues that our actual audience was sharing about we were not
only just listening to people and giving a chance to give us feedback but we were responding and
shifting our the way we our wors and our community to I think that's a really cool way to uncover
unexpected needs of your audience how would you otherwise know that if you're not asking for that
feedback that really kind of shows the trends and how you can adapt so how much feedback do you
think an organization would need
to be able to implement these thoughtful changes to their
website to better serve Their audience that's a great question I think if you're talking about
just user Behavior like on the page I think it obviously depends on your traffic like if you've
got a lot of traffic to your site you know you have thousands of visitors then you can probably
make changes within a few weeks or a month and I would say just in general based on user Behavior
if you're just looking at the scroll map or the hea
t map or the click map or whatever then yeah
you want more in data but if you're writing a poll and someone says I'm not finding this information
and you're like oh yeah that should be on the page you can get one piece of feedback like you don't
need a lot of feedback qualitative data is so valuable so a poll a survey any of that like you
can make changes right away especially if you're like yeah this should be there and if you're just
trying to like improve the copy it's helpful to gather
a little bit more however many results that
you want I think with that particular project that I was thinking of when we reot the landing page we
had about 100 150 responses so it just depends on how long that takes gather but that we were able
to like really pull out some patterns from that so other channels for Communication email remains a
really powerful communication tool for nonprofits so in the context of email how can nonprofits
practice this active listening um well the first thing
I would say is like we all measure and it's
understandable and it's good thing to you know effectiveness of email by open and click rate but
are we measuring our reply rate and are we wanting or aiming for replies because if people reply to
us we can actually listen to them we can actually engage in conversation and of all the channels
that we've talked about so far this one is the most like a real conversation because someone
can hit reply and ideally there should be someone they're into
can respond and so encouraging that
and I would say even text messages are even more effective for engaging someone in a conversation
people are much more likely to tap out a short little response swipe one on their phone than type
one on their email because just that's just kind of how we're programmed like we don't think of
replying to marketing emails but the more our emails look personal our marketing emails and the
more we tell people I will reply or respond to any I read all the respo
nses I will reply to you
that will encourage some of that so that's just one simple way um another one is people talk about
cleaning up your list to be more effective that's the benefit for us is you know engagement will
go up if we clean our list from people who are just not engaged anymore not opening our emails
but looking at you know our users engagement and saying okay no one responded to that like okay
I guess either there was something wrong with the way we communicated or people are
just not
wanting to hear about that right now and that doesn't mean what we're offering them is wrong
or or not right but we need to think about how to better communicate that in a different way or
if people are just not responding at all it's like well we need to let them go and we don't have
to like force them to unsubscribe we can just let them know hey we haven't heard from you in
several months you haven't opened anything and if if you don't click on anything like here's
some resourc
es that we have if you click on one of these resources that's you just telling us I
want to stay subscribe and this is helpful to me and if you don't no problem we'll automatically
unsubscribe you and that's just courteous to do you don't want people on your list who aren't
engaged and that's good listening you're paying attention to what people are responding to and
then if you have an email that people are really respond responding to it's like okay what is it
about this email that people
really appreciate if they're all opening it they're all clicking
it and then lastly like I have a client who they have what's called they invite people to
join the quote unquote insiders team and it's different from their donor team it's like we'd
love to get your feedback on stuff before we put it out widely so share a little bit about what you
think about this new resource that we created or before we like write on this topic we'd love to
get your you know so just giving people like the
sense of ownership in the organization so again
that kind of invites that relationship and gives people a chance to say your voice is welcomed
and heard and we want you to engage it sounds like there are a lot of ways through a lot of
different channels that people can implement this and I guess I want to take a step back you
know and ask for our organizations so what why does this matter what can the impact be if they
do this well I would say ultimately it provides Clarity and so whatever
your goal is you know say
we we really want to grow our donor base well then how should we go about doing that and and if you
start with a deeper principle rather than like oh we just want more engagement on Instagram well why
do you want that engagement you know just it helps you answer that question like why and how because
you're thinking about how can we be relational in our digital marketing because the more people feel
personally connected to us they're going to like believe you know
in our mission and be really
passionate about it and support our work and be part of supporting the work that they believe
in one final thought here where and how could this go wrong what are some common missteps that
nonprofits should avoid when attempting to apply these principles With Their audience a great one
is asking people to fill in a survey or respond and then not doing anything with it like you got
to be ready to do something with what they shared you got to provide the active li
stening part
you're asking for them to share and talk and you're listening in that way but then are you like
restating are you adjusting your Communications are you adapting it some way one thing to not
listen at all people don't expect you to listen to them what other thing to be like I'm listening and
then you just them till they're done talking and they don't feel listen to okay to wrap us up for
nonprofits that are looking to implement better ways of listening to the audience through an
y type
of Channel where would you say they should start what are some practical steps that they can take
to incorporate this active listening into their overall marketing strategy I think starting with
your website because that's just you know kind of who you are your digital presence and focusing on
like how can we ask people these little questions do a survey or especially like on a donor thank
you page like ask people why they gave like just start with that that'll be encouraging to you
and it'll also help you know how to better engage people and make a strong value proposition for
why should people give in the future I think that our listeners could set aside an hour even just
this week to take the time and think about what questions they should be asking and how they can
apply that once they do get those responses and from there Chris if folks want to dive deeper
how can they enlist the help of beine we have various tools like eBooks on our site that you
can download th
at'll give you like some helpful steps that are aligned with these principles your
beeline.com just homepage you'll find one but you can also just reach out and ask uh me and our team
any questions about this like how would we apply in this way or what should we do here or can you
recommend a tool that will help us I'm I'm happy to recommend tools to you to make this more easy
to do a survey or a poll or hot jar or other tools like that you could reach out teamyou beeline.com
and I will res
pond if you send me an email we also have a couple of great articles that Chris shared
with us on effective ad copy and email marketing for nonprofits so we'll go ahead and Link those in
the show notes as well Chris this has been really eye openening and I'm eager to learn more from
you thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today thank you jna to our listeners I'm
sure you're feeling as inspired as I am after this conversation it's a clear reminder I think that
authentic conne
ction should always be at the heart of what we do thank you for joining me on the
nonprofit podcast I hope you've left with the confidence to take a small step today that will
make a big difference tomorrow be sure to click the download button on your podcast player then
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