when i was down and out years ago i started coming here and the free lunch the just the opportunities and things they do for people it was so wonderful i just kept coming back coming back and once i got on my feet i still continued to come here and now come and pick up some guys to let him work with me and stuff like in the charm you know just do time prayer grace of god and get out and do what i'm doing i had no car no nothing not got a house car most like i mean it's a blessing and i i'll come
here until the day they take my last breath they're not the rich and famous their profit comes not from the thing they sell but the good they do our nation has more than 1.5 million non-profits that employ one out of 10 americans providing services that otherwise go unfulfilled keeping our community connected when all else fails but nonprofits often lack the tools to properly promote themselves to inspire more donors and volunteers and clients to their cause that's where i come in i've been in
the nonprofit world for nearly 20 years i connect non-profits with marketing professionals who donate their time and expertise so that at the end of the day these life-giving organizations can do more do better by creating more that's right buzz [Music] so today we are visiting the non-profit ram house ram stands for roanoke area ministries and ram house provides a lot of life-saving services for our region's homeless population which has really been ravaged by covet 19. so randhau started back
in 1971 when different churches and religious organizations noticed an increase in homelessness and we've been going ever since we have about 40 different churches that donate and about 30 that volunteer in different capacities fantastic i can't wait to see you yeah welcome to our home thank you ram house is the largest day shelter and it has a wonderful kitchen which is a restaurant basically not only for people who are homeless here but also people in the community that are food deprived and t
his is where all the culinary magic happens we have a workforce of all volunteers and our kitchen manager and they make hot healthy meals every day for our guests lovely hello ladies thank y'all so much this is awesome come have fun hamburgers homemade salad and fruit salad even during the covid crisis we have never stopped processing applications for people who needed help because we didn't want them to get way behind in their bills we provide rent assistance mortgage we can help with the first
deposit we help with utilities and we can also help with medical needs medicines prescriptions things like that a lot of them are coming from different places and they have no place to go maybe they haven't eaten they come in they get a breakfast they get hot coffee first thing they get to clean up shave a lot of the guys clean up and they get to wash their clothes they are provided a hot nutritious meal every day and they are provided a case management in the sense that we determine what they
need and we refer them to outside sources to try to to stabilize what's going on with them and this is our dining room which is closed right now during covet but instead we're using it to put together our chicken lunch bags so you have lunch bags here that have notes from guests from people in the community and they send in notes of encouragement okay so this one's from rose i do not know you but just know that i think about you and all those in need i hope things will get better for you and all
those who reach out for help bless you and try not to give up hope we also have a clothes closet and it's run by our lady of nazareth church and they we do see that our people have new or nice clothes and that is just such a blessing that we do that for people first off i have to tell you we are blessed with people my age and older who give to us they are so so gracious but like other organizations in the area you have to be planning to think about how you're going to bring the younger people a
board so that has become a very important part of our strategic planning if ram house wants to reach younger people they need to reach where younger people live and that's digital and social media so i reached out to dj witcher owner of rova digital which specializes in this very thing unfortunately just after our first conversation ds father was hospitalized with covet 19 and he had to back out so while i searched for another creative resource to help ram house i also took the opportunity to si
t down with some folks whom ram house had helped [Music] and i was telling her veronica has a lot of good opportunities job openings housing you know place to start over and everybody here was saying well no you we can't help you we can't help you we can't help go ahead go ahead go there and we sat down with jessica and she's been a wonderful help to us from there i mean they helped us get a house that we definitely wouldn't have been able to afford on our own i mean making 12 11 miles an hour i
t takes a long time to save up eighteen hundred dollars to move no i come in and get some coffee wash up when it's necessary because i am a homeless individual i mean i messed up on my own it's not their fault but they're here to help i've had custody of her since she was eight months old her mother gave birth to her may the fourth and two days later after she got out of the hospital she caught me to come get her she was tired so she's been with me since with the eyesight fixing i'm now allowed
this year to go back to my i'm electrician by trade go back to my normal job because i can see what i'm doing yeah she gave me the paperwork i filed it they helped push it through and it got done i mean at 50 something years old the last thing we thought about was raising the eight nine year old again but we got to do what we have to do and then this cove at 19 thing hit and i got laid off so she was the only one working so we went from 500 something hours a week down to 300 a week car insurance
you need car payment you need gas you need rent you need light bill you need phone bill you need cable bill and it wasn't like she walked in here and said hit hit with some money no he's like well if y'all do this y'all do this y'all do this we'll help y'all with this and that's what they did it was christmas eve it was a great yeah for the first time yes yeah it was christmas eve it was pretty awesome i mean i was walking around when i saw my skin i said man i need a shower when we moved in th
ere all we had was the clothes on our back and went to walmart and bought an air mattress and little by little piece by piece i mean between yards sales this and craigslist and let go of this goodwill and we making it work i grew up in the projects in east baltimore with nothing so now i take pride in everything i have and with this woman and that little girl and there's nothing i can't do it might take me a while to get it done i might not get it as fast as i want it but i'm gonna make sure the
little girl don't want for nothing and she don't spoil right get something to eat coffee get away from the mess the sanctuary is what they said ain't no fighting allowed here and in the streets sometimes it's a little rough i mean anybody can hand you a dollar but everyone can't teach you how to fill out a job application fill out a resume and they will take the time to help you with that and when it's pouring down rain outside you rather being here than sitting out there i never thought that i
would be on the sideways though i needed anyone's help i mean you figured you have a college degree you know you owned your own business for 10 years what you need from a ram house but they showed me yeah like i said this is a constant it's always been and here and today i get hired to demolition of building if it's this one i don't care if they offer me twenty thousand i'll let it hammer down on the ground building coming down so since deshay witcher had to care for his father suffering from c
over 19 i needed to find a new marketing team to help out with ram house thankfully wheeler digital was really excited to do it hey melissa and molly good to see you guys i am thrilled to introduce you to some special guests here we have cameron may we have freddie wright and we have theresa pasteretti here at wheeler digital they are really excited i'm really appreciative of them donating their time to help ram house i'm going to step out of the way and let you guys catch them up to speed great
great we have a brand new website that we have created in the middle of rebranding we're going to be finishing that rebrand deal with a new logo vision statement mission statement and colors um probably by the end of this week or month um so we're gonna get that completed our website is already up and running um we have a social media that has been going really well for us we doubled our facebook likes in the past five months and we create an instagram in april and now have 93 followers my job
um part of it is to bring in younger donors because we have a fantastic donor and volunteer base well a lot of them are in the more mature age group of 60 and up and we want to keep ram house legacy going for decades to come as a matter of fact the summer time is the hardest although we've done really well this this summer really well compared to last year as a matter of fact we have gone from a something like a hundred and eleven thousand dollars in the whole this time last year over a hundred
and seven thousand dollars in the black this year so and i think i attribute a lot of that to the work molly's done that's incredible we have a lot of our donors are part of religious organizations locally who participate with us and so i don't know if we can reach out possibly to religious organizations that have a younger audience we're at a little bit of a tricky place messaging-wise um we're definitely now in what we probably call cove and burnout um where i feel like um if i see one more co
mmercial that says we're in this together that's it that's all it's going to take i was already on graduate ground to begin with so we want to breathe fresh life into this and what we make for you is going to almost certainly include some new video material that our videographer is going to put together because i think video is an incredibly effective way to tell ramhou's story yeah our team will be in touch and we're going to start the process now of putting together uh based off of everything
that we just talked about um some potential digital strategies and pretty soon we'll have some really exciting stuff to show you guys [Music] all right guys what do you think wow um yeah it's awesome it's really exciting it's really really cool when we get to uh work with a client that has a story to tell um especially a story that has such emotional residents you know like when we're doing like an hvac commercial it's not it's not as cool today right but yeah it pays well right as well yeah yea
h but but we have an opportunity here to promote gram um but i think to just show people that are totally unaware right i don't know but you brought an example of uh they're totally unaware of the connections that they're making in people's lives here sure you're what you shared earlier about yeah yeah so i've been in roanoke my whole life went to roanoke college stayed here worked interned and you know been working here for 14 years and i didn't really know about ram house so i think the abilit
y to be able to get that word out about what they do to to reach a new audience we can definitely help them have some ideas absolutely yeah do you almost do like a day at ram house do we give people yeah a peek into all the different things that we have them unloading the trucks then we have mule time then we have this you know i really like that yeah yeah just make these little snapshots that all together give you an idea of what happens every single day i was blown away when i went there i mea
n i knew that they were a day shelter for our areas homeless but they go so much beyond just being a day shelter you know a place where it's cool and during summer where it's warm during winter i mean they're also serving lunches every day you know over 100 lunches a day plus we're sending out a snack bag with for the people who come so they have some food to eat until dinner time they're you know providing clothes uh they're providing a place where they can just keep a suitcase of stuff because
oftentimes that's that's their possession that's their closet plus financial services i mean so a family could come and say hey look i i'm going to get evicted if i can't make this grip payment yeah so they're gonna they're gonna arrange for that financing um we heard a story of a guy who needed uh eye surgery just so that he could then see again so he could get back to work they arranged all of them wow so i love the idea of going back to having a day in the life i do too i really like that an
d then i like tying that into what they've already got on their website where they're using the the see the need meet the need daily i want to be able to tie into what they're already working with because they're doing a great job with it yeah i think that we should maybe look at something like native video that has more advanced targeting so that we can get really specific into age locking and then even targeting by the cause of interest stuff like that but there's maybe something like geofenci
ng and geo retargeting churches that have younger people and we do something like email matching that's exactly my phone i'd like to see that but also because those people are aging out maybe look and build a demographic profile of those people and just scale the age uh when we say something like geo-fencing they're talking about these churches uh how they have a church base that they've always come from but then if we were able to get some churches that maybe aren't in that traditional 30 espec
ially if those churches trend younger we'd have the ability to get every sunday or get every day of the week and actually draw a digital fence around all of those prospective churches so we'd be able to grab the mobile devices of the people that are there and then start to deliver them video ads e-blasts which are awesome but i want to ask molly as far as the e-blast they send out what their open rate is and let's say they have a 20 open rate i want to find a way to get after the 80 of people th
at aren't opening it the way we might do that there's a few different ways what it would come down to is instead of sending them an email actually getting the list of potential donors getting their email addresses or their physical addresses and then we have different technologies that can for example match that email address to that person's online identity and so then rather than hoping that they check their email and open the email as that person is going to different websites and apps servin
g them video ads just to remind them that there is a daily need you know awesome well i can't wait to see what you guys come up with thanks so much yeah thank you we're excited excellent while wheeler digital got to work on ram house's marketing needs i learned of another team who was also providing the non-profit with pro bono help dr chris dwyer is a visiting professor of anthropology at george mason university joined by hollins university student sharon kristner they are researching the roots
of homelessness to help guide ram house's future project basically is a study an assessment of roanoke in the present conditions of the cobit 19 pandemic the context is to try to provide them with information that they can use for strategic planning and this project will be evolving into a report that will be delivered to the board of directors that meet in november and then they're going to use that not only to really assess well how do we do business how do we improve the way we do business h
ow do we improve the service and better help people but also then how do we project into the future to maybe expand services it's really easy to ask what should we do for the homeless but that's a huge group of people who are all individuals and need totally different things you can't know how to serve someone until you know them and you've talked to them about what they perceive their needs to be so i think that's one thing that ram house from what we found so far does really well is get to kno
w people by their names and by their stories and not just by you know the numbers and the data [Music] so it's time for the reveal here at ram house and i'm really excited to see what wheeler digital has in store for us at the same time it's a little bittersweet because deshay witcher reached out to me today with a video that he wanted me to play for molly and melissa here at ram house before we get started everybody at the ram house uh this is dj from rova digital marketing i just want to let y
ou know obviously you know i'm not working on your campaign right now but i know that wheeler is working hard on it and you're going to be very happy with the reveal i just want to let you guys know why i wasn't able to continue working on the campaign um about 33 days ago my dad came down with uh the coveted virus obviously you know about two weeks went on and it seemed like he was starting to get a little better the fever was getting a little better the medicine was lasting a little longer but
eventually he started getting a shortness of breath and he was admitted into the hospital they found out that he had double pneumonia and it just didn't seem like it was getting better so they put him in the icu on the ventilator and late last week around july 25th he lost a battle with cobra virus we know that he's in a better place now and all we can ask is that you guys just keep spreading the awareness keep helping out um the people that you help out and you know just keep my family in your
prayers thank you guys so much um like i said i know the reveal is gonna be fantastic and if you guys let me anything from me just let me know hey guys thanks for meeting with us we're super excited to be presenting our digital marketing strategy to ram house i've got molly here i'm gonna turn it over to freddy um he's he's gonna present so real quick the last time we talked um we had a few different ideas to give you an idea of everything that wheeler digital offers as a digital agency all of
the products are here on the screen but we know not all of those fit your goal you know you're looking to reach that young volunteer the younger donor so we have a few tools that we picked out of the toolbox that we like and think would work better based on our previous campaigns what we do with this system is we upload just one set of creative and the website where the ad is appearing on automatically molds the ad to fit the space that they have available we find this highly effective because p
eople are only seeing the banner ads the whole the old traditional space but with this they're actually being forced to read the native ad because it's a part of the content that they're looking at so we can target people who have recently given to a homeless charity uh those who are non-profit volunteers you know are following these people based on things that they've previously done online and now they've dropped into these behavioral buckets that we can show ads to for your campaign so here a
gain we are targeting people based on previous online behaviors but we can also go after some offline behaviors too so something that you mentioned to us last time is you have a core group of people in a specific group of churches who are donors and volunteers but maybe we want to look at going after some different churches so we would show ads there in real time hopefully though people are not using their phone while they're at church that being said although we're geofencing the actual church
what we're doing is capturing that device id that's all we're doing at that point we're not counting on someone to actually be served an ad while they're at church the beauty of this software is then when they leave and they go home that's when the geo retargeting layer comes into play and while they're sitting on the sofa sunday afternoon watching tv then they would see the ram house ad saying we need your help come volunteer so when it comes to targeting though on facebook and instagram and fa
cebook audience network these are some of those behavioral targeting categories that we thought would be most effective well and so then the other thing that we had was the email targeting because you guys said you had a pretty robust email list and you had some donors who had maybe donated in the past but haven't donated in like a year or it's been quite some time so we have a way to get after those people too great fantastic so harrison has been out actually our videographer and he's filmed so
me things and this is kind of a rough cut that we wanted you to be able to see exactly what it looks like so this is a work in progress but here's a preview ram house is a largest day shelter in roanoke people a lot of times aren't sure what a day shelter is what does that mean the real question is what does that not mean so much can happen in a day start off right with a good breakfast a nutritious hot lunch put on new clothes wash your dirty ones you can work in a day and receive a day's pay a
day can turn emergency like need to pay your rent bills into something you can handle a day can turn fear into hope and can make you feel proud again especially right now things are changing at very rapid rate for many people anything can happen but the thing is you don't have to face the loan know that in a day you can change someone else's life you can make a difference because when you brighten someone else's day you're helping to improve everyone's tomorrow learn how you can make a differen
ce at our website donate and volunteer what you can see the need meet the need daily so we share with you a lot of different ways that we can get in front of that young donor audience and the new population that you want to help out there at rim house and we really feel like the native video aspect is what's going to work the best so i'm happy to say that we're giving to you a campaign valued at seven thousand dollars thank you so much we are so thankful for all that you guys are doing and how g
enerous you've been we're very excited about this campaign i'm excited some young donors in here and expand um our people's knowledge of ram house what we do so thank you for that well thank you for allowing us to be part of it uh we couldn't be more excited to to work alongside you guys and be a part of what ram house does in the valley oh great go team ram house as i'm sure you all know they may not know however that this building of ramphouse used to be our lady of nazareth catholic school ri
ght until the 1950s when our lady of nazareth merged with saint andrews catholic school to form roanoke catholic school one of your big needs that you've expressed is not only recruiting younger donors but also younger volunteers and so i'm excited to announce that starting now this is the inaugural class of these roanoke catholic students of what is now called the ram fam guys oh my goodness oh my gosh this is great i love you i love you wow they're beautiful you're beautiful thanks everybody t
hanks guys we love it i want one there are over 1500 people who we helped that were identified as homeless last year so we're in this area and you guys get to be a part of making that impact for partnering with us so thank you thank you for being here you guys are awesome i'm gonna give you guys [Music] major funding for buzz is made possible by partners in financial planning a southwest virginia-based financial planning and investment management firm partners in financialplanning.com with addit
ional support by the american advertising federation of roanoke
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