[EO Chicago] Advancing Nonprofit Fundraising Through Technology With Mike Nellis

Mike Nellis is the Founder and CEO of Authentic and the Founder and Executive Chairman of Quiller. Authentic is a digital-first fundraising and advertising agency where Mike focuses on online fundraising, paid media, and creative design, catering to high-profile clients, including President Joe Biden, Vice President Kamala Harris, and entities like the United Nations Population Fund. Quiller is an AI copilot that helps Democratic campaigns and allied organizations draft and deploy high-quality, effective fundraising content, leveraging generative AI to innovate online fundraising and earning awards like AI Efficiency of the Year by Adweek in 2023. With over two decades of experience in fundraising and AI, he has been instrumental in raising over $1 billion for various political campaigns and nonprofit organizations.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

Mike Nellis shares the founding story of Authentic
Online fundraising tactics used in Obama’s 2008 campaign
The importance of creating an emotional connection with donors
Email marketing do’s and don’ts for political campaigns
The impact of direct response principles on fundraising
How Mike fosters a positive company culture in Authentic and Quiller
The #1 mistake Mike made in his career
Mike shares how they helped Vote.org resolve their email deliverability issue
Fundamentals in marketing and nonprofit work
Why Mike decided to start a second company
How AI can help improve fundraising efforts
Mistakes and misuses of AI

In this episode…

In a world where technology is rapidly transforming how we approach challenges, can it also revolutionize the way nonprofits fundraise? Imagine a future where AI not only streamlines processes but also fundamentally changes how we connect with donors and tell impactful stories.

According to Mike Nellis, incorporating AI into fundraising strategies enhances the efficiency of campaigns and also opens new avenues for donor engagement and data analysis. This technological integration goes beyond mere automation; it brings a nuanced understanding of donor behaviors and trends, enabling more personalized and effective fundraising approaches. He emphasizes that this tech-driven approach is about raising money more effectively and reshaping the nonprofit operations landscape, making them more adaptable, responsive, and impactful.

In this episode of the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast, Dr. Jeremy Weisz is joined by Mike Nellis, Founder of both Authentic and Quiller, to explore the cutting-edge intersection of AI and fundraising. They discuss Mike’s innovative approach to online fundraising, the role of AI in revolutionizing nonprofit strategies, and the importance of nurturing a supportive company culture in high-stakes environments.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Sponsor for this episode…

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Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Rising Entrepreneurs Podcast where we feature top founders and entrepreneurs and their journey. Now let’s get started with the show.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 0:13

Dr. Jeremy Weisz here founder of inspiredinsider.com I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders today is no different. I’ve Mike Nellis, he runs authentic.org and quiller.ai. And Mike, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes, people should check out other podcasts. Since actually, we are in EO together, that’s Entrepreneurs Organization. We had a great conversation over one of the events, dinners or he may tell some poker stories because I didn’t realize Mike has had some amazing success in the poker world, besides being an agency owner and software, SaaS business owner, but there’s some good ones and Mat Zalk of EO Tulsa, he talked about his journey. Robert Hartline of EO Nashville, talk about his journey building up a company to over $100 million. And he had a chain of cell phone stores. He also has a software too. So you know, just serial entrepreneur, type of person that was interesting episode, and many more on inspiredinsider.com. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. At Rise25 we help businesses give to and connect to their dream 100 relationships. And how do we do that? We do that by helping you run your podcast, we’re an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast we do the accountability, the strategy and the full execution. Mike, we call ourselves the magic elves that work in the background and make it look easy for the company, the host, so they can build amazing relationships and create amazing content. You know, for me, the number one thing in my life is relationships. I’m always looking at ways to give to my best relationships. And I found no better way over the past decade to profile the people in companies I most admire and share with the world what they’re working on. So we’ve thought about podcasting, you should if you have questions go to rise25.com. We have a lot of I have a bunch of free episodes and content on inspired insider, all about podcasting if you want to learn more. So without further ado, I’m excited to introduce Mike Nellis. He’s a fundraising and AI expert with more than two decades of experience helping nonprofit organizations, political campaigns, he’s helped raise more than $1 billion online. He founded Authentic, a marketing agency that specializes in online fundraising, paid media, and creative design. He also founded Quiller, that’s quiller.ai that uses generative AI to revolutionize online fundraising and Quiller even received an AI efficiency of of the Year Award by Adweek in 2023. So Mike, thanks for joining me. You know, before we get into the poker stories, which I want to hear, you know, just talk about Authentic and what you do for a second.

Mike Nellis 2:57

Sure. So I’ll talk a little bit about how I got to finding Authentic. So like you said, I have I have two decades of experience working for social impact organizations, that’s primarily nonprofits and political campaigns. I got my start working for Barack Obama in 2007, on his first presidential campaign, and I was a fellow, which was a fancy way of saying I wasn’t going to be paid to do the work. And but over time, I was able to kind of parlay that into a real job on a Senate campaign in Nebraska, which is where I’m from. And we were in a room I was a finance assistant and finances this job is, you know, making sure the candidate has coffee has the numbers they need to call for, for dialing for dollars and donor calls. And somebody in the room was like, hey, Barack Obama is raising a lot of money through online marketing. Does anybody know how to do that? And nobody did, because nobody had really done it before. And I was the youngest person in the room. I was 18 years old, and somebody just like, Hey, Mike, go figure that out. And I did, I sat down. And I basically copied exactly what the Obama campaign was doing at the time and built out a series of best practices. And we raised what at the time was like an unbelievable sum of money with like, $700,000 over the course of a year. Now I have clients that raise that on a day on a good day. And so but over time, I worked my way up and became the vice president of a very large DC consulting firm, that focused on online fundraising, and I got to focus on online marketing. I really loved my clients, I loved the team that I had, I loved the work that I was doing. It was a really miserable place to work. It was a hostile and toxic work environment that was really poorly managed to run. And it’s a much longer and deeper story about that, which I’m happy to maybe not happy, but I will get into if you want me to. But ultimately, I decided like, Hey, I think I could do a better job of this. And so me and now my business partner, Laura and Sean, who is the president of our company, we both broke off from that from that company and started what would become authentic. So to us. We want to make sure that authentic is a great place with a great culture with great people that is doing work for social impact organizations that they really care about that can be nonprofit organizations. We work with the United Nations we work with ngo.org. We work with the National Resources Defense Council, or it can be like political campaigns, we worked with Joe Biden, I was a senior adviser to Kamala Harris for many years. We work with other large political organizations in bands. And in our services include online fundraising is like our bread and butter. But we also do like digital paid media, would you advertising, I would do some fun stuff with AI, which we’ll probably get into today. We also do creative design, so websites, graphic design animation.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 5:28

We’ll talk about like culture for, you know, a will touch on the culture part, because you have some interesting initiatives that the company, but before we get to the culture part, with the Obama campaign, and you you, what were you seeing, and what were you modeling that was working then? And is that stuff still working today? Because he said, you know, you looked at Obama and you saw stuff working? And then you applied it? What was working? What you were modeling at that point?

Mike Nellis 5:57

Yeah, I would, I would say a couple of things. The first was, online fundraising was not necessarily new in 2008, like in 2004. For those who remember, Howard Dean’s presidential campaign had raised a significant chunk of money online. And then the Obama campaign sort of like skyrocketed that to raise unbelievable sums of money online, they broke a lot of records at the time that are now much smaller than than a lot of campaigns that we run, I think the thing that they were doing that was that was new, was they were taking tactics that had been used for direct mail, and porting them over to online. And then using CRMs. So like the monetary equivalent of that would be Salesforce, but at the time was probably Blue State Digital, I would imagine. And but they were also doing a great job of like injecting authenticity and personality into that campaign. I mean, if you go back, if you’re someone who is old enough to remember what 2007 2008 was, like, we were in the middle of the Iraq war, people were really frustrated with our politics not dissimilar from today. And people wanted to kind of turn the page into something new and interesting. And I think a lot of people resonated with with Brock Obama at the time, he was a new fresh face, he had young kids, he had an awesome wife, people wanted to connect with him. And so they let that lead through and shine through in their program. And ultimately, to me, that is the most important thing for any marketing period. But it’s certainly important for online marketing, there’s going to be a lot of people here who are like, Mike, I get political emails all the time. And most of them are terribly written. And they’re very impersonal. And they’re just trying to scam and scare me into giving donations. And that’s true. That is how like 80 90% of online fundraising programs and run, even in the nonprofit space, a lot of programs are run that way. And it’s not right. What the Obama campaign pioneered and proved to me is like if you can build a connection between the candidate and the cause, and then the user or the or the voter, or the activist on the other end, you could actually just create rocket fuel from an online fundraising and activism and engagement standpoint. And so that was what we were copying. So I was working for a candidate named Scott club, who, frankly had no chance of winning that Senate race in Nebraska. But he had an interesting personality. And he had a nice, beautiful family. And he had like interesting things to say, and a lot of resonated with a lot of people. And so we were able to build an email list of a couple 100,000 people who were really engaged in the race nationwide, and were willing to part with their dollars, you know, 510 $25 at a time. And when you do that, you can kind of build something really special together.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 8:21

I love what you said there. And this applies to all business, right? I mean, a lot of people study what, what the, what the political landscape is when they’re doing marketing, right? When you look at direct response, and you look at email, when you look at, you know, all the stuff that people are doing online. What were you finding, what have you found are do’s and don’ts of email? You’ve sent a tremendous amount of email. And it’s, I mean, the goal, the emails to raise money, it’s to have people donate, right, in the case of the political campaigns, so which is not an easy thing to get someone to take their wallet out, and enter it in and, and donate. And, you know, it’s for support, they’re not getting a good or a service with it. So what has worked and what are mistakes people make with with email?

Mike Nellis 9:15

Well, I would push back on one thing you just said, Right? There’s no good, there’s no service, but people make donations because of the way that it makes them feel, right. There’s a lot of behavioral science to suggest that when people volunteer with an organization, or when they donate to the Red Cross or any other NGO, like they’re doing it because it gives them a value and a self worth and an identity that they care deeply about. And I think that a lot of times when we’re in the weeds doing fundraising for you know, one of our nonprofits or one of our campaigns, we sort of forget that we are like doing social marketing and we are selling like a feeling we are creating emotion. And that’s a double edged sword. So when you talk about do’s or don’ts, the do to me is focused on like lifting people up, building something that’s sustainable, dry Hang up intensity with a smaller group of people opposed to what I see a lot of campaigns do or what I would recommend not doing, which is trying to build the biggest email list possible. And then sending hundreds and millions of fundraising emails that are awful and lying and deceptive. And this is very common practice in the industry. And the truth is like, you can raise more money in the short term that way, but you raise way less money in the long term that way. And that leads me to sort of like the other like do on this is you have to make sure if you’re doing any email, and I know there’s lots of people, you know, working on like commercial entities and corporations and stuff like that, who are worried like with all the changes that are happening with with Google Apple over the last couple of years, that it’s harder for them to get their marketing emails out, it’s hard for them to do their outbound marketing, like, you have to fundamentally make sure that your email deliverability, which is your ability to reach people, so it doesn’t matter whether or not you send a good email or a bad email, if I press send in my CRM, email, you know, 100,000 people, and 99% of them go to spam, you’re not even able to reach your people. And so it’s it’s lowering your open rates, lowering your engagement. So you have to make sure that your program is set up technically proficiently. So your demark records are set up, and you’re working with your CRM, and your domain provider to get all those things set up. And political campaigns have actually been on the forefront of doing that, right, because we first wants to get crack down on because frankly, a lot of a lot of others in this space, were abusing the leniency of the way that email had been operating. So now all these companies are cracking down on these, you know, Jeremy, you probably get a million of them these b2b, you know, emails that people send where they’re like, hi, I really love your business. It’s so cool. And they’re generic and stupid. And they and they probably work at scale, I imagine, but they’re gonna get cracked down on. So I think the number one thing you have to do is run a technically proficient program in order to be able to do everything else.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 11:49

Yeah. What are some other mistakes or bad examples of bad emails?

Mike Nellis 11:54

Yeah, I think other other mistakes is, you know, when you’re sending an email, only ask people to do one thing. There’s, there’s a ton of behavioral evidence out there that the more things you ask people to do, the less likely they are to do anything. So if you’re working for a nonprofit organization, you’re sending out an email, I get a ton of nonprofits who send me an email that’s like, make a donation today, volunteer their upcoming event, attend a seminar, read this newsletter, etc, etc. Like, I’m unlikely to do any of those. But if you send me one compelling email, that’s, here’s what the here’s the problem that we’re trying to solve. Here’s the solution or the opportunity that we have to solve it together. And then a compelling request for money that points to me towards Hey, you donate $50 $100, right now you’re going to, you’re going to make a difference. And in order to Chicago organization that’s relatively new that does a good job of this is the Grace Network. I highly recommend people check that out. Their founders are amazing, but the Grace Network helps provide, like basic supplies to kids who are struggling with like homelessness. And I know it’s not the right terms to say more, so I apologize. But then anybody but housing insecurity is the right here who experience housing insecurity. And like in Chicago right now with like, influx of like, you know, migrants and people who are fleeing violence and poverty, like, there are a lot more of those kids. So like, they’re helping to get like, you know, basic food, basic supplies, helping with like, provide schools with like laundry machines, so that kids can wash their clothes. Because you never know, like, what the one thing that’s going to trigger somebody to kind of give up is, or what the one thing that might inspire them to be is so like, they’re focused on small stuff, they do a great job of just like connecting that mission and making it really clear if I give them 500 bucks, like, what’s that scope?

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 13:34

Mike, I love what you say, which is like really rooted in direct, good direct response. I’d love to hear are there any resources, people mentors, like you mentioned, selling a feeling? That’s a political thing. That’s actually if you’re selling a Ferrari, right? I mean, ultimately, whether it’s a good or service you mentioned, but one call to action? What are there any resources, mentors, books that you have learned more of these direct response principles have helped you.

Mike Nellis 14:07

I think some of the some of the best resources I’ve ever I’ve ever written are like, Chip Heath and his brother. They’ve written a ton of really great book Made to Stick is yeah, Made to Stick is one of the I think it when I got my master’s in strategic communication, it was the first book assigned to me. And it like opened up so many different pathways in my brain, both explaining like why some of the things I had been doing for years in my career were working but also explaining like, ways to sort of like maximize them and Chip has a new book about numbers. I forget the name of it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 14:37

Okay, because I think it actually which they have.

Mike Nellis 14:42

Made to Stick. Yeah, so they have something about big moments. Okay. They’ve got one he’s got one out about numbers. I forget the name of it, but it’s really great. It talks about how the science of how you can take like a big number and turn it into something that like sticks with people and generates the emotion that you want because As so many organizations and I think like for nonprofits or political campaigns, this plagues them is, how do we talk about dense topics in a relatable way so that people understand what we’re trying to do. So I’ve been reflecting on that a lot.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:13

Yep. Is Upstream, the one that was Made to Stick, The Power of Moments, which decisive and upstream? I don’t know if there was, maybe there’s a more recent one besides that, but.

Mike Nellis 15:22

I’ll find it and maybe you can put it in the notes.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:24

I love it. There was there’s one I want to tell people to check out. I did an interview with Richard Viguerie, actually, who also has done direct mail fundraising. You know, he talked a lot about direct response in that interview, it was actually interesting, because at the time, he was 81. And he was work still working 14 hours a day, which was was pretty remarkable, dedicated, but check that one out.

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Mike Nellis 15:50

Dedicated isn’t gonna work for Jeremy.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 15:55

Culture. All right, talk about the toxic culture, you know, the specifics, but what you saw there that you were definitely maybe going to do the opposite of with your company, and then we’ll talk about some of the stuff that you’re doing.

Mike Nellis 16:08

Yeah, I think the number one thing is treating, treating people like numbers, I hate that. And it doesn’t mean that you can’t run like a thoughtful data driven business. But like, you have to realize that that people are human. And when you overload them with too much work, or you treat them poorly, like they’re gonna leave you and so your retention rate is going to be less, and you’re going to spend an inordinate amount of money on retraining and explaining to clients like why people are leaving, and it’s the first service industry agency like ours, like, it’s high touch, very difficult to explain. And, you know, there’s other stuff too, there was some, like the way that women and people of color were treated and promoted and give a pathway to success, the company was not great. There was financial mismanagement, I, there wasn’t a lot of things, it was a great example of what not to do. Because the work was good. And the trajectory of the agency was good, it should, it doesn’t exist, any one company literally doesn’t exist today. It should still be here, but it’s not. And that’s incredibly frustrating. So when we when we set out to build authentic, and I want to say up front, as we talked about this, we’ve made a million mistakes, like we’ve just gotten some stuff wrong, usually with a guy with a good heart involved, but like it management is hard leadership is hard. And you’re gonna make the you guys, a lot of times you make the best decision you can with the information you have, and it ends up being the wrong one. And sometimes it hasn’t been the right one and the way he didn’t expect so. But we sent out and like the very first thing I did, when I started authentic was I wrote a handbook, I wrote a handbook. And I detailed like what it was going to look like if we had how we were gonna treat each other if we had an incident that involved HR and like I hired an outside HR consultant like that was before I had a single employee. And to me, it was reflective of I had worked at large organizations that had 100 200 employees that didn’t have a handbook that didn’t have a paternity leave, that hadn’t ever thought through the scenarios of that. And so I sat down, and I did a ton of research. And I did that which made me a better CEO, because now I was thinking through, I’m eventually going to have somebody who needs to go on leave, because they’re going to have a kid and I’m going to have someone that’s maybe eventually going to do something that they shouldn’t, and I need a pathway to handle that. And it was very rudimentary, very basic handbook, we have a much more advanced handbook now that Laura and my business partners has pioneered, and she is really our, our head of culture, she does an amazing job of that. I also think it’s just there’s a tendency, I imagine this exists in every industry. But when working for social impact organizations, you kind of borrow on people’s passion for the cause. So if you’re someone who really cares about the future of our democracy are you really care about a particular issue area for a nonprofit, like, you can kind of whether you mean to or not, you can take advantage of that person’s passion, or you can get them to work those 14 hour days, for a long period of time. But you end up burning through those people so quickly. And if you look at major companies, smaller companies, other organizations, you can find, like people littered throughout those organizations who have done a year two, three working for a political campaign, for example, but who couldn’t sustain working in the industry and build a family with quality mental health, because they’re so hard to work on. So for us, it’s how do we build a great package of benefits that take care of our staff? How do we balance workloads in a way that are meaningful? How do we have a flexible leave policy that allows people to actually take it and not be taken advantage of Jeremy already kind of mentioned this, but like, we’re pioneering what I believe to be at least on the business side of social impact of good organizations like the first four day work week in the space. We’ve been doing that for the last couple of weeks, and we’ll be doing it for the next few months. And it’s just also just taking a risk and trying something new and not not accepting that like, Oh, we’ve always done it this way. You know, you got to kind of look at the possibilities and like, find ways to change because the way we work right now is broken.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 19:51

What made you decide to do that one, and people I did actually did an interview. The four day week with Andrew Barnes whoI don’t know if he started, cofounded 4dayweek.com. But they talked about, we really kind of went into the details of how that transformed his company. But talk about why did you decide to do that?

Mike Nellis 20:18

We decided it for a couple of reasons. I think that the first is it was kind of an accidental discovery during the COVID years, let’s call them that. We implemented like a half day on Fridays, and it was going to be like a summer initiative where it was we’re going to take Friday afternoons off, and we basically never stopped. And there was concerned when we did that, then it was in an election year, and a lot of our clients are election base. So it was we were afraid that our clients on like, would be angry with us. We weren’t online on a Friday. And the truth is over two to three year period, like nobody knows, there’s nobody noticed, nobody cared like we set a clear expectation with our staff. And you look, if something happens on a Friday afternoon, you have to go back into work, you’ve got to pull out your laptop and do the work for the client. And we’ll make sure you get that time back later. Right. So you have to work on that. But we basically started treating Friday afternoons, like like weekend, and then it kind of evolved into this conversation of like, well, if we just never logged in on Friday, and we did our work Monday through Thursday, would anybody and then couple that with over the last couple of years, all these studies that have come out about how 40 workweek helps with retention helps with mental health and burnout helps with productivity and creativity. We decided like last year, we were going to try to find a way to do this and like dive into the deep end a little bit on something new. And you know, so far we’re like about a month in maybe a little bit less than a month and it’s been it’s been fairly successful i I’m we’re in I think week, week four, Week Five and haven’t had a single complaint from a client, all the work is taken care of. And we’ve got great safety nets for that stuff. I mean, we we work in, in politics for a lot of our clients, that means we’re news based. So like if something happens on a Friday, we got to go back into work. But if something happens on a Saturday, we have to go back in order to so it’s I think we’ve got a good, good balance for it. And I’m a big believer in jobs like these that are hard and require like, like Jeremy, like, if you’re frustrated with like, what’s going on in the news or in the election, you have the luxury of turning the TV off, and not bother, I don’t have that. So I think giving our staff more flexibility to manage their lives will lead to better outcomes, even if it means like Monday through Thursday, they might work a little bit more a little bit harder.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 22:20

I think it’d be more efficient. Yeah. I mean, you say you’ve really only done it for four or five weeks. But really, you’ve done it for a couple of years, because you stepped into it slowly with the half a day Friday. So it’s almost like you tested it for a while and realized it actually was working and then just pushed it a little bit further. So what else?

Mike Nellis 22:41

Jeremy, if I can add one more thing, which is I think the most amazing thing to me is like how supportive our clients have been about it, they’ve been like, and the number one thing I hear is we trust you to figure this out. And so I think if you have if you’re out there, and you’re thinking about doing this, if you have a good relationship with your clients, if they trust you, if they believe in what you’re trying to do, you can take this risk and just do a pilot like, well, like we’re doing a pilot, right? Like we’re gonna make adjustments to it when it doesn’t work. And we’ve got blackout periods for next year when like work is really tough. So like, we’re we’re trying something new. I’m excited about it.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 23:11

Yeah, yeah. And love it. If people want. Andrew Barnes goes into the details of how they actually implemented it in from the beginning. So you can check that one out, too. What else with with culture has been important, and you mentioned mistakes, what’s maybe a mistake that you learned from that puts you on a really good trajectory, right? Because we often learn the most from mistakes that we’ve we’ve made.

Mike Nellis 23:41

Yeah. I think that the number one mistake that I’ve made in my career, like one, I haven’t well have them now they’re all coming to me. But for me, I had to learn the hard way of the value of systems and processes in a business, but also in my personal life. Like I’m someone who it’s always come really naturally to me that I can write really quickly, I can process really quickly, I could think on my feet. And so I had given myself a false belief that I didn’t have to have a system or a process because I could just figure anything, because I’m so smart. You know, it was very hard in my 20s. And in my early 30s. What I’ve learned in the last couple of years is if I combine my ability to move quickly, my ability to process quickly and make decisive decisions with the systems and processes with frameworks that helped me do that. It’s like rocket so that’s the number one and the smartest thing I ever did was hire Lorraine Rashad who got as my business partner and President like she is my polar opposite. She’s the end of my like she has all systems and processes she does the things that I think give her energy and don’t give me a lick of energy but things that she’s really really good at. So that’s that’s number one. The second thing is when building a leadership team or hiring managers or leaders, making sure that they get what you’re trying to do want what you’re trying to accomplish. publish, and I have the capacity to do it. Because I’ve had so many people who check maybe one or two boxes, and I’m like, Oh, I can get there on the third box. But you really, it’s really hard to get them. Right. If they don’t understand, they’re never going to be able to do what you want. And for a lot of folks, if they don’t have the capacity, you can’t really like, you can train people to do skills. And that’s probably the thing that’s the most teachable. But capacity extends beyond just like, hey, do you know how to code a fundraiser that extends to like, do you have the emotional intelligence to do the work, and you sit on a leadership team? Can you not sit on a leadership team? So those are the things that like I think about. And then the third thing is, in the early years of the company, I didn’t do a very good job of articulating the vision for the company, where we’re trying to take it where we want to be in five years, 10 years. And because of that, you could see like the cracks throughout the organization, as people didn’t know where they were swimming, like some folks read it this way. And some folks read it that way. And it was really frustrating. Now, I feel more than ever, and it can still be improved in many different ways. But a much more unified cohesive team that understands like where we’re going in the right direction, because we have the right people who are sitting in the right seats, and are all swimming together in the right direction.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:08

Like talk about that. You mentioned, you mentioned systems and processes. Talk about tech stack for a second. And what you do to manage these systems and processes if you have CRMs. If you have project management tools, what are you using?

Mike Nellis 26:22

Yeah, so I’m gonna talk about my personal tech stack first, because as a founder, I think that’s incredibly important. Like I used to be such a notebook I like I carried a notebook everywhere I went, I use bullet journaling for the longest time over a decade of bullet journaling, for sure. And it worked for me like it was great, but it wasn’t enough like I had, I would take notes and the notes would get lost, I would look at it I would be done with one notebook, I probably never look at it again. And over time, it became clear to me like like, What the heck was I doing? So I took a course Tiago Forte, and his PARA Method for like managing notes and and basically building a second brain. And so my tech stack. For me, I kind of think about like, you know, three or four core tools are one, I use notion to manage all of my notes, all of my task management, all of my projects, all my areas of responsibility, it is essentially my second brain. If notion disappeared tomorrow, I would probably be freaking lost. Which is why by the way, I back it up once a month that way, just in case, something happens because you never know. I think the second one is my Google Calendar. Like I manage my Google Calendar pretty efficiently. I use time blocking I color code things based on the different areas of responsibility that I have, and that me and my VA work together to kind of like track them all up. And then I have like a read later app. Because I find that there’s so many times and I’m like, I’m scrolling through social media, or maybe I’m just like on Twitter, or Twitter in the old days, you know, looking for like Notre Dame football news, which is like one of my big hobbies. And you know, I see something else. And I’m like, I don’t want to read that, but not right now. And I’ll send myself an email, and then I’ll never really read it. I use Matter. Matter is the app that I use a really like it. And I feel like there’s probably like one more app that’s worth mentioning. But I forget on the company side, like we use Asana, for that, and I think Assad has a really great tool. It’s much more like note, the thing about notion is, notion is like a very powerful series of tools. But when you start it’s a complete blank slate. So you have to build everything out. Asana provides a lot of tools that are already built out, but then it’s less customizable. So when scaling it to a 50 person organization like Authentic, it makes sense to use Asana, if you’re a founder, like me with a very chaotic brain that wants things in a very particular way. I think Notion is the way to go.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 26:49

Talk about time blocking, and how you use time blocking.

Mike Nellis 28:40

I love time blocking, I think the you know, as a as a founder of multiple companies like I have for businesses altogether, I’ve served on a couple of nonprofit boards, I have a four and a half year old, I also have somewhat thriving social life in between on occasion, like it requires some amount of discipline and planning in order to do and meet the objectives that I want. And so I use time blocking, which is essentially like I just put in my calendar, like, Hey, I’m gonna do this task at this time. I’m going to take this meeting at this time and I break it all right. And so and I’m relatively new to it, I think more so than a lot of other people. There’s lots of folks who’ve been doing it for years, my Lauren has been doing it for years, I’m probably more like six months into really time blocking. And I got into it because I just didn’t have control over my priorities. I just did. And I was taking I was saying yes to too many meetings. And when you say yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. And oftentimes the thing you’re saying no to that you don’t know is more important than saying yes to so I think just it’s really for me about intentionality of time and progress.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 29:43

I want to give people a sense about what you do. One of the organizations you worked with was vote.org. Can you talk about what you did there?

Mike Nellis 29:52

Sure. So we work with vote.org, which is basically like the nation’s largest provider of like voter contact information for for voters. It’s a nonprofit or nonpartisan organization, people will probably know it because it is the organization that Taylor Swift is always talking about. And so when there’s there’s Taylor on our website, which is just good marketing in this day and age, see, when we get a Taylor bump came to us. Last year, middle last year, they were suffering through like a massive email deliverability issue, like their emails, were going to spam, their previous vendor had done kind of a poor job of managing and maintaining and keeping up with the way that the industry had changed. And so they a big part of the work that boat.org does is they send millions and millions of updates to voters to help them find, to help them to help them find their polling place, make sure they turn out to vote. And if you can’t reach me via email like that, it was like a disaster for them. So the challenge was helping them like completely reinvigorate their CRM completely reinvigorate their email program, improve their open rate, help them get in front, and we’ve now been working with them for the better part of two years, we’ve helped them completely turn that around, we help them have one of the best low dollar fundraising years they’ve ever had this year in 2023. We helped them send you know, millions and millions of voter alerts in all 50 states this year for the off year elections. And last year in the 2018 midterm elections, we’ll be doing the same in 2024. So it’s a great relationship. And they’re like a wonderful, awesome organization.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 31:19

We’re looking at some of the if you’re if you’re listening to the audio, we actually have the video up, we have authentic.org you could see their website, here, but we’re looking at the vote.org page. And there’s a couple examples here. I don’t know if we want to we’ll just scroll through them, you know, because it’s ultimately Mike, when I look at your stuff, and I’ve listened to a bunch of your videos, it’s a lot of times a masterclass on direct response, email getting, you know, getting in front of people, and a lot of different things are being done here. So I don’t know if there’s anything you want to comment on any of these particular ones, and maybe some of the thoughts behind what went into it.

Mike Nellis 31:58

I mean, I think the biggest thing is like you had that Taylor Swift email there, and it’s, from my perspective, it’s we’re trying to meet people where they are, right. So if you’re like, look, Taylor Swift is a perfect example. She has captured the world by storm really in the last decade, but certainly in the last year. And she’s basically everywhere. And she has leveraged her platform to help other people vote, I think the single biggest day that vote.org had for voter registrations on their website was the day that Taylor posted about it on Instagram, just to give you an example of the cross cultural power that she has. And so we wrote an email to people because now we have all these new signups. So we started to piggyback on Taylor, we started to piggyback on her imagery, we met people where they were, right. If Taylor Swift is providing such a boost of energy and enthusiasm for our democracy through vote.org. We can’t just send them boring, basic emails. We have to kind of update and refresh for the people we’re talking to. And then if you go to the second email there, that’s a fundraising email we sent people. Right around the time Georgia was heading into a run off, I believe in 2022. The biggest thing I’ll tell you here, it’s like another example of meeting people where they are, as you’ll see, like Express donate buttons there. And for those who aren’t in the know, that’s essentially like when you buy something on Amazon with one click, your payment information is already saved. So we were sending this to people who we knew we had their credit card information for through our vendor at Blue. So that dramatically increases your conversion rate. So what you’re looking at is a program that is one technically proficient and maximizing its deliverability. So their open rates are high, it’s telling a good story and meeting people where they are and then it’s using quality tactics like one click donates to maximize conversion rates and bring in a significant chunk of dollars. And a lot of times when I talk to people about the programs that we’re running in the programs they want to run they want to hear about these like big, bold, creative, exciting ideas. And at the end of the day, and I think it’s probably true in 99% of all projects and organizations just doing the basic stuff that’s maybe a little boring is the pathway to success and it doesn’t mean you can’t do something cool and exciting. I think we’ve done a lot of cool and exciting things for the last six years. But you have to do the basics before you can do any of them and I think boat.org is perfect example of that because when we inherited it a lot of the basics were not being covered. And now we’ve been really put them in a really great spot so that when Taylor Swift posts on Instagram about them we’re ready to go.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 34:25

Yeah, it makes me think of sports. Mike it’ like you look at the fundamentals right and I think of John Wooden right I mean some of the best players basketball coaches of all time focus on the fundamentals again, those right.

Mike Nellis 34:37

100% right if you look at like a wide receiver like most people are gonna see you know, like a Randy Moss or you know, while we’re on while we’re on Taylor Swift with Travis Kelce is perfect example is not a wide receiver, but he’s, you know, a beast on the field. And like he’s doing footwork, and exercising do stuff it’s really really boring to like take care of his body, but learn the motions that he needs to do and like All we see is like a sick touchdown on a Sunday night game.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 35:04

Um, let’s talk about Quiller. For a second, I’m gonna I’m gonna pull in quiller. And at what point did you decide, okay, I’m not busy enough, I need another company and I need a software company.

Mike Nellis 35:18

Um, I like to joke that I have ADHD. And instead of taking medication, I just started new businesses. But I think for me, we have struggled with burnout in social impact organizations for so long, and a lot of it has to do with because we are underfunded and understaffed, we don’t have enough people that want to do this work. And we don’t have enough campaigns that are willing to like spend the money to invest in hiring and training and staff. So we end up having to ask people to do the job of like 10 Different humans. So if you’re a digital strategist, or a nonprofit, or a campaign, you’re a social media expert. You’re an email expert, you’re a texting and SMS expert, your stakeholder manager, you got to do graphic design you got to do video on that is too much to ask someone, even a young person who’s very talented to do. And I had a time in my life when I had 20 different clients working at another firm and like that’s not sustainable. You can’t do good work that way. So about a year and a half ago, I started going down this rabbit hole of wondering if I could use AI to build a copilot for my team that would help make their lives a little bit easier. And during all of that we had this like explosion of AI tools. I started like a little bit before that quite a bit of a head start. But you know, ChatGPT comes out it’s very clear that like generative AI presents a historic opportunity to change the way basically every organization functions and I’m a big believer in Moneyball, I’m huge. I love Moneyball the book, I love it. The the Brad Pitt movie is if you’re not, you know, if you’re not rebuilding your organization with this, you’re already a dinosaur, right. And I feel that way about about it. And I think from our perspective, we started up that we built this like ugly prototype of a tool that could write quality fundraising emails, but it was signed to help our team and then I was like, I can’t keep this inside. Like, I feel like I can commercialize this, I feel like I can bring it to the industry. And we went out and we raised $1,000,001.2 million, and hired a great CEO, Hillary Lehr, who has a ton of experience doing and building up companies like this. And right now we’ve got like, 100 different campaigns and organizations using it, you know, with varying degrees of success, because we still have to teach people how to use the tool and teach them how prompt generation works. But we’re really excited about the prospect here. And we’re also basically the first, you know, major AI mover in the political space. And so we’re helping to bring new technology to a space that is typically terrified of new technology. So we’re kind of excited about it. And I think I’m gonna Jeremy just because I’m a big believer in like a goals beagles. Right. So like, the a goal for quiller is let’s build a tool that’s widely used and changes the way that we do general AI, the seagull for me is like, let’s demystify AI in this space so that others have the headwinds that they can go out there and, and create new tools that change the space. So like, I feel like we’re doing like a joint mission. That’s really, really cool and interesting to me. And I’ve also just gotten a chance to learn a ton like this is really interesting technology, as terrifying as it is, and it is terrifying. I also think it’s really, really cool.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 38:18

What made you decide to raise money, obviously, you bootstrapped, Authentic, what? Why raise money for Quiller?

Mike Nellis 38:26

the cost of bootstrap and agency is much, much low. And I was lucky to have a couple of early clients, including like our first client was Kamala Harris, who is now the vice president United States. The technological startup fees are much larger, like the cost of building the prototype was like, you know, $100,000, the cost to commercialize build the MVP was more than that. And it was like, I we could have taken funds from authentic, we built it in authentic and then we sort of split it out after that. But we could have taken money that the company had and built quiller and owned it 100%. But my view of it was, it didn’t, it didn’t make sense to sort of risk the financial health of authentic on something that was that was less stable, like authentic is going to continue to do well. If I got hit by a bus tomorrow. I think Lauren, and our leadership team and the rest of our managers would continue to crush it and do really well. When you’re introducing new technology, like startups are born debt. I heard that recently. It’s like a startup is already dead. And like the minute you start when you’re like already resuscitating right, and I feel that way, like cooler might might fail. Like I think I get a lot of people that are like really excited. They’re like, Oh, I’m like, I love your ability to just like, create something from nothing and take a risk and blah, blah, blah, and like, that’s great. I appreciate and respect all of that, but like Willer might fail. And I think because it’s new, and maybe somebody will do a better job or maybe like the another piece of technology that’s coming will like engulf it and like, that happens to a lot technology. We could sort of play all of our cards, right? We could do all the great work and it fails. So that’s why I think you come in and you bring in investors to help to minimize the risk for yourself and to give you the scale and ability to move quickly. Like we were able to Launch and commercialize much more quickly and higher up much more quickly because we took on one.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 40:06

So Mike, I do want to get to a poker story, but just for a minute a few mistakes and misuse of AI.

Mike Nellis 40:16

I think misuses of AI especially for like for like the 24 elections, like you’re gonna find bad faith actors will use it for disinformation. So scaling up, like what we saw in 2016, where there were all these different, you know, lies on social media, like, that’s probably going to be on steroids the cycle, so everybody has to build better critical thinking skills, I think, and then media organizations need to do a better job of like, actually explaining what’s going on because the media does not do a good job of that right now. Because it’s more entertainment than it is information. And then I also think you’re gonna see like, the rise of like, deep fakes, you’re gonna find like, a lot of videos of like, you know, there’s, there’s gonna be like a in 20. In 2016, there was a video of or not a video but an image of Pope Francis endorsing Donald Trump, that was clearly fake. But a lot of people believed it. The 2024 version of that will be like a video of Francis wearing a puffy jacket with his arm around Donald Trump, like pointing his finger out. And like.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:07

Now you’re giving people ideas

Mike Nellis 41:09

People don’t need ideas. Roger Stone is somewhere in a deep dark basement just coming up. But you know, that’s what you’re going to see. And I but I think people need to be careful about their data, then you be careful about voter data. When you do like, just be really thoughtful about how we implement this technology.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 41:29

So the last minute, I want to hear a great poker story. I still don’t know you were you were a professional poker player. I think that’s fair to say. Right?

Mike Nellis 41:39

I was I was I was mildly successful. And I probably I think I could have been really great at it. But I chose this career instead. And I I have no regrets lots of regrets, probably, but no regrets really. I played the World Series of Poker a couple times. I played with Bruce Buffer for like eight hours the UFC announcer I think I knocked him out of the tournament. I cashed in World Series poker man, I knocked Nate Silver out from fivethirtyeight.com was big election forecaster. And anytime I see people talking about how great Nate Silver is, with data and math, I’m always like, I beat that guy at a game. Like how good can he be math because like, I’m not that good at math. Which is silly. I stood in line for the bathroom with Jason Alexander. At the World Series poker, so like just weird stuff like that. I want I once lost a hand of poker that cost me 600,000 hours, which is maybe a story for the next time you invite me back.

Dr. Jeremy Weisz 42:30

Love it. Well, Mike, I want to be the first one to thank you. Thanks for sharing your journey, your stories. Everyone check out quiller.ai authentic.org. And, Mike, thanks for joining me.

Mike Nellis 42:40

Thanks for having me, Jeremy. Appreciate it.

Outro 42:42

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