Nonprofit Marketing Strategies That Actually Work With Paul Feith of Paul Gregory Media
Paul Feith: 05:08
I think the way to couch brand identity and messaging is whatever marketing you’re doing comes back to the website. Your website is the largest digital real estate that you own. Everything leads back to that. But before that, even your website is talking the tone and voice of your brand and your message. And what I often find with non-profits is sometimes it’s not very consistent.
What the board says about the brand, what the executive team says about the brand. And they have multiple constituents like volunteers and like city council and their beneficiaries and their donors. And how do you speak to them using consistent messaging across all five of those different channels? So messaging and that brand identity is paramount. I would even say it’s even more important than the website because a lot of optics are involved as well.
So between that and the website, I think those are the two largest pieces. And you know what used to say, not me, but others used to say branding is fluff and it’s it’s not tangible, but it so is tangible. I have lots of examples of how branding can outperform the S&P index, just the branding alone. I mean, look at Starbucks. You take away all the brick and mortar buildings.
It’s still a multibillion dollar company. It’s going to be the owner of Quaker Oats once said, you know, take away my farms and my land and my buildings and my manufacturing plants and my factories. I’ll keep the brand.
John Corcoran: 06:39
Wow. Let’s talk about web design and development in particular for nonprofits, because a website similar to brand I brand kind of needs to serve different constituents. You know, it can serve as a place for people to make donations could be beneficiaries the way, you know, other constituents go to that to the website to learn about it. So talk about some of the unique considerations around web design and development for non-profit websites.
Paul Feith: 07:12
Well, you’re absolutely right. A website has to serve multiple constituents. And you, whether it’s a new donor coming to the page or an existing donor checking up on past donation history or looking for IRS tax receipts versus new members learning about what you’re doing in the community to maybe volunteer one day. There are several different constituents city council members. It’s important to have a website that speaks to all of them, and have an easy navigation that can figure out the easiest path to those pages or that content.
A lot of times what we do is we tied into other software so that we can see who’s coming to the website based on actions they took. Previous to that. For example, they may be clicking on something they saw on social media, and if something donor related, that would take them immediately to a donor page because we kind of know what they’re interested in. Same with emails. We can say, okay, over the last six months, they’ve been mostly interested in these types of events from this particular non-profit, and will take them to a page that lists all those events and how they can participate.
So it’s important to integrate a lot of different moving parts in that digital world. And that’s the great thing about digital media and digital marketing is, you know, all that information we have all that data, and nonprofits don’t have a lot of times the bandwidth to parse all that out.
John Corcoran: 08:28
Yeah. And speaking of limited bandwidth, social media is another one that can be so time consuming for especially for nonprofits that don’t have the bandwidth for it. What are some of your best strategies around that? As you know, social media has become such an important channel.
Paul Feith: 08:45
Well, you know why it’s so darn time consuming is because it takes so many different skill levels. You got to be a good graphic designer and or being able to put pictures together. You have to be a good ability to write, copy or be a copywriter. You have to know how to strategize what’s what’s the month long plan? What’s the year long plan?
So yeah, it is time consuming. It’s one of the core services that we do because it requires strategy behind the posts. It requires a look at the history and see what’s performing better than others and why. For example, you could have a great performing video or a poor performing video. And was it because it was posted on the day of the week where there wasn’t a lot of activity on that channel, or was it because of the video itself?
With a combination of AI tools and state of the art social media strategy, tools like Sprout Social is one of the ones we use. We can tell exactly why a post is performing the way it is, good or bad. What we can learn from it and how that affects our strategy going forward. Again, it’s data driven, which just does so much better in terms of. Taking advantage of all the tools that we have to do a better job at the KPIs or the key performance indicators, we know how to grow an audience.
We know if there’s not a big audience to start with, how to grow, that we know how to engage an audience, which is sometimes more important. But engagement can’t be just the only thing, because you don’t want to keep preaching to the same choir. So really, those two KPIs, growing an audience and engaging that audience, are the two biggest KPIs that we and we. Because of that, we don’t have long term commitments. We earn our keep every month because we want to learn from everything that we happened in the previous month and the previous quarter and apply it to the next month.
And it’s such a joy to take those moments, share them with the client and that clients, whatever resource they had doing social media, and if it was five hours a week or ten hours a week, is now down to ten minutes looking at and sharing in those moments with us, it’s it’s really a joy, a more joyful experience for them.
John Corcoran: 10:48
Speaking of AHA’s, so there is this Google ad grant management program or you rather you you do management, but there’s a Google ad grants program. Google provides money for nonprofits to run ads and nonprofit that I’m involved in didn’t even know about this until recently. And I think a lot of nonprofits are that way. They don’t realize that there’s this great opportunity. So explain what it is and how nonprofits can take advantage of it.
Paul Feith: 11:16
Right. So one of the many things that I hear from nonprofit executives is they wish they had more money for marketing and more resources. And here’s a company, a big company that Google that’s offering $10,000 every month. So it’s $10,000 to any legit 501 C3 or 501 C7. And there’s some others in there too.
Renewable $10,000 every month. And you only have to, you know, apply once and then you have that money, that bucket of money to use towards Google Ads for your events, for your services, for anything that your company does to get the word out there. Now you’re in that sponsored section just like any other paying organization. And because it’s free and it’s from a grant, you’re not weighted as high, but you’re in there. You’re playing the game with the big boys, and you get $10,000 of that money to spend every month.
And we try our best to spend the entire amount.
John Corcoran: 12:19
Wow. I want to ask you also about mission based storytelling, because this is a big part of of what you would do. Talk a little bit about how nonprofits can tell their story in a compelling way, that that talks about the mission, what they’re really passionate about.
Paul Feith: 12:39
Yeah. Without giving away too much of the secret sauce, the best advice I can give is tell a story of one one person, one beneficiary, one life saved, one, one family made whole again. When you focus on something that people can relate to on that one family or that one person, it becomes such a a much more powerful story than saying, we help the homeless or we feed starving people or or whatever that may be, which is all great. But when you focus on the story, on one person that you’ve helped and you don’t have to reveal identities, we can talk and a lot of our clients don’t. What a powerful story telling mechanism that is.
And then you can flip and dissect that story in many different ways. Video is probably the most compelling channel to use, but you’d also want to tell that story on social media via graphic, and you want to tell that story on your website, too. So pick 1 or 2 compelling ones that you can give examples of.
John Corcoran: 13:42
Yeah. And do you find that a lot of nonprofits struggle with that, with with figuring out what story to tell or capturing it in the first place, or they don’t want to toot their own horn.
Paul Feith: 13:54
Well, it’s funny you say that because the I always get we’re the best kept secret, right? It’s the first thing we hear at every engagement. We’re the best kept secret. But no, most nonprofits know who they’ve helped the most and where they’re. Where their biggest successes are.
I think they’ve got that down. It’s then what to do with that? And then who’s got the time? Who’s got the resources where, you know, where do we figure out how to get that? That’s where partnering with a marketing agency could really take that weight off of you and make it all happen, because marketing agencies not just do the strategy and say, okay, we’ve got this, but they do the production as well, and then they do the deliverable.
John Corcoran: 14:31
Yeah. Paul, this has been great. Where can people go to learn more about you and connect with you and Paul Gregory Media.
Paul Feith: 14:38
You can go to just PaulGregoryMedia.com plain and simple and has everything that you need. In terms of answering questions. And we’ve got a live real person chat agent standing by to answer questions as well.
John Corcoran: 14:51
Amazing. All right, Paul, thank you so much.
Paul Feith: 14:53
Thanks for having me.
Outro: 14:55
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