Small Businesses and Nonprofits Win with Organization, Strategy, and Personality

Emily Heck, Owner and Founder, Evergreen Strategic Communications (Indianapolis, IN)

Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications, started her agency in the fall of 2019. With no job in sight and no career plans, she started meeting with people, chatting over coffee, and trying to figure out her next chapter. Emily picked up some freelance marketing projects from a former co-worker and networked more intensely. Her business, helping nonprofits and small businesses organize their marketing, establish processes and systems, and more efficiently engage their audiences, grew. 

Although in-person networking dropped off during the pandemic, Emily is now finding contacts she did not see during the “isolation time” of Covid eager to meet and “catch up” and more interested in re-connecting face to face. Potential clients are responding to her cold-call invitations to explore partnership opportunities a lot more quickly and with a lot less requisite “relationship building” than before the pandemic.

In this interview, Emily talks about the importance of LinkedIn, “the place for silent scrollers,” for building connections. She says people may scroll through your feeds and read them, but do so with no likes, shares, or comments. Think nothing is happening? Emily says she often gets comments when she meets with people six months later, “I’ve really liked your content.” It‘s important to “keep posting.”

Emily says small business owners and nonprofits have the same marketing struggles and are “behind” the big companies on lead generation emails, getting conversions on emails and social media, and on figuring out how to “pump that up.” “Getting there” requires guiding clients to build marketing model proficiency and effectiveness and scaling larger company processes down to something that works to help “small” grow. 

When Emily first started working with clients, she spent a lot of time figuring out their processes, the location of their social media account login information, and establishing what they were trying to achieve through their marketing. Client websites, often a “mess,” may fail to “tell their story well.” “You can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization,” Emily explains. So, she cleans up client websites and SEO first, as a base to “push everyone back to” from emails and social media efforts.”

Email has changed a lot. Today, Emily says, “You’ve got to have some personality in your emails.” She recommends “changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name” to improve open rates.

Emily can be contacted on her agency’s website at: evergreenstrategic.org, or on LinkedIn as Emily Hack in Indianapolis.

Transcript Follows:

ROB: Welcome to the Marketing Agency Leadership Podcast. I’m your host, Rob Kischuk, and I am joined today by Emily Heck, Owner and Founder at Evergreen Strategic Communications based in Indianapolis, Indiana. Welcome to the podcast, Emily.

EMILY: Thank you very much. I’m so excited to be here.

ROB: Good to have you here and talk some Indiana connections here. Why don’t you start off by telling us about Evergreen, and what is your specialty?

EMILY: Evergreen started in the fall of 2019. I started my own business right before the pandemic; I’m not sure if that’s smart or adventurous or whatever word you want to fill in, but it is our origin story. We focus on nonprofits and small businesses, which may seem like two very different clients or types of clients, but they have the same marketing struggles. We help nonprofits and small businesses get their marketing organized, get processes in place, systems in place, and then work to help start engaging their audiences more efficiently.

ROB: Got it. Is that organization the common struggle of where they’re starting from?

EMILY: Oh yeah. That is 90% of what I see. It’s interesting; when I started my business, you’re so excited, there’s so much energy, and it’s like, “I’m going to do social media for small business” or “I’m going to do email and marketing for small business,” and I found I was spending a lot of time figuring out their processes, figuring out where the login information was for their social media accounts. I spent a great deal of time doing that because you can’t really be effective in your marketing if you don’t have a good base of organization.

ROB: I’ve certainly seen that. They may have worked with somebody; that person disappeared into the wilderness or just wasn’t very good or whatever, and they were the only person that knew the logins. Do you end up starting from scratch? Are you trying to figure out how to recover those logins sometimes? Even that part, what are you scrapping together?

EMILY: A lot of times I try to scrap it together, as you said, and find those logins. Just recently, last summer, I went through an appeal process with Facebook to get access to a client’s business suite. So I’ll go that route if I need to. A lot of times it’s just an email to an old coworker or something like that, trying to find those logins, but sometimes you have to get out the heavy-hitter techniques and tactics to get access to stuff.

ROB: I’m sure, Emily, sometimes you start with a client and they want to do one specific thing; sometimes they want to do everything. How do you help them come to the conclusion of how to do what is the right thing, what is the right thing to do first, and what’s the right thing to do next?

EMILY: This is a tough conversation that I have quite a bit. I do have a lot of clients that come to me and say, “We want an email newsletter” or “We want a blog started.” It’s more about “Okay, but what are you trying to achieve with this?” I take a step back; let’s have that conversation, let’s talk about what you’re trying to engage with your audience. And a lot of times the business owner or the nonprofit executive director is right. They know their business and their organization better than I do at that point in time.

So, the project usually evolves from what they originally thought. Maybe they were thinking a traditional-style email newsletter, and I start to throw out some ideas – because email’s changed a lot. Even I would say just in the past two or three years, how you’re communicating on email has changed so much, and they may not be up-to-date on those new strategies and tactics. That’s probably the second most common conversation I’m having behind “Where are your logins and what are your processes?” [laughs]

ROB: How would you characterize some of that transition on the email side? Because there’s certainly this historic idea of “Let’s get a good template, let’s curate some content, let me dump something in there that I think makes sense, and maybe I’m going to try to close some business too.” How does that evolve into what works in 2022?

EMILY: What I’m experiencing with a lot of my clients and a lot of the emails I’m sending out is you’ve got to have some personality in your emails. Gone are the days of just throwing together some content, a blog preview or something like that. You’ve got to have some personality. I have several newsletters that I’m making come from a specific person within the organization – just as simple as changing the sender name from the organization name to a person’s name has helped open rates. It seems so simple, but when you’re flying through, trying to get that monthly email out, it’s easy to forget.

I’m always talking to my clients about “Let’s add some personality in this. What are things that you can really connect with your audiences through on your email?” People don’t want to see this endless scroll of boring content. [laughs]

ROB: Boring content, company names. When I think about getting a bunch of stuff in Gmail across a bunch of different accounts – and I have the tabs; I don’t know how many people have the different tabs set up for the updates and the transactions. I don’t remember what all the things are. But it’s almost like when you get to the tab where the newsletters tend to sit, when you get over to that updates tab, there’s a certain curiosity to a person, a human, versus a company there. It’s almost intriguing on its own versus organization name and “Here’s my receipt from this other thing.”

EMILY: Oh yeah, it’s a total marketing trick when you really think about it. We’re tricking you into opening it. [laughs] Which you could argue is marketing in general. But yeah, you are intrigued by it. I want to take it a step further that it’s not a trick of “This is the same old newsletter that we’ve been sending you for the past five years, just we put a different sender name on it.” Let’s also take the content and make it more appealing for the reader so it isn’t an endless scroll.

ROB: That certainly makes plenty of sense there. Emily, you walked us through part of the journey. You mentioned in the tail end of 2019, you started the firm. But what led up to that? What led you to take that particular plunge to say it was time to start your own business, and what led you into that?

EMILY: I was working for an organization, and I’d only been working there for about two years, so I wasn’t looking to leave when I departed in fall of ’19. But I got into a very toxic situation that was not good for my mental health, physical health. I was deteriorating as a professional because of it. I left without a job lined up. I just went in and resigned one day because I knew this wasn’t the future that I wanted.

I reached out to a colleague