The Groupfinity Podcast Anthony Wilson

#056 - Today I am speaking with Allegra Mangione, marketing strategy specialist and Founder of Catharsis, a marketing firm focused exclusively on nonprofits.  We discuss Allegra’s 5 step strategic marketing roadmap for nonprofits.

1 Identify Your Audience
2 Set Marketing Goals
3 Marketing Channels
4 What messages do you share with your audience?
5 Evaluate

I love Allegra’s advice on why it's important to niche down on your audience…

“Charities and nonprofit organizations think, I wanna reach everybody - we have to reach everybody with our mission. The issue with that is if you're trying to reach everybody, you likely won't be able to reach anybody.”

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear what in Allegra helped a client grow their Instagram following by 50% in a year.

#055 - Teri Beckman is the Founder and CEO of HIGOL, a consultancy firm that works to align leadership behaviors with business drivers to dramatically increase revenue, community impact and improve overall organizational performance.  Specifically, HIGOL helps mission driven CEOs grow revenue and impact by 50% in 12 months.

After a long career working for nonprofits, even serving as Executive Director, Teri concluded that while technical knowledge is important, mindset is crucial if you want to be a change agent.

“My capacity to grow and have impact didn't have much to do with my technical knowledge. I mean, that was important, but there was plenty of it out there, you know, to be able to access. What really made a difference was my mindset and as the capacity of my mind grew, so did the capacity for me to help an organization grow, for me to have more impact on the community.”

In today’s episode, Teri shares her 5 step framework to transform non profit organizations.  She has particular success with small volunteer led organizations.

Teri’s 5 step framework is:

#1 Align around a shared vision;

#2 Establish goals;

#3 Three points you want to share with others about the organization;

#4 Come up with a list of folks you want to talk to: and

#5 Create a system to track your conversations.

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear what in Teri’s background she attributes to resiliency and ability to navigate the Pandemic.

#054 - Rachel Bearbower is the founder and CEO of Small Shop Strategies, a nonprofit consultancy focused on coaching nonprofit leaders how to detangle their systems, so they can focus their time and energy on building relationships and raising more for their causes.

In just 3 years, Rachel has built a community where over a hundred nonprofit leaders are showing up for themselves and learning how to boldly fundraise, tell better stories and become even more impactful changemakers.

In today’s episode, Rachel shares the 4 templates every nonprofit leader should have locked and loaded and ready at all times to maintain connection with their donors:

#1 An immediate automated thank you note or receipt;

#2 Within 24-48 hours a heartfelt quick personal email that is NOT the receipt from your CRM that lets your donor know the gift was received and appreciated;

#3 An email or video depicting the impact of their gift and reminding them that you did what you said you were going to do with their gift; and

#4 A Connection email - Ask for their opinion / Send them an article / Find out why they gave

Rachel emphasizes how important it is to ditch transactional relationships and develop real meaningful relationships with your donors - connect donors to the mission, connect them to what their gift actually did.

“Donors don't want to fund the process. They want to fund the impact. And so you, the organization, you are the process, and so you wanna remove yourself. So instead of saying, help us buy new uniforms, it's, you can provide a kid with a new uniform.”

The key takeaways from my discussion with Rachel are:

#1 The best way to connect more and raise is to have a plan;
#2 Communicate as quickly as possible after the donation comes in;
#3 Automate and personalize your communication; and
#4 Make your communication about the donor instead of your organization.

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear now being a farmer in training helps Rachel be a lifetime learner and makes her a better nonprofit consultant.

#053 - Adora Drake is a professional digital marketing coach and consultant with a knack for creating marketing strategies. She helps leaders establish relationships with their audience by teaching them the tools for attracting the right fit people, becoming a thought leader, and bridging the gap between initial contact to the final transaction.

Adora emphasizes relationship building.  She adds that when it comes to relationships, it is better to go a mile deep than a mile wide.  It is better to build deep meaningful relationships with a few people rather than shallow relationships with many.

“So you're building a relationship. No matter where you are, whatever platform you are, make sure you're building relationships.”

Adora teaches how we can use her SCALE Framework to convert social media followers to donors:

S - Social Media
C - Content
A - Audience
L - Lead
E- Execution

The key takeaways from my discussion with Minna are:  

#1 Master 1 or 2 social media platforms rather than spreading yourself too thin across too many;

#2 Find the platforms where your audience hangs out;

#3 Consistency key; and

#4 Nurture your new members with a welcome series.

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear about the welcome series Adora uses in her own business.

#052 - Minna Taylor is a trained actress.  After earning her masters degree, she began teaching accent reduction to corporate clients as a side hustle in between acting gigs.  That experience is where she found the intersection of speech & voice, body language, and breathing.

"Communication is a physical activity. We think about it as just coming out of our mouth, but our whole body is behind it. And if we go back to that statistic, which is 7% of the information people receive is verbal, 93% is vocal and nonverbal that means our body is doing most of the talking. What I see time and time again and what I saw at the very start of my career was people's bodies silencing them.”

Minna outlines the 3 characteristics of the most trusted people:
1 Generosity;
2 Curiosity; and
3 Likability

People come to her to increase confidence, to increase capacity, to speak up, to share their voice, to tell powerful stories, to influence people, and to become powerful agents of change.

The key takeaways from my discussion with Minna are:

#1 80% of your attention should be listening and 20% breathing;

#2 Generosity is about energy and presence;

#3 Curiosity is less about asking and more about how you choose to contribute without judging; and

#4 We have to like someone before we can trust them.

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear Minna share how giving up a little control and being vulnerable leads to being more trusted.

#051 - Rhea Wong makes a return trip to the Groupfinity Podcast, this time to discuss her new book - Get That Money, Honey! The No-Bullsh*t Guide to Raising More Money for Your Nonprofit.  Rhea points out that that mindset is a big limiting factor in fundraising.  We assume people will only give the minimum and we get too emotional about rejection, which impacts our ongoing fundraising efforts.

"I think people get so emotionally tied up in that if they don't give to my organization, that means all these bad things about me and I'm somehow inferior and less than, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's like, okay, let's just drop the story.  AND how could we do our job better without this disempowering story?"

Storytelling is a key to your fundraising success because we all want to believe that our lives have meant something.  We all want to think about legacy and believe we lived on the planet and the world is a little bit better. You need to help your donor see themself as the hero in the story.  They are the hero, not you.

Rhea tells why investing in systems is so important.  We’re always freaking out about money and not spending it and we end up missing the forest for the trees.  Think about how to automate your organization to make you more efficient rather than just the amount of the expense itself.

“If I spend money, it's either going to be because there's a monetary ROI, so it's gonna help me bring more money in, or It's going to give me back my time, or it's going to increase operational efficiency. If the expense that you're putting out doesn't do one of those three things, I think you really need to think about your expense.”

The key takeaways from my discussion with Rhea are:

#1 Evaluate your systems by mapping your processes to where the problems exist;

#2 In Fundraising a story is important because it accesses the empathy part of our brain. And empathy is where generosity lies;

#3 Don't spend your time doing stupid manual things like data entry. Spend the time creating relationships with humans; and

#4 Your meetings should be 75% of them talking, 25% you talking.

Be sure to stick around until the end to hear what Rhea learned from an FBI hostage negotiator.