Do LESS marketing (but GET MORE) 

Jaclyn Uloth:

Welcome to How to Market Your Nonprofit, the Counterintuity podcast featuring interviews with experts in marketing, fundraising, strategy, and leadership who offer how-tos and inspiration about how you can help your nonprofit succeed and grow during a time of chaos and change. Bringing his 25 plus years of experience in marketing, strategy, and nonprofit management, here’s our host, Lee Wochner.

Lee Wochner:

Thanks for joining us here today for How to Market Your Nonprofit. This is the latest in solo casts that we occasionally do to help nonprofits and social cause organizations with their missions. And today I thought we would try to be helpful with overwhelm. Overwhelm is when a nonprofit just tries to do too much.

Out of the goodness of their hearts. And I have seen this, I know this firsthand. I remember the first nonprofit I was involved with doing a mailing party at 2 a.m., which I suppose worked for us at the time and was kind of exciting in a romantic way. But I think frequently, and I say this having run several nonprofits, been on a lot of nonprofit boards, and certainly worked with hundreds of nonprofits at this point, generally, frequently, we would do well to do less, actually.

And so today, counterintuitively, I’m going to share with you that the answer to your nonprofit’s marketing problem may be less marketing in some ways. Less. So I know you’re under constant pressure to do more — more social media, more email, more video, more fundraising campaigns, more content, more technology, more, more, more, more. But more sometimes makes the problem worse because you’re not actually tackling the real core issue. And sometimes we should do less or do something a little different.

And in the meantime, when we do more, more, more, small teams get stretched across too many channels. Too many things to do, too many tasks. Supporters get bombarded with messages, and maybe they’re always the same message. Technology gets more complicated. Content becomes an endless production schedule. And organizations collect more marketing data without becoming much clearer about what’s actually working. And I say none of this with any judgment because, hey, I’ve been there.

I’ve done that. This episode is in service of trying to help you once again, but in a different way. Let’s think about lessness. So, in this episode of How to Market Your Nonprofit, I’m going to take a counterintuitive position that many nonprofits could improve their digital marketing by doing less of it in some ways. How to do less.

Let’s say that you have limited staff and capacity. Stop trying to keep up. Do what you do well. Focus on what you do well. You’re a nonprofit — you probably don’t need more marketing ideas. Years ago, there was a guy, a volunteer involved with a nonprofit that I was running, and we humorously called him the idea man. He always had lots of ideas, great ideas, not so interested in fulfilling them, which brings to mind the idea that inspiration is 1% and perspiration is 99%.

You already know you could be doing much more email, social, video, SEO, advertising content, and on and on and on. The problem is that somebody has to do it, all of it. Instead of building a marketing plan for the team you wish you had, build one around the people you do have — the time and budget you actually have, the one that you can fulfill in the real world — and decide what you can do exceptionally well.

So, to some degree, this is an exercise in focus. You can’t do everything. And as the great comedian Steven Wright said, “You can’t have everything. Where would you put it all?” So when you have limited staff and capacity — and by the way, all of us have limited teams, limited staff and capacity, no matter how brilliant and wonderful they are — they can’t do everything. So you have to focus, you have to choose.

How else can we do more by doing less? Let’s say that you’re getting poor conversion. So conversion is when you’re getting people to your website, but they’re not doing what you hope they would do. They’re not filling out a form, they’re not completing a donation. There’s a whole bunch of not-quite-doing things that they’re not quite doing. Give people fewer choices.

Sometimes we give too many choices. It’s like the famous menu at a restaurant — the Cheesecake Factory is a great example. Cheesecake Factory’s menu, I think, has 106 pages. I think I’m up to reading page five when I get there. I don’t want all those choices. I want to enjoy myself, enjoy my company, order something that fills my need. I’m not going to read all 106 pages. Perhaps others will — my daughter probably will, she loves Cheesecake Factory. But for the rest of us, that’s too many choices. And there’s good data, good research that shows when you give people too many choices, frequently they choose less, or they choose nothing. I don’t know what Cheesecake Factory’s success comes from, but for we mere mortals, too many choices are too many choices.

So, if you’re getting poor conversion on whatever it is that you’re doing in your marketing, give people fewer choices. There’s an example of getting more by doing less. So, getting more people to your website isn’t necessarily the goal. Getting the right people to your website and getting them to take the right next step is the goal. So, when every page has five messages — and I see this all the time — “do this, or this, or this, or this” — holy cow, wait, what? I’m confused. I took four seconds, or if I was feeling luxuriant, eight seconds, to look at your landing page on my phone or my desktop, and you gave me all these things to do. And the moment I have to stop and think about it is the moment at which I think maybe I’m not doing any of them.

Give people a choice. Figure out what you want them to do. When every page has five messages, six links, three calls to action, people have to figure out what you want them to do. Good marketing removes all of that confusion and all of that work. Decide what the next step should be and make it obvious, and simplify it. Make it easier for people. Ask them to do less.

How else can we do more with less? Let’s talk about donor retention. Maybe do a little less of chasing the next donor. I know we spend a lot of time seeking new donors, people to make that first donation. My question is: are we spending enough time with the people who are already supporters, to get them to feel valued and to get them to possibly do more?

So when you get a whole bunch of new donors, the thank-you goes out, the receipt gets sent, and the attention turns back to finding the next donor. What if the better opportunity is with donors you already had who aren’t really getting enough interaction with you? The first gift shouldn’t be the end of the marketing funnel — it should be the beginning of the relationship. And so when you think about the people at your nonprofit who actually do more and more to support your mission, they’re the people you’ve had more and more relationship with, when you think about it. And so if you feel overwhelmed in going after new donors, perhaps do a little less of it and ask yourself how you can deepen the relationship with the ones you have.

So in the corporate sector, this is called business development. And business development is partly about new business, for sure, but business development is greatly about growing the existing business with the existing customers, the existing clients. And that applies to donors as well. There’s a lot of work in getting a new donor and processing the new donor. Maybe some of it should be reallocated toward furthering the relationship with the current donor.

How to do more with less when it comes to technology. There are a jillion marketing platforms out there and marketing tools. Be careful which ones you buy. Be thoughtful about which ones you buy. When marketing feels disorganized, when you’ve got too much to do, when you can’t figure it all out, when you’re spinning your wheels — when you’re getting what Alvin and Heidi Toffler (by the way, the uncredited Heidi Toffler — she co-wrote Future Shock) — when these authors of Future Shock write about future shock, which is, “holy cow, I don’t know how to do this new thing, and I’ve given up” — that’s future shock. We all get some aspect of that certainly these days.

Stop buying it. Just back off a little bit. Ask yourself: What do I need? What am I trying to do? How does this help me do it? How does it work with my existing marketing? How does it make my existing marketing better? What can my team and I actually onboard and make successful? You don’t have to chase every shiny thing and try to grab it and put it on your tree.

So, software can’t fix a process that you need fixed — don’t buy it. Start with the experience that you want, the things you want to happen, and look for the tools that will help you do those. But you may find that you need fewer tools, not more, and you may need a deeper experience with the tools you have, not a new experience with something confusing that will take a long time to onboard.

And let me tell you my personal experience: at this stage of life, I am keenly aware of how long it can take to put in place a complicated new software package. We invest in research and development here at Counterintuity — we do a lot of this. And anything that I’m going to have to work with, with the team, I’m very careful about. We take our time. And we also develop a plan of who’s going to do the actual onboarding of that, and the transition, and what the phases are. And sometimes it takes months, but we want to get it right, and we want to make sure improvements come from it, and not just costs.

One way people get future shock — which is, of course, the fear of not being able to put in place the things that are new — is because they are overwhelmed with data. We all get a whole bunch of data. And the question is, what are we doing with all that data? And then sometimes I lie awake at night and go, “What am I — I have all this information, what am I doing with it all? Holy cow, and I’ve got 8,000 emails — have I read them all, am I doing these, et cetera?”

This is a case where we could do more with less. We have too much data and too little insight — that’s the problem that we think we have. And really, it doesn’t always matter. As a digital marketing agency, at Counterintuity we can measure — I think the count is up to 170-some different things — and I would rather we measure the seven different things that we need to know. (And I just made up that number — maybe it’s nine, I don’t know.) For clients, of course, we look at what are the relevant things that we need to measure, and that should be your focus.

So, digital marketing enables you to measure everything, but we don’t need to know everything. For you, you may want to know: what’s the open rate on your email newsletter, what’s the number of impressions, what are your clicks, what are your opens, how many followers do you have. But the bigger question is whether people are moving closer to the organization. Are they getting closer — and I mean closer, like emotionally closer — and donating more and supporting the mission?

So pick a small number of outcomes, things that would really move the needle for you, and track those numbers. And let some of the others go, and sleep soundly. We can’t track it all. Sometimes I think we track too much, but make sure you’re tracking the key performance indicators that’ll really help you understand how you’re doing. So, for instance: I have X number of donors giving an average of X number of dollars, and here’s how it compares with last year. It’s up 15% — we’re doing great. Ooh, it’s down 20% — are they donating less, or do we have fewer people? Those are the sorts of things you want to investigate, because they drive strategy and they drive the actions that you will take to build upon the success or remediate the problem.

Let’s talk about platform changes. I, like you, sometimes get irritated when I log into some platform I use, and holy cow, they moved something — where is it? I found out last week that when I went to do my assignments here at Counterintuity — we all get things assigned to ourselves — my list of assignments had moved, and I went, “I don’t have time to find the assignments, what is this?” And then, after those 30 seconds of frustration, I found where the assignments were and I moved along. And I have to admit that was actually a better place for them. But by the time I get to the end of the sentence, Facebook will have changed again. LinkedIn already put in place some sort of change. Google changes all the time, and boy, when Google changes, you’re at risk of losing a lot. And AI changes, of course, how people find answers.

So what I would say to you again is: focus on what’s relevant, and stop chasing all of this other stuff, because not all of it matters to you. And in life in general, it’s good not to be playing someone else’s game. Figure out what your game is and play your game. So build around the things your nonprofit actually owns. When you’re at the mercy of Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, etc. — and I like all of them for different reasons — they can change the algorithm and do whatever they want. And there are lots of stories of people being very successful with their digital presence, and then Google did something, and holy cow, it all fell apart.

Focus on what you own. Focus on your email list. Focus on your outreach. Focus on your donor campaign. Yes, do what you need to do to work with algorithms and with platforms where you need to. But whatever the newest thing is — I have a friend who sounds the alarm seemingly every day when she finds some new change, and she’s excited about it. I know — and she’s my friend, that’s fine — but I can’t get worked up about it. Life is short. I have other things to be excited about. Don’t get too excited about other people’s changes just because they seem important to them; that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily important to you.

Focus on what’s going to matter if you’re a nonprofit, and act accordingly. Own as much of your own real estate — i.e., your digital presence, your marketing plan, your messaging — as you can, because these other things will always change.

What if you’ve got so many great stories that you can’t get them all out? Similar to the data problem, right — you have so much data you can’t handle it all, you’ve got so many stories you can’t handle it all. And by the way, that’s innate to human beings — we all have stories like that, we all have things we want to share. So you’ve got content overload.

Well, you can imagine what I’m going to say here, and that is: create less content. I know we should all be doing content, we should all be putting content out — I’m giving you the same message I was giving earlier, which is be thoughtful about how you’re approaching your content, what the point of it is. And, as an example, we will sign new clients occasionally who we see are posting on Facebook — and I’m not exaggerating — three, four, five times a day. When you’re doing that, all you’re doing is stepping on your own story. “Here’s a story, here’s a story, here’s a story, here’s a story” — and all of those stories don’t get a chance to build an audience.

So most nonprofits don’t have a shortage of stories — they have a shortage of time to turn those stories into content, and/or they just flood the market with these driplets of stories. It’s like they wrote flash fiction, which we creative writers sometimes do. I have a friend who has published a lot of flash fiction — it’s a short story that’s a page long, maybe two pages. And I’ve read a bunch of them and thought, “This should have been a full short story, or this should have been a novella or a novel.” He’s kind of thrown the idea away in a page or two. It’s better to focus and drill deeper when you’ve got a great story. And ironically, it would probably take you less time to do that, and do it more successfully, than it does to spin out all of this content that just sails out into the universe — unmoored, unanchored to any satellite out there. It’s just spinning out and eventually gets sucked into the sun, and nobody saw it burn up.

So stop treating every email, post, article, and video separately. Think about: how is this a story that I’m telling in a variety of different ways, through different channels and with different platforms? Because they will land more deeply. Start with one strong story and pursue it, and use it in multiple ways, in various ways. If you look at major media outlets on the internet, you’ll see they take a social post that’s possibly a link to a podcast that has a video, and also they’ll have their people discuss it, and on and on — they’re essentially repurposing the same story. You can do that too. The goal isn’t to create a million of these things; the goal is to get more value from what’s already happening inside your organization.

How could we get better results from the calls to action that we put out? A call to action, of course, is when you have a link, a form fill, something that you want people to do — where ideally they would click and make a donation, or sign up to volunteer, or say, “Yes, I’m interested in having a discussion with you about being on the board,” et cetera.

How could we get more results by doing less? Sometimes we bump — and I understand this — we need some money to meet payroll, to do the big park cleanup, to send all the kids off with a backpack filled for the start of school, or whatever the cause is — getting animals adopted, please adopt the kitty cats and the bunny rabbits and the dogs, we love all of those, and the birds, right?

But if all we do is ask, ask, ask in our calls to action, we’re kind of missing the boat. If the only time supporters hear from you is when you need money, every message starts to feel like a transaction. It starts to feel the same, and it doesn’t feel relationship-based. And by the way, I get hammered with donation-demanding requests from elected officials and candidates, and I’m sure you do as well, and frequently they just sound the same. And when you’ve made the donation, you’re still getting the same thing every day, which is foolish on their part.

Spend more time helping people understand the problem, see the work that you’re doing to solve the problem, and feel connected to what you’re doing and how they’re making it possible. So this is another case of deepening the relationship. Then when you do ask — after you’ve said, “Here’s how this works, would you like to learn more, let me explain in greater detail, here’s the results we’ve had,” and so forth, and “here’s some video, and here’s a guest on our podcast to talk about this, and here’s a press release you might be interested in showing the results, and here are some photos” — after that, when you make a request that ties all of that together, they’ve had one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe seven touch points, and the ask can be stronger.

I am not saying don’t ask. One of the things I see more often than you would guess is nonprofits that don’t ask — I’m not even kidding, they need to do some asking. But if you’re already asking, and asking, and asking, and it feels a lot like a lot with diminishing results, my suggestion to you is: think about other ways to develop the relationship with the donor, the granting organization, the corporate sponsor, whatever the heck it is, the board member. Ask yourself how you can round out that relationship more, and maybe ask less frequently, but bigger.

So those are the ones that occurred to me today. I think there are lots of ways that you can be even more successful in what you’re doing by getting out of the hamster wheel of doing the things you’re doing, and doing them a lot, and doing them all the time, and feeling that you need to do those — and taking a moment to reassess and ask yourself, “What could I stop doing? What could I do a little more strongly — either something else, or this, less frequently, but in a better way?” Because you’ll drive yourself crazy trying to do it all. And there’s real value in those moments of peace, and in getting better results by being more focused, and frequently, by doing less.

Hey, thanks for the time today. Always glad to have you join us. Always want to be helpful. Really appreciate you. We know we have listeners from around the world and around the US — not in that order, around the US and around the world — but we’re really grateful to have you here, and always delighted to hear back from people. So if you have any questions, I hope you’ll reach out. We’re pretty easy to find on LinkedIn — I’m there individually, and Counterintuity is there. And go to our website, sign up for our emails — we’re happy to send you all sorts of great tips. I hope you found today useful, and thanks again for joining us.

Jaclyn Uloth: 
Thanks for listening. How to Market Your Nonprofit is available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Please like and follow the show. Visit counterintuity.com to learn more.