419. LIVE from New Orleans: Put the Good Back Into Marketing - Noah Barnett

Hey friends, we want you to join us for free at the sector's premier professional development virtual experience for growth-minded impact chasers like you. We're partnering with our friends at Virtuist to host this year's Responsive Nonprofit Summit on May 9th through 11th and we want you there. Friends, this is the most accessible, inclusive way to learn about what's working right now in the sector. Bring your whole team because have we mentioned it's free. We'll be hosting the conversation stage with 36 epic leaders, past podcast guests and friends that you've come to know, love and trust in this community. So join us live May 9th through 11th and if you can't make it, that's no problem. When you register, you get access to both the live event and all the recordings afterward too. Sign up for free today at weareforgood.com slash RNS. That's weareforgood.com slash RNS. Hey, I'm John. And I'm Becky. And this is the Weareforgood podcast. Nonprofits are faced with more challenges to accomplish their missions and the growing pressure to do more, raise more and be more for the causes that improve our world. We're here to learn with you from some of the best in the industry, bringing the most innovative ideas, inspirational stories all to create an impact uprising. So welcome to the good community. They're nonprofit professionals, philanthropists, world changers and rabbit fans who are striving to bring a little more goodness into the world. So let's get started. Okay, so we're here at AFP icon with the legendary Noah Barnett from Feather. And Feather is welcome to to their booth. Like we're kind of taking over the booth. Thank you and I are here interviewing, podcasting live from the Feather booth. We're having lots of conversations. We're giving lots of hugs around this conference center, but there's just some cool data that's coming out and Noah, y'all have been like on the cutting edge of this. I love this that y'all have doubled down into marketing specifically. What is the nonprofit world seeing right now? And you've launched this new report, but first introduce yourself and then let's jump in. Yeah, no, we're excited to share the insights we learned from the state of nonprofit marketing survey that we did. But the reason we did that is because Feather is the nonprofit marketing platform. And we're really focused on helping to elevate the narrative of nonprofit marketing from just being a service order taker in the back room to being really a strategic growth partner. And so for us to do that well, we needed to understand how people are thinking about marketing today inside their organizations, where are they investing in? Where are they pulling back? Whether they prioritizing, especially as we continue to move into this uncertain future. And so I am Noah Barnett. I'm the VP of marketing here at Feather. And I'm someone that's just is curious. I love collisions, so I'm grateful to be here on the podcast and just value being able to be an advocate for nonprofit marketing. I started my career in nonprofit marketing and it's great to be back being a partner with nonprofit marketers to help them grow their impact. I love that you described yourself that way because the thing I would say about you that I value so much other than your unmatched support and love for we are for good is that you are just naturally curious and Noah is got to be our most trusted advisor who's been pouring in and then curious about we are for good and he makes these recommendations and he sends these articles and I just feel like you have your finger on the pulse of what's working right now. So I know this report is absolutely insane. It has got such rich detail about what is happening right now in the sector. We are in the middle of a data revolution, a digital evolution of what is happening not only in nonprofit, but really around the world. And so Noah like dive into this report a little bit. Lift one or two things that you all are seeing that can be applied today by nonprofit listeners who are listening. Absolutely. And the only reason we actually know what's going on. So I appreciate the kind comments and we mean and comments. But we have the opportunity here at Feather to work with over 1500 nonprofits and associations. And so we wanted to reach out to them and really basically get feedback from them instead of us just speaking out and saying this is what we're seeing. We want to hear from nonprofit marketers. And there were five emerging trends that we observed in the responses with the number one trend being that we're operating on fumes as a sector. I mean I hear that I'm also every conversation I hear that. Absolutely. We're not exclusive to just marketing. We as a sector, as a fore good with a capital G sector are struggling. And it's everything from confusion and reporting to burnout to retention declining to constant change, lack of visibility and even knowing what's working. But ultimately comes back to the human side. And what I love about you, John and you Becky and this podcast and this platform is your showcase that you elevate that and say, hey, it's about the people and we need to be caring about our people. And so over 68% of respondents said that the biggest challenge that was impacting their growth was lack of time, resources and budget. I believe it's 68%. Yeah. Now, I think what's interesting about this as we've looked at the data closer is I have a question and maybe more of a challenge for the sector is that is our lack of budget and resources a true limit or is it a prioritization issue on what's important. And something we talk about a lot here at Feather is that marketing is good with a capital G. It's not a means to the good. And typically it's budgeted and resource for as though it's a cost center that we have to do when we see it in our constituents and our customers see this as well is that it's part of the mission of the organization. Okay. He just literally reflected back. Trend number four of 2023, which is marketing is mission. And it's this thought that everything that we're doing now is marketing. It is not a line item. Thank you for bringing that up and dispelling that myth because everything we're doing in engagement with radical connection, with messaging, with storytelling with the way that we're trying to amplify the good is marketing. And it's also about our world is no longer what's happening right now in our physical space. Our nonprofit missions are so global. They're so digital. And so I really love that you're aligning that. And I got to give like one little shout out to Feather because you were one of the first companies that came to us and started storytelling about small nonprofits who could take a really modest amount of money. I'm talking like a couple hundred bucks and you take that and you show them what can be done in the marketing space, whether that's with retargeting ads or putting some serious focus on your digital campaign. And the return on that to us is not surprising because we have seen this play out in the last 10 years as we've been trying to be kind of marketers, this guy's his fundraisers. And so I just want to encourage all of you out there. I mean, whether you have massive budget for this or no budget for this, it is the future. And we need to be not only aligning resources with it, but time, creativity, innovation. I feel like you have really taught us that really well, Noah. So would love for you to riff on that or dive more into what that report is saying as it relates to that as well. Yeah. The interesting thing is that marketing does is it really sits across the entire organization. So let's take a food bank, for example. Marketing has the ability to not only help that food bank raise the profile of a key service in the community and is something that those that care about the community to live in should support the local food bank. It not only has the power to engage companies and corporations that are invested in the community to give sponsorships, to give donations of supplies, like gifts and kind. It also has the power to recruit people to be volunteers, to show up every day, to make sure that that operates. It also has the power to reach out to the beneficiary population that needs to know that this food bank might not just be for those people, it might be for me and my family. And so it has the opportunity as we adopt good marketing practices to have an impact on the entire organization's health and wellness from program impact to supporter impact. And I think as we know as fundraisers, investing and connecting our supporters to our mission is part of the mission too. The more people connect and get involved with our causes, the more they show up for other causes, the better our communities go. And so I don't see fundraising or marketing as a cost center or as you said, just a line item. It is the mission, as you say, or in our case, it is good for the capital G. I mean, it's just a different conversation. And I mean, you're talking to two people that define themselves as marketers, disguises, fundraisers. And it's like, we've felt that for a long time. So I love that it's kind of coming to its own in that sense. But Noah, you know, there's a lot of scarcity in the sector and it's easy to talk about it, but it's harder to put it into practice. Like what are you telling? What is your team, how do you coach people in the nonprofit space to not only just embrace this ideologically, but change the conversations is how you budget and how you show up, you know, throughout the year? Yeah, absolutely. One of the focus areas we help customers of Feather do and we see this show up in the report is the importance of moving from what I call channel first thinking, where we basically say, hey, we're doing all of these marketing activities. We're sending email. We're working on social media. We're doing some advertising. We're sending some direct mail pieces. That's all great and good and organizations should be using the channels that are best fit to connect with the audiences that they're trying to engage. But by moving from channel first thinking to community first thinking, we have the opportunity to better understand our audience. Marketing starts with understanding the market. We so often jump to the inks, which is why then we say we don't have a budget to do marketing, because we're so focused on inks and not the market. And so I think there's an opportunity to really move from channel first thinking to community first thinking to identify who you're trying to reach. Let's say it's a population of your current donors that haven't given them the last six months. Okay, well, what do you know about them? What do you understand about them? Maybe it's actually a population of donors that you don't even know, but you should know. And the reason you should know them is because they look a lot like your best donors. So they're your future best donors. Hey, great. What do we understand about that? And now that we understand that audience, we can begin cultivating them through the right channels with the right content. And I think that's a big switch is if we move the conversation from channel first thinking to community first thinking, marketing, even in small ways, as you shared earlier, Becky, can make a huge impact because we're aligning it to our goals. We're trying to mobilize a community towards a specific impact as part of our mission. And that's what marketing is. It's not about email. It's not about social or tick tock or telethons or billboards. It's about moving community and mobilizing them towards some sort of impact. The inks are just the things that we do to build those purposeful connections. Well, you had us a community at that point because we really do believe it is everything. It's the final value of our company. And I just want to compliment you and thank you because you started off this conversation by saying we wanted to listen. And it wasn't about what we thought. And I think we get talked out a lot in this sector. And really, it's about how are we listening? And I was just in a session a little bit ago with Mallory Erickson and donor perfect. And they were talking about how do you build these donor personas? It's not enough anymore to go in and look at somebody's demographics or their giving profile. But you have to look at their behaviors. You've got to look at their psychographics. And it's almost like this Venn diagram of how are we really seeing the human being? How are we looking at their motivations? And we're not just going to guess. We're going to go and ask them and give them a voice in this conversation. And so all of a sudden, it's not just marketing that you're creating. And that is perhaps maybe what your leadership thinks or your or your board thinks. But the marketing becomes the mission, when your community rises up and they give voice to what they see in the mission, they express it. They interpret it through their testimony, through their own network, through volunteerism, as you've mentioned before, through their giving, through the way they bring others to the table. And so I just, this conversation is really resonating with me. And I just have one final question for you. Like, what would be a place that you would recommend somebody could start today? And we've talked about the mindsets, we've kind of talked about the action. What is a one good thing that somebody could do today to start to lean into this collective effort of marketing? So the one good thing I would share is for organizations to identify what's actually working for them. The best benchmarks are your own data and learning. And so I think it's important when we say, oh, we don't have enough to do this. We don't have enough to do that. Oh, that's what big organizations do, or that's what other organizations do. Or as some I talked to you last week, say we're an invisible cause. How do we really showcase our market invisible causes? You know, whether it's rare diseases or whether it's a societal change that is hard to speak about or policy change or environmental policy. And so I think what's interesting is a lot of times we lean into what we can't do or what we don't have, but we all have something that's working unless you're a brand new organization and really focusing on identifying what is working right now. Why is that working? Even if you only have five major donors or you have 20 donors at all, or you have 2,000 donors or 20,000 donors, some things working, someone is supporting your cause, someone's getting involved in your program, someone's volunteering every day and sitting down and saying, I see you, you're a part of this organization, let me understand why you're a part of this organization. What was your path to becoming a part of the organization the way you are? Because looking at those patterns of what is working sometimes are the best path to actually then replicate so that you can continue to have growth and impact. I love that. Oh my gosh. Every time we talk to NOAA, we have these kind of like breakthrough moments, but you're building something that is uniquely beautiful for that organization that plays to their strengths and it's going to cut through the noise in so many ways too. How do people get the report? No, I mean, someone listening, you want to dive into this information? How can they find it? Yeah, so the best way to find it is to click the link in the show notes, especially if you're listening to this regardless of where you are on the internet. Don't click on it yet because you're probably driving or walking, finish that. And then you click on it later and you can download a free digital call. You can download a free digital call. You can download a free digital call. You can download a free digital call. 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Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts or come find them at fundraisingisfunny.com. We can't wait to see you there. ♪♪♪♪