Purpose-Driven Marketing With Stu Swineford

Business Leaders Podcast

People often have this misconception that investments in marketing almost always run contrary to an organization's mission. They feel that any spending that isn’t directly tied to the mission runs counter to the good you accomplish in the world. Bob Roark and his guest, Stu Swineford, tackle this very subject today. Stu is the author of Mission: Uncomfortable - How Nonprofits Can Embrace Purpose-Driven Marketing to Survive and Thrive. Stu talks about purpose-driven marketing, showing that marketing isn’t really a bad thing, especially if you’re the leader of a non-profit organization or its marketing department.

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[embed]https://youtu.be/XIxoAhUkEbc[/embed]

Purpose-Driven Marketing With Stu Swineford

Marketing is not a dirty word. As a leader of a nonprofit organization or its marketing department, you may have been told that investments in marketing run contrary to your organization's mission. At the least, you may feel that any spending can't be directly tied to the mission that runs counter to the good you accomplish in the world. We're going to talk about that. My guest is Stu Swineford. Stu is the co-author of Mission Uncomfortable: How Nonprofits Can Embrace Purpose-driven Marketing to Survive and Thrive. He's also the co-founder of Relish Studio, a digital marketing firm and he's also the host of his own podcast, Relish This. Stu, thanks for taking your time.

Thank you for having me on, Bob. I appreciate it.

Fair disclosure, Stu and I are working together on a website. They do awesome work so I can attest to that right upfront. One of the things that we wanted to cover is one, we will talk about purpose-driven marketing and then the pillars of purpose-driven marketing, which are attract, connect, bond and inspire. Stu, maybe the first thing that we want to dig into is your thoughts on purpose-driven marketing.

Thanks, Bob. Purpose-driven marketing is a phrase that we came to over the course of a few years where we're trying to give people the idea that marketing shouldn't just be an activity that you spend money on and check a box but it is something that should return an outcome. A lot of people think about marketing as a cost. One of the things that we've tried to establish in purpose-driven marketing is that it's more of an investment. It's something that you're doing to either run experiments or prove a hypothesis or tackle a challenge that you're having with your organization.

There should be an outcome attached to that and it should be a positive outcome. That's what purpose-driven marketing is all about. Purpose-driven marketing can be applied to both for-profit and nonprofit businesses. It's marketing that has a specific goal in mind and we try to create all of the mechanisms by which you can attain that goal. In the context of Mission Uncomfortable, the book that I wrote, it's geared toward those businesses in the nonprofit sector specifically but the purpose-driven sector, additionally, to try and help them fuel growth.

Fair disclosure, too, I read your book. Thank you for providing the copy. In the nonprofit arena, the folks that are in charge of marketing are trying to identify who their avatar or ideal donor and/or client might be.

We usually start these discussions with an exercise that we call the values, vision and mission exercise. It takes some nonprofits a second to wrap their arms around it because their entire MO is around values, vision and mission. Making sure that that culture is intact and defined and everyone has a North Star so that we know what direction that we're going. When we work for for-profit businesses, we do an exercise that we call find the money and this can be something that a nonprofit can do as well. Essentially, it's looking back at your prior performance if you have historical data to look at and finding out information about your volunteers and donors.

Who are these people that are rising to the top that tend to produce the best outcomes for your organization? How can you get in front of more of those? The persona exercise then follows on the heels of that where after you've established who these people are, you can look for similarities and develop a persona or an avatar for that target audience that you're trying to reach. Whether it's in the volunteer space, donor space, corporate donor space or a repeat donor engagement. Trying to identify so that when those people show up, you understand what they're looking for and what is motivating them that'll get them engaged with your organization.

One of the things that hadn't crossed my mind, not that it should, is I was thinking about mostly donors and projects. What I was not keen on was the recognition of the contribution of the volunteer. In the book, you were talking about structuring. “This volunteer’s been working on five separate projects in this one group. This volunteer did ten projects.” It's a mechanism to reward a continual effort, which was quite remarkable.

[bctt tweet="Purpose-driven marketing can be applied to both for-profit and non-profit that has a very specific goal in mind." via="no"]

We've talked about stakeholders and those can be anyone who has some attachment to or engagement with your organization so that could be everybody from a beneficiary. For example, if you’re a nonprofit that helps the homeless. The houseless person has a touchpoint with your organization and they may then, hopefully through all the activities that you're doing to help them out, become a volunteer. At that point, they have two touches with your organization. From the volunteer standpoint, they may be able, at some point, to donate. They may become a repeat donor. They may become a board member at some point or may have the opportunity to rise up and bring a corporation that they're involved in as a sponsor.

Those stakeholders become valuable. You can escalate and move people around that ecosystem with your organization. It's easier to sell to or to get somebody to take a second action than it is to get them to take the first action. This was where the inspire phase comes into play. Being mindful of how to keep people engaged with your organization even in off-times. If you don't have any volunteer opportunities, how do you keep them engaged? How do you get them to spread the word? Leveraging all of those assets to your advantage as a nonprofit.

In the nonprofit space versus the for-profit space, both of them have mission statements and have things they’re trying to do and at the end of the day, it's a tax code differential. A lot of the business principles that apply to nonprofits apply to for-profit. That recognition has come a long way. We were talking about the pillars of purpose-driven marketing. We were talking about the avatar in round terms. Let's dig into the first activity, which would be the attract side of the pillar.

The attract phase is when you, as an organization or a business like a nonprofit, are trying to gain someone's attention in some fashion so that they come to your website or reach out in some way to take an action. That could be everything from earned media through public relations, what you're doing on social media, blog posts, for example, that you're putting out there that provide value and people are interested in that exchange. It’s essentially all of those elements that draw people to your organization. It could be a sign on the side of a truck if you're out and about giving food away or picking up donations for your organization. All of those places that you show up in that ecosystem where you have the ability to attract someone to your organization, that's essentially the attract phase. It's similar to what you might be doing in the for-profit space as well.

I'm curious, in thinking about the nonprofit sophistication, I'm sure it varies as far as SEO and paid traffic and so on. What's your experience and exposure to those types of techniques by nonprofits?

Nonprofits have some additional resources that either many aren't aware of or they don't have the capacity to take advantage of them. One is Google gives out grants to nonprofits and you have to qualify for the grant but the bar is low on that. Essentially, Google gives you $10,000 a month in Google AdWords spend to play with to drive traffic back to your property. That's an example of one of those things that maybe nonprofits aren't taking advantage of.

The other thing that we certainly see and this comes into this inbound methodology if anyone out there has done some research on inbound, is providing something of value to use as a value exchange. When we talk about value, this might be some checklist. If you're an organization that does a lot of work in the outdoor space like Leave No Trace, for example, they put out these little cards that you can clip to your backpack. They give you all the information about Leave No Trace and how to get rid of a campfire that you've created or how to deal with waste, for example. All of these little things would come on a card.

They could give that card away as a PDF on the site for people who are exploring ways to be more thoughtful in the outdoors and essentially put that behind an exchange of information. The idea is they're trying to build their email list so they get your email address in exchange for this valuable piece of information. Now, you're even more in their ecosystem. They've managed to go from the attract phase through the connect phase and now, they can start to work on that bond phase where they're continuing to engage with that person after they've managed to connect with them.

If there's such thing as a typical nonprofit but let's say you're shooting at the median of the nonprofit space, do you think that there's a lot of knowledge in that space about landing pages and the various mechanisms to take and connect with these potential folks?

[caption id="attachment_5830" align="aligncenter" width="600"] Purpose Driven Marketing: Find information about your volunteers and donors that tend to produce the best outcomes for your organization, and try to get in front of more of those.[/caption]

One of the things we see a lot is nonprofits have a limited budget, limited staff and sometimes, a little bit limited experience in the marketing piece and that's where we tried to position ourselves as somebody who can help them out. One of the larger things that we see happening is the reliance upon a single landing page. Usually, that landing page isn't designed particularly well and it's trying to serve a variety of purposes. It's trying to be the contact form and the landing page from some specific ask that they've done to donate, for example, or to get on the mailing list. They're trying to do too many things with one single page.

One of the things that we do recommend is tailoring those landing pages for specific asks and potentially specific audiences. Going back to the Google Grants idea, if one were to take advantage of that program, one would hopefully not drive people just to the homepage but to this landing page. The ad that you ran would say something specific. For example, we're looking to increase donations. Let's say that you're a nonprofit and you're trying to get $100,000 in donations in order to buy a piece of equipment. Instead of just sending people to a generic landing page that says Donate Now, what you would ideally do is set up a second landing page that is speaking specifically to that ask that you made in Google.

That landing page would talk about this piece of equipment and it would tell a story about how good you're going to be able to do once this piece of equipment is purchased and how many people you're going to be able to help through access to this piece of equipment. Ask for the donation and maybe make some suggestions like, “$20 will get us this much closer.” Creating a story around that and not being afraid to let that landing page help reinforce what you asked for in the ad. Where we see a huge disconnect happening in the nonprofit space is that they tend to just send directly to a page that says Donate Now and then they reuse that page for a variety of campaigns.

Not being in the marketing world like you, I would imagine that there are a lot of for-profit and nonprofits that try to use one landing page.

It's common. There are a few fairly standard mistakes they get made on landing pages. The first is asking before you have permission to ask. The idea that was hammered into everybody's head as a marketer back in the ‘80s and ‘90s was to get to the sale, reducing the number of clicks, etc. Those are all great pieces of advice if taken with a grain of salt. On a landing page, remembering that a nonprofit in particular has an uphill battle so there's friction at every step. Overcoming that friction is one of the challenges that need to be top of mind on a landing page.

One of the biggest things we see is either too many different asks. Leaving the navigation up there is a common thing that we see. You want to try to keep people from being distracted but you also don't want to necessarily jump to the Donate Now immediately because people can smell marketing. They don't want to engage with a marketing machine. They want to engage with a person. Creating opportunities to tell a story, stripping out as much design as you can, tend to work well in the nonprofit space, which is a little bit contrary to what one would think. Getting to the emotions that people have that are going to drive that decision and reinforcing those emotions would be some of the things that we would highly recommend for a landing page.

Do you think in the nonprofit space that they've started to engage with the storytelling what their story is?

I know you're a big fan of Donald Miller and his StoryBrand methodology. The storytelling in the nonprofit space is a little bit of a challenge because the nonprofit itself, the people who are running it, tend to position themselves as the heroes and the people who donate tend to be portrayed as helpers. What we would recommend is attempting to flip that narrative, having the nonprofit be the guide that helps the people who are donating or volunteering be the heroes in that scenario. From a storytelling standpoint, making it more about the people who are engaging and how they're helping the constituents or the recipients of the nonprofit's benefits. If you can weave that story, you're going to see some great benefits to that.

From my observation, that's a pervasive problem where there's confusion on who's the hero and who's the guide. I've got relatives that have volunteered on the Rocky Mountain trail for a long time. You think about all the good and the work and all the stuff that they do on the trail. I don't know that there's a lot of storytelling or visual aids or videos when they're on the trail and the camaraderie of being on the trail with like-minded donors and that kind of thing. For the folks that are reading in the nonprofit space, that part about the guide-hero shift is straight-up gold. If there was nothing else out of this episode other than that, that's invaluable.

[bctt tweet="It's easier to get somebody to take a second action than it is to get them to take a first action." via="no"]

It's a subtle shift. Once you see it, it becomes obvious. It can be a little bit of a challenge to get to and that's why we're here. We're happy to talk through that with people at any point. If they need some help crafting it, we can help with that too.

It's that it's not about me, it's about them kind of deal. We've got the connect part of landing pages, trying to get that all sorted out then there's that bonding portion or bonding with the inside of the organization. What's that all about?

The bond phase is where you cement that relationship. None of this information is stuff that necessarily I came up with. I'm just able to package it all together for people. Relationships tend to be created over time so it's interactions over time. If you think about how the strongest relationships that you've built in your lifetime came about, they typically weren't fall in love at first sight and become best buddies unless you were six. They tend to be established over time. You ask a question and you get an answer. You ask another question and they ask you a question. There's a back and forth that occurs.

During the bond phase, it's a matter of trying to create opportunities to have conversations and to keep conversations going. As somebody has raised their hand, for example, to say, “I'm interested in your organization and would like to learn more,” or going back to our outdoor scenario, “I'd like this PDF that has information about how I can be a better and safer camper.” Those people have raised their hand and said, “Your organization is neat and I'd like to be attached to it in some fashion.” The bond phase comes into play when you start those interactions and you start trying to provide people with additional things of value.

If they download a brochure about camping, maybe you ask them if they'd like to have a brochure about fire safety or how to how to build a trail or things like that. The reason I said ask them for it is this is one place where people tend to shove stuff at their audience as opposed to asking what things they might be interested in. When you ask, that creates another touch. If I say, “Bob, if I sent you my book and you woke up one day and my book was in front of you, you'd be like, ‘What's this thing? Why is this in front of me?’” Versus if I said, “Bob, would you like a copy of my book?” I wait and you say, “That sounds neat.” There are two interactions. If you take that relationship, our interactions over time idea, I enabled a couple more in that journey.

Somewhere in a conversation, there was a ratio that somebody says, “You 80% educate and 20% ask.” I don’t know if that's the true number but the short answer is you’re more on education and providing than asking is what I got.

We have a ratio and we still use this ratio and it's typically geared towards social media. This would maybe come back into that attract phase. Let's say you have a single channel, whether that's Twitter or Facebook or whatever your channel. Let's just pick Facebook. You're going to put out fifteen posts on Facebook over the course of five weeks, so three posts a week. The ratio of information to ask should be 14 to 1 in that regard, and 10 of those are what are thought of as maven informational items.

Those can be some other blog post or some article that you read that you think your audience might be interested in. Add a little bit of...