Marketing for Non-Profits: Building a Communications Ecosystem on a Small Budget

Webinar Transcript

Mohamed Hamad: Good morning, everybody. How’s everybody doing today? We’re very excited to have everyone on board today for a marketing for nonprofit session. My name is Mohamed Hamad, founder of Third Wunder, and with me I have Marissa Norton, executive director of Vent Over Tea. This is going to be a very exciting session brought to you by the CHSSN. Before we get started, Marissa, you want to tell us a little bit about yourself and Vent Over Tea?

Marissa Norton: Yeah, for sure. I mean, I’m seeing some familiar names in the chat right now. So, I’m Marissa. Like Mo mentioned, I’m the ED at Vent Over Tea. We’re a mental health nonprofit that provides free active listening services across Quebec. Also behind the scenes I’m also a communications consultant and in the past I actually was a a Wunder at Third Wunder so I worked with Mo for oh what six years five six years way back when so I’m really excited to be here and be able to talk about comms in nonprofit.

Mohamed: Yeah and a little bit about Third Wunder we’re a digital marketing agency based out of Montreal and for the last while we’ve been working with a lot A lot of nonprofits and philanthropic organizations helping them out with their marketing and communications, web development and design, and just digital presence in general.

All right, I see a lot of people coming in from all over the place. Lovely to see all of these names. Hi everyone. So today this is a three-part series. And the series today we are talking about marketing for nonprofits, but we are setting up a three-part series here. The next one is going to be about AI for nonprofits and how to work with AI. And the last one, if you are not familiar, the CHSSN mapping project is an initiative by the CHSSN to basically put All of the health and social service network on a map with demographic data and census data so that organizations can kind of go in and see who’s doing what where what are the stats around their neighborhoods what are the the gaps in services and how you can basically better the community and support the community with your services or collaborate with other organizations And to use the data to help, get more funding or, get support, for grant writing, based on real world data.

Communications versus marketing in a nonprofit

Mohamed: It’s saying that, today we are going to be talking, like I said, marketing for nonprofits, and I think it’s really important to, define really what the difference between marketing and communications, and the foundation really here. Is that marketing tends to focus on a targeted objective, right? It’s leading towards selling a service, selling a product, or getting a tangible goal. So if you are selling a widget, you want to have a marketing campaign to let people know about it, understand what the product is and who’s it for, and you you would usually use ads, promotions, and certain tactics to get that. Whether it’s an event to maybe let’s say convert on an event and sign up or to have a goal at the end. Communications is a little bit different. It’s a it’s broader and that’s what most organizations really need, especially nonprofits, because really it’s about outreach, education, community engagement, reporting to either your funders or your donors or to your constituency to let them understand the impact of the work that you’re doing. but it’s it’s about fostering trust at the end of the day. Marissa, maybe you like to say a few things about that.

Marissa: Yeah, the way I see comms is it’s reputation, it’s trust, it’s storytelling, it’s how do we communicate our mission and our vision, and then the marketing side of things is really what are the kind of objectives that we have where we want to create some sort of conversion, whether it’s a donation campaign, we’re going to be using marketing tactics and marketing strategies to do a donation campaign because we’re going to be incorporating a bunch of different tools, a bunch of different tactics. Our objectives are monetary objectives, but then once the campaign’s done, we kind of revert back into communications where we’re sharing the impact that those donations are making. So if you kind of think about it versus reputation versus Conversion, that’s a really nice way to kind of think about communications versus marketing in nonprofit.

Why nonprofit communications plans stall

Mohamed: Absolutely, and one thing that we’d like to know, and we’re going to throw out a poll over here, and if any if everybody attending could answer the poll, we want to know how many have how many of you have a dedicated communications person or a marketing person in your organization. If you can throw what out there, let’s see. All right. So it’s it’s a neck and neck race here. A lot of folks have a dedicated communications person, which is great.

Marissa: It’s nice to see, and it is something that can be tough when it comes to smaller nonprofit teams where we’re trying to focus on. You know, achieving funding objectives. So maybe a comms position isn’t necessarily a high priority, but when we think about it in terms of a role that is going to help us communicate our vision and communicate the impact that we’re making, and that falls into outreach spaces, it falls into event spaces. It’s a little bit easier to kind of see the scope and the value of that type of role, but I do understand that sometimes it is a harder role to. kind of find that space for, especially in a tighter budget when we’re, you know, prioritizing a social worker who’s going to intervene with the community versus having a comms person running certain things. So it’s nice to see that there is space for that in these in these organizations. But I totally understand that it is a tough role to fit. It’s also becoming a harder role to fit when it comes to volunteers. So, Vent Over Tea is primarily a volunteer-run organization. We do have some volunteers that help with comms, but. As of right now, I’m running our comms and I’m also running a bunch of other things. So it is a hard thing to find that space for.

Mohamed: Absolutely, and with smaller organizations, people tend to wear different hats.

Marissa: For sure.

Mohamed: You know, and sometimes things get stretched thin. And what ends up happening is, you know, there’s a few patterns that we end up recognizing when it comes to that role in itself. And just for a update on that, we have a almost 70-30 split. 68% have a dedicated person, and 32% do not. So this is interesting information to know. So some of the patterns that we recognize is, you know, organizations will start and get very. Ambitious about starting a blog and will start writing content, but then you know seasonalities come along, you know holiday season, campaign season, and then things fall by the wayside. Or you know you start off with a monthly newsletter and you know you skip a month or or not. You know this happens a lot, Marissa. You must have had that experience. I know I have.

Marissa: I’m very guilty of that. It happens. It does happen. Things kind of come up and you have to reprioritize. And a lot of times when you have somebody who’s in a comms role, they’re also, like you said, wearing other hats. And what ends up happening is that they take on more high priority things. So maybe they started out with a really ambitious strategy, a really great idea, and they’re starting to get into the swing of things. But then a team member in a different area leaves and they have to help support that, or they start falling into. The admin trap where the majority of their time is running reports and admin versus running kind of public facing things. So it happens. It’s it’s totally common.

Strategy versus tactics: what to decide first

Mohamed: Yeah, and with that, you know, we we get very excited about certain tactics, you know, starting a blog or you know, it’s a great idea to you know start a newsletter because we want to get the information out, or a social media series and all of that. But the one thing that we want to recognize here is the difference between strategy and tactics, right? And the strategy around your communication, your marketing needs to be the bigger picture objective, right? What is it that we’re trying to achieve by launching, let’s say, a blog or a newsletter, you know? And who is it targeting, you know? So the the main core tenets of a strategy really should outline the objective. What is it you’re trying to achieve? Who is it that you’re trying to talk to or reach? What is the message that you want to put out there? And how do you measure that? Right? Because you want to understand how successful you are with that. Now, within a strategy, could be multiple tactics, right? You can to get the message out, you can create a blog and a social media campaign and create TikTok reels or TikTok stories or whatever it is, but really, if if you’re not clear on where you’re going with this and who you’re talking to, all of it starts to get very muddled. And you can have multiple strategies throughout the year, but it’s really outlining that is is key there.

Marissa: Yeah, for sure. And when we’re looking at kind of developing these strategies within our kind of overall Strategic planning for the organization or our planning when we’re applying for funding, it’s a lot easier to think of that step back approach where we look at the overall objective. What do we want to do here? And then list out a couple things versus when we go into, let’s say, a funding application and they ask about your communication objectives and you say, “We’re going to start a TikTok. We’re going to do a podcast. We’re going to do that.” When you get to the end of the year, maybe you haven’t been able to achieve those things. And that’s a bit of a harder thing because it’s a very specific thing that you’ve named in that objective versus we’re going to increase our amount of youth engaging with our digital communications channels and then you list out the ideas that you want to approach. It’s a little bit easier to pivot when you need to and have that that room and that grace to pivot versus naming exactly what you want to do and then having to explain why you didn’t achieve those things.

How to write SMART communications goals

Mohamed: Exactly, and I like a little bit of a framework to establish sort of like a a foundation for a a strategy and making sure that our tactics really hit the mark. This is your favorite acronym here.

Marissa: I love a SMART goal. Yeah, a SMART goal. It’s the easiest way to map things out, and it’s something that should be applied to really anything besides just comms. And it’s a great way for you to kind of see maybe where the gaps are in your overall strategic objective. So a SMART goal is something that is specific. It says exactly what you’ll do. It’s something that’s measurable and that you’re able to kind of pre cognitively think about the the the the outcome and think about how you’re going to measure that. If you think of something that you want to measure but you have no means to measure it, that’s not a specifically measurable goal, right? You need to kind of layer on top of that. It needs to be something realistic. It needs to be achievable. It’s great to have those big dreams and those big objectives, but when we’re trying to create something that we can track over time and really measure that impact, having something really grand that’s just an idea thrown out there isn’t necessarily a, I say with the acronym, not literally a smart goal. It needs to be relevant, so it needs to be something that makes sense for your mission and makes sense for your organization. If you are an organization that services seniors, you’re not necessarily going to be creating a Discord channel to engage them about a new video game that you’re developing, right? So you need to make sure that it is relevant to your organization and having something that’s time-bound, having an actual start and end date can be really helpful. And you can have multiple SMART goals within an overall goal. So if your goal is to engage more youth. And you want to have five or six different SMART goals in that, that works. So, if you want to have a goal that’s for the summertime, if you want to have a goal that is for a specific program, creating those individual areas can be a really helpful way for you to kind of track that measurement very specifically.

Mohamed: Absolutely, everybody, if you have any questions, we’re going to be taking questions towards the end. Throw them into the chat so that we can bookmark them for later. but please let us know your thoughts and if you have any any questions about what we’re talking about today.

Voice and tone: staying consistent across channels

Mohamed: yeah, smart goals are a great way to focus a a strategy and to really maximize the intent of any of the tactics that we’re going for. if let’s say you know you’re going for a social media campaign. Time, budget, how do you measure it, who you’re talking to, and how you get there. Now, you know, within within digital marketing in itself, there are a lot of channels. There’s a lot of spaces to be to reach out to your audience, and within those channels, there’s different groups of people to engage with, right? And one of the things that we like to establish early on when we’re talking about marketing and communications is the difference between tone and voice, right? Having a established voice for the organization, to establish the the the personality of the organization, what is its mission, how it wants to communicate, what it does. If that is something that is Concretely defined, it makes it a lot easier to adapt your message to different organizations, to different audiences and in different channels. And that’s what we mean by tone, right? So the analogy is you know think of someone you know well, you know they sound different in different spaces, right? If they’re in a board meeting, they sound a little different, and if they’re at dinner with the family, they sound completely different. But who they are at the core is the same person. So, the the objective here is to create a consistency across channels with the message, with the organization’s objectives, and how they present themselves.

Marissa: This is also something really important when you’re working with team members that are kind of managing different channels. So if you have A bunch of different program managers running different different things and they all have their own different initiatives on social media, for example. It’s really important for them to kind of align with the tone and adjust align with the voice and adjust the tone for their audience. So if you’re an organization that supports youth, seniors, families, young adults, you know your tone and your approach is going to be different for each of them, but the voice has to be unified because if not, then there’s a bit of a disconnect there. There’s a bit of a Of a confusion of who is really running this, whose whose channel is this? So it’s really great to align on this early on, and adjust it over time. You know, our organizations are growing, they’re changing their programs, they’re changing their overall kind of strategies. So that might be something that is a conversation during strategic planning time is is our voice the same? Is our tone the same? Are there some adjustments that we want to bring into this?

Mohamed: Yeah, absolutely. And one of the big things is how you address specific topics. How do you address inclusivity, in your messaging? How do you, use acronyms, for instance, or, specific industry terms? You know, so if your if your tone is is more formal, you can, you know, potentially given the audience, you could be a little bit more. Jargony, for instance, but don’t be overly presumptuous in a sense, right? Being professional doesn’t mean condescending, for instance, where some people some some voices are a bit too strict on legalities, for instance, and have to be in a very specific language. But you can’t do that in a space like social media, for instance, where things need to be a little bit more human, a little bit more explanatory, a little bit more emotive and connective, right? So, if you know the the the tone that is for an annual report just won’t fly over there, right? So, being able to establish those different levels and those different types of tones is is key to good communication. Strategy especially for consistency.

Marissa: Yeah, a really great exercise that we do when we build out brand identity documents, for example, is we do an exercise of if our organization was a voice, they speak like this dot dot dot, but not like this. Having the spectrum and seeing where you align on that spectrum can be really helpful, and it could be something where. You have that professional spectrum. We are professional but not condescending, but maybe our tone slightly shifts in different spaces when we’re speaking to funders. We’re a bit more strong on the professional side, or not professional and condescending, more professional and casual. But where do we kind of align on that? And it’s a great way to kind of map that out. And it’s something that when you bring on a new person or when you’re working with a new partner. These are the types of documents that you want to have in your in your toolkit so that you can easily refer to it, so that there’s really no disconnect when you start creating stuff.

Mohamed: Absolutely, and a few you know rules of thumb here, you know, social media is casual, is friendly, is short, while email newsletters are warm and conventional. So each each channel and each audience would want a different Tone. If you want a worksheet on how to get this set up, we’ve got something for you. Throw it into the comments if you’d like something like that, and we’ll send something out to you at the end after this session. But we’ve got some templates, some great templates that make this very easy to to to fill out if you’re in need of it.

Using AI without sounding like AI

Mohamed: Okay, we’ve got a few people requesting that. Now, this also comes really important as we are getting into the age of AI where we are using AI to help out with a lot of this stuff. And we’ll talk about this a little bit more in the next session in October. But really, if you have good documentation and good templates for this kind of thing. It makes it a lot easier for making sure that if you are using AI to assist you in writing content for any of these channels that it is based on existing vetted what you call documentation that you have right now, right? And it really smooths things out, you know. And this works if you’re hiring someone new. To onboard them, or to have as a baseline documentation for an AI to be able to help you write content for any of these channels.

Marissa: Yeah, having those rules can be really helpful, especially when you’re working with these tools. A lot of times, if you’re using any AI tool really, and you say, “Write me a social post about this new program. Here’s the link to the new program from our website.” It’s going to write out the most generic possible thing. Ever. If you give it some boundaries, if you give it some rules, here’s our brand and voice guidelines, here’s how we talk, here’s the types of acronyms that we use. When we translate, we use these types of things. It can just make that step a whole lot easier, so that you’re not necessarily having to have, you know, 20,000 conversations with this AI until you beat it to create the right piece of content. You can trust that you can follow along with this and give them that. So we kind of listed out here a couple kind of AI tells. So. They love to speak in groups of three. They love to use things like it’s not just a program, it’s a movement. They use that really kind of overly cheesy, nonprofit language that we see a lot.

Mohamed: It uses em dashes.

Marissa: That’s something that, as a writer, I love an em dash, but now I’m terrified to use them. So it uses it a lot, unfortunately. If you ask it to write a post about an impact message, I can guarantee you it will include something like together we can. Build a better tomorrow. It’ll include one of those like inspirational things at the end, and you can tell very quickly if you’re reading, let’s say you’re on LinkedIn and you’re scrolling through a bunch of posts from organizations, you can start picking up on the pattern. So you don’t necessarily want to fall into that pattern. There might be times where you need to include that type of messaging, but it is really helpful to have those those boundaries set in place, and it’s something that you can create a document that’s you know. Here’s our tone and voice. Here’s our prompt that we add into our AI tool when we’re asking it to create things, where it’s like, “Please avoid using these things,” and you list out the the tell-alls so that it knows at the gate, “These are the things that it doesn’t want me to say.” But we’ll go more into it into the next workshop, but just something to be mindful of.

Mohamed: Yes, especially acronyms and abbreviations. And so, as a simple example, I have a client there. Their acronym is MFP and they’re a financial planning tool, but it keeps thinking that it’s MyFitnessPal. Two completely different things. So, if you have industry specific acronyms, always define them for that and you know for everybody to be on the same page, right? Now, I mean, we’re talking here about actual written content, but visual identity and visual guidelines are also just as important for consistency. As it is for the tone and voice in terms of your written work, I’d like to also throw out there another poll. How many of you have brand guidelines?

Brand consistency on a small team

Mohamed: And this is a very important one in that a lot of organizations that we know either have A set of brand guidelines, visual brand, which includes their logo, their colors, their fonts, their do’s and don’ts with their visual imagery and all of that. And either sometimes it’s, you know, it was done 10 years ago when it was really outdated and hasn’t been updated, or, you know, it was it was never really done formally and you know, we just went off the cuff. Okay. I’m glad to see most people have brand guidelines. This is fantastic.

Marissa: I like Laurieve’s comment that it’s they have it, but it’s not foolproof. I think that’s a really important word to think about when we’re looking at our brand guidelines is is this foolproof? Can I give this to a new hire to follow to create a social media post and then I’m going to get an on-brand piece of content?

Mohamed: Yeah. I see over here, someone has the brand guidelines, but they’re outdated and not complete. So this is something that we see quite a bit. And again, it’s a 70-30 split here. You know, good to see that y’all have brand guidelines or some documentation about that. And we’re going to talk a little bit about that in that. Brand consistency is one of those things we’re, as human beings, we’re very visual, right? We see first before we read, right? So the the the visual impact that your visual brand makes when someone sees a poster, someone opens an email, someone lands on your website, someone sees a social post, all of that signals out who you are first, and then. Once they recognize your brand and who you are, they tend to read the copy that we just talked about and associated with who they are and how relevant it is for them. So, in saying that, it’s it’s it’s very important to make sure that you stick to your brand guidelines. And these things drift over time, and it’s one of those things that you need to realign every. Every six months to a year kind of thing to look back and see how you know how how consistent it is and it’s normal to have a little bit of drift right and every once in a while you need a bit of a refresh you know what’d you call it design sort of like design trends I would say shift every every year or so and it’s you know it’s it’s good to stay relevant and stay sharp but Still, it’s it’s it’s voice versus tone in that respect.

Marissa: It’s also something that you know we’re collaborating a lot with other organizations. We have our funding partners. These are all other brands that are going to intermingle with our brand. So having guidelines on how you interact with those is also really important. So, as most of you know, with a lot of our funding. We have requirements to include logos and mentions on certain documents, and understanding how we interact with that brand and how their logo is adapted with our content is really important. So that you know you’re not second guessing when you’re putting a logo, or you’re not doing it at the last minute, being like, “Oh, we forgot to slap this logo on there. Let’s just throw it on there.” And then they send it to the funder, and the funder goes, “That’s not following our guidelines.” So it’s really important to understand how your brand also interacts with others. I’ve seen this all too many times where we see our logo or other organizations’ logos on others’ websites and it’s the wrong logo. It’s on a bright green background when our color is more of a calm green and then we have to reach out to them. So having a document as well that you can share with partners that is, hey, when you use our brand on things, this is how it’s used. You don’t have to give them the whole brand guideline. They don’t need to understand how your tone and voice. works. They just need to understand how they should be interacting with your logo and your branding. So having that is a really important consideration.

Mohamed: Yeah, it’s always good to have internal brand guidelines and a very sort of like cut down version for external designers, collaborators, that type of thing. So that it’s like maybe a one sheet, do’s and don’ts. These are brand colors. These are the fonts we use. This is our logo and in different shapes and sizes, whether it’s a Full logo, a bilingual one, a dark background versus light background type of thing. And you know, in in a lot of places it gets you know it starts to slip and we don’t want to do that. So you know logos get stretched or switched in different places. New staff member or summer student uses an older template versus a newer one kind of thing. So consistency can break down, but if you have strong strong guidelines, it works really well.

A way to keep this consistent is, well, I think everybody’s familiar with Canva. Canva is one of those tools that has taken over the world. Everybody uses it. It’s really powerful. There’s a lot going on in there. But one thing to make sure to keep that consistency is to use your brand kit, which is a section in Canva, that Allows you to set all of the the the design assets of your brand in one place, so that if one you want to adapt a template, you can draw in from the from the brand kit and keep things consistent. And if you are using the built-in AI tools and you say use this brand kit to update this off-the-shelf template that you found. It can do that, right?

Marissa: Yeah, it just adds that extra layer of of foolproofness when you’re creating content, so that when you add a new team member, they don’t have to second guess and refer to old things. They can just see out the gate through the brand kits. Here’s how our branding looks. It’s very tempting when you get into the the world of Canva when you start looking for templates to get really excited by the bells and whistles and you see something where you’re like, “Ooh, that’s pretty. I really love this.” But then when you kind of put it against other branding things, you go, “Ooh, there’s a bit of a disconnect there.” But a lot of times, we see organizations just kind of roll with that type of thing because we don’t necessarily have somebody who’s, you know, checking for brand consistency or we’re kind of working with the “get it out there as quickly as possible” mentality, which I understand it happens. But having these these kind of back end tools set up. It can be really helpful just to try to keep things a little bit more aligned.

I also just saw the comment from Laurieve about branding on social media and collaborating with organizations where maybe their branding doesn’t align with yours. What kind of is the priority? Is it the collaboration or is it the brand consistency? In my opinion, it is the collaboration. So, if we’re looking at a social media feed, let’s say I’m looking at Vent Over Tea’s Instagram. And I see a post that I collaborated on with another organization that they designed, they put our logo on, but it doesn’t look anything like the Vent Over Tea branding. I’m not all that concerned. I’m probably the person who cares the most about the visual stuff. I don’t think the everyday community member really cares. So seeing the collaboration is probably outweighing that. If you’re able to kind of approach a collaboration with, hey, like. Can we find a middle ground where the branding works for both of us? It kind of aligns nicely. That’s also a great way to kind of get things a bit more consistent with branding, but it’s not always the case. Usually, it’s whoever’s kind of running the show can kind of go off with the thing, and then you can collaborate afterwards in other ways. So it is kind of a decision from the organizational side. What is the priority? I would imagine it’s more likely the collaboration than. The visual on that side, but if you can avoid it, great. If not, it’s totally fine.

Mohamed: Yeah, and when it comes to collaboration, you know, a lot of these tools have a lot of collaboration tools. You can take a Canva link and share it with someone and get them to comment on it and just get a gut check. You know, if if you have a few team members that have sat with the brand or know the brand a lot a lot longer than you have. It’s good to have that someone with a design eye within the team. It’s great to get their feedback on all of that, but always just throw it out there and get a good feed a good feel for what that means in in general for the consistency, the look, this the layout, the structure. Is this image really working for us or not? That kind of thing.

Marissa: Yeah, the gut check companions really. Helpful to have and like Mo mentioned, like it doesn’t need to be a communications director. It doesn’t need to be this grand designer. It could just be somebody on the team who is understood to be a visual person who can kind of see very quickly at a glance, like oh this doesn’t really align. This can align. It could be that person who’s just like a Canva wizard by interest, not necessarily by trade. Or if you have a communications person on your team, it should be that person. But if you don’t have a comms person in that space, then find the person who has the interest who’s going to be available to gut check for you.

Mohamed: Yeah, and a lot of times it has to do also with how does someone else see it, right? Because sometimes you know it looks great to you or whatever it is, and then you share it with someone and they’re like, that reminds me of this, and it’s a negative feeling, and then you’re like, oh, I see it now, right? So getting in in you know because because you’re going out to a broad audience internally we always think that you know we’ve got the right message and we want it. Getting a little bit of a group feel goes a long way to you know foolproofing your your or crowd-proofing your message before it goes out and you’re like oh no I didn’t I didn’t see that perspective or that angle especially with sensitive you know sensitive topics.

Which gets us to, you know, talking about the message that you want to get out, right? And when it comes to the general message thrown out there, we’ve got the voice, we’ve got the visual identity, but we also want to make sure that the message hits and lands correctly where it needs to be for that audience. And so it’s all about taking the The tone, the voice, the audience, the visual brand and the visual identity all mixed in together, especially when you’re thinking about it in terms of your your strategy and your SMART goals, right? Is it reaching that audience with the message that you want, and is it giving them a call to action or a a message that you can measure later, right? So, if you’re somewhere in social media land and you want them to comment or to like or to share to get the message out, if you’re sending out an email where you want them to actually click on a button or register or sign up or donate or anything like that, the the the all of that needs to come together to get to that end goal of your to to that smart goal that you want.

Marissa: Oh, I don’t know if that was just me, but I did freeze a little bit. I don’t know if anyone can comment on that. I just want to make sure they heard that point.

Mohamed: Yeah, we’ve had a few people talk about having a some connection issues. We apologize for that. Hopefully, in the recording, all of this will come in nice and clear. Just to say that we are we are recording this. A recording of this video will be sent out after this session, and we will have a translated version of this sent out. Thank you, AI, for being able to translate audio into any language.

Marissa: Yeah, it’s creepy, but it’s cool.

Meeting your audience on the channels they use

Mohamed: Right. So, speaking of You know, meeting your audience where are where they’re at. We talked about this a few times and it’s it’s just one of those things that’s really important. You know, meeting your audience where they are at. So being able to be conversational in Facebook groups, communicative in an email announcement, and not making assumptions. So as you go along, you will learn how people like to be talked to. In the different channels, and the measurement of your communication is what will lead you to understanding better what message landed versus another, right? These things can be done in different ways, like A/B testing or anything like that. But at a high level, really, it’s understanding your audience. And a lot of the times, people get very excited about being in every channel all the time. You don’t have to focus on the channels that work for you or you know your audience is in, right? If your audience is in a Facebook group and there’s a lot of communications around there, there’s no need to start a TikTok channel because it’s cool right now. Focus on where they are. If you know, if they if you don’t get a lot of visits on your website, for instance. Go to the social platform. Use your email because you have all everybody’s email and you know that you can reach them there. Those type things are considerations in the strategy and based on your your real world data.

Marissa: It’s always important to kind of try to keep that window open when you’re having conversations with your community. So, if you’re leading a support group, for example, ask them, hey. Where would you like to know about these things most? I’ve seen really great examples from organizations where they’ve chatted with their participants and were like, “Hey, what’s the best way to communicate with you?” They’ll say, “Actually, you know what? I like a WhatsApp group. I like a Discord group. I like a Facebook group.” Having those questions, and it doesn’t mean that you have to immediately jump into that channel, you know, check to see if you have capacity for it. If you have somebody on the team or yourself who knows how to use those things or has the time to learn how to use those things. You don’t have to pivot a hundred percent into that, but if you have the means and it is something that the community around you is really excited about, it’s a great avenue to explore. And then you can kind of think about, okay, if we’re transitioning to a WhatsApp group, do we necessarily still need an email newsletter for this program? Do they engage with this? Then we look at our metrics on our email tool and see, oh, you know, not many people are opening our emails, but maybe. They’ll check out our WhatsApp messages and we can actually see when people are reading it. So, try to think about what is going to be the best use of your time, and not necessarily let’s try to get everywhere all at once.

Bilingual communications and Quebec French

Mohamed: Yeah, absolutely. And when we’re talking about meeting your audience where they are, it’s also communicating with them in the language that they prefer, and Making sure you have bilingual consistency when it comes to your communications. One, we are in Quebec and, making sure that we are bilingual or French first. So, this is a great resource, to be able to make sure that the language or the translations you have are adequate, and it helps with the consistency that we’re talking about.

Marissa: Yeah, the Vitrine linguistique, it’s a public website, a public database that you can access. It’s created by the OQLF, so it’s compliant with with the language, and it’s a really great tool to gut check things. So, if you’re writing out some bilingual content, and you’re not really sure if you’re maybe you’re using the right terminology, gut check with the Vitrine linguistique. It’s a really fantastic resource. It’s also a really good tool to implement when you’re using AI tools. So. Anytime that I’m doing any translation, I don’t say, “Hey, translate this to French.” It’s going to translate to France-France French. It’s going to use outdated terminology or it’s going to use very strict French writing. I will say, “Hey, translate This to French Québécois, following the OQLF Vitrine linguistique,” and I’ll also include additional prompts like. Be sure to use this acronym when we’re referring to the organization in French because we don’t use the direct translation. We use this instead, so that again you’re not spending an extra hour of your day going through every single line and then you’re like I could have just written this at this point. So it’s a really great resource to refer to and it also makes sure that you keep things compliant. It makes sure that you’re avoiding too much anglicism if you’re not in. Using that in your everyday French language for your organization, so I definitely recommend checking them out. It’s something that was originally kind of used for a lot of businesses and a lot of journalists, but it’s something that I recommend any organization bookmark and have ready to go at any moment.

Mohamed: Absolutely, especially with acronyms and, you know, because there is, like, as you mentioned, if you just ask it to, if you ask an AI to translate to French, it will baseline to French. From France, there is a difference between translation and localization.

Marissa: Yeah.

Mohamed: Right. Localization is really making sure that the terms and expressions of the region are what comes across. And you know, we’ve got different localizations for everywhere. This is a great way to make sure that you nail that.

Vanity metrics versus what actually matters

Mohamed: So. Now that we’ve talked about communications and branding and where to reach out to people and how to reach out to folks, we need to know how to measure any of our outreach and how that really what that really looks like. One of the things that we see most people default to is what we call vanity metrics and vanity metrics really is is that the the the big numbers that are flashy and you’re like okay from a high level you’re like this this looks good this sounds good we’re doing good you know those out of your metrics could be like the total number of followers that you have and as social media changes it’s not really about the follower count but it’s more about the engagement count for instance or you know how many people visited your website is that really relevant or how many people visited the blog post and actually read the blog post and spent time on that. That matters more than let’s say the bigger picture vanity metrics. Vanity metrics look great in in most cases and a lot of people default to them because they they’re flashy, right? But when you’re measuring for a campaign or a specific smart goal, you want to be a little bit more precise.

Marissa: Yeah, and I mean a lot of times with Our funding requirements or our own organizational goals, we have to report on our communication tactics. And I I’ve noticed over the last couple years that there’s a lot more specifics in our reporting structures, where we’re not yet at like every single line item, but we are asked to provide impact messaging. We’re asked to provide how many times we’re using x amount of logo on things. It’s something really important to track on. And it’s also a great way to show to your funder that, hey, we’re taking this project, you know, we’re taking this and we’re really making sure that we associate the funding with the project and the impact, and you’re able to track how many times you’ve slapped the logo on a flyer or x amount of things. So making sure that you have those measurement tactics in place versus just defaulting to kind of the top of the line data that you see when you access a measurement tool. it just helps you kind of you know build that story out a little bit better and help you understand what is that actual tangible impact that we’re making. If you say that we’ve reached 20,000 impressions on social media, impressions could be me on Facebook scrolling and I see your post and I scroll past it. That’s considered an impression. That doesn’t mean anything. Did I engage with that post? Did I share that post? Did I click on the link on that post? These are the types of things that help you see. Are we actually using our time effectively and creating this content? Are we reaching the right people?

Google Analytics and Google Search Console, explained

Mohamed: Absolutely, and there’s there’s a lot of different places that you’re going to get your metrics from. One of the things that I’ve experienced is on websites, a lot of organizations don’t have any tracking or have tracking, but have forgotten the login for it, or it’s been set up a long time ago and nobody knows that it actually exists, or that kind of thing, and There’s two types of tracking that you can put on a website. There’s Google Analytics, which is the type of engagement that you have on the website. So it’s when someone lands on a website, what have they done? What pages they’ve seen? What things they’ve clicked on? How long they’ve stayed on a page or certain sections of your website? And what’s the path they’ve taken around? Google Search Console is. What happens before, at least on Google and Google search, what happens before they get to your website? So, what did they search that showed your website? What keywords or terms that people are searching where you show up in the search results, and where you are in those search results, right? So, if you are providing a service in a specific region, you want to know. How many people have typed out, you know, your your service into the search search search box, and how often that happens, and have you shown up in front of them, right? And if they do get to your website, that’s when analytics comes along. What did they click on? Which page did they land on? How long they spent there? And did they engage with an action. Did they sign up? Did they donate? Did they register for an event or whatever, right? Social media has the same things: impressions, views, follows, likes, comments, and shares, and all of that.

And when it comes to deciding which metrics actually matter more, it’s about the goal that you have in the first place. So if you’re if if you post out a reel about a new program, you know the number of people that have actually seen it is good. But if it’s a reel and they’re just scrolling through, did it really matter? Right? How long in how did they watch it? Did they get to a certain point in in the viewership of that reel? How many times have they seen it? Did they share it? Did they like it? Did they save it for later? That’s the type of thing that matters. If you’re trying to engage with a conversation, let’s say a poll, how many people actually filled out a poll, versus how many people saw it, for instance. Did they comment? Did they reply? That type of thing. So being clear in your strategy early on will make it easier for you to know what. Want to measure and then be able to report that on that later.

Marissa: Yeah, and I mean, things always change, especially with social media. You might have set a strategy or a tactic in March, and now the tool that you’re using, let’s say you we wanted to do something with Instagram and they completely change the way that something is set up. You’re gonna have to pivot. It’s the reality of a lot of these channels. We don’t control the powers that be on social media, and they’re always changing their minds about things. And sometimes you’ll be able to track. something and then the next day they paywall it or they decide oh we need to have this type of account to access this so, and being mindful of that and having that that room that grace to understand like we might not always have the answers but maybe there’s some things that we can track besides this to help you kind of see the impact and sometimes we do just want to produce things because we want to share them with our community not every single thing that you publish on social media needs To have a SMART goal attached to it, it’s a nice thing to have, and more often than not, you could probably find a way to like red string it to a SMART goal. But sometimes we just want to connect with our community and and achieve some sort of connective moment. I do believe that’s part of an overall strategy is is to connect with our community and reach them where they are at. But I do just want to be mindful of, you know, sometimes spontaneity, there’s space for that in social media and in our strategies.

Mohamed: Absolutely, and there’s always surprises. Like sometimes you post something and you didn’t really expect you you weren’t really intending for it to start a conversation, but it did, and you end up with a lot of comments and conversation, and you’re like, that’s fantastic. Yeah, you know.

Marissa: Then a whole new thing comes of it, and you’re like, we didn’t realize we would start this, but this is what we’re building on now. We’re just going to roll with it.

Mohamed: Exactly. And from that, you can take those numbers and you can tell a good story when it comes to reporting at the end of the time.

Marissa: the end of the the the the campaign or the engagement you can really use those numbers to understand the community to to get the next message across better right yeah we love using our numbers when we’re doing our reports and it just helps us really align with our assumptions that we went into a project and it’s something that like If we’re reporting on a program and we say we went into it expecting to be reaching these people, but after looking at our metrics, we noticed that we were actually reaching this this community instead, and it was a really amazing moment where we found that pivot point. Those are the types of things that funders want to see. They want to see your journey into this program, into this project, and they want to see how you adapted to change. And they also want to celebrate the successes and also see the learning moments. You can acknowledge that. We had this specific goal in mind, didn’t necessarily work out the way we wanted to, but then out of it, we developed this whole new thing that really made an impact. And sharing that success from that learning can be a really important thing to include in your reporting.

Audience questions: ad budgets, search, and reaching youth

Mohamed: For sure. We’re coming in towards the hour. We have some time to take any questions. If you have any, would love to hear from you.

Today we covered quite a bit. We talked about strategy and writing a strategy and the difference between a strategy and a tactic. How to establish your SMART goals and what’s realistic for your team. Voice and tone, where it matters and why it matters in terms of consistency, if it’s visual identity. And making sure that you’re recognizable whether it’s in the written word or in the visual identity, and to to measure how to measure, when to measure and what to measure, and why that’s important for the overall the the goal in itself, and to establish the efficacy of your strategy over time because it’s all about learning, rinsing and repeating. Right, you make a hype, you know, a hypothesis in the beginning about reaching a target audience, where they’re at, what you’re going to say to them, when you’re going to say it to them, for how long, and then you measure all of that and you say, okay, did this work? Did this not? How to use that for the next one.

We’ve got a question here from Megan. Let’s throw that out there.

Mohamed: (Question from Megan): How do you know the budget to put in a Facebook campaign? I have a small budget, but we have small campaign and big campaign to publish, and I want to put the right budget, not too big, because sometime the budget is too big for the objective and too small to be sure it reaches its goal.

Thoughts on that, Marissa?

Marissa: Yeah, I think experimenting is really important, especially when you’re getting into the swing of starting to use Facebook campaigns. One example that I can say is with Vent Over Tea, whenever we have an event, we kind of have determined over time like which events we know will have signups very quickly and which ones we might need to do a little bit of a boost for. And we found over a year or two of experimenting with budget where we would put $20 for five days, $50 for 10 days, we would kind of play around and see what would be that that sweet spot. We were able to determine. What is our average that we will put into it, and then sometimes we’ll put in a little bit more. Sometimes, if we don’t necessarily have the budget fully for that specific thing, we’ll put a little bit less and maybe adjust our targeting. It really depends on what is the objective of the campaign. If it’s something where you want to reach the general public in your region, you can probably reach a lot more for a little bit less. But you’ll also kind of dilute the conversion rate that you’re looking for. So you really want to put your money in the space where you know you’re going to have the highest conversion, whether it’s a sign up or a donation or whatever. But you can always adjust.

So I would say that if you are starting with a campaign for, I just want to say like a program, for example, that you want to promote by the end of this month. Think about who is kind of the persona that we want to convert on this. Who do we want them? Who do we want to be in this space? Think about playing with the Facebook tools to see. You can set up like a fake ad, for example, and you can set your audience, your age group, interests, regionality, and play around with budget. You put it as $50 and you can see at a glance how much you can anticipate to reach. And then you know. Play around with that. See where you find a comfortable spot. Maybe you start with a smaller budget and you take a look for the first couple days. Oh, you know, we’re reaching a lot of people, but not a lot of people are clicking on our link or emailing us to sign up. Maybe we need to refine who we’re trying to target a bit more. We might not need to adjust the budget yet, but maybe we just need to refine. Maybe after a couple more days of that, you notice. When you do a campaign, it should never be just a set it and forget it mentality. It really should be something that you’re monitoring during that campaign period. And Facebook does work really fast at reporting on the measurement. It’s usually quite quick within the day. You can kind of see how the previous day was, so that you’re able to pivot. And then they also have a lot of tools where they’ll give you recommendations on how to adjust your campaign.

Mohamed: Absolutely, I I find like I tend to experiment quite a bit. So for each mini campaign, I’ll have three messages or three different call to actions. I’ll put a very small budget to them, see which one wins. Right. So within a day, you can put in $10 in each of these. You spend $30, but you know that one of them. Converted the most, and you say, “Okay, I’m going to double down on that one, and then experiment with the next one,” so that at least one you get to know which tone or voice or which call to action really landed with the specific audience, and then you leverage that. And if it didn’t work, then try another one. But with micro with micro campaigns, it makes it a lot easier to figure out which which message works.

We’ve got another question from Anne.

Mohamed: (Question from Anne): Is Google Search Console related to SEO?

Yes. Google Search Console is a free tool by Google. You connect it to your website and it will tell you how many times you’ve shown up in Google Search for Keywords. It’ll show you what people are searching for that you show up for, and where in the rankings you are. Also, it’ll show you which pages show up, where in the world people are searching that you show up for. So, if you are based out in Montreal in and you service a very specific, you know, a specific you know, neighborhood like Verdun, for instance, but for some reason, everybody in Wisconsin’s coming to your website, you’re like maybe I need to refine my website a little bit or adjust things. Also lately there have been changes in social media that allows social content to be searchable and to show up in search results. So you can actually connect your Instagram for instance or some social channels to Search Console to see what your posts Your social posts are showing up in in Google search, right? Which helps you also get a little bit more reach. You know, if if people see your social posts, but then also your website in the search results, that’s that’s a bonus there.

Marissa: For sure, it’s also a really handy tool just to see where are people kind of aligning their interests with your program and where there’s a disconnect there. So. Let’s say Vent Over Tea. We’re a mental health nonprofit. We provide active listening services. It is a bit more difficult in the health and health and mental health space when it comes to SEO because there’s a lot of things that maybe you might not get traction on because they don’t allow for those connections. So, for example, we can’t use mental health service for our ads. That won’t work for us. But active listening, peer support, those are the types of keywords that we want to traffic on. We also want to traffic on things like need to talk to somebody. So we have that on the header on our homepage, so that if I’m Googling need to talk to someone Quebec or need to talk to somebody Gaspé, we’re showing up in search results and then you can look in in your search console and see is that something that people are actually searching? Is there a different way that they’re approaching it? What are the types of things that are getting people onto our website? And maybe are there things that maybe we want to integrate? Are there things that we really don’t want people to find us when we’re looking for things? So one really. Unfortunately, hilarious example for us is that we have a blog post from five years ago that includes the word Jeffrey Dahmer in relation to mental health. So one of our highest traffic search keywords is “Was Jeffrey Dahmer mentally ill?” and that shows up for a lot of things and people find our service. It’s not something that we necessarily want. So we’ve adjusted our keywords and we removed that from our blog so that that isn’t. How people are finding us, so it’s a great way to kind of create that negative space on your website where you don’t want people coming to you.

Mohamed: Yeah, yeah, it’s always surprising what you find out about your traffic. We’ve got a last question here from Maggie.

Mohamed: (Question from Maggie): We’re having a lot of trouble getting registrations for employment and youth activities. We try big budget targeted ads, in-person events, online workshops, but often get zero signups. Any advice on creating better CTAs?

This one, thoughts, Marissa.

Marissa: It’s really tough reaching youth. It is the task that I feel like a lot of organizations have mentioned having a lot of difficulties with because it does require a lot more trust building. It does require a lot more meeting them in the spaces that maybe we’re not necessarily comfortable in yet, or maybe we don’t have the capacity internally to approach those places. So. You might need to consider where are we trying to reach these people. If we’re running a Facebook ad, you’re not going to reach youth under 25. They will scroll right past you. They might not even be on Facebook. They might be on Instagram, but they’ll scroll past an ad. I feel like especially younger adults and youth, we kind of have like the blinder for advertisements at this point. So when you see it, you just scroll past it. In person tends to do a lot more because you’re able to kind of interact with them and really meet them where they’re at. So if you’re at a high school tabling or if you’re at a community tabling where they have brought in youth into that space, it’s usually a bit easier. But usually it requires more than one touch base. It might require collaborating with another organization that maybe has the youth in the space. It might require collaborating or partnering with a school in your region that can refer. youth into those programs. If you have somebody on your team who is in that demographic and can do some kind of boots on the ground outreach, that’s really helpful to have that person because they can quite literally meet them where they’re at. It’s a question of do we need to keep throwing money at the wall and hope that it’s going to work. It might not be the case when it comes to reaching people for programs. A lot of times when you want someone to join a program or to sign up for something that’s anything beyond like. A webinar, for example, I’m committing to an hour of my day. I didn’t have to pay for anything. I didn’t have to give any additional information. That’s very low stakes and a very easy kind of sell. But when it comes to something where you’re asking someone to physically come into a space, be vulnerable in a space, engage with other people in that space, it tends to require a lot more handholding and a lot more kind of touch bases. It’s a bit harder to convert on a program. Through the digital channels only.

Mohamed: Absolutely, I am aware that we are at time and some people have to hop off and just wanted to let you guys know the next webinar is in October. We are going to be specifically talking about AI for nonprofits. You know, we’re going to leverage what we talked about today in terms of developing your voice with AI, but also adapting content for each channel. So scaling that up if you’re strapped for time or if you’re having trouble really getting the message out in different spaces and how to use AI to make sense of the numbers in in through these through these analytics channels. So that is coming out mid-October. We will send out more information about specific date and time. It’ll be around the middle of the month, around the same time as Wednesday at 11. But thank you everybody for showing up. Some of the great questions that we’ve had over here. For everyone that threw in their name for the assets that we discussed and those templates, we will share them in a follow-up email along with the recording and the bilingual version of it. And yeah, thank you everybody for showing up. Thank you Marissa for. Helping us helping me out with this with this talk and thank you to the CHSSN for sponsoring this. It’s great to work with some of these organizations out there and we’ll chat soon.

Marissa: Great. Thanks so much everyone.

Mohamed: Thank you.