062 – Transform Your Non-Profit: Melissa Bennett’s Power Tips

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: You’ve probably heard me say this time and time again, you need to run your non-profit like a business. And we’re going to be talking about that in this episode.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David. And in this episode, I’ve got Melissa Bennett with me, and we’re going to be talking about non-profit business style, having efficient expenses, and maximizing your fundraising results.

Melissa is the CEO of ctrl+f, a digital marketing collective based in Hamilton, Ontario. She started her career in fundraising and marketing at her local SPCA. Over about eight years, she learned the importance of partnerships and communication and the power of improving building processes to lower expenses and maximize fundraising efforts in the shelter and the community. Today, ctrl+f is home to a diverse range of Canadian clients. Approximately 40% of the roster is in the non-profit sector, and those non-profits range in size and needs.

Melissa takes great pride in bringing her non-profit heart and agency brain and passion to her collaborative business-focused approach to successful marketing strategies. Thank you so much for joining us. Melissa, how are you doing today?

Melissa Bennett: I’m great. Thank you for having me.

David Pisarek: Not a problem. Looking forward to talking about this. Every few episodes, I mentioned you need to run your non-profit like a business. So super excited to have you here. Let’s jump in and really talk about this a little bit. I guess the first thing is, why are you passionate about a business-focused approach when you’re working with your non-profits?

Melissa Bennett: I think because I came from a non-profit, I went straight out of university where transparently I thought I was going to be a psychologist. I thought I would take a temporary six months stint in non-profit, of course, at the SPCA, (who doesn’t want to work for your SPCA and petal puppies and kittens) before I obviously moved on to bigger and better things… Eight-ish years later (laughs).

That first six months, (I was 22, I was so green, and I was so in over my head, I came in the fall season, so for fundraisers, that’s mayhem), I was essentially handed a stack of paper and said, “You have four major annual appeals. Off you go. Best of luck to you”. I didn’t want to ask questions. I didn’t want to seem stupid. I ran and things went reasonably well. I always think about that when I’m working with non-profit clients because I remember how insecure I was, but how passionate and how dedicated I was. And I swear, a month after coming on board, our ED was walked out and a new one came in.

And of course, I was sick that day. So I came back to work the next day with my tail between my legs thinking, “Oh, what is this new ED going to think about me?” And she actually ended up being a fabulous mentor to me over the years (she was perhaps not everyone’s favourite because she ran that SPCA like it was a business). I can’t obviously speak to previous leadership, but my understanding was that it was just a different approach where she came in.

She looked at the status of their finances, and she said, “Well, we need to make some changes”. And so because I was a little green baby, and she was very seasoned in leadership, she took me under her wing. And I learned so much from her in terms of running a non-profit like a business.

It really should not operate at a loss, or you shouldn’t be holding on to folks that aren’t after some consult, that aren’t performing or aren’t a good fit for the culture. And that goes with volunteers. She really made some waves, and I think that organization was better for it. All these years later, she’s moved on. I believe she’s retired, but that’s always stuck with me. And I think after my non-profit years going into agency life, I worked for a small agency, and now I run a small agency collective, whatever you want to call it.

I really learned that small business is not that different from non-profit in terms of how you run your operations.

There are not necessarily buckets of money falling from the sky, and you need to manage your resources appropriately. So I think a lot of the time when I speak to clients, non-profit clients for a first consult, a lot of it is, “Well, we don’t have a lot of money”, and it’s fascinating to me that that’s how people open the conversation. I think that combination of where I originally come from in my career to where I am now and how those conversations often start,

I’m sure you hear something very similar. It’s often part of my repertoire. “I get that you’re a non-profit, I get that you’re charitable. It’s still a business.”

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think a lot of non-profits run on a shoestring budget. That’s just what it is. Everybody wants to put their heart and soul into the work, and why can’t everything be free? Where do you think are important areas for non-profits to maybe make some concessions or really think about investing some decent money? Obviously, budgets vary.

You’ve got some non-profits that are $10,000 a year budgets, and you have some that are hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the budget. But if we were to talk to small, medium-sized non-profits, where do you think a good place to start with investing and spending money on the non-profit would be?

Melissa Bennett: That’s a good question. I think obviously it is going to vary based on the size of the organization. One of the first questions I always ask people is, “How close are you to your budget? I’ve run it where your budget runs in different time frames”. First, if you’re looking at an annual budget, sometimes someone from the top down is looking at it once a year, sometimes you’re looking at it quarterly, and sometimes you’re looking at it monthly.

I’ve also been in positions where I really only look at a budget on a campaign basis and not the big picture. So I think there’s variation there, but I think the most prominent thing that I see, (and it’s going to sound biased now that I’m in a consultancy role)

I do find that lots of non-profits will either hold people that either have the potential, but the organization hasn’t invested in their training or their continuing education.

That was something that was always in my annual review. I would ask for more continuing education before I would ask for a salary bump because I felt that was a better long-term investment. So I see a lot of folks that are either in volunteer or paid positions that aren’t given the opportunity to grow, to continuously invest their skills that are then reinvested in the organization. Or really what I see is people saying, “Well, how much money do we need for that?” I think it’s a cart before the horse thing, so that’s where potentially a consultant comes in.

And recently, I’ve learned there are very creative ways to bring consultants in outside your operational budget with grants and what you have. But bring in someone that… Let’s say, a common one that I work with is people who don’t have a dedicated corporate partnership person or a sponsorship person to put on the back of the donor development person or the events person. And really, that’s not their skill set. So I can tell you, at my SPCA, I struggled.

I’m not a sponsorship person. I can speak to it and I can have wonderful meetings. Strategically, that’s not necessarily always going to be my strength area, but it was within my rules and responsibilities versus bringing in someone that does that day in and day out, know how to strategically structure your offer and knows how to help you position your value.

Obviously, that investment, that initial one-off investment might look like, “Oh, we can’t do that”, but think about what the return is going to be. I sometimes think there are just too many hats of what the existing team looks like and not necessarily an efficiency in “Do we have the right people?” and that’s not to say anything about the people that dedicate their careers to non-profit or volunteering in non-profit.

I think sometimes the roles and responsibilities or the creep are just sometimes what’s stifling that growth. Because with that might come opportunities for lowered costs through finding grants, I don’t know if they still do, but back in the day, we saved a lot of money on a grant from Microsoft. They covered all of our office products for the organization. Just people that know where to find the efficiencies that you might not when you’re in the trenches every single day.

David Pisarek: 100%. To your point, you mentioned creep and that’s not a creepy person, right? It’s scope creep.

Melissa Bennett: (laughs) Scope creep.

David Pisarek: Exactly. Quite often, non-profits and charities and community organizations for full-time staff, put a line item in the job description, other duties as assigned. If you’re hired to do fundraising, does that then mean that you need to know web development, so you can update the website to create landing pages for the events? Just one example.

Maybe I’m a little bit biased there because we’re a web shop, but I think there’s something to be said about getting the shortcut. Not that it’s like a cheat or anything like that, but…

Melissa Bennett: Efficiencies.

David Pisarek: Exactly, efficiencies. If you can hire, (again, maybe a little biased to your point here) or if you can bring a consultant in that has their team with them and their history and their knowledge base to give you the direction and say, “You need to do this, this, and this”, or “You need to do this, we’ll do it with you or for you, our team. You’re getting about $85,000 a month of salary by hiring my team because we’ve got 18 people in there”. Just like yourself, you don’t have to invest $2 million a year, a million and a half a year, $800,000, whatever it is for that consultant for their time, for the entire year. You can just bring them in for, I don’t know, 20 hours or 30 hours and have the power of the team that’s there to really help empower your team.

Melissa Bennett: Yeah, I couldn’t agree more.

David Pisarek: I think there’s a lot to be said for bringing in the expert where you need the expert.

A real expert will tell you whether you need them or not.

Having a conversation going, “You know what? You don’t really need us. Just do this, this, this, and this”. A quick half-hour call. And then you just know, “Okay, here’s what we need to do and move on and forward”. But I think it’s something to really think about, especially in a small non-profit where you might have a handful of people on the team.

There’s only so far that volunteers can work with. We’ve had two organizations come to us in the last month where they had volunteers running the website, and they were WordPress sites and Elementor was installed, which is a page builder. And then they had Beaver Builder installed, which is a page builder. Then they had Guttenberg installed, which is a page builder. Then they were running on a version of WordPress that was three years old and not updated, and there were just so many issues. It was everybody that came, had their skill set, and whether it was right or wrong, doesn’t really make a difference.

What matters is getting somebody in that can help and provide the expertise that you’re looking for.

Melissa Bennett: Yeah, and authentically and transparently because obviously there’s filtering sometimes of who those right people are. WordPress is a perfect example because so many people would put their hand up as a volunteer, as a well-meaning volunteer, and even a well-meaning staff person say, “Oh, I know WordPress”. That doesn’t mean that they’re necessarily the right person to be going into the back end with usually full administrative access to install any number of plug-ins and whatever else.

I can tell you there’s a national-level organization that I contract for on occasion, and that’s exactly what happens. I can’t tell you how many times in peak event season or peak campaign season, I get a frantic frantic-frantic. I’m not even there. They have an agency of record to do their web stuff, but I just personally have a relationship of frantic, like, “The website is broken. It’s registration day for thousands of individuals. What now?” And the loss of revenue on that single day, like the impact of that one volunteer or that one staff person versus having informed consultants that can make you a road map of “this, this, this, and this”, or efficiently use two hours of time to put the tools you need in place rather than a volunteer or staff person spending hours of perhaps even paid time on such a task. It’s efficiency.

David Pisarek: I think that’s a really key word. Efficiency, efficiency, efficiency. Let’s underline that, make it bold, and highlight it. That’s what it’s about how can working in a non-profit help save yourself time and effort and make your life easier?

here are tons of automation tools and things like that you can use out there like Zapier or IFTTT, or I don’t know, there’s a gazillion of them out there.

We could probably talk, Melissa, for hours on end about ways that tools like that could be integrated. Maybe we’ll have another podcast talking about automation, something like that, to improve efficiency. But something you touched on earlier was, (and I’m going to call it scarcity mindset), where it’s like, “Oh, we don’t have enough money”. Can you talk about the scarcity mindset that we know about in non-profits and how you can work with your experience to alleviate that barrier?

Melissa Bennett: Yeah, for sure. You could call it a scarcity mindset, you could call it a lack mindset. I think, by definition, it’s a belief that there’s not enough of something. In non-profit, it’s quite often funding. The example that I like to give is time. There’s just a finite amount of something, and I catch myself doing it as an individual. There’s just not enough time in the day, or I’m racing against the clock to get X, Y, and Z done. And I think the scarcity mindset is, from a growth standpoint, the biggest barrier to growth in non-profits.

I find if you open with, well, “How much money will cost?” Sometimes that’s different from saying, “Our goals in 2023 are to have a new website that has these functionalities, which could be to be able to accept online donations, to have an automatic registration for new volunteers, maybe to have a peer to peer fundraising functionality and having a bit of goal in place, a road map, if you will, to say, we need these pieces in place, what money do we need to get there?” As opposed to saying, “Well, what does the website cost?”. I think that mindset in general.

One is there’s a finite figure here and there’s a limit, and there’s probably a budget line that someone’s keeping in the back of their head, versus “These are our goals. We would love your expertise on how much it would cost us to get there”. I think that implies more collaboration and more conversation.

I think it’s a little bit more (and maybe I’m just an idealist), but a little bit more inspirational to say, “These are our goals. Hey, how are we going to get there? Board of directors, staff, volunteers, this contractor that I’ve brought into my office for a meeting”. I think the way you even just asked the question, “How much does this cost?” This X-cost website, marketing consultant, whatever, versus “These are our goals, and we would love for you to help us get there. Let’s have a conversation”. I think it’s an entirely different outcome for the most part in my experience.

David Pisarek: I think there are two things there. One is to think of it not as an expense, or as a line item. Think of it as an investment in your brand, in your organization, in helping. “This is just a method. This is just what it takes to get there”.

Planning out and having those goals, and having those really high-level strategic conversations, will determine what that final goal is. Then the deliverables and the tactics are overlaid on top of that. Yes, there are costs associated. Even if you can do everything in-house, there are still costs associated because it’s people’s time.

Maybe you need a little bit of software or something like that, a license from Adobe, for example, or whatever it happens to be. That’s “yes, you need to think of it as an investment”. That’s the first thing. The second thing is, you need to think of it as walking into a Honda car dealership and saying, “I need a vehicle”. How do you even start that car? Do you need a two-door little pickup like Coup? Do you need the SUV? Do you need a van? Do you need a pickup truck? Do you need the low end or the high end?

There are so many different variables that go into it and it’s such a loaded question. “Hey, how much is a car?” Well, you can get a Maserati or Lamborghini, or you can get a Pinto. To your point, what is the end outcome, and what are the steps that are going to get you to that? I think if anybody listening to this can shift their mindset to think of it as an investment instead of an expense, you’re going to end up with a better result at the end of the day.

Melissa Bennett: I agree. If efficiency is word one, investment is word two.

David Pisarek: You can invest in your own efficiency.

Melissa Bennett: You absolutely can. Listen, I had a quick story. An organization I worked for had a very dedicated volunteer running their donor database, which is very expensive software if you’re running with the… We won’t name names, but the most prominent provider of a donor database in the non-profit world.

David Pisarek: It’s been around 25 years that does everything but nothing really well.

Melissa Bennett: Yes, and nothing really changes or like new developments coming down the pipe. We’re talking about the same one. That is not cheap software to run.

Many organizations, at least peer organizations within this field have a dedicated paid staff member who knows if they’re paid well, who knows what their training is to run that database, to run donor exports, theoretically that then can be exported into email marketing pipeline, so then steward those donors, hopefully, help them become monthly donors. Maybe they leave a bequest at the end of all of this.

To me, your donor database in a non-profit is like your heart and your soul and your brain all at once, and if you’re not leveraging that tool, you’re automatically stunting your fund development, which is more than likely stunting your growth as an organization in terms of who you can serve and how you’re executing on your purpose.

So this organization had a volunteer who was untrained and who, while I loved them personally, was not a good culture fit, running the database for about 10 years. While the day-to-day execution in terms of like, were we able to reconcile with accounting? That box got checked without fail every single day.

That organization could look and say, “We’ve saved X amount of money on a salary by means of having a volunteer-run our donor database and complete these accounting functions”. Absolutely correct. However, there was no connection then between that database and marketing or that database and other legs of the organization that access other individuals in the community. Meaning, I could not take that information and again, steward a donor, say, “Thank you for your donation”.

I couldn’t tell you how to segment an email list or social media targeted ads or anything to say what our average gift was. Or if we have, I know that we had more female donors, but who are our people? The limitation of having that efficiency, that cost saving in a sense in place, the limitation in terms of growth and potential opportunity, completely lost. And it’s using an example that I give, yeah, you’re saving that salary, but what are you losing over here? What is the potential of fund development of marketing channels to reach corporate partnerships?

To me, it’s not worth the probably minimum wage salary that would have been over here.

David Pisarek: Being able to have somebody that can get that data. This software platform is very widely used, and getting somebody with expertise that can run the right queries and build this is critical. There are lots of other platforms out there for CRM, so customer relationship management tools are able to integrate into platforms and run queries more easily.

There’s a big lift to get out of this platform and into other ones. It’s not an easy switch. That’s why a lot of organizations stay with it because of the time and effort and then everybody had to learn a new tool, but getting somebody in that knows what they’re doing with it, that can really take a proactive approach and be about it instead of just going through and, “Yeah, all right, here’s the query finance. Here you go. Go reconcile. Run this to your financial software or connected” or whatnot.

I think that that’s really key is making sure that as a business as well, if you’re not a non-profit, if you’re a small business, and you’re listening to this, you need to have in your organizational chart all the seats that you need. Then you need to make sure that you’ve got the right people, the right fit, as Melissa was talking about, in that seat for that role, for your organization and making sure that they’re a good culture fit and all that other wonderful stuff.

Melissa Bennett: Well, you could think of it like if you’re running a small retail business, and you have a junior-level marketing coordinator, I think you’re going to ask that person to export your customers into some email segments and continue to steward and message them. So that’s perhaps the non-profit limitation versus that would never, I would hope, that would never happen in a retail or for-profit business. It’s like a must-have.

And if you don’t complete these tasks, we will find someone else for the role, versus the mentality is just sometimes switched on the non-profit side.

David Pisarek: So in terms of switching from money and scarcity into what I would call an abundance mindset, what are some quick, tangible ways that a non-profit could work through and think through that barrier of switching?

Melissa Bennett: So in terms of quick ways, I would say, (I may have already mentioned this) ask the right questions.

Ask the right questions with your business hat on.

What are your goals as an organization? Everybody can tell you what their mission statement is or who they’re looking to serve. But ask that question before you ask, how much money do I need to raise this here? Look at your goals, look at your purpose, is there a part of our purpose or mission that we’re actually not meeting? And consider those pieces before you consider, “How much money do I need to raise?”.

I think, second, I would remind non-profits to consider their value always. This came up very recently in a corporate partnership conversation. It was a fairly interesting article that I read about how so often non-profits will go into a negotiation or a conversation with a prospective corporate partner, and they almost have their tail between their legs or thinking, “Oh, what does Canadian Tire want to sponsor us for?” Or your local Walmart or your local small business to basically cover the cost of this one item that you need.

We used to run this like the Photos with Santa event, and I would shlep across the city making sure that this organization covered the cost of my ink, and this organization covered the cost of my paper. That doesn’t speak to the value of the organization. That doesn’t say, “With your help, we’re going to raise this much money, and that’s going to mean this much for people, pets, initiative X”. So I think understanding your value and what you bring to the table or to your community changes the narrative, and it changes your mindset from a lack of “We’re just a non-profit, and you’re a corporation, and we need you”. It changes your mindset, and it changes how you approach that conversation.

So knowing your value, I think, is incredibly important for your confidence in your conversations and your approach in collaboration or partnership or any growth. 101 in terms of running your business like a non-profit, and I don’t think this doesn’t happen without knowing your staff costs.

I am a stickler about knowing what your soft costs might look like, lots of organizations will brag, “Oh, we have 400 volunteers”, okay, what’s the value of those hours if those volunteers were paid, let’s say, minimum wage? What is the value of your volunteer’s time? Know your cost, know your big budget, know how that breaks down into your small initiative so that you know that you’re spending your time, where you’re spending your staff’s time on the right things that are valuable, that is going to see a return.

Again, if you’re working retail, or you’re working something corporate, you don’t have people that are not in the right roles. Then I think the last piece we’ve already talked about, but it’s just finding and investing in the right people, whether that’s your existing team and making sure that they have at least the opportunity for continuing education.

That can look like a lot of things that can be highlighting some free webinars that are coming up that might look like a conference. In Hamilton, we have a ton of women in business networking groups. But making sure that the people that you have in place are that have opportunities to grow their knowledge, which then reinvest in the organization, ideally pay them competitively so that they have confidence in themselves and what they bring to the table, they’re less likely to burn out.

And then other ways that you can be investing in the right people is, again, if you’re asking the right questions, and you’re following a bit of a road map, you might know what your gaps are. You might say, “I have such a strong administrative team, but no one really has web skills. Do I want Sarah spending 10 hours a week trying her best with the best of intentions to update our WordPress site, but it keeps going down?” or do you want to pay someone that understands your website, understands your goals, understands your needs, spending half or a third of that time on demand when you need it to make sure that the job is done right and that you’re not then burdening your staff’s already probably limited resources.

So I think whether it’s consultants or whatever, I feel a little icky being like, “Hey guys, you should hire consultants”. But sometimes it’s an efficiency question of, “Do my staff have time?” If they do, great. “Is this their skill set? Will it take them four hours to complete this when a consultant could do it in one?” Those are the big questions in terms of who are the right people, and that applies to volunteers as well.

David Pisarek: I made a couple of notes as you were talking there. There are two things that I’d like to touch on a little bit, to your point about approaching corporate sponsors. You need to really understand what the impact is that you’re having, whether it’s in the community or for a specific group of people, whether they’re local or global or in another country on another half of the planet. It doesn’t really matter.

Knowing what your intent and your purpose are and really making that your core value as a person, as the organization, and throughout your staff and your volunteers is really going to have a bigger impact on your brand.

When you go, and you talk to a Corporation, like one of the ones you may have mentioned or a small business next door, you’re looking to do, I don’t know, rummage sale or barbecue or whatever it happens to be. Having those conversations and explaining to them, “Look, the money we get from this, and this is how much money we’re hoping to raise from this barbecue that we’re going to host, and this is what we’re going to do with the money. You can be a part of that. You can help affect change, and you can be something bigger than Melissa’s hat shop next door. You can go and have a bigger impact than just what you’re doing right now, and it’s very easy to do”. That’s the first thing I wanted to mention.

The second thing was about the staff. You want to obviously make sure that the really awesome staff that you have, the people that care about your mission and your vision and what you’re doing and the impact you’re having, that you keep them. There’s a lot of time that goes into building institutional knowledge, and it could take years to recoup that when they walk out the door.

Maybe you can’t offer them more money, but maybe you can offer them another vacation day or two over the course of the year. Or you can let them, I don’t know, COVID has certainly put this in the forefront, but maybe you can let them work from home. If you’re getting everybody to come back to the office, maybe they can work from home once or twice a week instead of being in the office everyday kind of thing.

There are these other perks that can be offered that aren’t exactly money, but it still helps make a good vibe and feel like you are a community as an organization.

Melissa Bennett: Absolutely. Continuing education is one of those pieces as well, which it’s a perk or an incentive. But if you think about it, it’s also an investment in your organization as well.

David Pisarek: Before you were talking about Sarah, do you want her to spend 10 hours a week working on the website? Maybe you can hire a consultant to work with her and train her as they’re working and level up the experience in an informal educational way that makes them feel more confident about the work that they’re doing and provides them with support and growth.

Melissa Bennett: Absolutely. This is, especially through the pandemic, compassion fatigue has always been a component of the non-profit world. And I think burnout culture is real, and it’s prominent in all of us, non-profit and for-profit. And I think anything you can do to have the capacity internally, build confidence in your team members, whether that’s continuing education or my big thing is collaboration.

Maybe you don’t always want to have a consultant on your roster. You want to build internal capacity.

Then bring the right consultant in to work together to collaborate so that when your team is executing WordPress updates when they’re definitely not a developer, at least they’re confident doing so. It’s taking them less time, which means they can dedicate their time and their resources and their brain space to whatever it is that they actually do best and want to be doing.

David Pisarek: 100%. Okay, so if you were to go back in time, we’ve got the Delorian charge ready to go, 88 miles an hour. If you were to go back in time and tell your younger fundraising self a piece of advice based on all the experience that you’ve had to date, what would that be?

Melissa Bennett: It’s a tricky one. Not to be lame, but I think I would tell myself to really just go for it. Very early on in our conversation, I said it was trial by fire. I didn’t want to admit to anyone that I really had no idea what I was doing, but I figured it out. But I think that that early experience of being handed the stack of paper, I think it didn’t do a lot to build initial confidence. And so I think I would go back to 22-year-old junior fundraiser, Melissa, or 27-year-old director of development, Melissa, and say, “You know what? Don’t ask for permission, don’t hesitate, you know what you’re doing, just go for it, and don’t worry about your age”.

I was so concerned with the age gap between myself and everybody else that I worked with, not even in the development department because it was usually a party of one, maybe a party of two. But just organizationally, I was so aware of my age, and I thought that in my world, I thought people thought less of me, and maybe they did. But who cares? Because I can tell you it was in the age of Instagram when I was the one pounding down the ED’s door and saying, “We need Instagram, we need Instagram. We’re in SPCA. We have visual eye candy, nothing else. We are meant to be here”.

I remember having a chat with the board and a chat with leadership to make my case for why this next social media platform was worth everyone’s time when everyone is working on limited budgets, limited salaries, and limited time. I made that handle, I set that up. And so I think it’s hard for the non-profit to get young, invigorated, talented blood in the door because I think as the generations come in younger and younger, they are expecting work-life balance and better salaries and all of those things.

So I think it’s already hard enough for them to get those younger folks in the door. And I would hope that now when they’re coming in the door, they are feeling like they have something to add and something to bring to the table that’s new. I wish I knew that back then.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Yeah. Imposter syndrome is very, very real. Overcoming that takes a lot of courage, to be honest. Just being honest with yourself and knowing what your limitations are or what your perceived limitations are, shouldn’t necessarily stop you. You can be nervous, but you also need to trust your gut. If you’re like, “You know what? Yeah, we need Instagram. Why aren’t we doing this?” Go and set it up. If it’s not going to hurt the organization, set it up, post some stuff, and then show, “Hey, little pet project, I did this. This is where things went with it. Do you want me to continue with it?” And if you’ve been able to show some success with it, why would they say no?

Melissa, let’s talk about ctrl+f for a second. What work do you focus on in terms of digital marketing related to non-profits?

Melissa Bennett: That’s a good question. I do a lot of marketing strategy. I might go into an org and say, “These are your major events”, or “These are your major campaigns, this is your key messaging, map it out in a very detailed Google Sheets” and help people organize at a high level, but also at a very granular level.

Hear all your deliverables and help them not only see how their strategy comes to life but also help them manage their time.

If you’re writing an email, it’s not just the person who has to write the email, it’s the person that perhaps has to make the graphics or source the photos. It’s the person that has to review that email, make it, and get it back to the person that makes it. There’s a lot to it. There’s probably a data, hopefully, a data coordinator that’s making sure your email segments are up-to-date.

I do a lot of high-level marketing strategy and also really granular work around “What does this actually look like for your team?” And “Do you have the folks that are in the right places to do that?” Sometimes that trickles into fundraising. I try, I really do try my best to stay out of fundraising these days. It just creeps up on me, so I can tell you, I’m working on a Giving Tuesday campaign for a client right now, and I’m working on a 2023 marketing strategy as it relates to fundraising deliverables for another client. So I can’t say I’ve kept my hands clean a bit, but I do try.

I do a lot of social media. I can’t say I do a lot of day-to-day execution anymore, but I will set up social media toolkits. Again, I want to empower non-profit teams to have the tools or good brand representation, really, to be able to execute things internally while meeting their budget line. So I might set up some templates in Canva or Adobe that they can then always work with and build on their brand.

I might do some advice on how to set up a reel and give them a template so that all they have to do is drag and drop their content. A great growth opportunity there that I don’t do a lot of work in is automation. So now there’s a good automation company that you would recommend, that’s always a good tie to have. I do a lot of paid advertising and I do a fair amount of SEO and SEO copywriting work, which I can tell you, SEO, you probably know this is for non-profits, they’re like, “Do I need this? What’s the return?” But I wish more organizations would tap into that, only since people have been getting emails from Google saying, “We’re sunsetting Google Analytics. We’re moving over to GA4”.

Do I even have clients saying, “What is Google Analytics? Do I need this?” Which hurts my heart. That’s definitely something that I do a fair amount of, bringing people’s data to the forefront and whatever that looks like. But that’s mostly it in a nutshell.

David Pisarek: That is awesome. Melissa, thank you so much. Some amazing and fantastic insights. I hope people that who are listening to this, whether they’re listening to it now or at some point in the future, that they’ve been able to get some advice and some pointers from our conversation today.

What I want to do is challenge everybody that’s listening to this or watching this, if you’re catching this on YouTube (Hi!), I want to challenge you to meet with somebody that you work with, whether they’re a volunteer or an employee or your executive director or VP (or whoever doesn’t really matter), and talk to them about this scarcity mindset and how you might be able to shift it to a mindset of enablement and empowerment because I think that’s really what’s going to help drive your organization forward more.

That’s your challenge within the next seven days of listening to this, that you have that conversation. So, Melissa, if anybody wants to get in touch with you or ctrl+f, what do they need to do?

Melissa Bennett: You can find us, at ctrl+f, (we think we’re really clever). If you were to look on your PC keyboard, certainly not your Mac keyboard, because I’m staring at my Mac keyboard right now, you would see the Ctrl key like CTRL. It’s ctrl+f, because if you hit ctrl+f, it helps you find things. If you’re a web developer or a marketing person, that becomes incredibly important, so we like to think we’re clever.

So ctrlf.ca is the website and the Instagram account is @wearectrlf, so check us out. We’re still finding our own language in terms of how we want to tell our stories, but that’s where we are.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Thanks again so much, Melissa. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. To everybody listening, if you want the link that Melissa just provided, or you want to see any of the other details, we’ve got the full transcription on our website. Just head over to nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com, and click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful.