Facebook Tag

105 – Digital Tools That Will Help Your Non-Profit with Colleen Cook

Video recording

Audio recording

In this episode of the Non-Profit Digital Success Podcast, we’re thrilled to welcome Colleen Cook, co-founder of HighTide, the world’s first fully customizable CRM designed exclusively for non-profits. Join us as we explore the revolutionary impact of tailored CRM systems on non-profit organizations and delve into how HighTide is transforming donor management and fundraising efforts.

Colleen shares her extensive experience and insights into the non-profit sector, discussing how strategic digital tools and data-driven approaches can significantly enhance your organization’s outreach and operational efficiency. Whether you’re looking to overhaul your current CRM strategy or just starting to consider the benefits of a customized approach, this episode offers valuable guidance and innovative solutions.

Tune in now to learn how your non-profit can leverage these advanced technologies to better connect with donors, streamline processes, and amplify your impact!

Mentioned Resources

Listen and Subscribe
podcast logos itunes
I Heart Radio Podcasts, Non-Profit Digital Success
podcast logos spotify
amazon logo
YouTube Non-Profit Digital Success Podcast
post circleA img
post circleB img
post circleC img

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Ever wondered why some non-profits soar with their digital marketing while others struggle to even get started? Stay tuned, because today’s episode, it might just hold the key to unlocking your organization’s full potential online. Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. As always, I’m your host, David, and in this episode, we’re going to be diving into digital marketing for non-profits with Colleen Cook. Colleen is a non-profit marketing expert and the co-founder of HighTide, which is the world’s first fully customizable CRM built specifically for non-profits.

Now, over the last ten years, Colleen has kickstarted numerous digital marketing campaigns for non-profits across various industries, helping organizations achieve their goals through strategic digital campaigns. We’re going to dive in and talk a little bit about the platform as well. But this isn’t a sales pitch, right? We’re here to help give you some insight on how you should be thinking about the data that you’re collecting. Colleen, thank you so much for joining on today’s episode with us.

Colleen Cook: David, it’s a pleasure. I’m so happy to be here.

David Pisarek: I guess let’s just start at the beginning here, foundational information. You know, 1 or 2 sentences. What is a CRM? How should non-profits be using them?

Colleen Cook: Yeah. CRM is an abbreviation that means customer relationship manager. And so most non-profits use something CRM, or they may call it a fundraising management tool or a donor management system, but they use it to manage their donors, in large part their donations. How they could be using that, or how they should be using really is a window into the health of the organization, their donors and their donor base. So with our customers, that’s what we’re really trying to do. We made ours custom, but my background is in the agency world and in the non-profit space, and so that’s certainly a vision, not necessarily a current reality.

David Pisarek: Okay. So let’s talk about your background a little bit in terms of non-profits and digital marketing. What do you want to enlighten us with?

Colleen Cook: Sure. Yeah. So I actually came out of the non-profit sector, so I got a master’s degree in arts management and did most of my non-profit work in fundraising and in marketing for performing arts, and did that for many years, and then I came into the agency side, and we have a digital marketing agency that does consulting and digital marketing for non-profits very much like you, David. We’ve been working with non-profits for about a decade in this capacity, where it’s just been amazing to see how digital marketing can really transform their fundraising efforts, and with that, digital marketing is only effective when you can measure the results. CRM is really the home for where all of that digital data aggregates, so you can use and leverage that information. A little bit of what I’m excited to chat with you about today because I know that’s a passion of yours as well.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. I think having the data and having access to information will allow organizations, small or big startups, to have access to some kind of information that will help you make smarter decisions about what you’re doing right, and there’s different ways of doing that.

You can send out surveys; you can do A/B testing. If you’re an organization that had a donation platform for, I would say maybe a little over two years at minimum, you could take a look at trends, seasonal trends and stuff like that. And I think it’s really important to take note of that, not just go, “Okay, well, you know what? November and December, we typically get a lot more donations than the rest of the year.” No, no, no, no, no. Get specific about it, is it specifically donations because of Giving Tuesday? Is it donations for end-of-year giving because people want their tax receipts this year? You know, Giving Tuesday is in December. Let’s really understand what the data can actually tell us.

Colleen Cook: That’s true. And the thing that we see in our marketing efforts that I’ve seen in my own is that there’s even richer things than that, that you can get some specific. And what messaging is resonating with your donors more than others? So when you talk about A/B testing, like, what are the things that are connecting with their hearts and what are the things that are falling flat? You know, when we think about how fundraising has been done forever, we’ve been blind to that level of understanding of what’s really catching the heart. And so, being able to measure those things is critical. What we were finding, though, is that we weren’t able to find non-profits here with the abilities to get that granular and understanding to be able to really say, “Hey, what ad campaign is converting into into results here?” Or “You know what? Social push is really driving engagement.” You know, it’s difficult to find that in the non-profit sector just because there’s not a lot of organizations that have really advanced their digital marketing efforts, because the non-profit sector just doesn’t have a history of that, of precedent.

David Pisarek: I think part of it is understanding that this is something important, that as an organization, you need to have some insight and thoughts around not just shoot in the dark. One quick little pro tip for anybody listening as you were talking about A/B testing and messaging: you want to do some A/B testing around the days of the week that you send the messaging times of the day that you send the messaging, and then A/B test subject lines, then A/B test the message inside., and you need to do the scientific method.

You only change one thing at a time. You only test one thing at a time.

But it takes weeks and weeks or months, depending on how frequently you send emails out, or campaigns or websites or landing pages or whatever, to make those modifications because you can’t just change it after one day, right? You need to have a reasonable amount of information and insight to make educated decisions. Let’s just take a step back, so you explained what a CRM is; let’s talk a little bit about digital marketing.

So organizations that have been around for probably at least six months to a year, maybe been around for 30 or 40 years. Right. Do you think there’s a lot of organizations that aren’t using digital marketing? And I guess maybe define what your understanding of digital marketing is?

Colleen Cook: Yeah. I’m glad that you clarified that, because I think that’s really the key is what do you call digital marketing, right?

You know, I remember about a decade ago, I was the director of marketing for a performing arts center and I said, “Hey, we need a Facebook page. We should start a podcast. We need a new website.” And our website was ancient; all of that is digital marketing, right? Like there’s the qualifies.

I think most organizations are doing some extent of digital presence and are intentional about social content and things like that. But to me, I think really effective digital marketing goes a layer beyond and is a bit more strategic in that you’re looking to really build campaigns that align with your goals and what you want people to do as they engage with your organization, and then measuring those results and leveraging data in order to fuel more and more growth. And so for the campaigns that I’ve led and that I’ve been a part of, that usually incorporates some aspect of email marketing and automation.

I really like to see campaigns have some automation flow that’s behaviorally navigated so that people’s engagement with your content online helps to drive what paths they take with your content. I love to see organizations using really, really good site tracking and activity tracking and UTMs with their content so that they’re able to see what’s converting and what isn’t.

And then I think it’s a really awesome thing when you can have that tied into some lead score where you can recognize affinity because that’s really what lead score is. It’s an engagement metric. It’s an affinity metric in the non-profit space. Wealth scoring has been a long-time component of fundraising, but I think that lead scoring is only just beginning to show its face in the space, and that really ties back to where a lot of CRMs are in terms of their advancement.

When I think about like digital marketing campaigns that are really effective, they tend to have also a great, like traffic strategy where you’re running at some social contact email content, you’re hitting the watering holes where you’re dragging them to some sort of destination, and then you’re converting them with the form so that you can capture some information and get an understanding of who they are, and then take them to the next phase of your customer journey or where your you’re done, whatever it is that you’re trying to engage them with.

David Pisarek: And I think it’s important also to understand that if you can get somebody’s email address, it’s really hard; that’s not quite as going as far as “What’s your social insurance number?” but people hold their email address really close to them.

So if somebody’s willing to give you their email address to stay up to date, to subscribe to something to get if you have a lead magnet or something like that, that’s an intent there that they want to have a relationship, whatever that relationship, whatever those boundaries and confines are for them. But yeah, we use lead scoring, right? We send out a weekly email, and we suggest this to our clients as well. If somebody opens the email, you need tracking in that to identify that in a CRM, “Okay, this person, we give ten points if you open up an email. If you click on the link, you get another 15 points.” And building that up, then what we do is we have automations that trigger internally when somebody reaches a thousand.

When somebody reaches 550, is that other one that we’ve got so that we know, “Okay, these are people that are highly activated and engaged in that kind of way.” We also have engagement tracking, so “Has somebody opened an email in the last two months from you? Yes? No? Okay. We don’t remove them from the list, but we add a tag to them that’s disengaged.”

And if you did open an email, you get engaged, and then we can take a look at that and make smart decisions around, “All right. Well, we have a group of 5000, 10000, 30 people,” however many it happens to be going, “Okay, these are the engaged people. What do we do? How do we take them one step further?” So, from a non-profit standpoint, how do you engage them to share content with a family or friend or on social? How do you get them to come to an event? How do you get them to donate or volunteer? Not everything has to be about the dollar. Although, we know that you need to raise money to keep the organization going.

Colleen Cook: Yeah, I love the way that you were processing this because I often say that we need to steward an email address the same way that we steward a gift, because that first gift is really important. But that first email address submission is a really big step. It’s a decision to have a relationship. You know, it’s like saying yes to the date. And so if you treat that person like it didn’t matter, you may or may not go any deeper than that, and this is really how you fill a pipeline. With our clients and with people who led in this, it can be very difficult to change the paradigm for organizations that have never done anything like this before because they don’t see the value of that because it takes time for that to play out in terms of growth, but when you give it that time and space, it’s truly transformative to organizations. And we’ve seen it over and over and over. And, of course, it is because the for-profit sector has been doing this for 20 years.

Digital marketing techniques aren’t new. They’ve been around, but they really just haven’t made their way over to fully saturate the way that non-profits do business, and I think in large part that’s because of the technology, not introducing it to them first. But I also think that there’s just a skill gap with the non-profit sector where, you know, in an agency or in a business that’s really doing good digital marketing, it’s just a different business model, and they attract a different type of talent. That skill set tends to stay in the private sector.

Digital marketing is almost like a luxury item

for the smaller non-profits, but what’s amazing about it is that it really enhances their capacity because individualized donor outreach is the thing that everybody knows is the best way to raise money, the best way to grow your volunteers, the best way to build your network is one-on-one, like, no one ever leaves a good one-on-one conversation like, “I’m never talking to them again.” You know, “Oh, this was meant for me. And this was just tailored to what I care about and what I’m interested in. You want more?” And so this is where relationships really begin. But that’s impossible to do when you have an advancement team of 1 or 2 or even 5 or 10 in a donor base that’s far bigger than that or a potential donor base that’s bigger than that. This is where tools like email automation tools and strategies are meant to individualize products based on their engagement and their digital. Behaviour can be a huge help in customizing the stories that you are telling to their interest and the ones that they can receive, but also just your general path. But it takes time to build, and it takes time to see the fruit of that because relationships aren’t formed in a moment.

David Pisarek: That’s exactly right. And as you were talking, the thing that came to mind is, if you’re listening to this episode, send this to your senior executive, send this episode to your board of directors. What I’m about to say is what actually really needs to happen. You need to have an ongoing budget allocated for your marketing efforts and not specifically just, “Okay, we’re going to put ads on the side of a bus,” or I don’t know if you still put in newspapers or Yellow Pages or things like that, but you need to focus on digital, okay? You need to make sure that you’ve got a budget allocated for websites, for social, ongoing stuff for SEO efforts so that you can be found for building and communicating outwardly with anybody that’s connecting with you, as well as things like email marketing and CRM so that you can really get information and insight that will help you make decisions to do better in your organization.

Colleen Cook: I dumbbell stamp that hard. I’ll tell you what, if you made almost in just the comment about Yellow Pages and things like that, and also many organizations, that is what they are doing, and the reason they’re doing it is because the budget does not exist to do anything else.

Long ago, someone was on a board, and they worked for the vendor, so the budget has been assigned for life to that spend that is no longer returning and is not measurable. I remember a decade ago, the president of the local TV station came in and sat down with my boss because I stopped spending on their TV ads. It wasn’t effective for us, and I’ve moved it all to digital, 100% of it because I needed some money to put on digital. I had nothing to put there, and I thought, “Okay, well, there’s way more people.” And this is ten years ago, so there’s way more people on Facebook than on broadcast television. I don’t know if that’s even true anymore, but so with that being the case, I was put under pressure for that decision then, and I don’t think that’s even untrue today in a lot of organizations just because making big changes like that with money can come at a cost. So it’s very important to really see, though, that the return of digital and digital done well is genuinely transformative for organizations.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So having a really great website, I think that is probably one of the cornerstones of your digital marketing strategy, because it ties into so many different pieces. For example, the Google Ads grant that you can get. So if you’re not aware, you can get $10,000 a month in free ad spend from Google. Most organizations don’t have the capacity, let alone experience, to work the ads, right? So get somebody in that can help you use that. So there would be some cost with that and, you know, driving traffic to it. SEO, backlinks from other places, sharing content and information, just driving it all back. You can grow your email list, you can grow your CRM, you can grow all those pieces through that. So, I really think of that as the main hub. I think money, time and experience are probably three of the biggest blocks that come to my mind. Is there anything else from your side, Colleen, that you go, “All right, there’s another roadblock that people should be thinking about”?

Colleen Cook: Yeah, I really think tech is the other big one, like making sure that it’s measurable. This is actually why we built HighTide. This was the genesis of the whole thing. So I’ll tell you a quick story; we ran a wonderful campaign,\ that began a couple of years ago for a private university. And that university, I had a failed feasibility study and said, “Hey, you wanted a 15-million as your goal here, but $30 million is the best your donors are going to be able to do because, you know, they’re fatigued.” There’s questions about leadership and vision and all of these things that they’ve done multiple campaigns successfully. So, we did a stewardship phase for a year and a half. All we did was digitally ask for stories, and we were aggregating all of that in a marketing automation software. They ended up raising $100 million on that campaign, and they didn’t scrape the surface on using the data to talk to donors. That’s the power of a really intentional, content-driven strategy with digital marketing is because you really changing the message about your organization and the hearts of your donors when you do this and when you then can measure it, you can use that to inform the conversations with those donors and figure out who do you reach out to and how do you reach out to them, and what is the ask if they’re giving you all of this information digitally, but you don’t have a way to capture that in most of the CRMs that are in the market right now. So that’s really why HighTide exists: because we wanted to do that. And then it happened to be fully custom. So that’s our value prop, which is, you know, an interesting thing that was the heart behind it.

David Pisarek: You touched on something there that I think is interesting. So if you’re looking at evaluating products, meet with an expert, somebody that can really help you figure out what are the things that you should be looking at in terms of how can you get the data, the insight, the information. Just because a platform has been around for decades doesn’t mean that that’s the best platform for your use case.

That adventurous thing? Yeah. Nobody ever got fired for buying that license. I know which one you’re talking about, but because that’s the time-tested way everybody’s using it, “It must be good.” It just doesn’t necessarily mean it. It’s very difficult to get off of a CRM once you’re in it. A lot of organizations aren’t happy but they stay just because they can’t afford the time and expense to migrate.

And I know there’s some platforms out there where they will help you do the migration. So they will help you ease the burden of that. With that being said, Colleen, let’s talk about your platform for a couple minutes here. So what tools do you have in your platform that non-profits would highly benefit from?

Colleen Cook: Yeah. So since we’re talking about migration, that’s one of the things. I’m just so excited about this because, on average, I pick an organization from 18 to 24 months to migrate. And I have heard as long as four years, and I’ve heard as much as $1 million invested in the migration alone. I’m not joking. So that being the case, that feels criminal to me, truthfully, because when I think about resources an organization has, that’s not a good use of them. HighTide is unique in that it’s a fully custom CRM, and I’ll talk about that in a second. We can migrate UN days. So, as soon as you have your data out of your other system, you can come right in because we’re building the CRM to your existing data and then adding whatever else you want to be able to track. And so being fully custom, we can do that proprietary CRM builder that allows us to very quickly build a custom CRM. Like, if you call your donors “donors,” then that’s what the tag will be called. You don’t have to use constituents or contacts or accounts, you know what I mean? It’s just what you call them. Everything’s custom-named within their records. You’re only tracking what actually want to track because that’s the case, you can come right in because there’s no decisions you have to make about what data you have to leave behind and not track anywhere because it doesn’t fit your new CRM. And you can bring in all the stuff that you’re talking in spreadsheets. So, with that being the case, it’s also a very powerful marketing tool. And so email automation, fundraising. So take donations, payment processing and things like that. Some of the things that we’re going to be adding in the next couple of months include having text messaging and VoIP calling as well, so that you can see all of your engagement with a donor or constituent, all the data in one system. But the thing that is the most exciting about HighTide is that there’s a deep AI integration, so you can use it like a traditional CRM, but you can also just drive from your AI and ask it the question, and it will spit out the report or ask it to give you a summary of what’s going on with your donors, and it’ll answer that for you, so you don’t necessarily have to be a data expert to use it. So it’s a really great tool for anybody with a digital mindset because it’s really built with that kind of ease of use. And the idea is really that you use your CRM a lot less because you’ve got the information and a good understanding, and you get out there and really spend the time doing the work that’s worthy of your time.

David Pisarek: Anytime that you can have a platform that does multiple things very, very well instead of multiple things kind of mediocre, and you’re just kind of sticking with it, right? That will save you a whole boatload of time. Do you have a challenge that you can issue to anybody listening to this episode that they should do in the next 3 or 4 days of listening to this?

Colleen Cook: I love this. Okay. And as soon as you can set up site tracking on your website and then measure that at minimum, the meta pixel and the Google Pixel on your website, and start at least just tracking the behavior of people and seeing it in Google Analytics. That’s a great place to start. Start it yesterday. It’s important to begin doing that.

David Pisarek: Awesome. Google analytics is free. Facebook Pixel is free. If you need help with that, reach out to Colleen. Reach out to me. We can give you some resources or help you get that going on there. Now, before the episode, you and I were talking, you’ve got a little bit of an offer for people. So tell us about what that is.

Colleen Cook: So, if you are interested in HighTide, take a look and see if it seems like a good fit for your organization. Anybody who’s a listener of this podcast, when you talk to sales, give the code WOWDIGITAL, and it will give you 50% off of your license.

David Pisarek: Fantastic. And what’s the URL for HighTide?

Colleen Cook:  So hightide.com

David Pisarek: Hightide.com and if anybody wants to get in touch with you, they just go to hightide.com.

You can find me on LinkedIn as well. And we’re on Instagram, TikTok all those socials.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Colleen, thank you again so much for joining on the show today. It’s been great having you here on the Non-Profit Digital Success Podcast to everybody listening. If you want links, so from HighTide to LinkedIn for calling for the business, etc. head over to our podcast Show Notes page. It’s at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful!

We know
that your time is limited.

That’s where we come in.

Click the button below and book a free consult with us

We can get you on-track quickly to make your website have the impact your organization deserves.

0 Comments

Submit a Comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Wow Digital Inc Incorporated Ink David Pisarek free accessibility audit non-profit non profit not-for-profit hospitals foundations Toronto's best digital agency focused on your business 1.888.238.9679 1-888-238-9679 Toronto Ontario Canada non-profit design agency for nonprofits non profit design non profit website best web design wow websites webdesign graphic design ux ui user experience user interface photography databases html php javascript jquery portfolio programming software operating systems hardware computer sales consulting adobe photoshop illustrator flash javascript mysql microsoft windows apple osx macintosh iphone android linux operational excellence operex the crossways complex art of noise web manager web master professor ceo networking streaming ftp update site full website solutions development develop Thornhill Richmond Hill Oshawa Whitby GTA Greater Toronto Area web design Pickering Ajax North York Downsview toronto ontario editing productions gta ago rss twitter instagram instagrm facebook company portfolio people adobe ajax apple art audio broadcasting business complex computer consulting corel corporations database databases deployment designing developing dhtml downsview draw hrs michael bookmarks categories mac pisarek the best digital company read required durham personal cad enterprises excellence feedback news new bit boards businesses cloud continue david's deals digg eat entries exchange niche form friend work functions dream complete freelance consulting agency crazy designmoo