107 – Expand Your Non-Profit Globally with Morgan Gross

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Have you ever wondered how your non-profit could break through borders and engage donors from across the globe? Today, we’re diving into strategies that can make your organization a global success.

Welcome to the Non-Profit Digital Success Podcast. As usual, I’m David, I’m your host, and in this episode, we’re going to be talking about all things around international fundraising and digital marketing with Morgan Gross, the CEO and founder of Fundraising Beyond Borders.

Fundraising Beyond Borders is an international fundraising consultancy dedicated to empowering non-profits worldwide, with a focus on global donor engagement. Morgan provides fractional fundraising, custom plans and 1-to-1 coaching to help organizations like yours confidently expand their impact across continents.

Morgan’s got a bit of an adventurous spirit living in Africa for the last eight years on a rural farm. A bee swarming around her right now with the nearest town, 1.5 hours away, and the closest grocery store and airport six hours away. Morgan, thank you so much for joining us from where you are right now. So thank you.

Morgan Gross: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.

David Pisarek: Let’s just jump in. What are the benefits and challenges of registering a non-profit in another country?

Morgan Gross: Yeah, absolutely.

So, it’s really a unique situation when a non-profit can go global or expand from one nation to the next. So, you know, if you are registered in either North America, America, or Canada, and you want to expand to an African country, South American, or European country, there are a lot of benefits to that.

So, a lot of the non-profits that I work with are international non-profits. So, they might be fundraising in America or Canada, but their work is abroad. And, you know, a lot of my clients are around Africa, based in Africa. And so a lot of them are in Africa, and so oftentimes we see non-profits wanting to register in another country because A) they either want to find new donors, new global donors, and B) they will also want to figure out when you are bringing in international donors, they want tax receipts, they want to build that donor trust and see that you’re legally registered in other countries.

So that’s usually the main point to why people want to expand because they’re finding new global donors or they’re doing expanding programs in different countries.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I mean, there’s so many people on the planet and so many people that need help and support, whether it’s financial, whether it’s learning how to farm so they can be self-sustaining. Right? There’s so many great causes and people that can use support. It makes sense that organizations might want to expand and help out other areas of the planet. So I’ve got a non-profit, I’ve decided I’m going to go, and I’m going to expand internationally. What about localizing content? So you’re speaking directly to the audience in maybe the host country versus the country that you’re trying to do outreach and engagement in.

Morgan Gross: I’m glad you brought this up because I was just talking about this on my podcast with another guest, Ed Harris, and he was talking about Google Translate.

Yes, absolutely. You can add Google Translate, so if you have multiple different languages, that’s a great place to start. But it’s also making sure that you’re segmenting your audience on your website and what is important to them and what is speaking their language, what is contextual to them, making sure that you are storytelling as well.

You know, storytelling is really important and to building donor trust and building donor transparency and credibility. So what might be an important story to an American might be different to somebody in the UK. So you can often story tell differently depending on your audience, but it’s also giving a little bit more context to that country.

And I would start with Google Translate. You know, sometimes I’m asked “Should I create a whole separate website?” And that’s a lot. It’s a lot of work to create multiple different websites.

If you’re small and you’re just starting out, I would keep to one website. And then if it’s multiple languages, adding kind of different elements in there that you can bring in, and then you can always expand to multiple websites, but with multiple websites is multiple upkeeps.

And if one thing changes, the next thing has to change on the other website. So talk about it on your website, on the main page where you are based. So right straight forward. If you’re based both in America and Tanzania, say that and share that. And then also to a very simple like in the footer of your website, making sure that it’s clearly stated that you’re 501C3 registered in America, and then you’re also registered in Tanzania state that just making sure if you have one website, you’re very clear and transparent where you’re based.

David Pisarek: I love the idea of this around keeping one website. And for anybody that’s here in Canada or the US, if you’re based in Canada and I try to go, let’s say to the Best Buy website and I go, bestbuy.com, I get a prompt saying, hey, we noticed you’re in Canada. Do you want to go to the Canadian site or the US site so you can do some, maybe a little bit of custom coding with geolocation Information to be able to maybe help people guide them to the right thing. But having a page in the navigation that just says, like the country, right? That you can drive traffic to those individual pages. You don’t necessarily need a whole website built out for it, especially if you’re starting up.

Morgan Gross: Exactly. No, I love that. And having a page dedicated to that specific country. And, you know, and it’s very dependent. You know, some non-profits are just fundraising in America. They’re not doing any of the programming. All the programming is abroad. So that’s going to be a little different. But if you have multiple programs across the globe, then yes, absolutely. I would recommend having, you know, different tabs or different web pages built into your website so somebody really understands what is going on in that specific country.

David Pisarek: You talked about storytelling, and I think I’ve shown this on episodes before. There’s a great book by Ian Harris called Hooked on You. The subtitle here is the genius way to make anybody read anything. And this is really about how to leverage storytelling to get your point across, to get people to care and read. Nobody really wants to read anymore. So how do we engage with people? Right. So let’s talk about that for a second here. How can a small non-profit or even a big non-profit leverage storytelling in a way that can help them with donors that might be continents away from them?

Morgan Gross: Yeah. So, international non-profits are going to have to work harder when it comes to storytelling. And that is because a lot of their donors aren’t necessarily going to understand the barriers or the challenges or the everyday life of a beneficiary. So you’re going to have to work a little bit harder to explain, you know, what your beneficiaries are going through, whether that’s a person, an animal, a community, whatever that is, you’re going to have to work a little bit harder.

And so what I really like to do in non-profits, especially international non-profits, is choose three beneficiaries of your organization. And instead of just like updating, you know, donors or an audience every once in a while on a story here and there, choose three and showcase their journey for an entire year and really allow them to get to know a beneficiary, an audience member.

So a donor or potential donor is going to be able to see what that beneficiary is going through and really understand it and start from the basics. So, you know, instead of saying, I’m going to say, you know, here in my life in Zambia is going to be very different to my life in America, where in America I was very busy, busy, busy.

And we’re here in Zambia. I take my time and wake up to the beautiful sunset that is usually orange and red as it’s rising through the trees, and we have monkeys all around us. So you kind of hear the monkeys diving through the trees and like, really get descriptive with your storytelling because, again, so many people aren’t going to fully understand maybe that place or that scene or what the beneficiary is going through.

So that gives you a really good opportunity for an entire year to follow a couple of beneficiaries’ journeys and get to know them.

And that’s how you build donor trust as well. That’s how you build transparency and talk about the highs, talk about the lows, talk about behind the scenes and get testimonials and things like that. So that’s one of my favourite things to do with international donors.

David Pisarek: That’s the idea of that. And if you can empower them with a camera, a cell phone, something like that, where they can take pictures as they go about their day or their week or their month. You can put a video together with pictures. It helps tell the story more if you’ve got some visuals to go along with it.

Morgan Gross: I agree, and I’m glad you brought that up because it leads to kind of two points is when you give the camera or the video, whatever tool you’re using, to that person, they are telling their story. And I’m all about ethical storytelling. So definitely that is empowering them to tell their story in their own eyes. So absolutely. And then you really just get to better understand who they are. And I would try different types of media to write. So, anything for that entire year. So, anywhere between videos.

But then also, you know, the testimonials can go really far. And just putting a quote up on the screen, and there are so many different things you can do on social media, turning it into a blog. So like, how can you repurpose that content throughout across all your marketing, not just on social media, but on your website with donors, donor communication, donor engagement, and sending off a quick video to a major donor? Just saying this reminded me of your donation, and this is what is what your donation is doing, and sending that quick video off.

So it gives you a lot of content that you can repurpose.

David Pisarek: Even if you had them. Maybe write a letter or draw a picture and include stuff like that. Artifacts, like if they’re going and helping weave baskets, include some of that stuff there so that it helps build the story and the authenticity behind it.

Morgan Gross: Yes, and that’s what I also wanted to say, and I love that we were just talking about it before we hopped on here, wasn’t it? It’s like authenticity. It does not have to be this formalized video that is put together by professionals like people who want to see the realness. So if it’s a camera phone, that’s great. That’s absolutely fine. Yes. Every once in a while professional video is great, but people want to see the realness behind it.

David Pisarek: We talked about storytelling. We talked a little bit about the website. And you can have a page or not have a page or have multiple sites for different countries, that type of thing. But let’s take a step back for a second and talk about the website in general. Are there any specific elements that you think should be on a website that would help cater to those folks who are interested in engaging, donating, or volunteering on an international level?

Morgan Gross: Yeah. When it comes to engaging, I really like to think about it in making sure that you have virtual experiences.

So, a lot of people aren’t able to actually go in person to actually see it. So what are some creative ways to create virtual experiences, whether that’s webinars, Q&A sessions on Zoom, whether that’s behind the scenes live video on Facebook and Instagram, whether it’s a one-one-on-one talk to a beneficiary, know, just kind of getting creative with virtual experiences?

But when it comes to your actual website, my favourite page is the donate page, right? So, how can you make sure that you are creating a donate page that has multiple different currencies, that has multiple languages and different types of ways that actually a donor can carry out their transactions? So whether that’s a credit card, Venmo, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or check, maybe you have a donor-advised fund, or maybe you need to utilize a fiscal sponsor. you know.

So having a fiscal sponsor come into play so that a Canadian can donate to an American non-profit and get a tax receipt or, you know, vice versa, whatever that might be.

So when it comes to the donate page, there are so many cool tools out there. So, definitely look into some tools as an international non-profit that allows multiple currencies to happen. And then, if your checkout process doesn’t allow you to have multiple currencies, it’s really very much like clearly labelling UK donors. Donate here, Canadian donors donate here. You know, whatever it might be. So they clearly know where to go.

And it can be a really quick and fast process to actually check out. So I mean, you gotta love it these days. There are just so many cool tech tools out there that allow for multiple international donors to actually carry out their transactions.

David Pisarek: One thing that I do want to touch on with regard to donation forms is to keep it as minimal as possible.

Don’t ask them for like their entire life history, you can build out donor profiles later on. Don’t worry about that. Make it as easy as possible for somebody to just give you their money there on the page.

They care about your organization. Whatever drew them there, make it easy.

Morgan Gross: Exactly. And it’s just like, you know, shopping on Amazon. Like, think about how quickly we can press submit on Amazon these days. And you know, it’s a delivery the next day. So it’s kind of like a similar process. You know, you want them to have a very seamless, easy checkout experience.

You know, I was actually on a call yesterday with a foundation, and one of the board members was like, it would be really great to know their birthdays. Can we get that on the form? And I was like, I love that. Like we can send them birthday cards, but we’re going to get that information post checkout. So we’re going to want to make it as easy as possible. And that’s a great way to engage a donor afterwards. It’s like, hey, thank you so much for your donation. I would love to know when is your birthday? You know, it can be in an automated receipt or the second email welcome series, whatever that might be, but I completely agree it needs to be as easy as possible.

David Pisarek: Even be a second form after they’ve donated. Asking them why they decided to give to us. You can understand the rationale behind it, the meaning, all that. You can ask for some other details like your birthday for example as well.

So I think that’s definitely an opportunity to grow your CRM and to get insight like that. But don’t do it on the donation form. Let’s just make it simple.

So we talked about websites having potentially a page for the country or a section or a separate site, that type of thing. We were talking about storytelling a little bit, but let’s talk about social media. You have an organization, and that organization serves people in four countries. Should you have separate social profiles? Should you do it all in one? How do you speak to those different audiences that might care about this country but not those ones?

Morgan Gross: Sure. That’s a big question I get asked often, and I think it always depends on where you are.

So, if you’re a smaller non-profit, if you’re just getting your social media up and running, let’s stick to one profile and get really good at it. And there are different ways you can talk to donors. So you know, you have your different, what I call bubbles, your highlights on Instagram.

And you can have it per country if you need to do it that way. And there are different ways. If you have, say, you’re across three different countries. You can pin them across your Instagram profile and speak to them. So like if you are just starting out, let’s start small and be really good at it. But then there is the opportunity to expand, right? It’s just knowing how much capacity your team has.

So, with social media, social media equals consistency if you’re going to be really good at it. So if you can be consistent at opening another page, let’s do it. Let’s absolutely do it. Because then you can kind of start segmenting and talking specifically to that region or to those programs or whatever it is.

So if you’re working in multiple different countries and the programs are in different countries and you have the opportunity to scale, let’s do it. If you are a non-profit and these are a lot of my clients, like I was saying earlier, you’re just fundraising in America or in Canada, but your programs are abroad, and all your programming happens just in one country.

I’m going to recommend just keeping one Instagram profile or one Facebook profile because the fundraising is going towards only that one program in that one country.

David Pisarek: I think that’s a smart way to do it. And just because something’s working on one social media platform for you, for that country, doesn’t mean it’ll work with the other countries, right? So I think really understanding where your audience is hanging out, where you can connect with them, where you might be able to leverage social in your favor, is an important thing to play with.

So yeah, Instagram might work really well for you targeting this audience because they’re interested in this. You might need to go to TikTok or LinkedIn or Facebook or whatever else is going to be out there to connect with that audience that cares about this other country.

Morgan Gross: I agree, and, you know, I really like to do a lot of surveying with my donors and with my audience. So I really love it when we actually survey our audience. So if you have one really good account, but you have followers from another country, go and ask them. So segment them and go and say, “Hey, if you’re in Australia, where do you hang out? Where do you like to be?” Also, I use email marketing for that, too. And surveying and finding out or, you know, start talking to other non-profits as well and seeing where they’ve seen success in that specific country. So, definitely, I recommend surveying your audience and figuring out where they’re hanging out.

David Pisarek: Great idea. Absolutely love it.

Morgan. Amazing insights around international fundraising digital marketing tactics for non-profits and charities. I hope that folks listening to this are able to get some really great advice, insights, pointers, and things like that that will help you expand or reach the people that you need to reach.

So I just want to put you on the spot for a moment here, Morgan. If you can issue a challenge to anybody who’s listening to this episode to do within the next 2 to 3 days of listening to this, what would that challenge be? Yeah.

Morgan Gross: And I just said this challenge actually yesterday too. And it’s gathering those three beneficiary stories.

So, I’m going to go back to storytelling. So, figure out who those three beneficiaries are and how you can story tell with them over an entire year and start slowly implementing their stories. You’re going to see a really great change in engagement, building donor trust, and showing that transparency.

And, like I said, repurpose that material. So yes, put it on social media. Do it on your blog’s donor engagement, your emails, whatever it might be. So grab those three people, animals, and communities that you want to follow for next year and start implementing.

David Pisarek: Such a great idea. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, they want to ask you a question or engage or connect with you to have you help them, what do they need to do?

Morgan Gross: Yeah, you can follow me at @FundraisingBeyondBorders. I am really active on LinkedIn and Instagram, so definitely send me a DM there. And then you can also find me on my website. Fundraising beyond borders.com.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Thanks again so much for joining Morgan. It’s been great having you here on the non-profit Digital Success Podcast.

To everybody listening, if you want any of the resources, link to the transcript from this episode; we have full transcripts of all of our episodes. Just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com; click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful.