109 – Turn Data into Impact with Peter Murphy Lewis

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Have you ever wondered how non-profits can turn data and storytelling into powerful marketing tools that drive growth? In today’s episode, we’re covering strategies and insider tips that can make your organization amplify its impact, reach new supporters, and make the most of the tools like Google Ads Grant and LinkedIn newsletters.

Welcome to the non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking about non-profit marketing and data-driven growth with Pete Murphy-Lewis.

Pete is the founder of strategicpete.com, which brings his expertise to the non-profit world, helping organizations turn data into impactful growth. With experience spanning industries in media, including TV shows and documentaries, Pete’s insights empower non-profits to tackle challenges streamline your operations and amplify your mission. Pete, thank you so much for joining us on the show today.

Peter Murphy: Excited to be here.

David Pisarek: What’s it like to live in a zoo?

Peter Murphy: What an icebreaker. I was not prepared. I didn’t have notes for that, David.

It is surreal. I always make the joke, but it’s not 100% a joke, that I will never, ever be able to live in another home in another location anywhere in the world that will not piss off my eight-year-old son. I have set myself up for so much failure as a dad by moving into a zoo when my son was barely three and a half years old. He’s now eight, and we live inside of a zoo that has a private enterprise arm, has a non-profit arm. We live next to the zebras between the cheetahs, and we have ponds. That’s what it’s like.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing.

What does it sound like in the morning when you’re waking up? I know on farms, you’re going to hear chickens and roosters and animals and stuff. Similar idea?

Peter Murphy: Yeah.

Three main things: I try to sleep outside in a hammock every Saturday. If my wife will let me, I’ll do Fridays and Saturdays in a hammock and I sleep next to the zebras. Well, the zebras are close to the lions. You hear lions from about 6:00 PM until 9:00 PM, just roaring, and you can feel the vibration. Then in the mornings, you can hear lemurs and monkeys. Those are the three sounds that I feel make me know that I’m at home.

David Pisarek: Cool. You’ll have to do a lot of audio recording, so when and if you move out of there, you’ll still get that sensation. You have a background in media and documentaries. How does it help you create impactful storytelling with non-profits?

Peter Murphy: There should probably be a more academic, scholarly answer to this, but the truth is my marketing chops, my business chops, I learned on the run with my own budget.

The storytelling side of things is something that I learned when I was running my first company, when I was 27 years old. Down in South America, I opened a company with a business partner that landed us in New York Times twice with well-known clients like Beyoncé and Paul McCartney and Steven Tyler, and all that was with my own bank account. The documentary work that I’ve done, the TV show that I’ve done, was the outcome of me of years of finetuning my own storytelling and my own travel company in South America.

Back then, my storytelling was that most people come to Chile to see the mountains, the oceans, the Atacama Desert, Antarctica, but you’re going to fall in love with Chileans, and you’re going to fall in love with Chilean people because we’re going to show the real Chile to you. It was that fine-tuning of pitch of a company that ran for 15 years that then translated into what I do for a documentary or today, what I do with non-profits.

David Pisarek: In terms of the non-profit world, what do you think is one or two of the most important things that they need to think about when they’re entertaining the idea of actually telling their story?

Peter Murphy: Less is more. This is not just a non-profit issue, but it’s more so because you don’t have as many resources. So focus on one channel.

That’s the same thing with your story. Today, you might be helping veterans, and you might be hoping unhomed single moms, and you might be helping something with education, but slow down. Get your ducks in a row. Let’s find which is the story that resonates the most or the one that you’re most passionate on or the one you can teach the most or you can deliver the most of value and start there.

David Pisarek: I love the idea of really singling out or narrowing your focus instead of singling out.

On the specific thing, get really good at that and then go, okay, let’s bring this one in. Let’s bring this one in. I think it’s important for non-profits to really go back to the foundation of why they were created. Over time, things shift a little bit because if you’ve been around for 50, 60, 70 years or more, your priority may have shifted a little bit because of changing times and whatnot.

But I think a lot of non-profits, certainly during COVID, started up as people were relieved of their duties due to downsizing or whatnot, or they just went, you know what? There’s a problem here. We need to solve something. Let’s do something about it. So think about why you started the organization. As probably one of the parts to look at. What do you think?

Peter Murphy: I like that. That’s a good starting point.

I’ll give you an example of how the story has evolved for me at the zoo where I live. When I joined five years ago, there was a lot of language around conservation, industry jargon, like connections. As it’s grown, it’s grown into a national brand at this point;

I think their messaging has been to create wow moments.

Behind the scenes, when we’re not in a marketing meeting, David, at least why I’m here and why it’s important to me, we’re in a fight against cell phone addictions. I am trying to help moms and dads get the cell phone out of their six-year-old, ten-year-old, fourteen-year-old hands and change their lives through outdoor adventures with animals. Maybe it’s because I’m a dad. But the conservation, the connection doesn’t line up, but they’re creating wow moments that encompasses what I’m trying to do, and it encompasses what they’re doing from a conservation point of view.

It makes sense now. We can see when we run ads on Google Grant or we run ads on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok and types of things, people are getting wild moments and no one else is using that language as far as I know.

David Pisarek: Yeah.

David Pisarek: As a parent, one of the things that my wife and I agreed on very early on is we’re not going to give a tablet or phone to our kids out in public. If we’re at home, whatever, they’re in their downtime, they want to mess around with it, sure. We want them to have exposure to it because that really is the way that the future is going to be for them is working with technology in some way, shape, or form, regardless, I think, of whatever their career path happens to be. We don’t want to totally stop them.

Again, every parent, you’ve got your own decisions for your family, what’s right for you and what works for you. But really thinking about future trends, how can we empower our organizations, our children, our families, our friends, to think about what could be or what should be, and making that really a sense of reality for them however we can so that they can live and breathe it, which will then ultimately improve what they do down the road?

Peter Murphy: I don’t know if I have a perfect answer for that, but what comes to mind or maybe even what I felt in my gut, which is show, not tell.

I have this conversation all the time as a strategists, I come to your website, or I come to your email nurture, or I come to your testimonials, people are telling, not showing. When working with smaller non-profits, there’s so much marketing that can be done outside of the digital world that you’re showing and not telling.

I am on the board of a community foundation in my home county where I grew up in Kansas, and we don’t have a lot of resources. We have an intern, and we just hired our first executive director, but we clearly chose when we hired the executive director, we made sure that we were hiring someone who knows how to show and not tell, and she’s out in the community.

We don’t have the resources to create videos with her every day. We have a new website, that’s fine. We have a simple email nurture, it’s fine. We have Google Grant. But the biggest asset we have is her. It’s her face, it’s her smile.

Peter Murphy: We’re not, from a marketing point of view, trying to explain what can be done or what should be done. Rather, we’re showing optimism through Tammy’s face and smiles and going to rotary clubs and high schools. Now, as a marketer who supports her, my job is then to translate her personal vision into our Community Foundation vision and do a little bit more, I think, of what you asked, David.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I think human assets are definitely a strong piece that non-profits need to think about.

I guess it depends on who you’re serving. If you’re serving an international audience, it might be a little bit hard to get out there in person, but you can showcase the personality and the frontline people of your organization through social, through messaging, through video, through all these means, certainly the last four or five years have been brought to light a lot more because people are okay with virtual. COVID threw everybody into that. You had no choice between school programs, doctor’s appointments, this, that, whatever. Everybody’s used to the online thing.

So get out there and be genuine as you’re going out and telling the world about what you do.

Peter Murphy: This is very tactical, but I see it as low-hanging fruit every single time I start helping any non-profit is if you have a bunch of people who already love you, let’s just start by getting Google business reviews. That’s showing, not telling.

Instead of me telling you, David, “Hey, David, I have the most amazing community foundation. We do this and we do this and then we do that type of thing,” why don’t I just have the 15 people who come up to me every month or every other month and they tell me how much of an impact we’re having on the homeless shelter or the woman’s shelter and say, “Hey, you know what? Google allows you every 90 days to give me a new Google business for you. Can you go give me a five star and tell me what you just told me in person? How about I just record it? I’ll send it to you in an email. I’ll send you the link and just upload it.”

Start there by having people share your story.

David Pisarek: If you don’t have a Google business profile, you can go and set one up. It’s absolutely free.

Just go to google.com/business. You can create it all for free.

Even better is if you go to Google, I think in Google, if you just search for the name of your organization on the right side, you’re going to get the listing and it’ll say, Is this your business? Claim ownership, and then you can take it over from that perspective. It’ll save you a little bit of time in terms of some of the information that Google’s already amalgamated about your organization. Then you actually own your profile instead of somebody else owning it. It’s absolutely free to do. It’ll take a little bit of your time to do it, but maybe you’ve got a volunteer in your organization that you can do that with.

My advice would be set up a generic account that you own that with, so info@ or webmaster@ or something like that. So if people come and go through your organization or different volunteers, it’s not tied to a person, it’s tied to a role.

Peter Murphy: Yeah, I agree.

David Pisarek: Amazing.

So you were going to talk about this very, very briefly. Well, you didn’t talk about it. You mentioned it, the Google Ad Grant.

For anybody that doesn’t know, the Google Ad Grant, if you’re a 501(c)(3), or if you’re registered with the CRA, or you’re a official legal non-profit or charity, you can qualify to get $10,000 a month in free ad spend. That’s $120,000 a year.

What strategies do you recommend for people to make the most out of the ad grant?

Peter Murphy: I think I only have two, and that’s mostly based around my background and what currently has worked for our clients, which is tons of content.

Create tons of content around the keywords to couple your SEO work and then line those up. Any non-profit that I’m working with, I put either interns underneath them to write up content around the keywords so that you can maximize the Google Grant spend. And that’s one to three blogs per week. And then the second thing is try to put inside of those websites inside of those landing pages, inside of those blogs, put YouTube content in there.

Do little videos, interview the executive director, cut up pieces from your reviews and put in videos. And I don’t know if this is the case. This may longer be an outdated strategy, but I find when I line up an SEO strategy with a YouTube strategy, so I’m lining up Google strategy with YouTube strategy, which are the two biggest platforms, there seems to be some extra oomph that we can get from that. For the zoo that we’re working with, Tanganyika Wildlife Park, we get north of $8-$9,000 in monthly spend.

For your listeners who aren’t taking advantage of this, they’re leading $100,000 on the table of free marketing, a year.

David Pisarek: Yeah. It’s in perpetuity as long as you are still registered.

Further to your point, Google is, I would say, 11 out of 12 months of the year, the number one search engine. Youtube is the second most popular search engine, and then they alternate. Alphabets owns YouTube and Google. There’s got to be some correlation between what you’re talking about and the algorithm where the sharing of data and information and pieces like that are flowing back and forth.

I’ve got the content board on the wall behind me here, and what we’ve seen with our clients that we create content for them, we’ve been able to get 510% increase in unique organic traffic over 8-9 months of doing this. That’s one article a week, about 500-600 words, but they’re keyword dense.

Then we also look at our Google Webmaster account to see what are those search terms that people are actually looking for, that are driving them to the site and creating more content around that because what’s working works, so make more of what works.

Peter Murphy: Going back to your point that YouTube and Google are partners, right? They look like competitors, but they’re not really.

If it scares your audience, like I can’t do video, definitely not two or three times a week, nor once a week. What I can do is what’s working for you from a content point of view, written content point of view, go do the video after the fact, two months later, three months later.

One of my bigger clients, not a non-profit, but an enterprise SaaS, we’re doing 40,000 visitors per month to our website. Well, any blog that moves into the top 5 or top 10 of most blogs visited, then I go write a video and a talking head video to engage, and then I embed it on that website. I do that six months after someone starts to rank.

David Pisarek: Google wants to see modifications to your site over time. Go back.

If you’ve got some articles that are getting some decent traffic, two years later, three years later, go back and revise it. Make sure you put on the page the original publication date and then the modified date because that’s going to help with your ranking.

If you’ve got a WordPress site, it’s really easy to do a little bit of PHP script. There’s probably a plugin that could do it. We usually just create a little script that we throw in for that.

Okay, so Pete, marketing tips for non-profit leaders that they can implement relatively quickly. Content, sure. You can leverage ChatGPT, AI tools, and things like that to create a foundation for the article. I do not recommend you taking it, pasting it and saying, Okay, job well done, we’re good. No, you need to take some time and edit. So that’s a quick thing that people can do. What are some other actionable tips that you might have?

Peter Murphy: In smaller communities like mine, right, in Kansas, if your local news organization doesn’t understand digital marketing, and many of them don’t, they’re pasting once a week, some type of non-legible content about their newspaper that Google does not know how to keep, nor does it know how to read, nor does it know how to rank. Take the best content that lines with your mission and vision, and then have your executive director or your executive team or your founder comment on that and then reshare it and then just structure it into a blog.

For our community foundation, we’re taking the best three pieces of content from our local newspaper that doesn’t rank. We’re having her give a shout-out and talk about why this is important for our community. We’re making it sure it’s SEO-optimized. We’re writing up our keywords, we’re optimizing the titles, we’re putting the images, and then we’re putting this on our website. We are slowly ranking for those keywords that people are searching for afterwards. It can be your local music festival, it could be when is the rodeo, how much do tickets cost to the state fair, those types of things. Just simple repurposing when other people aren’t good at digital marketing, it means we’re not having to create the content.

Peter Murphy: Moving over to LinkedIn, the three current clients that I’m working with right now in the non-profit space, LinkedIn is hot for us. Those are where our donors are, there’s where our thought leaders are, our stakeholders in the community. One is in long-term care, the zoo world or conservation and then the other is Community Foundation. We need to be talking to business owners, to rotary club members, to golf members.

These are people who want to make a difference, to have a little bit more time, and where can we find them on LinkedIn? In my space, David, this is hot because I’m in Kansas. I think we’re five years behind in terms of LinkedIn. We’re not like the Coast. It’s not Boston, New York, or LA, where everyone under 25 years old has a LinkedIn account and logs in at least once a month. In Kansas, that’s not the case. We can really easily stand out.

Then what we do there is that exact same process that I shared with you of taking the best content from our local newspapers. Then we’re just moving that over to a LinkedIn newsletter. In our LinkedIn newsletter, we’re taking the best content that’s already out there.

Peter Murphy: We’re repackaging, giving it credit and then tagging all of the local leaders in our state, in our county, in our city, giving them a shout-up. Then LinkedIn is doing the algorithm.

LinkedIn is recommending people subscribe to our newsletter without us doing anything. We’re doing it for free. You don’t have to pay for ads. On Facebook, if you want people to join your Facebook group or your Facebook page, you got to spend money on ads.

David Pisarek: Now that you’re talking about the article posting. For the last several years, I have a blog for Wow Digital, and we post every two weeks. We’ve got a blog. When I started the podcast, we post those in between. Every week we’ve got some content. What I said is, Hey, we’ve got this blog. When I found out about the articles in LinkedIn, let’s post these there as well.

Just organically, I’ve got just under 800 people subscribed to that newsletter just by posting it. We’re already spending the time and effort creating it. We put the email to

gether, we take it, we essentially copy and paste it into LinkedIn. We put the right hashtags and those pieces in. It’s maybe 10 minutes of work, not even. We have another almost 800 people in our list over there. If you think about this from a non-profit side, it shows up in people’s feeds. Anybody that’s subscribed will also get an email with it, and it’s just organic growth.

Peter Murphy: Anybody who comments or likes, then we’ll share your content to their audience.

David Pisarek: It’s amazing.

I would really encourage anybody listening to this to go and just set it up. It’s free. If you need help figuring it out, you do have to, I believe, change your account to a creator account to be able to post those articles. It’s really easy to do. You can go to Google, you can search, you can go to Perplexity, ChatGPT, and just ask it how to set this thing up. There’s a setting in your profile. That’s really all it is.

Peter Murphy: The only caveat to that is that I don’t think you can transfer ownership of a newsletter. So think about the person who’s going to be inside your organization for the longest period, or if not, even if the person is not going to be in it, find some 30-year-old who lives in the community and believes in what you do and say, “Hey, can we put this to your account?” Because if I’m moving tomorrow to Florida or I’m a hired executive director, tomorrow I’m moving from Kansas City, and I’m going to a bigger job in Colorado. Unfortunately, I can’t leave that newsletter with your organization.

David Pisarek: Yeah, that’s a very valid point, for sure.

Okay, so we’ve got hosting content that gets more organic traffic. We’ve got video, which is taking advantage of YouTube and the algorithm over there, getting more traffic, ideally in the descriptions, having some clear call-to-actions to drive people back to your site or the cause or the page or the program or the service or whatever it happens to be. We’ve got LinkedIn, so we’re generating buzz there. We’re getting subscribers, so people who are interested in your organization, and that’s spreading organically as anybody comments, likes, etcetera, and you’re going to get more followers because you’re putting in the hashtags that people want to find you by.

Do you have any specific examples of where these data pieces can be used in a bigger strategy to create really good insights on what you should focus on?

Peter Murphy: I just filmed a docuseries for a non-profit for a healthcare association, Their Foundation Branch.

The documentary was launched on YouTube about a month ago in Nebraska. It’s called People Worth Caring About. What we’re doing there is we’re repurposing that content over and over and over into short little reels. We’re constantly paying attention to two main things as we optimize it. We’re paying attention to what are the titles that are capturing people’s attention outside of their subscriber base or outside of even more so long-term care. Because the intention of this docuseries is to bring attention to the beautiful work of caregivers and then help out with the staffing crisis, everything that I’m looking at from a marketing point of view is what is getting the attention of non-health healthcare workers to watch this documentary. I’m not trying to get that 20,000 healthcare workers.

Yes, I’d like them to watch it, but I want to see how I’m going to get the one million non-healthcare workers to watch it. Those are insights that we’re paying attention to.

We’re spending ads on YouTube, we’re spending ads on Facebook, and then we’re seeing which is the ad that’s bringing over the most impressions, the most amount of clicks, the most amount of subscribers.

Now, it doesn’t line up exactly, I don’t think, with what you’re saying, and especially because we’re playing with an ads budget and a bigger team. But I am taking small insights there to determine what works somewhere else.

I’ll give you another example, and this is going to be really into the weeds, but I’ll try to keep it high level enough for anyone who’s tech savvy. One of my favorite tools that I use a lot, David, you’ve probably heard of it, is Quuu Promote. Quuu Promote allows you to share your content to the universe of people on social media, and then they get to reshare yours and their handles. I use Quuu Promote to determine where I’m going to put my ad budget afterwards, because I’m letting the organic know to tell me what goes viral by thumbnail, by title, and then I adjust all my content afterwards.

Quuu Promote, I don’t know, it’s $50 or $100 a month, but it’s saving me thousands of dollars per month and what I’m not wasting on new PPC campaigns.

Let’s give an example, David. I’ll take this podcast that I’m doing with you, and I will write it up on my blog with three different thumbnails and three different titles. I may or may not index them on Google.

One angle will be, one will be about non-profits, one will be about how to growth hack LinkedIn, and the third one is how to repurpose for non-profits or something like that. Then, I will run them on Quuu Promote for a month and determine which has the most clicks and shares. That’s where I’ll put $1,000 or $3,000 in ads. That answers your question with either one of those examples?

David Pisarek: Yeah.

So Quuu Promote, it’s quuupromote.co I believe, right? Okay. Essentially, what you’re talking about, if I want to take this higher level a little bit, is A/B testing. Put some money in, see how it goes. You don’t have to put a lot of money. I forget the gentleman’s name. There’s somebody out there that talks about dollar-a-day ads. He starts with $1.

Peter Murphy: I took that class.

David Pisarek: All right. Instead of me explaining, why don’t you tell everybody the gist of what that is?

Peter Murphy: It’s if you spend a dollar every day, the first seven days, let’s say 14 days over one or two ads, then you reiterate it, and you start to put more money into one ad. I think that’s the gist. My wife runs all the PPC for me nowadays, but I think I’ve got that wrong.

David Pisarek: Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

You spend a dollar today on ads; see what’s working better. You spend $2 tomorrow, but you refine the ad that’s doing better. Then you spend $3, but you refine that one. You keep bumping it up until you end up getting the results.

Basically, for maybe 200 bucks, you can get really clear over a period of, I don’t know, 2-3 weeks. I don’t know. I can’t do the math at the moment, but over 2-3 weeks, you can get clarity on what’s going to work well and optimize well.

Then, you can run that, for example, on multiple platforms and see which platforms are working well. But I think part of that is knowing where your audience is hanging out and understanding where they are so you can connect with them. I talk about that episode 16 of the podcast way back, I talk about psychographics and really understanding what’s going to motivate, what does your audience care about, and how can you get them to care about you and your cause and the purpose that you serve?

Peter Murphy: Yeah, love it. I think the class was with digital marketer, digitalmarketer.com

David Pisarek: Maybe. I’m sure it’ll be quick for us to find it. We’ll throw a link in the show notes page for that one.

Peter Murphy: To take the dollar-a-day exercise even one step further, I have an acquaintance inside of one of the entrepreneurship communities that I love and belong to called Dynamite Circle.

Her name’s Esther. She taught me about three years ago, she’s written 30 or 40 some books. Before she actually writes a book, she sells three different books on Facebook ads. She’ll say, “Hey, this book is $19.99. You could pre-buy it today for $3.99”. Since she does the cover of the book, the title of the book, and she runs these ads separately. The book that sells the most, she writes the book. For the book that doesn’t sell, she says, “Hey, I’ll give you a refund, or you can buy this other book that’s being written first”, and she writes books based on what happens with ads.

David Pisarek: That is amazingly brilliant.

There’s a mentor of mine, and he talks about flying the plane while you’re building it. There’s something to be said for taking a step forward, starting down a path, and figuring it out as you go. The key is that you actually start doing something. Because thinking about it, talking about it in meetings, talking with your colleagues, going to the community, talking to people that only get you so far.

At some point, you actually need to put the pedal to the metal and start doing something.

Awesome. Pete, some really fantastic insights in the conversation we had today. Thank you so much for being here. Before the show, we were talking about you’ve got a free audit for marketing funnels. Tell us about what that is.

Peter Murphy: Yeah. One of the things that I enjoy most in life is helping small startups, medium-sized companies, and non-profits grow. I have done more than 200 sessions for free, doing pro bono work for a community called Growth Mentor.

If there’s anything we talked about today that you think I can help with, reach out to me and go to my website. I’ll give you a free audit and what I would do, or you can just reach out and say, “Hey, Peter, can I have that first session for free on Growth Mentor? I’m not an owner.”

I’ll give you that free session and I’ll be happy to help you. I do many, many more hours per month, David, giving away free help as a consultant that I do as paid. As I said, learn how to ask, you can ask me now.

David Pisarek: What is your website? How can people get in touch with you?

Peter Murphy: Strategicpete.com if you want to connect with me directly, find me on LinkedIn. I’m the only Peter Murphy Lewis on LinkedIn that I know of. But reach out and say, “Hey, I love the podcast, David. I’ve been listening him for some time. Can you help me with this?” I’ll give you my phone number and my Zoom, and we’ll jump on a call.

David Pisarek: Thank you so much again, Peter, for joining us on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you’d like to access any of the resources or the links or the things that Pete and I talked about, just head over to our podcast show notes page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And until next time, keep on being successful.