123 – 5 Video Tips for Fundraising with Nikolaj Kloch

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you drowning in digital noise and tired of creating content that just doesn’t stick? Nikolaj Kloch shares how non-profits can cut through the clutter with powerful video and innovative digital strategies.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success Podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’ll be discussing all things related to video storytelling, brand credibility, and cutting through digital clutter with Nikolaj Kloch. Nikolaj is a videographer and former aerospace engineer who helps public speakers, businesses, non-profits, and the like create high-impact videos.

He’s trusted by the Candy Bomer Foundation and even by speakers at AWS, Rolls-Royce, Jaguar, and NFL athletes. He’s the founder of Thrivr Productions, and he’s here today with us to help us all get better at standing out online.

Thank you so much for joining in, Nikolaj. How are you doing today?

Nikolaj Kloch: Good. Thank you so much for having me.

David Pisarek: My pleasure. All right, so let’s jump in and let’s start at the beginning.

When a non-profit says that they need better marketing, what do you think they actually really mean by that?

Nikolaj Kloch: A lot of non-profits will come in with just the goal in mind, just what they want out of that. And they don’t really understand that diving into traditional marketing doesn’t work in today’s market. If you learn marketing today, it will be gone in three months’ time.

Trends are a perfect example of this, of what works. It’s completely changing, and nobody could have predicted meme content, or TikTok videos, or just these short six-second clips that are just outperforming everything else. So, it’s really tough if you nail down traditional marketing, just with the goal in mind, you’re going to produce something that’s very polished, bland, and doesn’t really focus on anything. It’s just a standard reel of photos with someone talking underneath.

The thing that people often overlook when building something like this is examining what’s performing well, which can trigger a pain point. What are you trying to solve in that story? Don’t just say, ‘These kids are hungry.’ You could, actually, build out that pain point of what they’re feeling, tackling that, then going through what you’re doing to solve that, and showcasing the full transformation on a trend that’s happening today.

The best way, there’s a great book called Steal Like an Artist, and it’s actually just taking the foundation of what’s working in today’s world. If you see a non-profit that’s killing it compared to others, take the bones from that. Never copy. It will never work for your foundation. But take the bones, right? And you can take the bones and build upon that to produce something that is not traditional.

You can still make it polished to look great, great audio, great lighting, great photos. But take what’s performing, and that’s the engineering background, which is finding what’s performing well. I think a very nice, polished, traditional non-profit video is awesome. But what’s even more awesome is taking those tactics out of that and making a great video that performs.

A non-profit is always for a good cause. So, actually taking that out, finding the good cause, producing a video that performs, and analytics off of the back of what’s performing. I think that’s where a lot of people are going wrong, is that they’re looking at 30 years ago today marketing. They’re not looking at what’s performing, and every space has things that are outperforming everything else. I think that’s where we need to be focusing, and that’s exactly what I’ve done to get much higher returns for my clients: doing what works.

I know it sounds so simple, and I have to preface that with ‘posted is better than perfect.’ There are a lot of non-profits that will spend eight months at a crazy budget just to get one polished video that doesn’t work. I would much rather see 100 videos that work at a higher level, that take less time, that you’re actually getting exposure out there, you’re gaining traction, you’re getting more people actually to look you up and see what you’re doing.

I always say, before you dive in and make it so perfect: posted is better than perfect, please.

David Pisarek: I love the ideas that you mentioned there. Taking a look at it, we don’t like to call it competition in the non-profit space, right? Because we’re all here to help humanity, solve problems, and do better things. At the end of the day, it really is competition because there’s only so many donor dollars out there, so many grants, so much government money that you can bring in. You want to try to capture the attention from the people that are seeing the content.

I love the idea of taking a look at what others are doing. Try to break it down and figure out what is the skeleton of what they’re doing. Are they anchoring at the start with a pain point and then talking about how they saw it? What is the formula?

And yeah, maybe they got 1,000 views, maybe they got 100,000 views, maybe they got 5 million views, whatever it happens to be. Take a look at it, analyze it, and see if that’s something that could work for you with your own message. Because, to your point, not every organization has the same goal. And so, you can’t just lift what one person did or what one organization did and do it for yourself.

I love the idea. Analyze and go, ‘Okay, let’s create some content around that.’

Nikolaj Kloch: I always say, it’s not competition if it’s for a cause you believe in. It’s not competition. It’s not competitive. If you have a cause you believe in and you want it to change the world or change your local bubble, whatever that might be, it’s not competition. It’s strictly doing a good thing to actually get people looking, eyeballs, money, coming your way. Money is not bad. It’s how we use it that could be bad. But non-profits are always on the good side of that. So I don’t look at it like that. I think you should be doing this.

You should be listening to this podcast and taking some great advice, and doing better, actually competing, performing.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and I really struggled early on in my agency. Everything has to be absolutely perfect, right? It’s taken a lot of willpower. It’s taken a lot of workload for me to go; this is good enough for us to get out there.

To your point, produce something, put it out there. If it works, create more of the same. Focus on the thing; almost verbatim, what you said. If this is working, why do something else? Keep doing that until it stops working, and then, figure out how you need to change to get things working again. If it’s 80% of the way there, go for it.

Nikolaj Kloch: Exactly.

David Pisarek: Post it. Do something. You have to put one foot in front of the other. Yeah, you might take 10 steps, and then you go back to. But you’re eight steps ahead at that point than where you were before. Absolutely, you’ve got to put time, effort, and just do it. Just do it. All right. Yeah. Nike, don’t sue me over that.

Okay, so you work a lot with non-profits. Have you seen any branding or design mistakes that you see happening over and over that feels like it hurts their credibility?

Nikolaj Kloch: Yes, absolutely.

One of the biggest challenges is a non-established non-profit coming in and trying to establish their branding like a company that’s been around for 200 years or 100 years. Non-profits go way back. It’s been a thing. They’ve been named differently, right? But actually coming in and making a very, not ancient, but very dated logo, trying to set up that high net worth, all these things when, I guess, unpolished always outperforms if you’re not authentic to yourself.

If you come in with raw videos and your boots on the ground, and you’re just showcasing in these horribly made clips, it will outperform somebody coming in trying to fake it, trying to say, ‘We’re this polished thing’ because it looks fake. A great example of this is AI. AI, it’s getting there, but you can tell. You can always tell. There’s that little thing that seems off. I think that exact thing goes across for branding, and it kills you when you come in trying to act like something you’re not.

Another really highly successful vantage point is hitting the younger market, getting the goofy marketing style up. A video that’s six seconds, and it’s this crazy content, and you’re like, this will never work. It’s just funny and goofy, but then you get a million eyeballs on your account, and it’s for a good cause. And the sales funnel is set up, right? It’s a sales funnel. It’s still for a great cause. And that, I think, it should make selling easier for everyone when it’s for something you believe in.

Don’t think of it as you scamming. Use psychology. It’s for a good cause. It’s actually for good. But that kills people when they come in, they set up their brand as this highly polished, refined. You need to think of who you’re serving. They’re the people you care about. What’s the most effective way that we can get that money to serve that community? It kills me when people come in and say, ‘I want a polished video like this, a $10 million company. This is what we want to emulate.’ I’m like, ‘Great, that’s easy.’ But it pulls away from that in authenticity, if you think about it, where your CEO, whoever the founder, could come in and have a video where they make mistakes when they’re speaking. They’re actually showcasing just a video shot on a phone, and we can make it look polished. Polished, it could be super cinematic, but if it’s aligned with not trying to fake it as much.

I get there’s a lot of advice out there that’s ‘Fake it till you make it,’ and it has its weight in the conversation, but it’s not ‘be somebody you’re not.’ Fake it till you make it is to be confident, go to the investor meetings, go to these types of things and get funny. But it’s not, let’s pretend to be a $10 million company that is serving globally when you’re not even bootstrapped in your local community and serving them.

It kills you when you’re trying to fake everything and you’re trying to start from the top and work down. It’s much easier to start from the bottom, show who you are. Take advantage of those goofy, low-budget videos. Take advantage of the super serious, sad videos that are deleted from your phone. Use what you have and post. I think that is one of the biggest things that people miss: they’re trying to be this entirely different entity where there’s a reason in marketing, you see, when companies say family-owned, that’s a big business trying to look small sometimes, and they’re doing that.

And that’s your vantage point, trying to look small and then go big. Or if you’re at that million-dollar scale, take that, own it, show the impact you can make, show that from a very smart, psychological angle. Showcase the pain points, whatever people are most concerned about.

You can also send out surveys to determine what matters most to your clients. If you’re ever on a call and somebody donates and you don’t ask them where they found out about you, please start doing that. That is your simplest first step to finding out everything. Ask them how they found out about you. Ask them why they donated. Ask them why they want to get involved. And those are really the only three questions you need to know to build everything off of. So if you’re at the very top, start asking that. Start figuring out those things that you could truly build videos off of, marketing material off of, and it’s for a good cause.

So do not be scared to dive into copywriting psychology and the video attention tactics. It’s for a good cause.

David Pisarek: One of the things that you talked about right there in the last 30 seconds is about psychology. And there’s something called psychographics. For anyone interested in learning more, please listen to episode 16 of the podcast. That’s like 100 and some odd episodes ago, but go listen to it. It’s very, very relevant still, where I talk about why you need to care about psychographics.

We know about demographics, we know about geographics, but the psychographics, what happens in their brain and their mind? What do they care about? What are they passionate about? What resonates with them? Where do they hang out? Where do they spend their time? If you can identify, I don’t know, maybe even 20% of your donor base, where they go and spend their time online, what social platform do they use the most? Start spending your time and effort on that social platform because you’re going to resonate with more people there.

Absolutely. Try to collect some information. Don’t add it to your donor form. Keep the donor form simple, but try to build out the profiles over time. You can send out an email survey and build up profiles with their responses to that, but focus on what’s working. If you have got an audience in TikTok, work in TikTok, ignore Instagram, ignore Bluesky, ignore LinkedIn, ignore Facebook, ignore everything else, focus on the thing that’s actually going to drive some business.

And absolutely, to your point, you need to be authentic. If you were to walk into a bank and ask for a loan for your organization, they’re going to want to see a business case. They’re going to want to see the impact. They’re going to want to see all of that. You could fake it. You could lie to them. I mean, there’s a huge responsibility that comes with fraud and things like that. Be authentic. If you are a very serious organization, play into that. Let people know that that’s what you are and why is it that you are this way. Lean into that.

Absolutely. I guess the question I’ve got is, how often should organizations be posting?

Nikolaj Kloch: That’s platform-dependent. It goes in different ways. I love what you say, master one platform.

If you have the budget, get people who know how to repackage the content. So every platform has a different way of packaging. TikTok: hyper, edits, quick, fast-paced. But YouTube, that’s long-form video content. I always advise clients to use the short form to feed into the long form. And if you’re smart with it, you can produce your long form into stand-alone clips, so you can pull out short form clips, precisely what we do with podcasts.

You pull out the short form clips that lead into a longer trust-building funnel. So, I would definitely say that if you’re focusing on one, unless you have the bandwidth to spread out, I would recommend posting at a minimum of three to five times per week, especially if you’re a big company. And I only set the bar so low because a lot of people, you’d be very surprised, and this is your leverage point, they don’t post; they post once a month, twice a month. If you can hit that and you can figure out what’s resonating with your audience, and the only way you know that is engagements, likes, comments, saves, shares, things like that.

And if you can figure out what’s working best, tweak it and keep using it.

And a lot of the time, only around 18% of your actual audience, that’s a high number, and I’d say if you have a low follow-up count, it’s actually seeing your content repeatedly. The higher you go, the less likely they are to notice that. And a great way, if you’re a large company with a big budget target, hire the person who is at the very bottom of their career. They are the most in-tune with a different demographic. Keep on the people that are seasoned veterans. They master their demographic. But if you can just spread that nest. And you’d be very surprised, there are a lot of people across the board, and you’ve got your target demographic. So have that single person be your first backbone. But you can hire different people at different stages of their career that are much better in that specific target audience. So maybe a younger person for Instagram, TikTok, and then you get your seasoned vets on LinkedIn, YouTube, these dominating factors. And don’t be afraid. If nothing’s working, focus on one. Do some research on where your industry is outperforming the rest. Very easily found on AI. And then focus on that one.

Start learning one trick, one tip. Start recording the simplest way you can, so that you can post. If you take on too much and you don’t post, it’s wasted effort. If you take on just enough, and if the bar is so low that you want it to be once a month, and that’s guaranteed, you will never miss that. Start at one and build up. You will never hurt more than not posting. By posting, you’re getting eyeballs, you’re getting views, you’re getting people to look at you.

So three to five times minimum, if you’re not posting at all, once a week, once a month, whatever you guarantee will do, and then build. And I get people coming in and they pay a lot for coaching from me, and they say, I’m going to post every single day, and they don’t post once. And I’m sitting there, calling, sending emails, and texting. You promise me, you promise me, you promise me. So, just start with where you’re at, with what you have. Get consistent and then build. Do not go and buy a fancy camera. Do not go and hire any blah, blah, blah. Consistency, the tools you have, build up.

David Pisarek: Cellphones are so much better now, even over the last three to four years, than they were a decade ago.

Nobody is really expecting Hollywood-quality production from a non-profit, especially if you’re in startup mode or if you’re under a million a year in operating budget; nobody’s really expecting that. There are some low-cost things you can do.

You can use your phone, you can buy a no-name Gimbal off of Amazon or something like that and use that to help stabilize the video. You can buy a low-cost tripod and set it up. That’s totally fine. There’s magic that you can do on the post-production side to stabilize video, to add effects and stuff like that. But nobody’s expecting some action-packed 10-second clip from your non-profit. It’s okay, right? Figure out, to your point earlier, what works, make videos like that.

Try other things out in between, right? You could do some testing with videos. You could have one produced in this way and one produced in this way, and publish them simultaneously to see which one receives the most views, or publish one a week later at the exact same time. You can also conduct A/B testing with it, but you still need to start somewhere.

I love your point, Nikolaj, about connecting with the younger audience. There’s a huge amount of wealth that is going to be transferred down over the next 8 to 10 years from the boomers. I was talking at a conference in April, and you’ve got millennials and Gen Z as the biggest consumer groups, and they are going to come into a boatload of money over the next 10 years. We’re talking trillions of dollars being handed down. And you want to encourage them to engage with you now, maybe not now, this month, next month, sooner than later, because at some point, and we know that the millennials and Gen Zs, they care about organizations that have an impact on the planet. It’s just what it is.

This conference I was talking at, it was a digital marketing conference, and I was telling them that they need to connect with non-profits to sponsor them, to work on relationships with them, and to work on their branding and their products and their materials, whatever, to be more eco friendly, to be more geared towards this younger generation that really cares about causes. You can have a lot of growth by connecting with people’s emotions when it’s tied to a cause from the non-profit side, as well as the for-profit side.

If you can partner with an organization, maybe there’s a local company and they’ve got somebody on staff in their marketing team that can do a little bit of video. You can have them do that for you. You don’t have to do this stuff alone. There are other people out there. You can get coaching from Nikolaj. You can come to us. There are lots of people out there. You can even maybe try leveraging AI to help you figure out what you need to do. It’s just a matter of what is the right prompts to put into there.

We’re producing content as our non-profit. We’re publishing it maybe two, three, five times a week. Ideally, more, I think, is better because I think the algorithms in the platforms cater to people that publish more because they want to showcase them more. But let’s take a step back for a second. We’re putting some time and effort. Maybe we’ve spent a couple of hundred dollars on a little bit of it, maybe a ring light and a gimbal, and maybe we bought a new cellphone or something like that, whatever it happens to be. How can we measure the ROI when goals aren’t necessarily just financial? There’s brand awareness.

From your perspective, how could non-profits or charities create metrics around awareness or action? You can see how many likes, comments, shares, saves, and things like that. But awareness and action, what do you think about from that side?

Nikolaj Kloch: There are a lot of different ways. If you’re speaking with a marketer, they might say KPIs, your Key Performance Indicators. The way we like to do it on our side is to ask what they care about when they’re producing. What do you care about? Is that money? If it’s not money and they have everything, they really just want awareness and people to do these, donate their time to help; then it’s something different. That could be engagement. It could be click-throughs on their funnels. But getting really clear on what the outcome is is step one.

If you’re on the other side of decision-making, if you want boots on the ground and you want people to donate, that’s going to be click-through. That’s actually going through and seeing how many people come from your social page or a specific link, and there are ways of producing the links to see where they came from. So you would actually want to see the sales funnel, or I guess the click-through funnel. And if you look at each step in that process, you can see where people fall out. I just want to touch on this really quickly.

The best way to actually improve everything is figuring out your overall process and then seeing where they fall out. So if they fall out on your landing page, you need to reduce friction. Keep everything else the same. Reduce the friction to what you think would be best. Testimonials, transformations, and the actual process of how you do work. Change one, keep everything else the same for a month, two weeks at minimum. And that’s how you control and experiment. And if it got worse, you need to change it again. If it got a lot better, you move on to the next point.

Over the course of a year, you could have a completely different machine built out for your company. Now, if it’s engagements, there are great ways to tweak a post to see increasing engagements, and that should be on the other side of whoever is producing the content. But if you’re tracking that, that could be awareness for your cause. Follower growth, things like that, are great ways of actually breaking that down and seeing, ‘Okay, we care about social awareness, and we’re not getting any followers. So that could mean our content is inconsistent.’ There’s a great phrase that is called ‘Bingeable content.’ So they can click into your page and see a lot of the same style content that keeps attention, and they can scroll.

And after seven touchpoints, it’s the same through sales and social media; it’s all the same psychology: seven touchpoints, and they’re likely to convert to a subscriber.

It’s a great way through podcasting, you break those up with non-profits, you break up those posts, you’d have a lot of them, and then eventually showing up consistently, again, that’s how you would actually go about getting somebody to convert on that front. I think it comes down to knowing what matters most to you.

There’s a lot of untrackables. If you’re a huge company that can’t really get a handle on what needs to be done, it needs to be done through surveying the end customer. They would put this in a great way. Don’t put this in your actual capture sheet when you’re talking to the customer. Make that as frictionless as possible.

But if you have them on the call and you can just chat with them, ask some questions, and get some more details, and then it could break into, ‘How do you feel about our company?’ And then that could be a great indicator, over 100 calls, of how people are actually looking at you. Pick up a phone, call people, and see how they’re actually tracking your brand.

But again, it’s how you show up every single day. If you want to look like you’re doing good in the world, go do good in the world consistently. If you want to show up that you’re top dog and you’re making a lot of money and you can help other people make money, go show up like that by doing it. It’s really hard to fake these things, but if you just show what you’re doing, it’s really easy to show.

David Pisarek: Two things you mentioned there that I want to touch on.

One is figuring out where people are dropping off. There’s a concept called Conversion Rate Optimization, or CRO. If they’re falling off on your landing page, you have got to follow the scientific method. You change one thing and let that ride. My research and other research that is out there, you can go, you could Google this or whatever, is, for example, the colours of buttons, the psychology behind the colours of buttons.

You would think traffic lights, right? You place a green button on a page. That green means go. People are good. No, that’s actually the opposite. Red buttons have a higher conversion rate than green buttons. Follow through, play with things. Maybe it’s actually the wording. Having the wording ‘learn more’ is too generic. Learn more what? Learn more about what? What is it that you want somebody to? Make that the call to action on the page. Maybe you don’t even have a call to action there, and you’re just taking them to the ‘About the Organization’ page. Well, who cares? You need to think about it from their perspective and follow the entire process through, and ask: How can we actually make this help us for whatever our goal is?

To your point about that, you need to figure out what the goal is before you even start working on anything. Don’t start making all these videos spend, I don’t know, 3 hours shooting 15 quick little clips. If you don’t have the end goal, then the messaging isn’t going to work. So figure that out.

Nikolaj Kloch: If I could just touch. You said so much. I want everyone to understand that when I say marketing can go out of style, psychographics and psychology do not go out of style. Please go binge-watch that episode. It will always help you. There’s never a point in time when it will not help you. Marketing is a changing, fickle thing. The psychology, the research that David has done, please go watch, read everything you can on that. It will always help. It will not hurt. Sorry.

David Pisarek: All good. The other thing that you mentioned is seven touch points. I’ve mentioned this on countless episodes.

There’s a know, like, and trust factor, and it takes seven to eight connections with somebody, whether it’s via email, a meeting, Zoom, seeing them on a podcast, or whatever it happens to be, before they know, like, and trust you. And it’s at that point that they are going to interact, that they are going to share, that they are going to believe, they’re going to understand, they’re going to be empathetic, they’re going to ultimately hand over their hard-earned dollars to you. That’s the goal: to get donations. Maybe they can’t afford it, but they can share some content, and somebody down the road will get it through the trickle effect.

So just keep on at it. It It’s not going to be, I’m going to publish this video and everything’s going to be fixed overnight. It’s a long game strategy, right? You can’t just expect it overnight.

Nikolaj Kloch: Exactly.

David Pisarek: All right. So, we talked a whole bunch about marketing stuff. We talked about video and how it can help, and all of that. Is there anything you wish that people would unlearn or rethink?

Nikolaj Kloch: 

To put it in the simplest way possible, is to unlearn your own embarrassment. I think a lot of people put this frame that they have come out and be so polished because you’re comparing yourself to everybody else.

And I think the biggest thing on planet Earth is, and you don’t realize, this same thing happens in the biggest companies, that their CEO doesn’t want to get on camera because he’s not good, or he’ll kill a campaign because he’s in the video and he doesn’t like it. Those things that are imperfect are incredible 10 years down the line when you’re showcasing, ‘We’ve been doing this forever. Look at how far we’ve come.’ And it’s okay to showcase that, ‘Hey, I’m nervous on camera.’ You can absolutely say that, and people resonate more with you.

There is a reason that people are so scared to public speak. It’s the number one fear in the world. It is also one of the most incredible ways to build awareness, which is to get on video and talk with people. Build out these marketing campaigns, put yourself out there. But if you’re going to learn being embarrassed in front of and not having to be perfect every single time you show up, I think your message here is absolutely incredible, with giving such a good foundation.

If you could take everything you’re teaching, what David is teaching here, and you could go and unlearn the embarrassment side and put those two together and start with the bones. He is giving you such a solid foundation here. If you could just take those bones and build on that. The embarrassing side is you’re scared to be cast out of a tribe. Our tribes are so different now that you don’t have that same fear, but it’s still ingrained in us. So published is better than perfect. Show up. Do this for the good cause. Don’t think of yourself when you’re actually thinking through, what am I going to look like when I show up on camera? How was your first podcast, David?

David Pisarek: Oh, my gosh. I got to tell you something: Two years ago, I was on stage, or I was invited. I was on stage, but I was invited to speak at a national marketing conference, and I discovered that they were using a software platform for displaying the slide deck that wasn’t like Google Slides or PowerPoint. It’s some other weird thing. I won’t mention it, but I dislike this platform. And they told me the day before, so I had to give them the slide deck a week early, and they told me the day before, ‘By the way, there aren’t going to be any presenters’ notes for you.’ And I just went into total panic mode because I was emceeing the conference, and then I was presenting a master class, and I was doing an expert panel, but I made some cue cards for that. And I just went into panic mode because my slides, I like my slides to be very minimal, because I want people to pay attention to me and not be reading whatever’s behind me.

So, I went, ‘What am I going to do?’ And I practiced the presentation, I think four, five, six times, and then, that night, I think I went to bed at two, but I practiced another five, six times to memorize everything. And then I realized nobody is going to know what I want to say except for me. They’re just sitting in the audience. All of you are just out there watching this or listening to this podcast. You don’t know what I’m going to say. You don’t know what Nikolaj is going to say. So what am I worried about? I’m the only one who’s going to know if I missed something important that I want to talk about. They’re not going to have a clue. At that point, I was just like, ‘All right, nervous calm. I’m good. I got it.’ It’s totally fine.

Nobody is expecting perfection. So do your best. That’s all anybody can ask for you to do. And that’s all you can actually expect from yourself. So it’s all good.

Nikolaj Kloch: And the trends are moving away from perfection right now, too. So, it’s like, it’s better to have user-generated content, the unpolished stuff as well. It could be in parallel, but that was a beautiful point. They don’t know what you’re actually missing out on. In your head, you’re beating yourself up. ‘Oh, I didn’t mention this or this.’ Get them next time.

David Pisarek: That’s it. So when I went back, I changed my slides because I knew what I was dealing with, and I had a little bit more information on it, so it would help prompt me as I was going through. It’s a learning thing, right?

At the time that we’re recording this, we have about 119 episodes of the podcast. The first 20 or so were just audio, and I spent a lot of time myself doing the editing of it because I didn’t like the little clicks and stuff as I spoke. As soon as I got my guest, I brought in the team and I brought in the process, and I don’t have to listen to my voice over and over and over again. I can’t stand it. I’m done with it. But I built a process around that, so I don’t have to do the things that I don’t like to do. I don’t want to watch myself on the podcast. I know what I look like, for better or for worse, I know what I look like. I know what my voice sounds like. I don’t want to hear it. So I built a process around that.

And maybe that’s something the organizations that are listening to this could do the same thing. You can build a process. You could have somebody else do the editing. And as long as you’re not talking bad about the organization, or the executive, or the board of directors, or anything like that, unless you have a really dark campaign and you want to go into something like that, I probably don’t recommend it. You would need to have a very, very special use case to do something like that. But nobody’s likely going to have a problem with whatever it is that you’re outputting on the other end.

Nikolaj Kloch: You said gold there, David. You found something, you did it from the start. If you’re on that side of the spectrum of starting this, or if you’re on the very far side, whatever that was, you took out what you didn’t like, you found somebody to help you with it, and now I bet everything is so much smoother.

David Pisarek: Yeah. We record the episode, and it gets saved by… We’re doing this on Zoom. It gets saved, it gets transferred to Dropbox, a notification is sent off, and I’m done. They’re doing everything else. I’ve pulled myself out, and I’m spending time on the value stuff that’s going to help drive my business. We know what we can do with our podcast. As a non-profit, you don’t need a podcast. Maybe you want one, maybe you don’t. Maybe it fits with your goal, your vision, and your mission. But you don’t need to be doing this.

Producing a couple of episodes, I hop on with my team, usually twice a week. We record some video, they go and edit and publish. So whatever the process is, just go and do it. It’s not going to be perfect, and you are going to hate things, and you are going to learn what you like, what you don’t like, and what works and what doesn’t work. To your point, Nikolaj, just lean in on what’s working.

Nikolaj Kloch: Exactly, 100%, I couldn’t agree more. And get rid of this that you don’t like.

David Pisarek: There are always platforms that come and go. I know a lot of organizations are jumping off of X because of the whole thing going on from whatever it was, February till May, with Elon Musk and the government and this and that. Bluesky is out and getting a lot of traffic in the non-profit space and not in the non-profit space, too. People are jumping over there. But do you think there are any trends on the digital side that non-profits could and maybe should ignore? And are there any that you’re seeing that maybe they should be jumping on that they haven’t thought of?

Nikolaj Kloch: Absolutely. One of my highest-performing platforms right now is LinkedIn for clients. Just to break it down on a personal profile, which I highly recommend.

It’s a lot easier to grow with a personal profile. And there are some caveats there. If you’re trying to step away, as a large company, you have to be smart with this. But you can go set up a profile, and then you get 200 connection requests per week. If you have a nicely set up profile, you get 50% connection requests. That shows up as a follower once you have 500 plus connections. You can gain 100 followers per week, which will establish you as a notable authority in your space. Once you reach 1,000, 5,000, or 10,000 followers, you can actually connect with your target audience.

And while you’re doing that, you’re producing content that is directly applicable. So it’s almost a growth engine right now on a higher scale. That is really something that we’re seeing a lot of traction come out of. It’s actually going and producing that relevant content while you’re growing. And it also, and this speaks to psychology again, it reinforces into whoever’s posting’s mind that it’s working because you have a set amount, that 50% that is accepting each week.

And you can get help to grow quicker, and your content will take care of itself eventually on the growth side of things. And then I’d say that a large one, for if you’re a larger company, the best thing you can be doing right now is longer form content, and then having somebody that’s actually able to break that down. And if you’re not sure what that means, if you just focus on your long form content and you get somebody to help you, or you step back and think, how could I set this up to where I do a hook or a re-hook, body problem solution, and then a call to action or something along those lines multiple times, three times within a long form clip.

Then you have small little chunks that you could actually pull in viewers into the long form. And the reason I harp heavily on the long form goes directly back into the seven touch points. Once you get them into a longer form, the more time you spend on camera, and this is the same psychology behind streamers and TV; you trust people you see more of. You trust them when you see them more, they show up more, and you’re listening them longer.

They’re able to actually give you more tips and details, and the problems they’re facing, and they’re building the brand by showing up. So, actually going into long form is the long-term play because that’s how you’re building that trust and authority. So the bigger companies, I would say start YouTube, actually build out that long form, break that up into smaller clips, and then maybe distribute those on other socials and have that as a funnel. Again, if you have the bandwidth, go for it. If you don’t, focus on one. On the smaller side, I would absolutely say LinkedIn. And do not be afraid to try the stupid, short 10-second clip trends. If it works in one industry, you can absolutely morph this to your own industry. And sounds everything like that. And, of course, be mindful of copyright. But don’t be afraid to try things and just post them.

David Pisarek: Here’s my thought about the short-form clips. First off, everything you said.

But around the short-form clips, I believe that the algorithms look at the percentage of the video viewed. If you make a 10-second clip and somebody watches it for one second, they’ve seen 10% of the video. If you make a minute clip and they watch it for one second, they’ve seen one-sixtieth of it.

I don’t know what % that is. I can’t do the math in my head, but that’s probably 0.4% or whatever it is. 10% is much better than 0.4. So the algorithm is probably looking at it and going, ‘Oh, okay, people are watching more of this.’ And what I’ve seen in a lot of, for example, TikTok videos is you’ll get three seconds. So if you’re making a 10-second clip, that’s 30% view. Their algorithm is going to go, ‘Oh, okay, this is higher than average. We should show this to more people.’

That’s my unprofessional opinion, because we don’t typically do video in that way, but that’s what I’m seeing in terms of the data side of it, as to why these are working more effectively than others.

Nikolaj Kloch: I 100% agree with you. Just to give a short example of exactly what you’re talking about, they’ll put text on screen that takes 10 seconds to read. It loops it, too. The music loops, everything loops, and then you’re stuck there watching it to read the entire thing. Make it interesting, of course, but all they’re doing is getting, ‘Wow, people are watching this 5X. I’m going to push it to more people.’ And that’s going directly to what you’re saying, 100% multiple times. And these are just small little things you can implement. That’s an exact example of something that everyone should go try today, that’s listening right now.

David Pisarek: Yeah. And one example, my son was playing in a citywide school hockey tournament, and I was walking into the arena with him. It was 6:30 in the morning. They were having a little practice, and I was like, ‘Oh, this is interesting.’ So I filmed us walking in. I panned to the arena, and then a shot of him on the ice, skating or whatever. And it got 100,000 views or 149,000 or something like that, it’s at right now. It felt in the moment, I was like, I should do something with this, and I did it. And I was like, I did it because I was bored. I was at the arena, right? But it felt like something to do, and it got what, I think, is a stupid amount of views for what that video was.

If you’re in the moment of something, maybe you’re sitting in a meeting or you’re sitting at your desk thinking through something, grab your phone and record.

Nikolaj Kloch: A lot of the time, the one video you think will absolutely destroy the rest does okay. Maybe it exceeds expectations compared to baseline. But then, that video you’re talking about, that you just, whatever, I’m going to throw this up. It doesn’t matter. That one outperforms everything, and you’re sitting there for a week going, ‘Why did this outperform?’ Study them. Always look back, but study them. And then you’re thinking, ‘Why did this one that I spent way less time on?’ And that’s also behind the magic of this post.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Nikolaj, awesome insights around digital storytelling, marketing, digital strategy, and video strategy. I hope people listening to this show, to this episode, have gotten some really great advice from you. I know I’ve got a couple of things that I’m going to take back and talk with my clients about and my team about. We can do some implementation at my agency as well.

I like to put my guests on the spot right near the end. I don’t know if you caught that on any of the episodes you’ve listened to, but if you were to challenge anybody listening to this episode to do something, let’s say within 24 hours of listening to this, what would that challenge be?

Nikolaj Kloch: It’d be to post, I jumped the gun. It would absolutely be: post once something out there.

I want everyone to realize that there’s something with new habits that, once you do it consistently, your brain creates pathways. It’s like walking through the same path in the woods. So, just getting the habit down. The first time you post will be the hardest. But then once you get going with that and the momentum is behind you, you don’t realize how much easier this is for David this time on this podcast versus his first. Your first time public speaking, right? There’s things like that that you don’t realize how easy they are once you have momentum behind you.

And I would absolutely say that the number one thing you could for your organization right now is to get visible, eyes on you. And you don’t realize that people come and offer to help in extraordinary ways because the world is good, that they will come and find you if you’re visible, you’re actually out there. So I’d absolutely challenge you to post at least one thing. I know that 60% of you listening are thinking, ‘Oh, I should have posted last week or done something like that.’ Go. Do grab the low-hanging fruit, listen to some more podcasts from David, and then go post.

David Pisarek: Before we hit record, we were talking about that you’ve got a freebie to give away. Tell us about what that is.

Nikolaj Kloch: Absolutely. Essentially, I’ve broken everything down because there’s no guide that clearly shows you the simplest way to achieve consistency and start posting content that works. As we all know, once you start diving into a lot of these single-factor digit things, there’s a lot of over-learning and over-sharing. I try to distill everything down into the simplest way that gets followers, that converts, and sets up a guide and a system that you could actually put into place. It’s what I wish I had years ago. So put all that together, and I’d love to give that for free.

David Pisarek: If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Nikolaj Kloch: So you can just go to my website, thrivrproductions.com, T-H-R-I-V-R-productions.com, and reach out to me there.

David Pisarek: Fantastic.

Nikolaj, thanks again so much for joining. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links or resources that Nikolaj provided, he talks about these guides, right? Got a link for his website. We’ll grab a link and have his link in there for you as well. Just head over to our podcast show notes page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details. And something else that I’d love for all of you to do, once you record that video and you publish it, come and leave a comment on the video on the show notes page for this episode. 

And until next time, keep on being successful!