125 – Storytelling Secrets that Increase Donations with Chris Norton

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Are you feeling like your non-profit’s digital presence is getting lost in all of the noise? Chris Norton reveals how to amplify your voice through clever, budget-friendly PR and digital strategies. From storytelling tips to social media must-dos, this episode is packed with all the insights that you can put to work right away.

Stay tuned, and let’s give your cause the spotlight it deserves.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. I’m your host, David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things around PR strategy, storytelling, and digital trends for non-profits. I’ve got Chris Norton here. Chris is the Managing Director of Prohibition PR, a two-and-a-half-million-pound-a-year, award-winning social media and PR agency. He’s a seasoned strategist with over 25 years of experience. He has worked with the likes of the NHS, Fentimans, and the University of Oxford, and has won over 45 industry awards. He’s also the host of Embracing Marketing Mistakes, a podcast where marketing pros get the real lessons they’ve learned the hard way.

Chris, thank you so much for fitting us in in your probably extremely hectic schedule.

Chris Norton: No worries. Thanks for having me on the show. I mean, wow, what an introduction that was. You’re a pro. I’m learning from you. Even before this show started, when you were just showing me how to do the hand signals to get the balloons, it taught me quite a lot about backgrounds. Yeah, there you go. Look at that. Amazing.

David Pisarek: Well, let’s kick things off with the big picture. I say big picture, but the next word I’m going to say is small. How can small to mid-size non-profits use PR and digital marketing to grow awareness and engagement, even if they have limited budgets?

Chris Norton: Well, the great thing about… We work with approximately eight charities, I’d say, and we’ve supported various campaigns. I’ve worked on everything from Comic Relief through to Children in Need, which are big ones in the UK. We’re based in the UK, so I was involved in Comic Relief, and we turned the… We could do big-big campaigns if you’ve got loads of money. We turned the BT Tower red, many years ago, for Red Nose Day, which, for those of you that don’t know, BT – British Telecom. The BT Tower is one of the biggest buildings in London, and it was quite a thing to turn it red back in the day. The whole thing was red, and we got it on national TV, national television, all the news, and everything like that. That was many, many years ago. It was actually before I started Prohibition. That’s a big stunt.

What can you do visually, or what can you do to tell your story? That is what PR and marketing is all about. It’s telling a story. The great thing about working in charities is that you have got great human interest stories.

Your listeners are listening, and they work in a great sector that is doing good things wherever they’re getting their money from. I know that’s one of the key things is doing great work and getting money.

So what can you do? You can do it; you can tell a story on a human level, and you don’t need big budgets for that. You need to just make sure you get those human interest stories where people can tell their story, whether that’s somebody that’s had a donation and it’s enabled them to, I don’t know, buy some community housing or whether it is…

I’m trying to think of some of the stuff that we’ve done for Yorkshire. One of our clients is Yorkshire Cancer Research. Yorkshire is the biggest region in the UK, and we do all sorts of things around Yorkshire Day. We get to do a big event for them to help them raise awareness of the great work that they do in Yorkshire. Yorkshire Cancer Research, for instance, is rooted in cancer research, but in the Yorkshire region, so they’re constantly focusing on the number of lives they’re saving through their research. They identified, I believe, they identified a drug not too many years ago, which has helped with raising revenues.

But the key for us is always getting on a one-on-one level, getting to sit with somebody, and getting that personal story, because numbers and statistics… if you’re working in marketing, we’re obsessed with statistics. Everything’s about numbers and conversions. But actually, it’s the real human side of stories. And if you can get those human stories, you don’t need massive budgets. You just need to get… You can get your Sony camera, and you can walk down to them and film them. You can even get your iPhone out. And as long as you’ve got a decent microphone and get the story. Whether that’s a short story or whatever, and then it’s sending the story out to the media and selling it in.

A personal story goes much further than a thousand this and a thousand that, and a life saved. So yeah, there are tons you can do, especially with video now. Video is the key for all charities. It is about telling the story.

A lot of people think when you say to people a video, it’s terrifying. ‘Oh, God, I’ve got to do a video.’ But actually, it’s just asking a few questions and putting a story together. It’s like telling that story.

David Pisarek: Yeah, I love that idea, right? Nobody’s expecting from non-profits, charities, even small businesses, right? Nobody’s expecting a Hollywood production video. No. But these devices, the phones, are so awesome now. They have image stabilization, they’ve got face detection, they’ve got the ability to make much better quality even than 2, 3, 4, 5 years ago. So grab your phone, make a recording, do something.

Chris Norton: The other bit that’s great about them, though, is you’re talking to me on your professional DSLR, which I was just commenting on how brilliant it is for the sharpness of the picture. You want to see it, boys, and you can’t see it. Yeah, you can use a mobile phone. And a mobile phone – the great thing about it is it’s more authentic. It’s more authentic.

The other side of what you can do is, and this podcast is a great example. Your podcast is brilliant. You’ve been doing it since 2022, which is creating a central pillar asset. Now, your central pillar asset is your podcast. Your podcast is: you’re telling this story, and then you’re breaking it into snippets and little clips from the video and maybe some highlights. Maybe if you’ve got some statistics, you might want to do some social posts. If you’ve got some statistics based on your story, you might want to do some infographics. Maybe you want to do a quote. Maybe you want to do one of those; it depends on what channel you’re using. Maybe you want to do a slide share, a little carousel. There are many things to take away from one podcast. That’s the same thing. It’s what I would call a pillar asset, which is why I think podcasting, even though it’s been around so long, is thriving with video. Yeah.

David Pisarek: We’ve talked about this on a number of episodes. You can create one piece of content, even a blog article, a news release, or something that you’re already creating, and you can split that into multiple pieces of content. If you take a look at your latest news release or blog post that you’ve got on your non-profit site, you could easily turn that into five or six social posts. Super easy, right? If you need help with that, you can create an AI prompt, throw the article in there and say, ‘Hey, I need six social posts from this. Give me some recommendations.’

Chris Norton: The AI thing is interesting because it is everywhere, and everything is now. I was talking on a podcast this morning. We interviewed somebody who’s a LinkedIn specialist. She’s got half a million followers on YouTube, and she’s massive. She’s just written a book on LinkedIn. I said, ‘What’s the key thing to get awareness on LinkedIn?’ Then I made a joke, ‘Is it just adding two letters AI to your profile now?’ Because that’s what everybody seems to be doing, don’t they? Just add the letters AI, and that’s how you win on LinkedIn. It’s quite amazing.

David Pisarek: I think it’s important to note the points that you mentioned around storytelling.

We need to create some kind of an emotional connection with our ideal audience.

We were talking before we hit record on this episode, Chris, about how you need to run like you’re a business. It takes money to make money. You need money coming in so you can spend it on this and that, and have a salary, or buy clothes to do whatever. Whatever it is that you’re doing, it all takes money. It all takes time. And one of the things that we need to think about is that emotional connection that we can connect between our ideal, I’m going to call them a customer, but the donor, the person that you want to engage with, the person that you want to come and volunteer or be a member of your board or sign up for your program or your service that you have, make a donation either in money, in time, or in kind.

We need to develop these personas of these people to how can we connect with them? What is the message that will ultimately be the engaging piece with them?

Chris Norton: For me, it’s got to be a motive, especially in this space. You’re asking people to put their hands in their pockets. And for charities, any charity or non-profit organization out on the street, and I don’t know if it’s like in Toronto, but in the UK, it amazes me now that so many people, it’s just a cashless society. Even, I’d say five years ago, if you were a charity, you’re trying to collect the people on the street, they’re trying to collect various bits and pieces. Now it’s cashless. I feel for them. So you have to have a card to donate now, don’t you? I mean, it’s a whole different ball game, but it’s still the same thing. It’s an emotive experience.

So, if you can create that emotive experience through telling a story, through whatever piece of content, through a podcast, through a blog post, like you say, and then creating smaller social media posts, I would often say, be careful with AI because AI can do what I call the vanilla content, which is everything looks the same with AI.

I’ve got this policy where I would use, if you want to get the maximum out of AI, you want to save money, if you’re working in a charity, you haven’t got a big team. I get it. I would say use the 10-80-10 principle on social media. So we do social media for a lot of charities, but loads of different types of brands. And the way that I would work is 10% human. AI is often best if you, you would say write a blog post. If you wrote the majority of the blog post, maybe you scoped it out of what you would like to cover, then you use the AI to help you write it, and then you sprinkle the magic, the 10% back on at the end, where you give it your human, and you give it that human touch, the experiences that you’ve had.

Because that’s the one thing AI will never, ever have – even AI David won’t be able to have had the experience of meeting other people, except maybe virtually, because maybe you can now have an AI persona drop into a call and be you, which freaks me out a little bit. But they can’t be in the real world, and they can’t have the experiences that we can have. Yeah, I think that AI can be used really, really cleverly, especially for your target audience. If you say this is your target audience, but treat it like it’s going to be a six out of 10 because it’s never a nine, and then sprinkle that little bit of magic.

You get that emotive thing out, which is really what you’re trying to do in a charity, isn’t it?

David Pisarek: Yeah. From your perspective, are there digital marketing or PR mistakes that you’ve seen non-profits make? And what should or could they do differently?

Chris Norton: Mistakes? Loads. I work in PR and social media. Yeah, I mean, crisis, galore, I’ve seen with people doing… There have been various mistakes. Obviously, the podcast is about embracing market mistakes. Our podcast is where people come on to tell a story about something they’ve absolutely screwed up and why.

Some of them are hilarious because they’ll tell a story, some of them are quite cathartic for the person. They say, ‘I’ve never told this before.’ In terms of charities, though, I think I’ve seen a glimmer of, I’ve touched on it, which is sharing too many statistics. We served a thousand meals with no human context, or we saved this money. Because numbers don’t tend to tell the story.

So it’s like you might say: ‘Meet Maria, who can now feed her family based on this brilliant campaign.’ And it’s that in the UK, we’ve got the BBC, and they do it beautifully on the news, where instead of going and telling the big story, they’ll go into a family in a war-torn area, I’ll name one of the countries, but they’ll go down to the family level. And that’s what a charity has got to do. It’s got to tell those personalized stories. As I mentioned earlier, sharing statistics is often a mistake, you see.

I suppose another one is like overlooking donor journeys. So what’s the donor journey? And treating every supporter the same. So, one-off appeals without long-term engagement.

So you need to think about: How can that support it? Because they’re going to support… Yorkshire Council Research is a good example; I’ve been involved in several projects for them, and I also do quite a bit of charity work for them, as they’re both a client and local to me. It’s a great charity, and that’s why we work with them. But, I get ongoing communication with them, not only in a worker sense, but in a private sense as well, for the things that they’re doing and the lives that they’re saving, and that goes down to the small level. It takes you through that journey, rather than just a one-off donation, which is great. But in real marketing, in the other marketing sphere, we talk about lifetime customer value, not the one sale. We talk about the sale and the sale and the sale.

And it’s easier to get that resale from a customer or a redonation from a customer multiple times.

So yeah, that’s another thing I’d think about. Underutilizing owned social media channels as well. So, relying solely on paid ads or seasonal campaigns. So I see a lot of charities, they just wait for Christmas, they wait for Easter or whatever, they’ll do a Mother’s Day campaign or something like that. Actually, there’s always something on that you could be doing rather than just seasonal campaigns because paid ads come and go. And if you’ve got a clever idea, you can do a lot on your own channels.

Also, the other thing with channels is: if you work at a charity now, ask yourself, why are we on this channel? Because I meet so many marketing people that have got, I’m like, ‘What channel is you on?’ And they reel them off as Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. It used to be FriendFeed and MySpace. I’ve been involved in social media right from the beginning. Yeah, YouTube. I’m like, ‘Why are you on X, for instance?’ Which is a big question we get in the UK at the moment. I’m sure you do in Canada because of where X has gone. People still call it Twitter because they don’t really feel comfortable calling it. But yeah, that’s a debate.

And then I always say to them, ‘Why are you on those channels?’ It’s often because other charities are on it. I’m like, ‘Well, why don’t you just double down on a channel that works best for you? Where are your donations coming from? What age group? So do you really need to be on TikTok? Or should you focus your energy on Instagram? Yes, you can still have a presence, but put your energies into the channel where you’re getting the most donations. Do you even know that?’ Which is often what they don’t know.

Do you know what I mean? What else have I got? I suppose other mistakes, neglecting internal alignment. So people are operating in silos. And this just isn’t in the charity element. Obviously, it’s a key thing.

I worked with, I don’t know if you’ve got the brand called Interflora. It’s the biggest florist in the UK. And it was, I don’t know if it still is, but it was the biggest in America as well. And when I first ever met them back in the day, I was talking about always integrating your marketing because they had a PR team, they had a brand team, they had an advertising team, they had an SEO team, and they wanted to do a campaign to get some PR coverage.

I was like, ‘Can I have someone from this team?’ I got them all in a room and said, ‘Right, what do you need?’ And because it was something independent, it was a lot easier. So what do you need? And that person would say, ‘Well, we’re in brands, so we always want a good, strong brand. Make sure all the campaigns are on brand messages.’ Great. Okay, what do you need? Well, we need it. And we just went round and round and ticked all the boxes. It’s a classic politician’s way of doing it, but stopping the teams working in silos because it happens in brands, and I’m sure it happens in charities as well. Where marketing has spun off from doing something and press team are doing something else, and then the CEO decides to talk about something that nobody’s even… It’s not in line with everything else. So, yeah, but not working in silos; trying to make things work in an integrated way. That’s another one.

Is that enough for you? I suppose I could go into PR crisis. I’ve seen loads of those as well because I love a good PR crisis.

David Pisarek: So there are a number of things that you touched on there that I think are really key, and I was making some notes as you were talking. One is LTV and CAC, right?

So, lifetime value. We talk about this in the business world. We need to consider this in the non-profit world. Somebody makes a donation, are they a monthly donor, an annual donor, a one-time donor, a multiple-year donor, that kind of thing? What is the lifetime value of that donor? And then you have the cost of acquisition, the CSE.

It’s easier to retain the customer, the donor, than it is; it’s less expensive, is what I mean. It’s less expensive to keep the donor continuing to donate than it is to go and find new donors. It’s the same in business. The cost of keeping somebody in your ecosystem is less than the cost of finding new customers.

Non-profits need to think about that in this way because a lot of them don’t. How can we keep the people engaged with the brand? How can we keep people engaged with the cause that you are trying to fight and solve? The way to do that is storytelling. Numbers are good.

Chris, you said numbers are hard to tell the story. I think numbers are like half of it. To your point, you need to humanize the number.

Chris Norton: Yeah, 100.

David Pisarek: We’re going to talk about this on the donation side. Stop asking for money. Start asking for things.

I don’t know, maybe 80 episodes ago, I had Josh Bloomfield from GiveCloud on the show, and we were talking about gamification of donations. I believe the example he gave was that they worked with one of their clients, and they had a donation page. Organization, I think, helped get children’s school supplies for school. It was like, ‘How many backpacks can you buy?’ That humanizes it. Instead of asking for $30, £30, whatever the currency is, ‘How many backpacks can you buy? How many of this can you buy? How many families can you help feed? How many cows can you provide to this community that’s starting to do farming or whatever it happens to be?’ That really humanizes it and makes people understand where the money is actually going.

Chris Norton: Yeah, the malaria nets thing, isn’t it? Is that Oxfam’s one where they say this amount of money saves this many people from malaria, that thing. Yeah, I completely agree.

And by the way, just to be clear, statistics are good because I work in public relations. And I’m going to use this; 90% of the statistics are slammed into press releases. But, actually, when you do, if you want to tell a story, like a video or something, it can be quite hard-hitting, but it’s a personal story. A human story is so much more powerful than 2,000 people were affected by this or that.

When you say about gamification of donations, that’s actually quite interesting because we’ve worked on a couple of things where charities have asked us to help get people to get out and do things. So maybe step out. So steps, it’s counting steps with pedometers and your smartwatches, and it’s tracking how far. So, my team we are all doing loads and loads as steps as part of it. And it became really competitive because we had different teams, and we were all competing. So completely, that’s another thing, to get people exercising, because that was a good thing.

But then you could also donate to take part. So just little clever things. Gamification is brilliant, by the way. It does make you do. That’s why smartwatches work. Sometimes when I’ve only done 9,735 steps, I end up walking around the block to make sure I’ve done my 10,000, which is absolutely insane. I don’t know why I do it, but it’s the gamification element, isn’t it? Is it 10,000 steps. You must do it.

David Pisarek: Yeah, my daughter and I have Apple watches, and we’ll do challenges with them to make sure we’re staying active or we’ve hit the goals for the day that we’ve set in there.

The other thing that I want to touch on is we’re talking about social channels, right? Why are you on this channel? Why are you on that channel? You didn’t mention this specifically, but I think the underlying thing is to create personas and understand who you want to attract. Who are your primary, secondary, and tertiary markets? Who are the people, consumers, organizations, and businesses that you want to bring into your ecosphere? Who are they? What drives them? What motivates them? Think about the psychographics.

So I think episode 16 of my podcast, so going back on like 100 some odd episodes ago, I did an episode on why psychographics are so important. And you really need to understand where is the person that you want to connect with, where are they hanging out, what are their pain points, what are their motivations, and all of that will help figure out where should you focus your effort. Because you understand the demographics, the geographic aspect, to an extent, doesn’t really matter as much, but it does have some impact.

But the psychographics are really going to help you hone in your message, identify how you can emotionally connect with them and then where they spend their time so that you can put time and effort into that channel or channels or mediums or whatever.

Chris Norton: Yeah, but I’d also say that’s good. Persona is great. Who you’re aiming for, David, but do they actually know today? Which marketer and charity today can answer the demographic of their channels that they’ve got right now, today, right now, this moment? Because a lot of other sectors, whether it’s consumer, food and drink, or higher education, I asked that question, and they go, ‘Well, most people are on Facebook,’ and then they don’t actually know.

And then what you can do is, you can audit each channel to see. And you see if you’ve got your ideal persona like you just said there, then you can see which and compare because sometimes it’s quite shocking. You think it’s one thing, and you’re actually wrong. It’s not. It’s something else. Yeah, it really, really, really depends.

But once you know your ideal persona and where you’re going to get your donations from, you can then marry the two together and make sure you focus your efforts. And once you’ve got some focus, that is when you’ll start winning. No doubt, no doubt. The other part of the lifetime customer value thing, which other brands and other industries don’t take into account, is the charity element.

I’m aware that when people die, they leave donations to charities. And that happens quite a lot. It’s quite a few of our clients in that space, which doesn’t happen if you’re the head of marketing at Coca-Cola, they’re not expecting someone to pop their clogs and leave all their inheritance to Coca-Cola. That’s it. The lifetime, literally the lifetime value of somebody, it can be anyway within the third sector.

David Pisarek: There is a gigantic wave of money. I like to call it the Silver Tsunami. So you have the baby boomers. They have a huge amount of wealth. And it’s expected, at least in Canada and the US, that over the next 10 to 15 years, I think the number is $4 trillion, is going to be passing down from generation downwards. And so there are two things that that means from my perspective. One is that non-profits need to get in front of the boomers, make them care about your organization, exactly to your point, to try to get some legacy gifting and things like that going. But they also need to connect with Gen X, Gen Z, and millennials because they more and more care about leaving a better mark on humanity, leaving the planet in a better place than it was when they came into the world and all of that. If you can create an emotional connection with them, money is going to be transferring down, and if they care about your cause, they will care about your cause when they’ve got money. It sounds a little bit like corporate greed here, but you need money to run the organization.

If you can connect with them before they come into this money, they’re going to care. It’s a long-term play on all of that for sure. But, it’s something that organizations really should be thinking about.

Chris Norton: Definitely, yeah, I agree. I completely agree.

David Pisarek: Okay, so thinking future forward because I went that way a little bit. Are there any digital trends, tools, or social media strategies that non-profits should be paying attention to over, let’s say, the next year, or the next 12 months?

Chris Norton: Wow. Yeah, absolutely. Well, what we’re doing now, so short form, this is long form video, but live-streaming, we’re doing that. We’re not live-streaming this, but if you’re doing this on LinkedIn Live, live-streaming is a big one. Short-form video. So I mean, weirdly, TikTok changed the game in terms of social media and videos because it opened the discovery element of video. So predominantly, before you have to have channels with high follow numbers to get your video to go far. YouTube is slightly different. You could still get there; there’s still discovery on that platform, despite all the other platforms.

Because what tends to happen is a platform comes out, and its strategy is to give 100% reach. Do you remember Facebook 2006? Here you go. Have 100% reach. Everyone gets in, everyone buys in, slowly but surely, they reduce the reach, and you all have to pay for it. That’s what’s happened with TikTok, but you still can get visibility with a great video, even if you don’t have a lot of followers.

And short-form video, the point is that short-form video has had a rebirth through TikTok. It’s what changed Instagram’s game. They added reels because of TikTok. They tried to buy TikTok, but they couldn’t buy it. So, Zuckerberg tried to buy it, but they couldn’t get it. So they created reels. And now that’s short-form video. Short-form video has now stretched a little bit, which is weird. It went really short, and now it’s gone a little bit longer again. But in essence, a short form punchy video, a video is still where it’s at, hence why we’re recording this on video.

Other trends, I cannot do a podcast without talking about AI, but the one thing that is interesting me the most, very, very recently, and I think it’s generative engine optimization instead of search engine optimization. It’s basically because search engines used to Google a problem, and up would come 10 links, a page of 10 links. It was always key to be on that page one. That’s dead. As of mid-July, that game is over. You’ve not had it for about six months; you’ve had the AI Overview, which I’ve just read very recently, has killed news sites by 80% traffic. And Google knows the game’s up on this, so it’s changed its strategy. I can’t believe more people aren’t talking about this, by the way.

Google has been the monopoly that every business out there has thought: ‘Get a website, get it high on Google, and we’ll get donations, we’ll sell. We’ll get donations or we’ll sell something.’ That’s totally changed now because the searches are much more nuanced. And instead of giving you 10 results with links, you might get one result, and there’s no link in it. If I ask a question on Google, it’s…

So, my point is that you’ve now got to optimize your website differently, which also merges with something from this space, which is: purpose-led search, which is basically getting people to purpose-driven search engine optimization.

So yeah, it’s by embracing optimizations about FAQs, when people ask questions about how can I support a mental health charity? So to drive organic discovery, you want lots of FAQs so your site will appear in generative queries. So this is probably the biggest thing I think that’s happened in digital marketing in the last… Well, since I’ve been in it, I’d say 25 years, Google has literally, a couple of weeks ago, they’ve announced that they’re not just doing the AI overview now. They have an option to do a normal search or an AI search, which means you completely bypass the entire model that it has always had.

So yeah, the game has fundamentally changed. Purpose-driven SEO, generative engine optimization, awful term. It’s a new term, but basically for the different large language models. So that’s a big issue for me. I think I could do a whole webinar on that because it’s going to be all about trust. It’s going to be all about all the signals that make your organization look trustworthy. But how do you then stand out from the other five charities that are coming up in the search? That’s the issue.

David Pisarek: Totally, totally agree.

I stopped talking about search engine optimization, and I’ve started talking about search everywhere optimization so that your organizations, your businesses, your websites, and your content shows up in AI.

There are some new things as of our recording. We’re recording this. It’s the end of July right now, isn’t it? So this is going to come out in about 10 weeks. But we’ve been playing with it, I’m going to get a little geeky technical here. Websites have Robot.txt files. There are the site map XML files. There’s a new proposed standard called LLMs.text, which is supposed to help the large language models, the AI, get more context about your content. We’re playing around with that with our site and a couple of our clients’ websites as well to see how we can rank.

The reality is that, Google is actually late to the game on this. ChatGPT and Perplexity were there first, where people are going there and searching for something, getting the information without ever having to visit the website. So what we’re seeing in Google with the Gemini result at the top is that they’re getting the information without needing to click through the website. They’ve made these small little references that are like, nobody knows really that you can click on them to get to the website.

But, the reality is that your Google Analytics are going to show fewer numbers. If they haven’t already done that, you’re going to see a decline in website traffic. But the traffic you are going to get from search, they are more engaged and they’re ready to go. So they’re there. They’re on the cusp of donating. They’re on the cusp of getting ready to sign up for your program, for your service, to get in touch, to volunteer, or whatever the engagement pieces that they want from your organization.

So, the reality there is, what are you doing to optimize your website, to take advantage of people that are already past that initial curiosity? Because they’re there. And for me, that’s the biggest part is CRO, the conversion rate optimization, getting people to take the next step. And a lot of that comes down to the clear call-to-actions that you have on your website.

But Chris, to your point, building the authority through your website so that you show up in the AI platforms is what’s going to really be transformed informative over the coming year for sure.

Chris Norton: I’m not going to lie. Our site, ProvisionPR, if you Google in the UK, in fact, is Google even going to be a verb anymore? If you search for top PR agencies in Leeds or Yorkshire, we come out on ChatGPT as the number one, which is great. But in the UK, not so much. But we were always on page one in the UK of SEO. I’m going to release some statistics to you because I looked at them two days ago. Our traffic has always been six to seven thousand a month. We get good numbers, right? And it’s dropped by 53% in the last 28 days. But our AI search content has gone up by much less than that. But it’s literally the two who have gone.

One’s gone down like that, and the other one’s gone up. We actually had our first client off the back of… They searched in ChatGPT for a particular thing, and they called us. And as you just said there, David, they were much more qualified than who we were, what we’re all about. And it led to a much easier conversation. They’re now a client. So weird, different.

But I would say to every marketer listening to this, check your analytics today, and it will have dropped since January, it’ll have dropped 50, 60%. That’s not just us, by the way. That is every business everywhere, all around the world.

That is why what you were saying about Google being late to the party is true. Yeah, they’ve been caught with their pants down. Gemini wasn’t ready. They had to rush all of this, but they know that they are losing the monopoly that they’ve always had. That Google is becoming a verb is now… That’s what I say. Is it a verb? Now it will be back to, ‘I’ve just searched for.’ And there’s a gap there, isn’t there? Who is going to win it? Is it Liner? Is it Perplexity? Is it ChatGPT? Is it Copilot? Or is that just a sideshow because Microsoft are investing in ChatGPT anyway? Or is it Gemini? And then there are a couple of others as well. There is Grok. They’re all investing their dollars. And the worst of all was probably Mr. Zuckerberg. He even changed the company name from Facebook, which was the number one, to Meta because he put all his dollars on it being the metaverse. It turns out it’s not going to be the metaverse. The actual thing that we’re all using, they’ve literally done a bit of a U-turn, aren’t they?

And the amount of money they’re investing, but they’ve got that much money that you’re going to have to watch that space as well. So it’s fascinating. It’s like the VHS, for people of a certain age, VHS and the Beatamax thing. Who is going to win this battle? Because Google have won it. Bing was… None of the others have really come close. We’re talking 95% of traffic was Google, and now, it’s fascinating to me, who is going to win? And how do you optimize your site for six or seven different generative large language models? How do you do that? Stop panicking.

I think it’s still through the stuff we’re doing right now, which is stuff that gets you trust, a reputation trust. Pr is going to help. You get good PR in the top media about you being a reputable business. That’s myself from now on. That’s how they’re judging you. If you’ve got great praise in all the newspapers and about the industry that you’re working in, you’re going to come up higher in search. You’re going to be more trusted by Google and the others. So yeah, it’s fascinating. But this is the biggest shift in digital marketing since I started 25 years ago, I’d say.

David Pisarek: Yeah, and I’m just going to throw one more out there, like laser disk. How long did laser disks exist out there on the market?

Anyways, Chris, these have been some amazing insights around PR, storytelling, and certainly the last, I don’t know, 10 minutes or so around AI and leveraging that and the importance of PR. I hope that the people listening to this episode have gotten some great tips and pointers from our conversation with you today on this.

I challenge everybody listening to this episode to take one insight that we’ve talked about and implement it in your organization today, or even just go and talk to somebody else at your organization about it. So one challenge that I have for you, specifically, is to go into whatever AI platform you want and do a search. What do you think about and then your organization’s name and see what comes back.

Chris, if anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Chris Norton: You can find me on LinkedIn, Chris Norton on LinkedIn. I’m also, look up the podcast Embracing Marketing Mistakes. I’m also on X @chris_norton. So yeah, easy to find.

David Pisarek: Chris, again, thank you so much for joining in. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast.

Everybody listening, if you want any of the links, we’ve got the link to the podcast and Chris’s social channels or to any of the other things that we’ve talked about. We’ve got the full details on our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!