131 – How to Create Authentic Content That Builds Donor Trust with Kimberly Haley-Coleman

Episode Transcription

David Pisarek: Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast brought to you by wowdigital.com, your best place for non-profit websites and design, now including fractional CMO support.

Want to grow trust online and inspire action across borders? Kimberly Haley-Coleman from Global Aware reveals how digital storytelling, volunteer engagement, and a strong website can fuel global impact. Tune in and discover how your non-profit can turn international goodwill into real-world results.

Welcome to the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. As usual, I’m David. I’m still David. In this episode, we’re going to be talking all things around volunteerism, trust-building online, and digital impact with Kimberly Haley-Coleman. Kimberly is the founder and executive director of Global Aware, which is a US-Canada-based non-profit that mobilizes volunteers for short-term service projects in over 25 countries. She’s a multiple patent holder SMU guest lecturer. She’s also deeply engaged with the International Volunteer Programs Association and even holds consultative status with the UN.

A little bit of a fun fact here: Kimberly’s organization has over 300,000 followers on Facebook. So let’s talk about global reach. Kimberly, thank you so much for joining on the show today.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: David, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

David Pisarek: Yeah. So, I guess, let’s start from the beginning. What inspired you to launch Global Aware? And what does volunteering with purpose look like in today’s world?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Such a good question. I’ve had a very circuitous route to get where I am. Academically, the one thing that was in common in my background, whether it was in the for-profit or non-profit world or academic world. It was always taking place in other cultures, in other countries, other languages. I have always been drawn to things that take us beyond wherever our home country is.

I was actually working in a for-profit space back in the year 2000, a space-related company, and was abroad and was kept over the weekend. And after having already seen all the sites, I was looking to do something more meaningful just to engage my time. I started calling around, asking Habitats, Humanities, anybody, who can I come and help short-term with? And I found that nobody was really set up for short-term because the amount of time and cost it takes for someone to oversee you. You’re taking them off wherever their current project and work was.

So really, that was the genesis of it, where I started looking individually to people on how can I help you? What can I do in your life? And when I would come home, tell people what happened, they were almost universally interested and wanted to do something similar. And I found it was just so easy to chat about this and have people want to come and do it with me.

And that’s when I realized, ‘Oh, gosh, it’s not just me that feels uplifted by this. There are other people. How do we make this happen?’ That was happening right about a time where certainly things were going so digital. That was a big part of our success, actually. Volunteer service roles. Before that was largely on Peace Corps, church mission trips, and so forth. It just so happened that I was getting going at a time when people were looking digital for how do you get involved. That was a really fortuity for us.

David Pisarek: That’s amazing, right? Sparking an idea based on the happenstance of you looking to do something, and now here we are. How have you translated such a human-centred mission into measurable goals for the digital marketing and web presence?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: I have to say that I’m not smart enough in all these things to actually give you as good a detail as our marketing, our website, our social media people. They’re really much more on top of the granular detail for that thing.

Because of the space we’re in, we’re not focused, for example, on how many flags we’ve planted on the map. We’re much more focused on the houses that we’re building in Kenya. Are they actively being used? Are they serving their purpose? Are people safely and comfortably able to use what we left behind? And so, we do use our digital footprint for this, but in a little bit softer capacity in that we are sharing.

Our volunteers will come for just one week, right? So anybody who is signing up, they’re there short term. But if they want to stay connected to the community, it’s so easy, thankfully, on social media to go back and see, well, what are they doing in Guatemala, this week? And who’s their building? And, ‘Oh, look, there’s Anne. And look, I remember those kids.’ And so they’re staying connected digitally, even though it is also outreach for us. It’s a marketing piece.

For us, social media is such a huge communication device for us between our volunteers, between the communities, because we’re really not heroes to any of these community members.

We’re partners, we’re equal partners working together with them.

So this becomes a shared space for us to actively engage everyone in the process to see what’s happening in all of our communities.

David Pisarek: So, giving that social and online presence really is helping to drive the organization forward and keep people connected within, and the volunteers, and the communities, and all of that. What would you say would be, maybe, the number one driving factor pushing that?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Goodness. Well, it’s funny. There are the intended actions that happen, and then there are the incidental things that happen. And by that, I mean, when volunteers go and serve on our projects and programs, they’re obviously really enthusiastic.

It’s a different culture. They’re hearing different music, different food, different background. People are dressed differently, and they’re really excited to learn something new, whether we’re installing concrete floors in the homes of single moms or we’re assembling and distributing wheelchairs for landmine victims. These are almost always something that’s not a part of your everyday-to-day thing.

And since everyone is armed with their phone as a mechanism to stay connected back home and feel safe, but they’re also wanting to naturally take photos and share with people back home. ‘Hey, look, we did this today. I met this kid, I met this family. I tried this new food.’ And so, they very naturally want to share that.

Our local communities, many of whom operate in places where they don’t have phones or even access to electricity and water, sharing that photo in real time takes on a different high level of joy factor than you might get at home.

If you’re talking to a bunch of children who haven’t seen a phone before, and you get to take a picture with them and then turn around and show it to them. It’s such a natural thing that happens in terms of digital marketing. I think volunteers don’t go there with this in the back of their minds, but when they’ve finished building something, building a home, of course, you’re going to want to document this and remember it. It’s a wonderful souvenir. You know you’ve left this thing behind.

So even though I don’t think any of our volunteers go into this thinking, ‘Hey, I’m going here to take photos for Instagram.’ But it is a natural consequence that happens as people go on the programs, and they share their experiences. So even though it’s not necessarily the intended objective, it’s definitely a very natural outcome that people are sharing so much of their experience through social media that it dovetails really nicely with what we’re trying to do inside about in terms of letting people know, ‘Hey, first of all, it’s not all that scary. See, you can see these people here who have never held a hammer before doing this thing. If they could do it, you could do it, right?’

And then also getting to see the outcome of being a part of that.

David Pisarek: I think that’s really amazing and inspiring. And to everybody watching or listening to this episode, think about this for yourselves.

How can you get the people that are coming to your programs or your services or attending your events or whatever, what can you do to make them want to capture that and share it online? It really lends a lot to the credibility of the organization, and it’s organic.

You’re not asking people, ‘Hey, we need 50 volunteers to go to this village. Pretend like you’re building something and post a bunch of stuff on social.’ No, they’re going, they’re doing something, they want to remember it, and they want to tell people about it. That’s amazing.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Something that has changed a little bit, I’m probably older than most of the people listening to this, but I remember watching TV decades ago, and Sally Struthers would come on, and she was raising money to support a child in Uganda or whatever. And chances are that people weren’t actually meeting whoever was on the other end of the dollar they were giving. But in this case, it’s just the opposite, right?

Our world with our programs, we’re actually getting to meet and know the same people you’re going to see on social media. So it engenders this connectedness in such a natural, powerful way. And that is something that has changed a lot.

Back in 1977, people just were not able to stay that connected. And so that social marketing, that digital marketing, as of course, there are pros and cons to it. But in our world, it’s mostly upside, getting to share that joy. And people do… You’re right to think about it in terms of what are people going to want to share so that they’re actually doing the work for you in that sense, right?

David Pisarek: Right. The interesting piece is like, sounds like this whole thing came about organically, right? People are out there, they’re on sites, they’re doing stuff, they’re taking pictures, and they’re publishing that, right?

That’s huge credibility for the organization. It’s a huge amount of trust. Plus, you’ve got all the additional periphery brand awareness and marketing happening.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Well, and we also have, for us, we have lots of different pieces to our digital footprint, and we used to see them as all scattered and unrelated. But, for example, our podcast we use… Our initial thought was we’re going to use our podcast so that people who are going on to our Costa Rica program, for example, they want to know what to pack, what the weather is going to be, if there are any donations, what donations people like, what food to expect, all of those kinds of things, how to fill out your entry requirement forms.

And we still have all of that, so that if people don’t want to read the packet and they just want to listen to it or watch a YouTube video of it, we still have all that. But now, of course, we have interviews with our local coordinators, the local community members, our volunteers, so people can get a day-to-day blog. All of this YouTube video content, this podcast content, you’ll see it replicated across our platforms because we’ve seen that it’s all very integrated.

The same person who is usually preparing for what is my entry visa look like for Zimbabwe is also super interested to see what do we do in Zimbabwe last week, and who’s there this week? So they all do fit together. And that was also organic and accidental, because we certainly didn’t start out, 25 years ago, with a podcast objective or a YouTube channel.

So, fortunately, they’ve all just worked very happily and harmoniously together, mainly being driven by what is the content that is going to serve our volunteers and our local communities. And by starting there as a big part of our mission, it’s what bridged the gaps between all those pieces.

David Pisarek: I think one of the key things that you alluded to there that I’m just going to outright say:

You need to know your audience, what drives them, what motivates them, what they’re interested in, what they’re looking for, so you can give them the information. You also need to understand what is the format, medium, etcetera, that works for them.

It sounds like you’re producing it in a number of different mediums, which is great because there are learners and people that prefer reading versus video versus photos versus infographics, etcetera. Being able to provide that content and that insight is working for you.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Yeah, it’s certainly changed over the years, although I do think the fact that our largest audience is Facebook, says something as well about our demographic as opposed to our TikTok audience.

But something that does surprise me is, especially for the under-30 crowd, they’re so much more likely to consume preparatory orientation content via audio podcast than they are to read a PDF manual that we email them, and even to respond to things that we text to them as opposed to email. So we do see that our different audiences have different things they respond to.

And even though our programs are really designed so that, assuming you’ve taken care of any entry requirements, whether that’s health, a shot, or vaccination, or any visa, assuming they’ve gotten past that, almost everything else can wait until you get there, and our coordinator walks you through it. That said, we’d certainly rather our volunteers show up as formed as possible.

I mean, even just things from cultural sensitivities to setting expectations so that they know, for example, the standard of living, what kind of… We certainly provide running water and electricity and power, but a lot of the communities where we serve don’t have those things, and we don’t want people to be really surprised by it.

So that we’re hoping that through all of those different information sources, they will get enough information so that they won’t be negatively surprised by anything, so that what we’ve been provided ahead of time matches what they see on the ground, and they feel less fear.

Because, obviously, going into another country, there are all sorts of concerns about it, whether it’s safety or what food they’re going to be eating. There are so many factors with travel overseas that this is a very effective medium across all of these avenues to communicate those things and communicate them more quickly than if you were to read them. You can see the environment, and you get to see safety. Obviously, a picture is worth a thousand words thing.

David Pisarek: Amazing. All right, so you’ve welcomed volunteers to 26 countries. How do you capture, or do you even capture their stories that they’re publishing to web, email, and social, without things feeling like a commercial?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Yeah.

What we’re really trying to capture is both the volunteer serving and the community that we’re serving alongside.

And so with our podcast, we’re doing interviews on both sides of the hammer, so to speak, so that we’re hearing from both sides. And we have a huge tool that facilitates this for us, is that: our coordinators who are shepherding the week are bilingual. So they’re able to share this information in both languages, so that we’re asking: what does it mean to you to have this Wattle and Daub-style home in Kenya, as opposed to the prior format of home you have? And then, also, asking the volunteers to share, well, what is it like when you’re serving alongside this family, and to see how they live, and see the difference between these two. What does that do for you? And so these are all such personal stories.

I think so much of this comes down to the specific personalities of the people that we are interviewing in terms of how we share it. We actively ask our volunteers to tag us so that, if they are sharing things online, we will see what they’ve posted so that we can share.

And there are some limitations that we don’t like. I wish Facebook made it easier for us to be able to tag our organization when we see that we’ve been hashtag referenced so that when our coordinators post something, if our volunteers have given permission, I wish we could tag them individually, but we really can’t do that. So there are limitations, but we are trying to capture that digital storytelling.

Usually, the lens of our coordinator is guiding that, or our volunteers who are serving, who’ve captured that. Even if they maybe didn’t go into it with a mind of, ‘Hey, I’m doing this to share a story for Global Aware,’ but they’re just giving a video saying, ‘Hey, look at this, the concrete floor we just finished, this foundation here in Guatemala, and here’s the family we’ve been working with.’

They’re not doing it for our purposes. They’re doing it for their purposes. But that does make it so authentic, right? So in terms of digital storytelling, we’ve been really fortunate that the specific activities we’re doing lend themselves so well for that.

And I will say, too, an underlying piece of what we do is having fun, right? We really try and underline that the serving for us, it’s not just about helping someone; it’s the act of helping: what it does for you, selfishly. And so as a source of joy, because we’re also… If you go on our Cuzco, Peru program, you’re going to be helping kids, you’re going to be engaged in a part, but you’ll also see Machu Picchu one afternoon. There’s a bucket list item. We don’t want anybody going to any of these project locations and missing the big cultural things.

So the fact that they’re having fun at the same time they’re helping and serving people, there are two big motivating factors that are making them want to share their story. They’re having a huge moment of joy and a huge moment of meaning.

And these are two very motivating factors in terms of basically proselytizing in terms of whatever it is you’re doing, that these are the kinds of things that make people want to share. ‘This is what I did this week. It’s so exciting. It’s so fun. I got to meet this kid and play soccer with these people. They sing their national anthem for me. I got to learn how to cook tortillas in Guatemala.’ It naturally makes people want to create that content and share it. Yeah.

David Pisarek: That’s awesome. You mentioned Facebook, over 300,000 followers, 350,000, somewhere around there. Engagement is a big piece of, I’m sure, the work that you do, trying to, I’m going to say, recruit, but get people to sign up and participate and be a part of. How does your team approach engagement and growth?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: A shout-out to Sika, who’s been with us for years and years, who really leads those efforts for us and keeps the conversation going with them. And she notices when people refer to us in their own social media, and we’ll engage with them and ask, ‘Can we share this? And can we, in some way, reshare it across other platforms?’ So really, that comes down to our really good people.

Also, our coordinators will, on-site, encourage our volunteers to do that. And sometimes, if in some really fun way, there are various means that will become popular. For a while there, there was where everybody’s frozen, and the camera goes around them. We would do that at Machu Picchu, wherever the latest thing is. We try to have fun by engaging in those kinds of activities. Even if our volunteers aren’t thinking of doing it, our coordinators often have that in the back of their minds because they know it’s a fun way to share and get people’s attention, really.

David Pisarek: It’s awesome. It sounds like you have a lot of pieces around digital transformation, engagement development, and organization of your systems and your processes. A lot of non-profits struggle with digital transformation. I think that’s really just, unfortunately, the truth of the matter. Are there any tools, techs, techs, tech or platforms that have helped you streamline operations and scale the way that you have?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: We use, probably, a lot of the same tools that other people use. An example is Google Ad Grants, in terms of tracking who is engaged with our website in particular and what kinds of conversions we had from that. And certainly our web developer and marketing team, they’re using… Well, we’ve really gone through lots of different sites and sources, and they’ve changed over time.

I totally empathize with non-profits. We, generally, are small and don’t have the kinds of margin to really devote a lot of resources.

So while we do use various platforms and tools, or Webstats, it’s webstats.com, I think, is where we’re tracking. We have a variety of sources like that. And yet, I would still say our most powerful resource online for marketing isn’t even the measurement conversion tools, it’s actually just a straight traditional social media Facebook, and Instagram as well. And in a rising way, our podcast, because it really wasn’t until maybe five years ago that we started doing podcasts in the way we’re doing it. So I don’t know what… I imagine there are several new platforms we should be using and we’re not aware of. But boy, podcasting really has been a great resource for us.

David Pisarek: It’s amazing. I’ve got a question for you a little bit off topic, but what’s a story or a moment from the field that really stuck with you?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: I have a whole bunch of them, and it always… Well, not always.

A lot of times, it comes down to seeing the local community interact with whatever project we’ve just finished or working on.

One stayed with me that was from early on was in Cambodia, where we were assembling wheelchairs for landmine victims. It’s usually children who pick up landmines. They’re put there during the Vietnam War in Cambodia, and they’re neon-colored, and they’re round, and they will come to the surface over time. They’ve been cleared from the touristy areas like Siem Reap, but in the outline areas, there are still many there. Again, it’s usually kids that pick them up, and they’re maimed. They’re usually not killed. And so we give them wheelchairs.

I really thought that the moment of looking in a child’s eyes at the moment of giving them a wheelchair would be the most impactful part of the program for me, and it wasn’t. It was looking at the faces of the parents. These four and five-year-olds often don’t have a vision of what their future is going to look like, don’t have very specific hopes and dreams, and the parents do.

And as a fellow mother with grown children, just looking at someone else who is worried about the future of someone they’re responsible for from this human-to-human perspective, I could not have foreseen how powerful that was going to be.

I do think there’s an element of that in all of our projects and programs, and largely because the volunteers have made it that way. It’s even many times above and beyond anything that we’ve organized, where the volunteers will be on location and see something else that, you know, those kids are over there playing with trash because they don’t have a soccer ball, so they’ll buy them a soccer ball. Something we didn’t ask them to do. It’s these kinds of spontaneous moments that are unscripted that I do think stay with people. Just that real human.

We’re in such a digital world that you can lose sight of what it’s like, that high-touch human-to-human reality, particularly in a cubicle digital corporate environment, it can be easy to lose touch with that humanity. And look, we use a whole lot of digital footprint. And yet, at the heart of what we do, it’s very human-to-human. So I have a million memories, but that’s one of them.

David Pisarek: Amazing. And what’s one piece of advice that you’ve gotten that you would want to pass along to anybody that is listening?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Really not to hesitate. And I think, I don’t know, maybe younger people are better at this, but I feel like for a long time, I always thought that, ‘Look, I don’t know how to do this. This is beyond our capacity. This is more high-tech, new tech. I-don’t-understand-it-tech.’

And we would just plow through anyway, knowing that whatever we were doing was imperfect and then, realizing that the people who serve alongside us aren’t expecting perfection. And so getting out on these platforms before worrying about being perfect, particularly if you’re a non-profit, what motivates you will show and help you get there, even if you’re not perfect.

Obviously, there are lots of resources out there, but just not hesitating. Yeah, because there are so many good resources, and you could feel with AI, with so many things constantly developing, that it’s impossible to be on top of all of it. And, yeah. But try it anyway, because it’s hard to fail as long as you’re led by the right things.

David Pisarek: Absolutely.

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. You don’t know if something’s going to work unless you’ve actually gone and you’ve tried it.

It’s not trying it for a week. It’s not trying it for a month. You have to give it a bit of time. You’ve got to give it, I don’t know, four months, six months, whatever feels right to you and understand your gut as well. If you’re like, I don’t think this is working, stop it. Re-evaluate.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: That’s right.

David Pisarek: Absolutely. Kimberly, these have been some amazing insights, a very inspiring conversation hearing about what you’re doing over there and building international impact using digital tools, the storytelling and the networking. I hope that the folks listening to this show have been able to get some great advice, thoughts, pointers, and maybe a few ideas from the conversation.

I have a challenge. I’m going to challenge you. I want you to issue a challenge to everybody that’s listening, something that you want them to do within 24 hours of listening to this episode.

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: That’s a good question. I’d say if you haven’t defined your joy point in your business in terms of what’s going to drive joy, not just information and not just utility, spend 24 hours thinking about it while you’re working out or driving to work, where’s the joy point? And make sure that that’s a part of your mission. Everything will be driven much faster, better, stronger if you’ve got joy in your mind with it, right?

David Pisarek: Love that. That is so great. If anybody wants to get in touch with you, what do they need to do?

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Oh, we’re anywhere. If you look at Globe Aware, a lot of people think it’s global aware, but it’s Globe Aware, whether it’s our website, our podcast, our YouTube channel, Facebook, all of that, we’re at Globe Aware in any direction you look.

David Pisarek: Amazing. Thanks again so much for joining in, Kimberly. It’s been great having you here on the Non-profit Digital Success podcast. To everybody listening, if you want any of the links, resources, transcript, video, audio, etc, of this, just head over to our podcast page at nonprofitdigitalsuccess.com. Click on this episode for all the details.

And until next time, keep on being successful!

Kimberly Haley-Coleman: Thank you, David.